Until the advent of materialism and 19th c. dogma, Western Civilisation was superior to anything Islam had developed. Islam has not aided in the development of the modern world; in fact civilisation has only been created in spite of Islam. Proof of this resides in the 'modern' world and the unending political-economic and spiritual poverty of Muslim states and regions. Squatting on richer civilisations is not 'progress'. Islam is pagan, totalitarian, and irrational.
Not only did Christian Byzantium save Europe from the Mahometan Jihad, acting as the protective shield for the West, or the remaining rump of the former Roman empire, it also salvaged ancient Greek philosophy, science and literature. The Byzantine ‘Renaissance’ from the 9th to 11th centuries, was similar to the Carolingian in Francia during the 9th century, but deeper, broader and more extensively premised on ‘classical’ Greek history and sources. Universities were developed in Constantinople during the 6th century, predating ‘Western’ institutions by some 500 years. Byzantine scholars had long studied the ancient Greeks and reconciled if not incorporated many of their ideas into Christian theology.
The Christian Byzantines or ‘Eastern Romans’ fully embraced their Hellenistic past and culture. World history would be much different if they had not. Greek culture and the Koine Greek language suffused and enthused Byzantian society and its development, transmitting ancient Greek ideas and influences to the world. Copies of ancients were transcribed and stored in massive libraries and archives.
The largest library in ancient history sat in the Christian Greek city of Alexandria – burned down by the Mahometans in 641 A.D. Thousands of tonnes of priceless artefacts were destroyed by the Jihad. Who knows what wisdom, science and philosophy were annihilated in this book burning. Entirely new perspectives on Christian Byzantium and ancient Greek and Roman history were lost.
Byzantine literature represented a continuation of ancient Greek traditions, replicating the styles of Homer, Lucian and Herodotus. Byzantine monks collected, translated and copied Greek language texts and classical literature safeguarding them for posterity. These preserved works were the basis for the Western ‘Renaissance’ of the 15th century, an event fuelled by Greek refugees fleeing the Mahometan Jihad, who ended up in Italy with their treasures and libraries.
John of Damascus in the 8th century wrote the ‘Dialectica’, which commented on Aristotle’s ‘Prior Analytics’ and deductive reasoning. He used this format in the great ‘iconoclasm’ debate of the 8th century. If certain principles are known to be factual we can make deductions from that premise. In the 9th century Plotinus the Patriarach of Constantinople wrote ‘Amphilocia’ which included a commentary on Aristotle’s ‘Categories’ and concepts of substances and predication. The 11th century monk Psellos reintroduced Plato with analysis and commentary, aligning Platonic thought with Christian theology.
Medicine, much more advanced than the ancient Greek and the ideas of Galen, also flourished in Constantinople, eventually transferred to the West through merchants and the Crusades. Architecture and new engineering practices abounded during the 1000 years of Byzantine existence. The Haggia Sophia, built in the 6th century, was the largest dome ever built and was only imitated and surpassed in Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries.
Roman water works, aqueducts, baths, sewers and fountains providing fresh water dominated major Byzantine cities by 900 A.D. Such public works did not exist in the West until the 19th century. Justinian’s legal codex compiled in the 6th century, is the basis for Western canon and civil law and directly informs today legal corpus in Western states. Sundry inventions from the knife and fork, to gunpowder, military inventions, advance art, chemistry, advanced mathematics and governmental organisation, flowed from Byzantium to the West.
The cultural impact of Byzantium on European history was enormous. It is not an exaggeration to state that the West would not have existed without Christian Byzantium.
Raymond Ibrahim, Scholar on Islam and its perpetual Jihad against Christianity.
Armenia is one of the oldest nations in the world. Armenians founded Yereyan, their current capital, in 782 BC — exactly 2,700 years before Azerbaijan came into being in 1918. And yet, here is the president of Azerbaijan waging war because “Yerevan is our historical land and we Azerbaijanis must return to these historical lands.”
Armenia was also significantly bigger, encompassing even modern-day Azerbaijan within its borders, over two thousand years ago. Then the Turkic peoples came galloping in from the east, slaughtering, enslaving, terrorizing, and stealing the lands of Armenians and other Christians in the name of jihad.
Anyone who doubts this summation should consult the “Chronicle of Matthew of Edessa” (d.1144). According to this nearly thousand-year-old chronicle, which is near coterminous with the events it describes, it was only in 1019 that “the first appearance of the bloodthirsty beasts … the savage nation of infidels called Turks entered Armenia … and mercilessly slaughtered the Christian faithful with the sword.”
Three decades later the raids were virtually nonstop. In 1049, the founder of the Turkic Seljuk Empire himself, Sultan Tughril Bey (r. 1037–1063), reached the Armenian city of Arzden, west of Lake Van, and “put the whole town to the sword, causing severe slaughter, as many as one hundred and fifty thousand persons.”
Other contemporaries confirm the devastation visited upon Arzden. “Like famished dogs,” writes Aristakes (d.1080) an eyewitness, the Turks “hurled themselves on our city, surrounded it and pushed inside, massacring the men and mowing everything down like reapers in the fields, making the city a desert. Without mercy, they incinerated those who had hidden themselves in houses and churches.”
Eleven years later, in 1060, the Turks laid siege to Sebastia (which, though now a Turkish city, was originally Armenian). Six hundred churches were destroyed, “many and innumerable people were burned [to death],” and countless women and children “were led into captivity.”
Between 1064 and 1065, Tughril’s successor, Sultan Muhammad bin Dawud Chaghri — known to posterity as Alp Arslan, one of Turkey’s unsavory but national heroes — laid siege to Ani, then the capital of Armenia. The thunderous bombardment of Muhammad’s siege engines caused the entire city to quake, and Matthew describes countless terror-stricken families huddled together and weeping — not unlike those of modern-day Artsakh, as well captured by the following recent photo from yesterday, with the following caption:
As for their ancestors, once inside Ani, the Muslims “began to mercilessly slaughter the inhabitants of the entire city… and piling up their bodies one on top of the other… Innumerable and countless boys with bright faces and pretty girls were carried off together with their mothers.”
Not only do several Christian sources document the sack of Armenia’s capital — one contemporary succinctly notes that Sultan Muhammad “rendered Ani a desert by massacres and fire” — but also so do Muslim sources, often in apocalyptic terms: “I wanted to enter the city and see it with my own eyes,” one Arab later explained. “I tried to find a street without having to walk over the corpses. But that was impossible.”
Such “was the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” Matthew of Edessa concludes his account: “So, lend an ear to this melancholy recital.” This has proven to be an ominous remark; for the aforementioned history of blood and tears was, indeed, just “the beginning of the misfortunes of Armenia,” whose “melancholy recital” continues to this day.
But what was the reason the Turks invaded and so ruthlessly attacked Armenia? What “grievance” did they have? Simple: Armenia was Christian, and the Turks were Muslim — and Islam makes all non-Muslim enemies to be put to the sword until and unless they submit to Islam.
Incidentally, Islam’s animus for Christianity was on display then no less than now. Thus, during the aforementioned sack of Ani, a Muslim fighter climbed atop the city’s main cathedral “and pulled down the very heavy cross which was on the dome, throwing it to the ground,” wrote Matthew.
Made of pure silver and the “size of a man” — and now symbolic of Islam’s might over Christianity — the broken crucifix was sent as a trophy to adorn a mosque in, ironically enough, modern-day Azerbaijan. Fast forward nearly a millennium to Azerbaijan’s war on Armenia in 2020, a Muslim fighter was videotaped triumphantly shouting “Allahu Akbar!” while standing atop an Armenian church chapel where the cross had been broken off.
Such is an idea of what the Turkic peoples did to Christian Armenians — not during the Armenian Genocide of a century ago when some 1.5 million Armenians were massacred and even more displaced — but one thousand years ago when the Islamic conquest of Armenia first began.
This unrelenting history of hate makes one thing perfectly clear: all modern-day pretexts and “territorial disputes” aside, true and permanent peace between Armenia and its Muslim neighbors will only be achieved when the Christian nation has either been conquered or ceded itself into nonexistence.
Nor would it be the first to do so. It is worth recalling that the heart of what is today called “the Muslim world” — the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) — was thoroughly Christian before the sword of Islam invaded. Bit by bit, century after century after the initial seventh-century Muslim conquests and occupations, it lost its Christian identity. Its peoples were lost in the morass of Islam so that few today even remember that Egypt, Iraq, Syria, etc., were among the first, oldest, and most populous Christian nations.
Armenia — the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity — is a holdout, a thorn in Islam’s side, and, as such, will never know lasting peace from the Muslims surrounding it — not least as the West has thrown it under the bus.
Note: Quotes from Matthew of Edessa and others were excerpted from and are documented in Ibrahim’s book, “Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.”
