Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (35 page)

With the Muslims, this was never an option. These were the “unconvertibles”, men who were driven by their own religious zeal, and who waged war specifically to spread that faith. And this was an enmity that time did not ameliorate: for centuries after the invasions of southern Italy, Spain and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, Muslim freebooters scoured the Mediterranean and the coastlands of southern France and Italy, robbing, killing and enslaving. With the arrival of Islam, Mediterranean Europe was never again at peace – not until the early part of the nineteenth century, anyway. Muslim privateers based in North Africa, the Barbary Pirates, terrorized the Mediterranean until after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In the centuries preceding that, Muslim armies, first in the form of the Almoravids and later the Ottomans, launched periodic large-scale invasions of territories in southern Europe; and even when they were not doing so, Muslim pirates and slave-traders were involved in incessant raids against coastal settlements in Spain, southern France, Italy, Dalmatia, Albania, Greece, and all the Mediterranean islands. This activity continued unabated for centuries, and the only analogy that springs to mind is to imagine, in northern Europe, what it would have been like if the Viking raids had lasted a thousand years.

It has been estimated that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries Muslim pirates based in North Africa captured and enslaved between a million and a million-and-a-quarter Europeans.
[36]
Although their attacks ranged as far north as Iceland and Norway, the impact was most severe along the Mediterranean coasts of Spain, France and Italy, with large areas of coastline eventually being made uninhabitable by the threat.

The impact of this incessant violence has never, I feel, been either thoroughly studied or fully understood. The Mediterranean coastlands must learn to live in a state of constant alert, with fear never far removed. Populations needed to be ready, at a moment’s notice, with a military response. Fortifications must be built and young men trained in the use of arms. There was the development of a semi-paranoid culture in which killing and being killed was the norm, or at least not unusual. Small wonder that some of these territories, particularly Southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, Corsica, parts of Greece and Albania, would in time develop their own violent and relentless cultures; and that it would be above all in Spain that the Inquisition would find its spiritual home. Small wonder too that it would be from this same land that Holy Warriors would set out, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to conquer the peoples of the New World for Christ.
[37]

It is not true, of course, that Christendom and the Christian Church can be entirely absolved of the guilt for what happened in the decades and centuries that followed the First Crusade. There can be little doubt that some Christian doctrines made their own contribution. The narrow teaching which confined truth and salvation to the Christian community alone cannot have but produced a intolerant and irrational attitude to those of other faiths. In the end, however, it seems that without the continued and incessant violence directed at Christendom by Islam over a period of many centuries, Europe would have developed in a very different way: And it seems certain that the rapacious militarism which characterized Europe from the beginning of the Age of the Crusades would never have appeared.

How then, without Islam, would events have unfolded? It is of course impossible to say with certainty, but it seems fairly obvious that the “medieval” world as we now know it would never have appeared. Certainly, the period we now call the Middle Ages would have been a lot less “medieval” and a lot more Roman. It is likely that Byzantium would have continued the process, already well under way in the late sixth century, of raising the cultural level of the West. The break between Rome and Byzantium might not have occurred, or been so acrimonious, and there seems little doubt that Western Europe would have experienced its “Renaissance”, or re-flowering of classical civilization, much earlier; perhaps half a millennium earlier. Indeed, it is likely that by the late seventh century the whole of western Europe would have come to resemble contemporary Byzantium, with expanding cities and a thriving cultural and intellectual life. The Viking raids would not have occurred, or at least would not have been as destructive as they were. There would certainly have been no Crusades, there being no Islam to launch them against. And the lack of Viking and Islamic influence would almost certainly have induced the development in Europe of a more pacific culture. Without Islamic influence it is doubtful if the particularly virulent form of antisemitism that characterized Europe from the eleventh century would have arisen. The lack of an external and dangerous enemy like Islam would have hindered the development of the paranoia that gripped Europe over the issue of heretics and “witchcraft”. There would probably have been no Inquisition. And without the Islamic example of slavery, the contact with the natives of the New World, when it came, would have been very different, as would Europe’s relations with the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa.

