Current wisdom would have it that 'five centuries of peaceful co-existence'
between Muslims and Christians were brought to an end by 'political events and
an imperial-papal power play,' that was to lead to a centuries-long series of
so-called "holy-wars" that pitted Christendom against Islam, and left an
enduring legacy of misunderstanding and mistrust.'[1]
A school textbook,
Humanities Alive 2, for Year 8 students in the
Australian State of Victoria, carries the anti-Christian/anti Western argument
further:
Those who destroyed the World Trade Centre are regarded as
terrorists. Might it be fair to say that the Crusaders who attacked the Muslim
inhabitants of Jerusalem were also terrorists?[2]
Muhammad died in Medina on June 8, 632 AD. The first of the eight Crusades to
free the Holy Places in Palestine from Muslim control, and offer safe passage to
the Holy Land for Christian pilgrims, was called only in 1095. At the risk of
sounding pedantic, the period in question is not 'five centuries,' but
four-hundred and sixty-three years; and those years, we contend, were not
characterized by 'peaceful coexistence'.[3]
Islam's attack on Christianity
For the Christian states bordering the Mediterranean, it was a four-hundred
and sixty-three year period of regular, disorganized [and occasionally
organized] bloody incursions by Muslim mainly Arab and Berber land and sea
forces. These came intent on booty - gold, silver, precious stones and slaves -
on destroying churches, convents and shrines of the 'infidels,' and on the
spread of politico-religious Islam throughout Europe from their bases in the
Mediterranean and the Adriatic.
At the time of Muhammad's death there were flourishing Christian and Jewish
communities in Arabia, and throughout the major centres of the Persian Empire.
The whole of the Mediterranean world on its European, Asian and African sides,
was predominantly Christian.
It had taken only a few years for Muslim tribesmen from Arabia, inspired by
Muhammad's revelations and example, to invade the Eastern Roman or Byzantine
Empire whose emperors devoted more time to religious disputation than to
defending their empire. In 633 Mesopotamia fell. After a few years the entire
Persian Empire fell to the marauding Arab tribesmen who drove the young Persian
emperor Yazdagird into the farthest reaches of his empire, to Sogdiana
[Uzbekistan], where he was eventually murdered by his Tartar bodyguard in a
miller's hut.
Damascus fell in 635, and Jerusalem capitulated five years after Muhammad
died, in February 638.
The fall of Alexandria in 643 sounded the death knell of more than thousand
years of Hellenic civilization that once enriched the whole of the Near East
with its scholarship and culture. Henri Daniel-Rops claims that from the point
of view of the history of civilization, Alexandria's fall was as significant as
the fall of Constantinople to the Turks eight-hundred years later.[4]
Cyprus fell in 648-9 and Rhodes in 653. By 698 the whole of North Africa was
lost.
Spain invaded
Less than eighty years after Muhammad's death, in 711, Muslims from Tangiers
poured across the 13 km wide strait of Gibraltar into Spain. By 721 this
Arab-Berber horde had overthrown the ruling Catholic Visigoths and, with the
fall of Saragossa, set their sights on southern France.
By 720 Narbonne had fallen. Bordeaux was stormed and its churches burnt down
by 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Abdullah al-Ghafiqi in early spring 732. A basilica
outside the walls of Poitiers was razed, and 'Abd al-Rahman headed for Tours
which held the body of St Martin [who died in 397] apostle and patron saint of
the Franks.
He was to be defeated and killed by Charles Martel and his Frankish army on a
Saturday in October, 732, one hundred years after Muhammad's death, on the road
from Poitiers to Tours a defeat that was hailed by Gibbon and others as decisive
in turning back the Muslim tide from Europe.
Attacks on France, however, continued, and in 734 Avignon was captured by an
Arab force. Lyons was sacked in 743. It wasn't until 759 that the Arabs were
driven out of Narbonne. Marseilles was plundered by them in 838.
Muslim incursions into Italy had been a feature of life from the early 800s.
The islands of Ponza [off Gaeta] and Ischia [off Naples] had been plundered, and
then, in 813 Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, whose harbour had been constructed
by Trajan, was sacked by the Arabs.
In 826 the island of Crete fell to Muslim forces which retained it as their
base until 961. From around 827 they then began nibbling at Sicily. They
captured Messina and controlled the Strait of Messina by 842, and finally took
the whole island in 859, after Enna fell to them.