Armenians, who are indigenous to Artsakh, have inhabited the region for centuries; Armenian occupation and government has withstood in Artsakh since the 5th century B.C.E, regardless of countless attempts by neighbouring dynasties and powers to gain control over the land. The territorial conflict between Artsakh, also referred to as Nagorno-Karabakh, and Azerbaijan originated after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, during the establishment of the republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. At the time, Artsakh declared its independence and elected its own government. In response, Azerbaijan, with the help of Turkey, employed military action and carried out massacres which targeted Artsakh’s 95% Armenian population, killing 40,000 Armenians in the city of Shushi alone.
After the establishment of Soviet rule in the Caucasus, Stalin first declared Artsakh as part of Azerbaijan SSR, but Artsakh was later removed and attached to Armenia SSR. Shortly thereafter, a three-day pogrom was launched in the city of Sumgait, leading to the death of about 100 Armenians. As ethnic tensions rose between Armenians and Azeris in the region, the Armenian Supreme Soviet and Artsakh’s National Council proclaimed Armenia and Artsakh’s unification. After this proclamation, Azeri protesters in Baku committed massacres against the remaining Armenians in the region. Only after most of Baku’s Armenian population was killed, Gorbachev intervened and condemned the attempts of ethnic cleansing that had taken place.
After both Armenia and Azerbaijan declared their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the conflict surrounding Artsakh escalated. A war broke out from 1991 to 1994 and left behind 20,000 casualties and about 1,000,000 refugees. Through Russian negotiation, a ceasefire was established in 1994 and still continues to this day, despite countless violations from Azerbaijan’s forces.
The current war brewing along the border of Artsakh and Azerbaijan was not entirely unanticipated. After 11 Azeri soldiers died during an attempted border breach by Azerbaijan in July, thousands of Azeri protesters took to the streets of Baku and vigorously demanded a war with Armenia and Artsakh as they chanted “Death to the Armenian.”
Azerbaijan’s war efforts are also supported by its brother nation of Turkey. Turkish president Erdogan recently remarked, “We will continue to fulfil this mission which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the Caucasus region.” Erdogan’s genocidal rhetoric references the Armenian Genocide of 1915, during which 1.5 million Armenians were martyred and a majority of the Armenian mainland was conquered by the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Evidently, Turkey and Azerbaijan’s dictators, Erdogan and Aliyev, are fixated on continuing the efforts of their ancestors. The pan-Turkic agenda put forward by Talaat Pasha, the main orchestrator of the Armenian Genocide, and other Turkish leaders during the past century or so, is the driving force behind Azerbaijan’s actions.
Although Aliyev has attempted to paint this conflict as purely geo-political, claiming that his mission is to rightfully repossess Artsakh as a city of Azerbaijan, he is not interested in governing Artsakh as it is now. Rather, he is interested in an Artsakh that is free of Armenians. Should Azerbaijan’s armed forces successfully conquer Artsakh, which would give them access to mainland Armenia, the governments and leaders of Azerbaijan and Turkey would put forward exceedingly ardent efforts to eradicate the Armenians of the Caucasus.
Over the course of their recent attempts to viciously attack the Armenians fighting for and inhabiting Artsakh, the Azeri government has committed countless war crimes and international human rights violations. In the past month, they bombed the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral of Shushi as well as the maternity hospital of Stepanakert.
Dozens of schools in Artsakh have been destroyed by Azeri shelling, while their use of widely-banned cluster munitions have been damaging residential areas. Their armed forces have targeted and killed countless Armenian civilians in both Artsakh and mainland Armenia, specifically in the regions of Martuni, Askeran, Stepanakert, and Syunik. In addition, Azerbaijan’s white phosphorus munitions have burned about 150 hectares of Artsakh’s forests.
Azeri soldiers are also guilty of torturing and killing their Armenian prisoners of war, then releasing video recordings of them doing so. The killers of one Armenian fighter even went as far as to post pictures of his beheaded body on social media, then call his brother to taunt him. It was recently brought to light that the Syrian mercenaries illegally bought by Azerbaijan were told that they would be rewarded $100 for every Armenian they beheaded. Of course, none of this is being reported by Azerbaijan or any journalist visiting Azerbaijan — the Azeri government has restricted all journalist entry into the military zone. This limitation is very much in line with Turkey and Azerbaijan’s lack of media freedom.
Azerbaijan’s allies, Turkey, Israel, and Ukraine have aided Azerbaijan in its military efforts through funding, provision of military personnel, and the blockage of humanitarian aid to Artsakh. Meanwhile, countries who have attempted to intervene to peacefully facilitate agreements between Artsakh and Azerbaijan have failed continuously. Azerbaijan has violated ceasefires called by France, Russia, and the United States. Although Aliyev’s regime has faced criticism, it has yet to experience any significant consequence from the international community. Furthermore, Artsakh has been placed on Genocide Watch, but there has been no extension of any humanitarian aid to the people of Artsakh.
Although Artsakh’s Armenians are unquestionably facing the worst impacts of Azerbaijan’s actions, anti-Armenian violence is not limited to the caucasus. Armenians in Russia, France, and the United States particularly have faced hate crimes by Turks and Azeris in support of Erdogan and Aliyev’s agenda. In addition to harassment and inappropriate content on social media, violence has also been incited at protests held by Armenians. Counter-protesters at pro-Armenia rallies have been seen wielding axes and firearms in an attempt to intimidate and potentially harm Armenian protesters. In late October, 3 Armenian demonstrators were stabbed during a protest in Fresno. Around the same time, a crowd of Turkish nationalists who are members of Turkey’s ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves group took to the streets of France looking for Armenians. The Grey Wolves are a militant wing of Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party, which is strongly allied to Erdogan. The Grey Wolves have since been banned in France.
Moreover, Armenians also face harassment on social media. Not only have Turks and Azeris attempted to portray Armenians as the aggressors, but they also themselves have acted as offenders as they flood direct message inboxes with threats of assault, rape, death, and extermination. They have been vocal in their support of Aliyev as well as their desire to rid the Caucasus of Armenians and any historic Armenian landmarks or traces of culture.
Although the Armenians of the diaspora have banded together to garner attention toward the violence in Artsakh, it seems that there is not a single world power willing to sanction Erdogan or Aliyev, and oust their fascist, genocidal governments. Before, as descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors, we could only imagine the pain and fear of losing our people and homeland. Now, as Aliyev and Erdogan attempt to continue Taalat Pasha’s legacy, we face our very own threat of extinction as the world continues to ignore the Armenian struggle once again.
Artsakh is an Armenian Christian community sited in Mahometan Azerbaijan. It is the oldest Christian community in the world. The genocide started last December (2022). 150.000 Christians are being starved to death by Musulman Azeris. Christian churches, schools, rectories and abbeys are being systematically destroyed. No one cares. Imagine the outrage if Christians had built walls and wires around a Musulman region, sent in a Christian army to encircle and strangle said region, and cut off all food and supplies into the area.
12/16/2022 Artsakh (International Christian Concern)
On Monday December 12th, Azerbaijan started a blockade on the roads connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to all outside resources. This is the second time they have done this in the past month and is crippling for the Armenian people “the road, known as Lachin Corridor, is the only road connecting Karabakh to the outside world,” ..they also shut down the gas lines for roughly four days, causing schools to temporarily close, heat was shut off in homes, and long lines at gas stations. The blockade refused humanitarian groups from entering and the government also threatened to attack any aid that attempted to enter the territory by plane.
Genocide Watch, “The present blockade [of Artsakh] is designed to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the end of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group in whole or in part.” The Musulman Turks murdered 1.5 million Armenian Christians from 1915-1917, a holocaust that the ’NATO country’ still denies to this day. It destroyed 75% of the Christian population of Turkey, which at that time, comprised ¼ of the total population. Every vestige of Christianity from cemeteries to churches was destroyed. Christian genocide is now happening again in Azerbaijan.
Artsakh was given to the Azeris by the Soviets under Stalin in 1923. Artsakh became an oblast (an autonomous province with its own government) with Azerbaijan. During the past century Azerbaijan has taken the other autonomous Armenian province called Nakhichevan and literally wiped it clean of Armenian Christians, by making Christian life impossible. The Azeris also destroyed all the churches in Nakhichevan, a process they will repeat in Artsakh.
None of this is on your Fake mainstream news, nor debated in your fake ‘democratic’ assemblies. No one cares. Artsakh Christians and Christians in general, are not worth anything in the eyes of the ‘modern’ secular world, especially when they are being slaughtered by Muslims.
Historian Michael Haag has written an excellent 358 page account of one of Western Christendom's most virile, vital and interesting organizations. Haag's account is an informative and accessible layman's journey through the founding of the Templar's in 1119 at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre which marked the crucifixon, burial and resurrection of Christ; to its demise in 1307 at the hands of the bankrupted French King ironically named Phillip the 'Fair'. As Haag relates, over twenty thousand Templars died in battle or as prisoners of war fighting the Muslims. There is no recorded example of a Templar renouncing his faith or his Order's vows under torture, punishment or extended captivity. The romance, mystery, and demonstrated energy of this most unique of Western groups will always been of interest to any interested in the Western tradition.