So much for a world without Islam. But what if Islam had been triumphant? What if Europe had become Muslim in the seventh and eighth centuries? No less a person than Gibbon mused on the likely outcome of an Islamic conquest of France, when he noted that, had such an event transpired, then the whole of western Europe must inevitably have fallen, and the Dean of Oxford would likely then have been expounding the truths of the Koran to a circumcised congregation. Against such “calamities,” noted Gibbon, was Christendom rescued by the victory of Charles Martel at Tours in 732. But an Islamic conquest of Europe would have had far more serious consequences than that. From what we have seen of Islam’s record elsewhere, it is likely that the continent would have entered a Dark Age from which it would never have emerged. If we seek the model for Europe as a whole we might look to Albania or the Caucasus of the nineteenth century. These regions, inhabited by semi-Islamicized tribes, were the theatres of perpetual feuding. A Europe under Islam would have been no different: A backward and greatly under-populated wasteland fought over by Muslim tribal chiefs, conditions which would have persisted right into the present century. There would perchance have remained a few, largely decaying and very small, urban centers, in places like Italy, France and Spain; and these territories would have housed an impoverished and sorely oppressed remnant population of Christians. In Rome the Pope would preside over a miserable and decaying Vatican, whose main monuments, such as the original Saint Peter’s, founded by Constantine, would long ago have been transformed into mosques. In such a Europe the entire heritage of classical civilization would have been forgotten. Of Caesar and his conquests, of Greece with her warriors and philosophers, the modern world would know nothing. The very names would have been lost. No child now would know of Troy or Mycenae, of Marathon or Thermopylae. The history of Egypt too, and all the great civilizations of the Near East, would lie buried in the drifting sands of those lands, forever lost and forgotten.

There would have been no High Middle Ages, with their Gothic cathedrals, no Renaissance, no Enlightenment, and no Age of Science.

The fall of Europe would have had consequences far beyond its shores; and the twenty-first century may have dawned with an Islamic (and underpopulated and impoverished) India threatening the existence of China, which would then likely be the last significant non-Muslim civilization. The wars waged between the two would be pre-modern, and though the two sides might employ primitive firearms and cannons, the sword and the bow would remain the most important weaponry, and rules of engagement would be savage.

But these are all what-ifs. History happened, and what happened cannot be changed. Yet if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past, it is important that we understand exactly what did happen, and why.

[1]
Painter, op cit., p. 303

[2]
Briffault, op cit., p. 217

[3]
Ibid. p. 219

[4]
Ibid. p. 217

[5]
Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 143

[6]
Ibid., p. 133

[7]
Ibid., p. 137

[8]
Muhammad said, “If anyone changes his religion, kill him.” (Bukhari, Vol. 9, book 84, no. 57).

[9]
Bat Ye’or, op cit., pp. 60-1

[10]
Ibid., p. 61

[11]
Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 159

[12]
Lactantius, “The Divine Institutes,” in “Fathers of the Third and Fourth Centuries,” in
The Ante-Nicene Fathers
, 156-7.

[13]
John Chrysostom, Homily XLVI, in George Prevost, trans. “The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom” in Philip Schaff, ed.
A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church
, Vol. X (Eedermans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1986), p. 288

[14]
St Augustine, Letter C, in “Letters of St. Augustine,” in J. G. Cunningham, trans. in
A Select Library of the Nicene
(etc as above)

[15]
Colin Wilson and Christopher Evans, (eds.)
Strange but True
(Parragon Books, 1995), p. 285

[16]
Ibid. p. 285

[17]
Bertrand, op cit., p. 76

[18]
Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 147

[19]
Ibid., p. 17

[20]
Ibid.

[21]
Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History
Vol. 1 (Trans. Franz Rosenthal, Bollingen Series 43: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 480. Cited from Bat Ye’or,
The Dhimmi
, p. 162

[22]
Bertrand, op cit., p. 163

[23]
Ibid.

[24]
Ibid., p. 159

[25]
Ibid., p. 160

[26]
Bat Ye’or, op cit., p. 87

[27]
Steven Runciman,
The History of the Crusades
, Vol. 1 (London, 1951), p. 135

[28]
Ibid.

[29]
Painter, op cit., p. 100

[30]
Ibid., p. 119

[31]
Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The State of Mind of Crusaders to the East: 1095-1300,” in Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed.)
Oxford History of the Crusades
, p. 79

[32]
Ibid., p. 78

[33]
Ibid., pp. 80-2

[34]
Alan Forey, “The Military Orders, 1120-1312,” in Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed.)
Oxford History of the Crusades
, p. 205

[35]
Robert Irwin, “Islam and the Crusades: 1096-1699,” in Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed.)
Oxford History of the Crusades
, p. 251

[36]
http//:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates

[37]
We should not forget of course that the Conquistadors usually acted without official sanction, and that the Church, often in co-operation with the Spanish Government, worked very hard to control their excesses.

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