In 836 the Neapolitans self-interestedly invited the Muslim forces to help
them against the Lombards and set the stage for more than a century of Muslims
raids along the Adriatic, involving the destruction of Ancona, and Muslim
progress as far as the mouth of the Po. 'Saracen Towers'[5] south of Naples,
built in the ninth century to warn locals of the approach of Arab fleets from
Sicily and Africa still charm visitors to the Neapolitan coast.
Bari, now home to the relics of St Nicholas of Myra, the original 'Father
Christmas,' fell to Khalfun, a Berber chieftan, by another act of treachery in
840. From 853-871 the notorious Muslim brigand al- Mufarraj bin Sallam, and his
successor, another Berber named Sawdan, controlled all the coast from Bari down
to Reggio Calabria, and terrorized Southern Italy. They even plundered the Abbey
of St Michael on Mt Gargano. They claimed the title of Emir, and independence of
the Emir in Palermo.
Sacking of St Peter's
Naples herself had to beat off a Muslim attack in 837. But in 846 Rome was
not to be so fortunate. On August 23rd 846, Arab squadrons from Africa arrived
at Ostia, at the Tiber's mouth. There were 73 ships. The Saracen force numbered
11,000 warriors, with 500 horses.[6]
The most revered Christian shrines outside the Holy Land, the tombs of Sts
Peter and Paul, were desecrated and their respective Basilicas were sacked, as
was the Lateran Basilica along with numerous other churches and public
buildings.
The very altar over the body of St Peter was smashed to pieces, and the great
door of St Peter's Basilica was stripped of its silver plates. Romans were
desolated and Christendom was shocked at the barbarism of the Muslim forces.
Three years later Pope Leo IV [847-855] formed an alliance with Naples,
Amalfi and Gaeta, and when a Saracen fleet again appeared at the mouth of the
Tiber in 849, the Papal fleet joined forces with its allies and they repelled
the Muslim fleet which turned, and ran into a violent wind-storm that destroyed
it, like Pharaoh's army long before.
Survivors were brought to Rome and put to work helping to build the Leonine
Wall around the Vatican. Twelve feet thick, nearly forty feet in height and
defended by forty-four towers, most of this wall, and two of the round towers,
can be seen still by visitors to the Vatican. These defensive walls were
finished and blessed by Pope Leo IV in 852.
Taranto in Apulia was conquered by Arab forces in 846. They held it until
880.
In 870 Malta was captured by the Muslims. In 871 Bari, the Saracens' capital
on mainland Italy, was recaptured from the Muslims by Emperor Louis II, who in
872 was to defeat a Saracen fleet off Capua.
223 years from the First Crusade
At this point in our examination of the 'peaceful coexistence,' which is
made much of by Muslim apologists, we are still two-hundred and twenty-three
years away from the calling of the first Crusade.
Perhaps readers may better
understand, now, why Emperor Louis II, grandson of Charlemagne was absolutely
convinced, in the ninth century, of the need for a Crusade. 'He was quite sure
that Islam must be driven right out of Europe.'[7] But still there was no
call for a Crusade.
I haven't spoken of Muslim attacks against the Byzantine Empire even though
these, too, played a part in setting the stage for the Crusades. The much
vaunted military might and political power of the Eastern Roman Empire carried
with it responsibility for protecting the West from Muslim invaders. This it
generally failed to do.
Constantinople had been attacked in 673, and then for the next five years
Arab armies and fleets attempted unsuccessfully to break through the Byzantine
defences. 'Greek Fire,' that mysterious substance that burned on water,
destroyed the Muslim fleets and won the day for the defenders.
Then, in 717, the Muslims returned to the attack, emboldened by their
successes in Spain.
Fate intervened, and like Charles Martel and his Franks at Poitiers in 732,
emperor Leo the Isaurian [717-740] turned back the Muslim tide. Constantinople
was saved - for a time. Leo, for all his military skills, was a usurper, and an
iconoclast. Despite defeating the Muslims, his policies ultimately further
weakened both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires.
In 870, when Bernard the Wise from Brittany wanted to visit Palestine he had
to obtain a laissez-passer from Muslim authorities in Bari, on the Adriatic
Coast.[8]
In 873 the Muslim forces devastated Calabria in southern Italy to the point
that it was reduced to the state 'in which it had been left by the Great Flood'
and the Saracens expressed their intention of destroying Rome, the city of the
'Petrulus senex,' 'the ineffective old man, Peter'.[9]
In 874 Pope John VIII did all he could to dissuade Amalfi, Naples, Benevento,
Capua, Salerno, and Spoleto from forming a pragmatic alliance with the Saracens.
Amalfi, Capua and Salerno alone heeded his pleas for Christian solidarity.