There are seven parts. The first three cover the historical background of the Middle East including the origins of Solomon's Temple, the rise of Christianity and the 'rise' of Islam and the context for the pilgrimmages and the Crusades. Part four deals with the Templars proper, including their rise to power and their fall. Part five deals with the aftermath of the Templars destruction and the co-optation of some of their culture, by Freemasonry. The last two sections deal with the Templar castles and sites, as well as the role of the Knights in popular culture, including games, websites and books.
What makes this book so very good, is the realistic appraisal of Islam. This is the context of this first review. Islam is not portrayed by Haag as a religious faith. It is painted as it should be – a naked program of power and control. A true Muslim believes that the Koran supersedes the Bible, and that the military-political adventurer and fascist Mohammed, was the last and greatest of the Jewish-Christian prophets. Nothing further from reality could be true. Islam was and is, a Jihadic military poli-cracy, whose goal was and is world domination:
“Islam was the revealed and perfect faith, and as for the Christians, and also the Jews, as long as they submitted to Muslim rule and paid their taxes they were permitted to conduct their own affairs according to their own laws, customs and beliefs.”
As Haag states, the key to Islam is that it demands the submission of all people's to the Arab cult. Period. In the real world we call this imperialism. In PC-Cultural Marxist terms, the subjugation and tax-farming of second class knaves is termed 'inter-faith harmony'. This harmony is a resplendent orchestral composition in the 'minds' of the Muslim-lovers, as long as those playing are White Christians under the control of the masterful, educated, sophisticated and uber-intelligent Muslim class. Harmony, like so many words, is now re-equipped to denote the enslavement of Whites and Jews, under the caring tutelage of the 'minority victims', the Muslims. Islamic rule was vicious, predatory and arbitrary. In order to escape enslavement many non-Muslims just gave up and converted to the moon cult. So much for inter-faith harmony.
“Many Copts converted to Islam after the ferocious repression of 832; being unable to meet taxation demands, partly because the irrigation system was falling into further disrepair, they migrated into the towns, leaving large areas of land uncultivated. Even so, not until the eleventh century, four hundred years after the Arab occupation, did the majority of Egyptians finally adopt Islam.”
The poverty of Islam was so rife and its theological Fascism so obvious that revolts against Arab and Islamic cult rule were common. Islam was not spread by preaching and earnest debate. It was manufactured in, and expanded through, war and violence. As Haag so rightly elucidates, Arab and Muslim culture was barren, and far from producing anything that created the modern world, the Islamic states were in the main poor, backwards, and uneducated. Their only salvation came from squatting and plundering richer non Muslim locales and empires:
“With the triumph of an authoritarian and incurious religious dogma, with the failure to develop resources or technological advances, and with civil administrations replaced by local military autocrats, the empire of the Arabs fell into intellectual, political and economic decline.”
Even in Egypt as quoted above, it took 400 years for Islam to take root. The reason? The utter insipidity of the Muslim program militated against any social organization which could produce wealth, opportunity and rationality: In North Africa and elsewhere, the Muslims destroyed the existing and far superior Byzantine lands which had advanced systems of agriculture, irrigation, public works, sewage, and even public libraries. The complex system of social advancement was eradicated by the Muslims and Arabs. Libraries were destroyed, industries neutered and even large monuments defaced or pulled down.
“There were uprisings against the Arabs throughout their empire. In Egypt, where the population had been three million at the time of the Arab conquest, the mismanagement of the country's resources was so appalling that there were not maore than one and a half million Egyptians by 1000 AD.”
The decimation of Egypt's population was a singular event. Half of the population either died or left. This is a remarkable display of an anti-civilizational theology hard at work. In fact the mindless destruction visited upon Egypt by Islam, included rather remarkably, the loss of the wheel for 3 centuries. Pack animals replaced carts in North Africa as the wheel, and its necessary ancillary infrastructure of roads, hospices, and trade centers all disappeared. No wonder the political-economy of the once rich delta state simply collapsed.
It is worth noting that the Crusades, which saved Western Europe and which were a military response to 400 years of Muslim warring against Europe, including the killing and enslaving of millions of European Christians, not to mention the destruction of once Christian lands in Syria, the Levant, North Africa, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, are positively depicted by Haag. In fact Muslim savagery is given a fair hearing in Haag's work, with the destruction of Christian pilgrims by 'extremist' [a modern appellation] Muslims, for instance being well documented.
“An especially shocking attack too place at Easter 1119 when a large party of seven hundred unarmed pilgrims, both men and women, set out from Jerusalem for the river Jordan.....set upon by an Egyptian sortie from Ascalon. Three hundred pilgrims were killed and another sixty were captured to be sold as slaves.”
Even the 'sack' of Jerusalem in 1099, in which we are now told was a gigantic slaughter by Crusaders of defenseless Muslims and Jews, and which is a very large myth is told in more measured terms by Haag;
“What is more, contemporary letters written by Jews living in the Eastern Mediterranean make it clear that not all Jews and Muslims in the city were killed; and indeed the contemporary Arab writer Ibn al-Arabi estimated the number of Muslim dead at Jerusalem at only three thousand.”
The multi-cult usually attributes the 1099 retaking of Jerusalem, the ancient Jewish capital of David, and the home of Christendom's most sacred shrines and relics, as a barbaric slaughter in which the streets ran with blood. No more than 4.000 died and none were enslaved out of a population of 500.000. This hardly constitutes anything more than a minor episode in the long and bloody history of Near East warfare. The Muslims slaughtered far more in taking Jerusalem in 637 and in 1187 when Saladin who is much beloved by PC Fascists, retook the city from the Latins, he enslaved over 10.000 and only let the rest go for ransom. His usual policy was to slaughter all the inhabitants, a fact which he repeated on over 10 occasions in his ceaseless wars with the Christians and Sunni Muslim sects that he conquered to unite the Muslim Near East.
In expelling the last of the Knights from Acre in 1291, the Muslim Jihad under Baybars likewise killed some 10.000, destroyed the city, and sent any survivors into slavery. When the Muslim cult attacked the greatest of Christian cities,Constantinople, in 1453, 40.000 were butchered and 35.000 more cast in chains and sent off to the Muslim heartlands as sex slaves or workers. But none of these facts would make an impression on really clever PC relativists. For them Islam is a minority class and race, constituting a wonderful theology of improvement and love.
At least authors like Haag are detailed, realistic and intelligent enough to dispense with such claptrap.
In 2008 Crusader and Medieval historian Riley-Smith compiled a brief pamphlet (80 pages) on the important topic of the Crusades and the interactions with the cult of Submission. It is well worth reading, including 24 pages of sources and references he supplies. The ‘clash of civilisations’ is one of the major issues in our times, along with the civil war destroying what is left of ‘Western Civilisation’. One of the benefactors of the imploding West will be the Musulman states bordering post-Christian, post-truth Europe. They will have ample opportunity through emigration, demography and Western suicide through ‘woke’ and ‘politically correct’ cultural Marxist zeitgeist to take over vast swathes of Europe which had previously defeated the Jihad for some 1200 years.
Riley-Smith looks at the era of Crusading starting from 1095 to 1300 and picks up the story again from 1800 to 2007. Writing and speaking in 2007, he states that the ‘politico-religio’ hostility has a long history, much of it unknown in the ‘West’ ignorant as most of the masses are about history and reality. The terms Crusader and Crusading are used with aplomb to define this 1400-year conflict with few cognisant of what they mean or why they occurred.
In fact, as Riley-Smith proves, ‘Arab Nationalism, and Pan-Islamism…share perceptions of crusading that have more to do with 19th century European imperialism than with actuality.’ He is right of course. The corruption by Walter Scott in the 19th and later using the same corroded untrue strains by historian Steve Runciman in the mid-20th century, have given the ‘West’ and ‘Musulmans’ an inaccurate and ridiculous declaration of Crusaders and Crusading. Neither of these two men was a historian in the real sense of the word. And neither had any real idea about the subject matter. Their output is grossly inaccurate and prejudiced but it is popular because it serves the secular society and feeds the anti-Christian, anti-Catholic culture of our times.
The above is a key insight from Riley-Smith and often appears in his other works as well. In this short work he elaborates on the lie that the Crusades were barbaric, unprovoked, and of no value. Catholics had suffered 400 years of endless Musulman Jihad, war, sex enslavement, destruction and the annihilation of men, women and some 30.000 churches from 630 AD to 1095 AD; not to forget the thousands of unarmed pilgrims raped and slaughtered by Musulmans. 2/3 of Christianity was taken over and wiped out by the Mahomentan Jihad and Spain and France were at risk of permanent Mahometan occupation. The entire fabric of the political-economy and the continuity of the Catholic world around the Mediterranean basin was destroyed.
“The Crusades themselves were deeply embedded in popular Catholic ideas and devotional life. They were not thoughtless explosions of barbarism. The theory of force that underlay them was relatively sophisticated and was considered to be theologically justifiable by a society that felt itself threatened. It is hard now to conceive of the intensity of the attachment felt for the holy places in Jerusalem, the concern aroused by heresy and physical assaults on the church, and the fear Westerners had of Muslim invaders who reached central France in the 8th century, and Vienna in the 16th and again the 17th century.”
The Crusades were a part of an all-out war to save civilisation. Not just the Holy Land, but in Spain and in Provence against the demonic evil of the Albigensians. Internal and external enemies – much the same as we have today – were rending and tearing at civilisation. Without the Byzantine Crusades which were never called as such but starting in the 8th century the Eastern Christians were the first to fight back against the Musulman hordes, and as Riley-Smith illustrates, without the muscular, uncompromising Catholic response starting in Spain the 8th century and continuing for almost 570 years, Europe would not exist.
As Riley-Smith warns, the cultural degradation now apparent in 2023, was manifestly obvious in 2008, and was premised on ‘secular Marxism’, or cultural-Marxism, dressed up as ‘democracy’, ‘liberalism’ and other nice sounding political-platitudes, none of them accurate or true. He wrote that our own ‘values’ would be as foreign and ridiculous to anyone from the past, as it will be to anyone from the future. They are not the ‘right values’, and do not represent our civilisations or cultural history. What we have today as a ‘culture’ is historically anomalous, insidious and quite evil. The anti-Catholicism and hatred of Christianity which permeates the ‘West’ is the rejection of reality, history and real culture. Musulmans suffer no such anxiety about their cult. Our weakness due to our ignorance is their opportunity. Herein lies the core of the problem cited by Riley-Smith. Hating and debasing the Crusades without knowing much about them just highlights our own ignorance and febrility.
THOMAS Sowell was born in 1930 into extreme poverty in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression. Growing up in Harlem as a black orphan, he dropped out of high school, didn’t earn a college degree until he was 28 and didn’t write his first book until he was 40. He served in the Marine Corps in the Korean War, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in economics, earned a Masters from Columbia and went on to become an internationally known economist, social theorist, philosopher, author and latterly Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In 2002 he won the National Humanities Medal and the Francis Boyer award in 2017. In 2020, at the age of 90, Sowell published his 36th book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies.
Today, however, there are many colleges and universities who are openly opposed to letting Dr Sowell address their students.
What did he do to deserve that? What crime has this man – an all-American success story – committed? What did this thinker, whose quotations are doing the rounds on social media to this day, do wrong?
First of all he became a conservative; second, more heinous perhaps, he became the best internationally known black (conservative) thinker – and one entirely unafraid to challenge received wisdom on race discrimination.
It goes all the way back to the 1970s when Sowell’s criticisms of the direction of the civil rights movement drew attack and his early ‘cancellation’. Black elites as well as the rest of the leftist elite establishment wanted nothing to do with him because he opposed ‘affirmative action’. But Sowell argued that the problems blacks face involved far more than what whites have done to them in the past, that focusing on white racism was not helping the black underclass. He has been proved right time and again as his biographer, Jason L Riley points out in this 2022 lecture and tribute to him. It is worth reading in full.
Today, Riley points out, efforts to defund the police are being pushed by activists and liberal elites who claim to be speaking on behalf of low-income minorities but are mostly speaking for themselves, something he says that Sowell began focusing on long ago.
‘Sowell would often be asked how it felt to go against the grain of so many other blacks. He would inevitably correct the premise of the question. “You don’t mean I go against the grain of most blacks,” he would respond. “You mean I go against the grain of most black intellectuals, most black elites. But black intellectuals don’t represent most blacks any more than white intellectuals represent most whites”.’
Nowhere has Sowell gone against the grain more than with his critique of the slavery debate, today permitted to be understood only through the prism of ‘critical race theory’ (whites are indelibly racist) which has now entered US elementary schools through The New York Times 1619 Project, and which puts the institution of slavery at the centre of America’s founding.
It is fundamentally wrong, Sowell argues. What makes America unique is not slavery; it’s emancipation – the economic and social progress of black Americans in only a few generations unmatched in recorded history.
His analysis and debunking all elements of the white racism slavery myth need as wide as possible transmission. That is why we are showing 14 short videos he’s produced and presents which take on the different elements and examine the facts to expose the many widespread flawed assumptions about slavery. Source
Blacks, Muslims and Arabs were the great slave traders of Blacks. Some 50 million were enslaved. Whites were also enslaved en masse by the Muslims - some 25 millions over 1400 years.
Black slaves were treated far worse by Muslims than Whites in general as given by death rates and the mere fact that no Black culture exists within Arab countries or the emirates to which Blacks were sent.
The great Christian David Livingstone provided first hand proof of the barbarity of the Arab-Black slave trade still thriving in the mid to late 19th century. His journeys were undertaken to shine a light on this barbarism and end it.
Today some 5 million Blacks are still enslaved by Blacks and Muslims.
Mein Koran, or ‘Recital’, is the most brutal, bloody and supremacist book in the history of ‘theology’, though it takes a creative mind to connect Muhammad’s cult and its doctrines to religion. Yet perversely, in our ‘Dumb Ages’ it is a protected icon, you can’t criticise it, burn it, or use it as a repository for faeces. To give this book its justified honours, you might well be imprisoned in many countries within the demented, perverted and increasingly fascistic ‘West’.
Mein Koran can be simplified and summarised to Sura 9:5 when it commands Muhammad’s legions of cult devotees to “Kill them”, with them being Christians, Jews and polytheists. Then when the Sacred Months (the Ist, 7th, 11th, and 12th months of the Islamic calendar) have passed, then kill the Mushrikun (see V.2:105) wherever you find them, and capture them and besiege them, and prepare for them each and every ambush. But if they repent and perform As-Salat (Iqamat-as-Salat), and give Zakat, then leave their way free. Verily, Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful. Mushrikun is another Arab word for Infidel. Someone who is a ‘Mushrik’ practices ‘Shirk’ or who disbelieves in Muhammad’s cult and his moon or celestial deity, Al-Lah.
Most Suras or chapters are devoted in part to violence and war against Shirk and the Mushrikun. Sura 5:33 expresses the goal in lurid terms, “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter.”
In Moslem theology ‘waging war’ against the moon or celestial deity Al Lah includes violence against any who do not convert to the cult, or who deny any aspect of Muhammad’s importance, his revelations, statements or demands. In Muslim theology non-compliance is viewed as ‘waging war’. In other words, a practicing peaceful Christian living in a Moslem state can be charged with ‘blasphemy’ for being a ‘Zalimun’ or polytheist-trinity worshipper, and for not joining Muhammad’s cult and in the ‘modern’ world, this is a regular occurrence.
Of the major Suras 2-9, at least 30% on average are dedicated to war, violence and hate against the Mushrikun or Infidel. Sura 9 is the last and most important Sura within Musulman belief and jurisprudence, and its apogee of clamouring hate and bile reaches an apex in 9:29:
“Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allah, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”
The destruction of Zalimun, Mushrikun and those who Shirk are not stories from the 7th and 8th centuries, outlining tribal or territorial conflict as we find in the Old Testament. Slaughtering the ‘Canaanites’, ‘Moabites’, ‘Amalekites’ or ‘Edomites’ as referenced in the Old Testament describe Bronze-Age history, wars and the violence needed to create a priesthood dedicated to monotheism and Yahweh. These conflicts do not form part of Old Testament laws or Jewish regulations (some 641 of them).
Not so with Muhammad’s cult. The violence in the Koran against non-Muslims is the foundation of Musulman theological practice called by the bien pensant as ‘laws’, though they are not ‘laws’ but barbaric relics stretching back into the Bronze age and to celestial cult worship. Modern day expressions too numerous to list include:
“Muslims must kill kafirs wherever they are unless they convert,”
said Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti of Egypt.
“Islam says: kill all of the kafirs. Jihad stands for killing all kafirs,”
proclaimed Ayatollah Khomeini.
“Enmity and hate shall forever reign between us,”
wrote Osama bin Laden.
“Jews and Christians are filthy. Their lives and property can be taken by the Muslims in jihad,”
preached Yasir Qadhi in Tennessee.
Denying any verse instantly makes a Mahometan an apostate, a ‘Munafiqun’, one who has left the cult and this is punishable by death. “If they had gotten rid of the punishment for apostasy Islam would not exist today”, said the famous scholar and broadcaster Yusuf al Qaradawi. Not being able to leave the cult and enforcing ‘Sharia’ or a complete totalitarian imposition of control, including blind devotion to Muhammad on pain of death, is why the curse of Mahometanism is still with the world. Mein Koran equates apostasy with Mushriqun and Shirk – in other words it is the same as being an Infidel and should be punished by death and hellfire.
The clever people only believe that only Blacks were slaves. Their ignorance of history is so deep that they don’t know that other races, with different levels of melanin and pigmentation, have been enslaved en-masse. White slavery was the foundation of Greek empires and the Roman. At least 25% of Whites in ancient Greece were slaves or helots (probably more). At the time of Christ some 10-40% of the population of Rome were White slaves with a similar total across the empire.