From the close of 876 Pope John VIII had been sending letters in all
directions to obtain help against the Arab forces which were devastating
southern Italy and even threatening Rome itself. He sought the aid of Duke
Bosone of Milan whom Emperor Charles the Bald had appointed his legate in
Northern Italy - to no avail. He wrote for cavalry horses to Alfonso III, king
of Galicia in Spain; and for warships to the Byzantines, and from 876 until May
877 he sent numerous letters to the Frankish Emperor begging him to aid the
Catholics in Italy.
The Emperor proved to be a frail reed, and in 879, upon his death, the Duke
of Spoleto turned on the Pope. John VIII, unable to cope with both Saracens and
Spoleto, at once, had to pay tribute of 25,000
mancuses annually to the
Arabs. A silver
mancus was worth roughly AUD$25. This situation lasted
for two years.
In 881 the Muslim allies of the Neapolitans captured the fortress on the
Garigliano [the ancient Liris] 14 km east of Gaeta close to Anzio, just north of
Naples, and plundered the surrounding countryside with impunity for forty
years.
Returning from a synod at Ravenna [February 882] Pope John VIII found, as he
put it, that 'the Saracens are as much at home in Fundi [close to Rome, in
Latium] and Terracina' [80 km SE of Rome] as in Africa. 'Though we were
seriously unwell,' wrote the Pope, we went forth to battle with our forces,
captured eighteen of the enemy's ships, and slew a great many of their men'.[10]
Six hundred captives of the Saracens were liberated.
Syracuse fell to the Muslims in 878 after a nine-month siege from which few
escaped alive. The Byzantine city was pillaged and destroyed. Its collapse
freed-up more numerous bands of marauding Muslims to harry the Italian towns and
cities.
880 saw victory over Saracen forces at Naples by Byzantine Commanders and
also the arrival in waters off Rome of warships sent by the emperor Basil to
give the Pope the means of defending 'the territory of St Peter'.[11]
Meanwhile, the Saracens had turned their attention again to southern France
and northern Italy. They had taken Avignon in 734 and Marseilles in 838 and they
were ravaging Provence and North Italy from their bases in the Alps. The most
important of these bases was Fraxineto or Frejus, not far from Toulon, which
they captured in 889.
They were displaced temporarily from their base in 942 by Hugh of Arles who
had a Byzantine fleet harry them from the sea, while he attacked from land.
Horace Mann comments[12] that it is symptomatic of the kind of pragmatic leaders
who controlled the destiny of Europe at that time, that instead of wiping out
this bloodthirsty band of Muslim invaders, Hugh allowed them to stay where they
were on condition that they did all they could to prevent his rival as 'king of
Italy,' Berengerius Marquis of Ivrea, from returning to Italy.
The latter managed to return from Germany to Italy in 945, and the Muslims
were not to be expelled completely from their lair until 972 - almost
one-hundred years after capturing Fraxineto - by a league of Italian and
Provencal princes.
In the meantime they infested the passes of the Alps, robbing and murdering
pilgrims on their way to Rome. In 921 a large band of Englishmen, on pilgrimage
to the tombs of the Apostles in Rome, were crushed to death under rocks rolled
down on them by Saracens in the passes of the Alps.[13]
174 years from the First Crusade
At this point in the alleged peaceful coexistence between Muslims and
Christians, we are still one-hundred and seventy-four years away from the
calling of the first Crusade to free the Holy Places.
Meanwhile, Muslim fleets sacked and destroyed Demetrias in Thessaly, Central
Greece, in 902, and Thessalonica the second city of the Byzantine Empire fell to
them in 904. Muslim armies took Hysela in Carsiana in 887, and Amasia, the
metropolitan city of Pontus in Asia Minor.
The bishop of Amasia named Malecenus wanted to ransom those of his people who
had been captured but knew that the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI would not help; so
he appealed to Pope Benedict IV in Rome.
The Pope received him kindly, and gave him an encyclical letter addressed to
all bishops, abbots, counts and judges and to all orthodox professors of the
Christian faith asking them to show Malacenus every consideration, and to see
him safely from one city to the next.
In 905 Pope Sergius III helped Bishop Hildebrand of Silva Candida restore
some of the damage done to his See by the ravaging Saracens who had devastated
the Church of Silva Candida in the neighbourhood of Rome.
In 915 Pope John X successfully created a Christian League with the help of
Byzantine Admiral Picingli and his fleet. Even the bickering princes of southern
Italy joined forces against the Saracens, along with King Berengarius and his
armies from North Italy. The enemy were holed-up in their fortresses on the
Garigliano near Gaeta, north of Naples. After three months of blockade, they
tried to fight their way out only to be repelled by a victorious Christian
force.