This would mean 100.000 to 400.000 White slaves in Rome, and potentially 40 million White slaves across the empire, or 4 times the transatlantic Black-slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries. I can’t remember reading in any history or panegyric of ‘classical’ civilisation, much if any discussion on White slavery.
Take the Musulman Jihad and occupation of richer lands over 1400 years. The Arab Musulmans enslaved millions of White and non-Arab Christians in Syria, North Africa and Spain. European coastal areas were attacked and denuded of Whites, with hundreds of thousands taken in sex, military-service, naval, or labour-slavery. The Arab Mahometans enslaved millions of Persians and Hindus as they conquered east during the 7th and 8th centuries.
The Arab-Muslim enslavement of Whites from cities and villages along and inside the border with Christian Byzantium was a yearly occurrence as it was in Christian Spain. Countless tens of thousands of Whites and Christians were enslaved. The Viking conquests of Britain and northern France were in part the lust for White slaves, most of them being sold to the Musulmans. Countless tens of thousands are transhipped from Britain and Normandy to the Musulman caliphates in Spain and beyond.
The Ottoman empire was built almost entirely on White slavery, constituting over 500 years, some 15 million or more White slaves. Tamerlane the Turkic Musulman enslaved many millions of non-Whites, Persians, Indians, Turks and even Arabs, and slaughtered far more. At least 1.3 million Whites were enslaved in North Africa during the Atlantic-Black-slave trading era from 1600 to 1800, a trade supplied and enthusiastically supported by Black slave traders. The extent of the Musulman White-slave trade is never discussed but needs to be researched and propagated.
To his great credit Simon Webb has produced a fascinating book, ‘The Forgotten Slave Trade; The White European Slaves of Islam’, which outlines the Musulman enslavement of Whites. Some facts that most people are completely unaware of:
White slavery has a long history
-The Celts who long pre-date the Roman era, relied on White slavery, a cultural attributed that survived in Celtic areas, during the entirety of the Roman empire.
-The Roman writer Strabo commented that Britain circa AD 10 was famous for its trade of cattle, gold, silver, iron and White slaves.
-During the ‘Iron Age’ (1000 BC to the time of Christ), White slavery was common across Britain and Europe, with evidence of iron chains, metal collars and sundry tools to control and manage slaves being unearthed.
-Slavery was well established in both Roman and Anglo-Saxon England (Webb is English). As in the Roman empire at least 10-25% would have been considered slaves in some way (there are different gradations of slavery).
-Roman slavery, during its 1100-year history was in total some 10 times more extensive than the shipment of Blacks across the Atlantic during the 18th century. White slaves were worked to death, their conditions often far worse than what Blacks would experience during the 18th century slave trade.
-It is estimated that every year, the Roman empire needed at least 500.000 new White slaves to keep its empire, military and economy afloat. In just 100 years, this means 50 million White slaves were taken by the Romans. Caesar famously enslaved some 3 million Gauls in less than a decade.
-Bristol on the Severn river was built during the Anglo-Saxon era, to trade in and export White slaves (St. Patrick from Bristol is one famous example), with many White slaves shipped to Muslim slave trading centres for hard coinage.
-The 1086 Domesday book compiled by the Normans after their conquest, states that at least 10% of the population in Britain were Whites slaves listed as chattel or assets.
-Dublin was founded by the Vikings in 841 as a White slave-trading port. Dealers and traders would often ship their cargo to Musulman Africa.
-Musulman slave traders took over Lundy island near Devon in the mid-17th century and enslaved thousands over a period of just 5 years, sending them back to the slave auctions in Tripoli.
The Musulman enslavement of Whites
No one knows how many White slaves were taken by the Mahometans over 1400 years, be they Arabs, Berbers, Senegalese, Turk, or Mongol. A reasonable estimate is 25 million.
-In Musulman theology, only non-Muslims can be slaves. As with the Roman empire, the Musulman slave-based empire must constantly expand and seek out slaves.
-Musulmans were the masters of White castration, hundreds of thousands of European White men were rendered ‘feminine’ with their testicles crushed or their penises cut off.
-Venice and Verdun during the entire medieval era, had ‘eunuch’ factories of White slaves who were castrated and shipped off to Musulman courts and emirs, as well as to Christian Byzantium, often to guard harems, women, or to protect palaces and emperors.
-By the 7th century, Jews were the largest middlemen in White slave trading between Christendom and Musulman Africa and Asia. A fact not forgotten within Christendom and a casus belli for Jewish pogroms during the medieval period.
-From the Musulman Jihad and conquest of Syria, Egypt and North Africa from 640 to 670 AD, it is estimated that some 1 million Whites and Berbers were enslaved, either as sex chattel or labourers. Dhimmitude it should be said, is the Musluman imposition of 2nd class status on non-Muslims, akin to serfdom, with Christians subjects open to rape, onerous taxation, loss property and random killing. Serfdom or 2nd class knave status, while not ‘proper’ slavery, is a gradation of slavery.
-In Spain, Arab and Black Musulmans or Almoravids (Senegalese, Niger river area), enslaved some 1 million White Christians over 800 years. Many of these were sent back to Africa or Asia to slave markets or emirs, many others were slaves within Spain for various emirs and Musulman rulers.
-10-15 million White ‘Slavs’ (or Slaves) from the Balkans and Eastern Europe, were fed into the White slave markets during the middle ages, as eunuchs in both Constantinople and Byzantium, and in Musulman emirates as soldiers, concubines, sex chattel labourers or galley slaves. The actual numbers are unknown but in any area of the Balkans, parts of Eastern Europe and Ukraine, there were almost yearly Ottoman-Musulman raids, wars and slave trading.
-This trade in White Slavic-Slaves was unimaginably brutal and vast, and over 500 years no fewer than 10-15 million White ‘Slavic’ slaves were taken by the Ottoman Musulmans. An example not given by Webb, is the small region of Albania where during the heroic defence of the Christian Crusader Skanderbeg, some 20.000-50.000 White Albanians were taken by the Ottoman Muslims in any given year from 1420-1470, or over 1 million. The depopulation was so severe that Albania never fully recovered.
-Mamluks (a word meaning ‘property’) were largely White Circassian and non-Muslim-Turkic slaves, and the foundation of the Musulman state in Egypt. The Mamluks overthrew their Arab masters, establishing a state in Egypt and Syria (1250-1798) until the time of Napoleon. The numbers of Mamluk slaves over 400 years would be in the millions.
-For over 400 years, from 1350 to 1750, the Ottoman Musulmans enslaved some 7000 young White Christian men just from the Balkans and forced them into the feared Janissaries, or the ‘new solders’ of Islam. Some 2.5 million White Christians would have been thus enslaved.
-Barbary coast ‘pirates’ or more accurately Musulman Jihadis, who were largely vassals of the Ottomans, slave traded some 1.5 million Whites, from 1500-1750, from all across Europe including Iceland and Britain.
The above is just a brief list. The book does not list the Mongol-Musulman enslavement of Russians in their millions. If you add up the totals above and add in the millions of Russians taken and enslaved by Musulman Turks and Mongols over 500 years, you arrive at about 25 million White slaves. Though the book is Britain-centric in many ways, it is an excellent compendium of Musulman White slavery and atrocity. This sordid, dark, satanic part of history – the mass enslavement of Whites is never told. Simon Webb deserves much praise to have produced a fine work to rectify this injustice.
An excellent book and anodyne to the general secular and even Catholic ignorance about the Crusades. After 400 years of Musulman conquests of Christendom, after endless Jihads, sex slaving, destruction, plunder and death, the rump called the ‘West’ finally fought back. As the book explains the Crusades were initially against the satanic cult of Muhammad but also included crusades against the pagan Wends and Lithuanians in the Baltics and the heretical Manichean sect or Cathars in Provence. These efforts to save Christendom and extend it, cover some 500 years. They are an important reason why Europe rose to world dominance. No crusades, no Byzantium, no Christianity would mean no modern world which is now being destroyed by 19th century materialism, the Globalist New World Order and the cult of ‘science’.
The book gives voice to scholars and experts in the history of Crusading who argue against the persistent and mendacious myths which permeate the study of the Catholic crusades, including Jonathan Riley-Smith, William Urban, Thomas F. Madden, Jessalynn Bird, and Paul Crawford.