In 934 the Fatimid imam al-Ka'im planned an audacious invasion of Liguria led
by Ya'kub bin Ishaq. The latter attacked Genoa that year, and took it in
935.
It wasn't until 972 that Duke William of Provence succeeded in driving the
Saracens finally from the fastnesses of Faxineto. In 976 the Fatimid Caliphs of
Egypt had sent fresh Muslim expeditions into southern Italy. Initially the
German emperor Otho II , who had set up his headquarters in Rome, successfully
defeated these Saracen forces, but in July 982 he was ambushed and his army was
almost cut to pieces.
In 977 Sergius, Archbishop of Damascus, was expelled from his See by the
Muslims. Pope Benedict VII gave him the ancient church of St Alexius on Rome's
Aventine hill, and he founded a monastery there and placed it under Benedictine
rule, with himself its first abbot.
The pontificate of Pope John XVIII [1003-1009] was marred by famine and
plague and by marauding bands of Saracens who plundered the Italian coast from
Pisa to Rome from bases on Sardinia.
By 1010 they had seized Cosenza in southern Italy. Then Sardinia fell to the
Arabs in 1015, led by a certain Abu Hosein Mogehid [thus the Latin Chronicles].
I take this person to be Mujahid bin 'Abd Allah whom Arab sources credit with
the invasion. The Saracen force based on Sardinia, over the next few years,
torched Pisa, seized Luna in northern Tuscany, and ravaged the land. Pope
Benedict VIII managed to assemble a fleet and challenged the Saracen chief who
turned tail and fled to Sardinia, leaving his fleet at the mercy of the papal
force which was victorious.
Mujahid bin 'Abd Allah then sent the Pope a bag of chestnuts and a message
that he would arrive in the following summer with as many soldiers as there were
nuts in the bag. Benedict accepted the chestnuts and sent back a bag of rice:
'If your master,' he said to the astonished messenger, 'isn't satisfied with the
damage he has done to the dowry of the Apostle, let him come again and he will
find an armed warrior for every grain of rice'.
The Pope did not wait for an answer but carried the war into the enemy's
territory. He co-opted the combined fleets of Pisa and Genoa and they sailed for
Sardinia in 1017 only to find Mujahid in the act of crucifying Christians on
Sardinia. The Muslim leader fled to Africa, and Sardinia was occupied by the
Pisans. Mujahid kept trying to re-take Sardinia until 1050 when he was captured
by the Pisans and the island was made over to them by the Pope.
Muslims from Spain sacked Antibes in 1003. They sacked Pisa in 1005 and 1016,
and Narbonne in 1020.
Sometime around 1025 Pope John XIX granted the pallium [sign of
Ecclesiastical jurisdiction] to Archbishop Peter of Gerona in northeast Spain,
on condition that he redeemed Christian captives of the Saracens as he had
promised the Pope when he had come on his 'ad limina' visit.
The First Crusade what made it a reality
The four-hundred and sixty-three years that elapsed between Muhammad's death
in 632 and the calling of a Crusade to free the Holy Places in 1095 was not a
time of 'peaceful co-existence' between Muslims and European or Byzantine
Christians. Nor was it, for Christians living in Muslim-occupied territories.
They enjoyed 'peace' only by keeping the lowest possible profile, paying the
jizya, or head-tax, and accepting nonperson status in lands that had been
Christian before the Muslim invaders arrived.
The new millennium saw the situation go from bad to worse. In 1009 the
Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, abu-'Ali Mansur al-Hakim, ordered the destruction of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The edict of destruction was signed by his
Christian secretary ibn-'Abdun. The Muslims destroyed the Tomb of Jesus, the
Dome and the upper parts of the Church until their demolition was halted by the
great mound of debris at their feet. For eleven years Christians were forbidden
even to visit the rubble or to pray in the ruins.
Shocked by the destruction of Christendom's holiest Shrine, Pope Sergius IV
appealed for help to go to Palestine to rebuild it. His appeal fell on deaf
ears.