Some important points of emphasis emanate from this eminently readable and learned dissertation:
-The pagan, warrior cult of Islam and its endless Jihad against Christianity
-The religious fervour at the heart of the Christian response to the Muslim Jihad
-The fact that the Crusades had nothing in common with ‘colonialism’ and that 90% of the men either died during the Crusade or returned home
-The so-called atrocities of the Crusades pale in comparison with the Musulman Jihad, the millions of Christians killed and enslaved over the first 400 years of the moon cult’s ascension to empire, and the innumerable massacres of Christians during and after battles, sieges and raids
-Jews, the erstwhile and long time allies of Muslims, were always in the frame for revenge and violence
-No Crusades, no Byzantium (which has its own history of religious crusading against the Musulmans), no Europe and modernity
Crusading to the East included:
· The First Crusade of 1096–1099 that captured Jerusalem;
· the ill-fated Second Crusade of 1147–1149 that unsuccessfully attacked Damascus;
· the Third Crusade of 1188–1192, known as the Crusade of Kings, which pitted Richard the Lionheart against Saladin;
· the Fourth Crusade of 1202–1204 that captured Constantinople;
· the Fifth Crusade of 1217–1221 to Damietta that ended in disaster in the Egyptian Delta;
· and the Sixth Crusade of Emperor Frederick II, 1227–1229;
· the Seventh (or Sixth) Crusade of Louis IX of France, 1248–1254, which also experienced a disaster in the Nile Delta;
· the Eighth (or Seventh) Crusade of Louis IX and Prince Edward of England, 1270–1272
Other Crusades include the Teutonic incursions into the Baltics and Russia during the 12th to 15th centuries and the Albigensian crusade from the 1220s to 1240s.
Myths. Despite crusade historians’ best attempts, crusade myths continue to live on, repeated endlessly as fact.
Probably the most pervasive of all is the Grand Myth that the crusades were an assault on a peaceful, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and tolerant Eastern world by fanatical barbarians from the West who managed to deal a mortal blow to Byzantine civilization and taught the Islamic world to fight savage assailants in a like manner—giving no quarter. In the end, the crusades produced nothing but failure and hate.
Runciman’s sympathies lay with the Byzantine Empire, and he viewed the crusaders as intolerant barbarians who destroyed the foundations of this ancient and brilliant civilization, thereby making it mortally vulnerable to the Ottoman Turks who eventually conquered Constantinople and the last remnants of Byzantium in 1453. [There is some truth to this view of course. Runciman however, was a crusade historian from the 1950s, who hated Catholicism and the very idea of crusading against Muslim exotics, and much his work has been discredited as ahistorical]
Muhammad the warring totalitarian. Not much diversity or tolerance within the Meccan cult.
Indeed, as Rice University religion scholar David Cook has pointed out, Muhammad personally participated in or sanctioned no fewer than eighty-six military campaigns or raids against various opponents, including Jews, pagans, and Byzantine Christians, as he and his early followers established political control over the Arabian Peninsula. Because Islam theoretically forbids warfare between Muslims, for the deeply entrenched razzia tradition of Arabia to continue, raiding activity had to be turned against non-Muslims.
The Quran identifies Jews and Christians as enemies to be exterminated.
As Cook has further pointed out, the Qur’an contains a well-developed doctrine of military jihad (jihad of the sword), with one of its primary goals the conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, and Hadith (the collection of sayings and actions ascribed to the Prophet and his companions) established holy war as a tradition within Islam from a very early date.
Qur’an 9:29 states, “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day…until they pay the jizya [the poll tax paid by non-Muslims] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”; this principle was re-affirmed by Caliph Umar I, as quoted by the early Muslim historian al-Tabari: “Summon the people to God… those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency.” As recorded in the Qur’an (the eternal word of God, which Muslims believe was dictated to the Prophet by the angel Gabriel), Muhammad declared that non-Muslims were to be attacked “until religion becomes Allah’s in its entirety.”
As Carole Hillenbrand has noted, significant “discriminatory measures” against Christians and Jews had become “enshrined” in Islamic legal books by the later eleventh century, on the eve of the First Crusade no less, although the degree to which these discriminatory measures were enforced by Islamic authorities varied from place to place….the status was the payment of the jizya, an annual head tax placed on all non-Muslim adult men ... Combined, the jizya and the kharaj—the levy on dhimmi-held land—usually exceeded twenty percent of a person’s wealth; this was very high for a pre-modern tax, but they could be set at much higher levels if the Muslim authorities chose to do so. Muslim women were not allowed to marry non-Muslim men, but the reverse was encouraged, for obvious reasons.
Crusaders were a mix of men and motivations
Research on crusading charters by Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus Bull, among others, has demonstrated how rather than blindly rushing off to the East in a religious frenzy, individual crusaders of means carefully considered the costs and logistics of crusading as they made preparations for the management of their affairs in their absence. The greater lords who wished to go had to arrange financing for themselves and their followers, often borrowing the funds from local moneylenders or mortgaging their estates to obtain the necessary funds. Furthermore, leaders had to be designated, travel routes determined, and large amounts of equipment and animals to transport men and materials acquired and organized.
Today the considered judgment of most historians who study the chronicles, letters, songs, charters, and art works of every sort from the crusade period is that the Christian spirituality and religious fervour of the Middle Ages, rather than elements evident in European colonialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was the dominant factor in a complex mix of motives for crusading.
Religion was absolutely central to the Crusades. Runciman’s nonsense vs Tyerman’s scholarship
Christopher Tyerman’s massive new history of the crusades, which he offers as a corrective and update to Steven Runciman’s equally monumental history of the crusades places religion squarely at the centre of the crusading movement from start to finish. Reflecting the general consensus of today’s crusade historians, his Preface begins: Violence, approved by society and supported by religion, has proved a commonplace of civilized communities.
The crusades were wars justified by faith against real or imagined enemies defined by religious and political elites as perceived threats to the Christian faithful. The religious beliefs crucial to such warfare placed enormous significance on imagined awesome but reassuring supernatural forces of overwhelming power and proximity that were nevertheless expressed in hard concrete physical acts: prayer, penance, giving alms, attending church, pilgrimage, violence.
Riley-Smith and the religious dimension of crusading
1986, Riley-Smith wrote under the assumption that crusading was a form of armed pilgrimage and compared the documents he examined with similar ones for those departing on a more traditional pilgrimage as an act of penance. He found “a serious and purposeful devotion on the part of would-be crusaders,” “a pious desire to arrange for intercessory prayer,” sometimes by those whose previous “cruelty” had “astonished” local clerics.
Yet Riley-Smith has highlighted … by showing that, far from being “an economic safety valve” for landless and impecunious male members of a family, the prospect of any member of a family participating in a crusade resulted in significant financial sacrifices on the part of the family. Moreover, Riley-Smith has shown that such financial sacrifices were usually made to send the head of the family or the eldest son on a crusade, rather than younger sons.
Jews had always allied themselves with the Muslims
…the association of Jews with the Muslim enemy, followed by the first major persecution of Jews in Western Christendom; a lingering sense of fear and injury that resurfaced in many First Crusade chronicles; and the gradual refocusing of Christian spiritual energy on the salvation narrative and the physical places associated with it.
The fact is Jews had figured for centuries in Christian writing and in liturgy in ways that preserved Christian resentment for their supposed role in the Crucifixion.
Anselm’s famous defence of the Christian faith, Cur Deus homo (Why God Became Man), whose “adversaries” were almost certainly meant to be Jews and which was most likely written while the First Crusade was underway. This growing sensitivity to Jewish criticisms of the doctrine of the Incarnation, among other points of faith, is perhaps best reflected in twelfth-century crusade historian Guibert of Nogent’s vicious attack on the count of Soissons, who was suspected of being a “Judaizer.”
In fact, the papacy reiterated the doctrine of toleration for Jews and took steps to prevent, or at least discourage, persecutions during subsequent crusades. After 1096, the most pressing issue was deciding what to do with the Jews forced to convert to Christianity.
No, the Crusades were not an early form of Colonialism
Thomas F. Madden is among those who see its application as totally inappropriate. In one of his several essays on crusade myths, Madden assails “Myth 4: The Crusades were just medieval colonialism dressed up in religious finery” by stating: It is important to remember that in the Middle Ages the West was not a powerful, dominant culture venturing into a primitive or backward region.
The Crusader States, founded in the wake of the First Crusade, were not new plantations of Catholics in a Muslim world akin to the British colonization of America. Catholic presence in the Crusader States was always tiny, easily less than ten percent of the population. These were the rulers and magistrates, as well as Italian merchants and members of the military orders. The overwhelming majority of the population in the Crusader States was Muslim.
They were not colonies, therefore, in the sense of plantations or even factories, as in the case of India. They were outposts. The ultimate purpose of the Crusader States was to defend the Holy Places in Palestine, especially Jerusalem, and to provide a safe environment for Christian pilgrims to visit those places. There was no mother country with which the Crusader States had an economic relationship, nor did Europeans economically benefit from them. Quite the contrary, the expense of Crusades to maintain the Latin East was a serious drain on European resources. As an outpost, the Crusader States kept a military focus.
A final and compelling reason to conclude that the vast majority of persons who left on the First Crusade had no intention whatsoever of colonizing eastern lands is that most of the surviving veterans, their pilgrimage to the Holy City completed, returned to their homes in the West shortly after the capture of Jerusalem in July 1099, leaving a small minority of Westerners to govern a vast majority of Muslims and Eastern Christians. There were probably not more than 5,000 crusaders, many of them noncombatants, left in the then-three crusader states in late 1099.
No profits from the Crusades
…in a 1998 review of Riley-Smith’s The First Crusaders, Professor William Chester Jordan of Princeton University effectively summed up the view of many current crusade historians of Riley-Smith’s research, when he wrote, “Riley-Smith has, I hope, laid to rest for all time the contention that crusaders profited monetarily from the wars. They did not, or at least the vast majority did not. Nor did they say that they expected to profit materially.”
This is not to say that crusaders expected nothing in the way of an earthly reward. They were well aware that crusading brought with it considerable social capital at home. Crusading families, especially those for whom crusading became a multigenerational tradition in the years after the First Crusade, were highly regarded in their communities. The charters are silent, however, on this all too human expectation of prestige. It is a rare person who openly admits to such desires.
A third crusade historian, Giles Constable, anticipated and even laid the basis for Riley-Smith’s and Bull’s work in 1982 with an insightful essay on the financing of crusades in which in pointed to the enormous cost of crusading, the ways in which many crusade lords mortgaged the future and imperilled their heirs’ patrimony in order to crusade, and how crusaders did not expect to return richer in the goods of this life.
There is much more in this book, but the above were some important themes gleaned from this scholarship and which rectify the incorrect aspersions and indignities heaped upon the Crusades by modern culture, which appears to be mostly unacquainted with historical reality and perspective.
No greater lie exists than the perversion that Islam is a religion. And one of peace yet. Muslim practices and Islamic doctrine have nothing to do with 'religion'. They are premised on a 3000 year old moon cult, and are concerned with control, power, supremacism and racist ideology. Islam has far more in common with Nazism than it does with Christianity. Is Nazism to be accepted as a religion? If Islam, the most primitive and pagan of pre-modern ritualised moon worship must be embraced as a religion why not Nazism?
Hitler's great statist-fascist experiment was in essence a cult movement founded on the same ideals which animate Islam. Cults share many features. Hitlerite fascism was of course a left-wing, communal phenomenon using the power of the modern state to militarise, terrorise and engage in domestic and international violence. Yet few today would subscribe to the belief that Nazism was a religion, a way of life, a cultural expression or some sort of experiment which went sadly awry.
Not many defend the 70 million dead including 6 million Jews in an industrialised murder, as being unfortunate victims of a brave and morally superior 'new world order'. Nazism was a cult-centric evil of communist proportions, surpassed only in violence and butchery by Chinese, Russian and African marxists, and of course by Islam itself.
Islam in the name of the Arabian moon deity Al-Lah (some aruge it is the Sun idol, or a general celestial God), has killed about 300 million people over 1400 years. It enslaved some 20-25 million Blacks, and about 15-25 million Whites. Slavery still goes on in the Islamic world today, along with terrorism, female mutilation, female bondage, female slaving, and the persecution of Jews and Christians. Freedom, individuality, progress – all are neutered, corrupted or non-existent within Islam.
However, we the publicly educated knaves of the West are told by preening fembot politicians and 'experts' to accept the crass stupidity, forwarded by 'progressives' and socialists, that this murdering machine is a peaceful religion? Interesting. One supposes that Mr. Hitler was likewise an apostle of peace. The Nazi apes, like their Islamic brethren, also clambered about on top of the public corpse, discussing communal salvation, guaranteed social peace, and the 'volksgemeinschaft', or individual-community obligation, in supporting and loving the Hitler cult, and thereby achieving spiritual healing .
It was Hitler's desire after all to turn Linz into a Nazi Mecca and it would have been a short step to declare himself a prophet, inspired by the Norse gods to lead a greater Germany. In fact many German writers and socialist-fascist sympathizers described Hitler as a Christ-like saviour and god-inspired leader. For many Germans Hitler was god's instrument. The Nazi party a necessary vehicle to create a new earth-bound utopia of communal, socialist greatness. Mohammed would have been impressed.
Nazism was suffused with pagan cult practice and a deep hatred of Christianity. The Hitlerites hated not only Jews, but any philosophy or thought which made men 'weak', 'pacifist', 'bourgeois', and boring and middle class. Nazism was a revolutionary socialist doctrine. National socialism – rule of all by the state for the state, with nothing outside the state and everything in it – was in essence a massive program of communal madness.
Individuality, choice, debate, bourgeois living, peace, trade and commerce, dissension, religions, clubs – these and anything else which took away loyalty to the cult would and must be abolished. Guarantees – jobs, health, income, education, pensions – these would be given IF you are 100% loyal to the cult. There is nothing 'right wing' about such a program. This is collective madness.
Islam demands much of the same and given its origins as a pagan moon cult, this is not surprising. Most real experts – meaning those who are not populist politicians, nor the talking heads on TV – know that the word 'Allah' comes from the compound Arabic word, al-ilah. Al-ilah has always referenced the moon cult in Arabia, and in fact within al-ilah there are different moon deities depending on the cycle of the moon and its appearance in the heavens. It is not a mistake that the crescent moon is the symbol of Islam. Allah is the 'male' moon deity and the cycle of the crescent moon was his pagan cycle of ritual.
According to the Encyclopeida of Islam "Allah was known to the pre-Islamic Arabs; he was one of the Meccan deities" (I:406, ed. Gibb), and "Ilah . . . appears in pre-Islamic poetry . . . By frequency of usage, al-ilah was contracted to Allah, frequently attested to in pre-Islamic poetry" (III:1093, 1971). In the Encyclopedia of Religion: '"Allah" is a pre-Islamic name . . . corresponding to the Babylonian Bel' (I:117 Washington DC, Corpus Pub., 1979). According to Middle East scholar E.M. Wherry, whose translation of the Quran is still used today, in pre-Islamic times Allah-worship, as well as the worship of Ba-al, were both astral religions in that they involved the worship of the sun, the moon, and the stars (A Comprehensive Commentary on the Quran, Osnabruck: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1973, p. 36).
The Quraysh tribe into which Muhammad was born was particularly devoted to Allah, the moon god, and especially to Allah's three daughters who were viewed as intercessors between the people and Allah.
In mad Mohammed's home town of Mecca, his family, part of Mecca's ruling tribe, worshipped three moon-astral based goddesses: Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat. All of these moon deities were worshipped in the shrine called the Kabah, a shrine which Mohammed's family helped to support and protect. Of particular importance was the veneration and kissing of the black asteroid rock called the Hubal signifying a gift from the heavens [later turned into a gift from God to Abraham by Mohammed]. Al-ilah was the common Arabic word for 'the god' or this supreme deity of the moon cult, though this God was never fully described by Mohammed or any Arab for that matter [it was largely an illiterate society].
Al-lah was in essence an abstract concept which probably referred to 'something' which controlled the other moon and astral deities worshipped by the Arabs. It was no accident that when Mohammed started his cult he named it Allah or al-ilah meaning the highest God or deity. It would be a word and a concept well-known to all the disparate Arab tribes with their various beliefs as being something they could identify with.
The moon or celestial cult was thus well known to Mohammed and had been in existence for 3000 years before his birth. Al-Kindi, one of the early Christian apologists against Islam, pointed out that Islam and its god Allah did not come from the Bible but from the paganism of the Sabeans who inhabited northern Arabia. They did not worship the God of the Bible but the Moon-god and his daughters al-Uzza, al-Lat and Manat. Dr. Newman concludes his study of the early Christian-Muslim debates by stating, "Islam proved itself to be...a separate and antagonistic religion which had sprung up from idolatry." Islamic scholar Caesar Farah concluded "There is no reason, therefore, to accept the idea that Allah passed to the Muslims from the Christians and Jews."
Why would moon cult worship pass from the Judeo-Christian world to the Arabic? Moon cult worship has existed for millenia in the Middle East, and polytheistic moon worshipping societies, such as pre-Mohammed Arabia, were the norm, not the exception. Islam is fundamentally a moon cult, polytheistic, primitive and contradictory. Equating 'Allah' which is never defined nor illustrated by Mohammed with Christian or Jewish ideas of God is simply madness.
Islam is not a religion in the Western Judeo-Christian sense of that word. Probably the best definition of 'religion' is this one by Michael York of Bath Spa University College, Bath, UK who defines it as:
"A shared positing of the identity of and relationship between the world, humanity and the supernatural in terms of meaning assignment, value allocation and validation enactment. A religion need not accept or believe in the supernatural, but it takes a position on. Likewise, some religions deny the reality or at least value of the world, but they still take a position."
Religion is largely monotheistic and an enterprise of spirituality, designed to provide a road map for living, a set of laws and ethics, and to regulate behavior through such ethics and perhaps ritual. At its core any religion must be based on some pagan practice. Religious ideas have to have antecedents. But here is the crucial difference between a real religion and a cult. In the cult, the individual has no free will, no independent power, no responsibility, no self-made destiny. He exists to please the cult and its symbol. Submission, follow, repent, and accept. Period. This is Islam. This is Nazism. This is commmunism.