At the beginning of the fifth century, two hundred years before Muhammad
appeared, there were seven-hundred Catholic bishops in Africa.[14] Two hundred
of them attended the Council of Carthage in 535 AD. By the middle of the 900s
there were forty left. By 1050, as a result of 'peaceful coexistence,' there
were only five left. In 1076 there were two. We learn this from a letter that
Pope Gregory VII, 'Hildebrand,' wrote to Cyriacus, Archbishop of Carthage in
June 1076. As three bishops are needed for the valid consecration of another
bishop Gregory asked him to send a suitable priest to Rome who could be
consecrated assistant bishop, so that he [Cyriacus] and Servandus, bishop of
Buzea in Mauritania, and the new bishop could consecrate other bishops for the
African Catholics.[15]
Gregory VII, on his deathbed in 1085, dreamt of forming a Christian League
against Islam and said, 'I would rather risk my life to deliver the Holy Places,
than govern the Universe'.[16]
It seems to have been the Seljuk Turkish capture of Jerusalem in 1076 that
finally swung the balance, exhausted the patience of the European Christians,
and fulfilled Gregory's wish. Pilgrimage to the Holy Places had became more
difficult; a poll-tax was imposed on visitors. Those who dared journey there
were harassed, robbed and some even enslaved.
At the Council of Piacenza summoned by Pope Urban II and held in March 1095,
Byzantine delegates emphasized the danger facing Christendom from Muslim
expansion, and the hardship facing Eastern Christians until the infidel be
driven back.[17] They repeated an appeal made by Emperor Alexius to Robert of
Flanders asking him to return to the East with some knights to assist the
Byzantines in their struggle with the Muslims.
Towards the end of that same year, Urban II, at another Council held at
Claremont in France, took up the suggestion, and urged Europe's Christians to
'Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre ... let each one deny himself and take up
the Cross'. The Assembly rose to its feet and shouted 'God wills it'.
Muhammad died on June 8, 632 AD. It had taken four hundred and sixty three
years for Europe's Christians to combine their forces and rise up in defence of
themselves and of their Faith.
Endnotes
[1] John Esposito,
Islam: the Straight Path, 3rd
ed. OUP, 1998, p. 58.
[2] See 'Civilizing influence of previous wars fought
between East and West',
The Weekend Australian, March 18-19, 2006.
[3]
This article restricts itself to a brief discussion of these claims and counter
claims. We plan future articles that will discuss other controverted issues like
the collaboration, in the initial phase of Islamic expansionism after the death
of Muhammad, with Muslim military forces, by Christians and others, for
political and sometimes religious reasons. We will also look at the claim that
the Crusades were anti-Islamic, put relations between the Crusaders and the
Byzantines, and the sacking of Jerusalem and Constantinople in context. We will
consider the degree to which ongoing anti-Catholic polemic since the 16th
century has now become a weapon in the hands of radical Islamists.
[4]
The
Church in the Dark Ages, J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1959, p.336.
[5] The
term 'Saracen' is sometimes mistakenly derived from the Arabic Sharqi or
'Easterner'. St Jerome considered it to be the name the Arabs gave themselves,
deriving their origins from Sarah, Abraham's free wife, rather than from Hagar,
his slave. In many of the sources we have used, the term 'Agareni',
or'Hagarines,' is found.
[6] Letter from Adelbert, Marquis of Tuscany and
protector of the Papal territory of Corsica, to Pope Sergius II in
Liber
Pontificalis, n.xliv, ed. Farnesiana.
[7] Henri Daniel-Rops,
The
Church in the Dark Ages, ed. cit., p. 472.
[8] Quoted Runciman,
A
History of the Crusades, Cambridge University Press, 1951, vol. i, p.
43.
[9] See Horace Mann,
The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle
Ages, 12 vols. Kegan Paul, London, 1906, vol. iii, p. 321.
[10] Epistle
334 fragment of a letter to the Emperor.
[11] Epistle 296 to the Byzantine
Emperor Basil, August 12, 880 AD.
[12] op. cit., vol. 4, p. 10.
[13]
Flodoard [894-966]
Chronique de France 919-966, entry for 921.
[14] H.
Daniel-Rops,
The Church in the Dark Ages, ed. cit., pp. 340, 344.
[15]
Register of Gregory VII, III, 19.
[16] H. Daniel-Rops,
Cathedral and
Crusade, J.M.Dent and Sons, London, 1957, p. 434.
[17] Steven Runciman,
A History of the Crusades, ed. cit., vol. i, p. 105.
Articles by Dr. Paul StenhouseAnswering Islam Home Page
Bill Sherk mentions that a list has circulated throughout the
United States since around 1936 under the title “Parable of the Isms.” A column
in The Chicago Daily Tribune in 1938 attributes a version involving socialism,
communism, fascism and New Dealism to an address by Silas Strawn to the Economic
Club of Chicago on November 29, 1935.