Christianity is wholly different. There are pagan aspects to Christianity of course. Christianity was a Jewish offshoot and the Jews lived and developed their ideology in a turbulent and multi-ethnic and dimensional world. But Christianity exults the individual. There is free will. Freedom of choice. A division between the church and state. A protection of women and the weak. And there is the golden rule – 'do unto others as you would have done unto you'. None of these concepts can be found in pagan cults. The pagan cult demands the communal and the unthinking loyalty of the mass. Christianity preaches the opposite.
Islam is not a religon in our Western sense of what constitutes a religion. It is a cult of obedience and submission. Hence Islam meaning submission, is a very good word choice indeed for the millenia old Arab moon cult.
It is a commonplace and entirely untrue lie that Islam had a golden era, and in that mythical state, viewed Jews and Christians as equals. No more absurd claim, other than Globaloney Warming, can be constructed. The Islamic hatred for the Christian was only surpassed by the Muslim detestation of Blacks [the original Kaffirs], and the sinful people of the 'book', the 'devious' Jew. As historian Louis Bertrand so eloquently expressed it, Muslim terror against the conquered Christians in Spain for example, was almost as profound as that against the Jew:
“To keep Christians in their place it did not suffice to surround them with a zone of famine and destruction. It was necessary also to go and sow terror and massacre among them. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, an army sallied forth from Cordova to go and raid the Christians, destroy their villages, their fortified posts, their monasteries and their churches.”
Muslim Spain – unmitigated carnage which proves yet again that Islam is peace.
The Arab invasions in the 7th and 8th centuries denuded and decimated more than half of 'Christianity' in the Mediterranean. Jews, Berbers, Christians, Greek-Romans, and the polyglot of merchants, artists, philosophers and skilled tradesmen were all negatively affected, by the onslaught. The Arabs were never a majority until much later in history. In the beginning they had little choice but to squat and rule as a minority. Some degree of 'tolerance' would be expected in such a circumstance. The entire edifice of Muslim rule was premised on the tax farming of Jews and Christians since Muslim males did not pay any taxed. Killing the entire host which supplies your wealth, slaves and cadre of sex vehicles or concubines, is probably not what any rational or in the case of Islam, irrational cult would enforce.
Thus the myth of 'inter faith' harmony. The necessities of tax farming and control over the vastly important slave trade does not mean that the Arabs were particularly interested in allowing 'freedom' or equality to the 'other'. They were very interested in chicks, gold and tax money. Islam is a doctrinaire theology of political power and control. It is not particularly concerned with the Golden Rule [the Koran has none], nor with respect, toleration or gratitude [except to the Meccan male moon deity Ali-ilah]. Though treated somewhat better than the Hindus or Buddhists who were exterminated in their millions, the 'peoples of the book' or Jews and Christians were still dhimmis, and second class slaves. The definitive study of this has been done by the Egyptian born and now French national Bat Yeor – another Islamic critic who is the target of post-modern hate and vitriol. But Yeor knows her topic as she asks of Islam:
“Are these countries conquered by Islam - Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Sicily, Crete, and the southern regions of France and Italy, for example - Arab lands? The shari'a was imposed as far to the north as Hungary and Poland, not to mention all central Europe, including regions of Greece, ex-Yugoslavia, Rumania and Bulgaria up to the end of the nineteenth century. Are those countries Arab countries, in which non-Muslim inhabitants must return to the condition of dhimmis, whose testimony is rejected by Islamic courts? Are they once again going to don discriminatory garments such as the Talibans today demand; and be subject to the prohibition on building and renovating their churches, like the Copts in Egypt?”
Good questions. Ones that the Western multi-cultists can't answer.
The Dhimmis were and today are, second class slaves. Submit to Muslim power. Pay taxes. Shut up. If you transgress 'norms' we the Muslim elite reserve the right to take your property, wealth and women. Be nice. Be discriminating. And we will let you be.
This is not an orthodoxy of tolerance but of supremacism and control. Tolerating the 'other' to tax them, is not a religious or spiritual enterprise. It is political and economic. As distinguished Orientalist G.E. von Grunebaum has written:
“It would not be difficult to put together the names of a very sizeable number Jewish subjects or citizens of the Islamic area who have attained to high rank, to power, to great financial influence, to significant and recognized intellectual attainment; and the same could be done for Christians. But it would again not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms."
Muslims did use educated and well connected Jews and Christians to help manage their empire. Why wouldn't they ? They were a minority, they needed the continuation of some sort of known bureaucracy and it made good PR. Political convenience however, does not make a philosophy of totalitarian control moral, or tolerant. It just makes it cynical.
JJ O'Neill also knows his topic, and writes in 'Holy Warriors' of the open Muslim contempt for the Christian during the so-called Islamic golden age – which never existed:
“The humiliating status provoked many revolts, punished by massacres. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa in 781 and 881, Cordoba (805, 818), Merida (805-13, 828, 829, and 868), and again in Toledo (811-819). Many of the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran (5:33).”
Indeed. Bloody uprisings. Even dhimmis can get annoyed by their slave status. Arab Spain was anything but a multicultural paradise so prized by academics. It was a bloody Arab imposition of Koranic tyranny.
Throughout the entire history of Arab and Islamic imperialism the hated dhimmis were excluded from public office and armed service, and were forbidden to bear arms. They were not allowed to ride horses or camels, to build synagogues or churches taller than mosques, to construct houses higher than those of Muslims or to drink wine in public. They were forced to wear distinctive clothing and were not allowed to pray or mourn in loud voices — as that might offend the Muslims.
The dhimmi also had to show public deference toward Muslims; for example, always yielding them the center of the road. The dhimmi was not allowed to give evidence in court against a Muslim, and his oath was unacceptable in an Islamic court. To defend himself, the dhimmi would have to purchase Muslim witnesses at great expense. This left the dhimmi with little legal recourse when harmed by a Muslim.
And this imbalance in rights is now termed inter-faith equality ?
Islam of course has never been restructured or reformed over 1400 years. Islam and its Koranic invocations has remained in place for over 1000 years. It is ossified and static. It will never mutate. H.E.W. Young, British Vice Consul in Mosul, wrote in 1909:
“The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed."
The same is true today. Post 1945 almost 1 million Jews were expelled from Arab and Islamic states for example – thanks to Arab and Muslim racism. Many found refuge in Israel in hastily constructed camps. Those camps were gone after 10 years – its one-time inhabitants integrated into a surging Israeli society. Without a Christian state in the Middle East, Christians have fared far worse. Christian populations in Arab and Muslim lands have declined by 90 % in the past 100 years. The Muslims are either killing or forcing into exile, those 'others' of the book. It is a pattern repeated throughout the world and throughout the course of history. But never mind, the really smart people will still keep telling us that Islam is peace.
French police shoot a 17 year-old Muslim with a criminal history and the country explodes in coordinated civil violence which will leave dozens injured and billions in damages. The vast majority of the rioting and depredations emanate from the Muslim and Arab demographics. France has some 70 million people, with at least 10-15 million Muslims and Africans (legal and illegal), or double what the ‘official’ news sites and agencies state. Everywhere Muslims emigrate, unemployment, crime, Jihad and violence follows. A French Imam advocated Jihad back in 2019, to takeover France. Many urban areas in France are dominated by Muslims.
Police being attacked by Muslims and Arabs
Police claim they are at war with Muslims
Muslim rioters hunt down Police, issue death threats
Muslims are not integrated by their own volition and design. They refuse to acknowledge the secular values of the Republic (Muslims will not sign the French ‘values’ Charter 2020). Many routinely call for the overthrow of the Republic. Muslims and Blacks along with the fake-news blame non-Muslim and White French for all issues that dominate the Muslim-Black communities, including poor education attainment, poverty, unemployment, crime, drugs, rapes, and sundry violence.
When you import Muslims and Blacks into your country, this is always the result. A civil war.
Marine Le Pen rips apart those who have always denied the above statement as France becomes yet another victim of the Muslim hijra and Western stupidity.
![Scanderbeg: A History of George Castriota and the Albanian Resistance to Islamic Expansion in Fifteenth Century Europe by [A Brackob]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51L9JwbXwbL.jpg)
“For men’s souls are tired of the Turks, And their wicked ways and works, That have made of Ak-hissar A city of the plague; And the loud exultant cry That echoes wide and far Is `Long Live Scanderbeg!’” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“…the exploits of Scanderbeg, it would be inestimable; for he excels all the officers, ancient and modern, in the conduct of a small defensive army. I met with him in the Turkish History, but nowhere else.” — James Wolfe to Thomas Townshend, 18 July 1756
Written in 2018, this is an excellent modern overview of the great Christian Albanian Crusader and hero, Skanderbeg. During the mid-15th century, Skanderbeg or Lord Alexander in Turkish, saved Christian Italy and central Europe from the Ottoman Jihad. An overview of Skanderbeg is here.
The Christian resistance in Albania
As the author writes, for a quarter of a century, from 1443 until his death in 1468, Skanderbeg used his military prowess to thwart the efforts of the most powerful Empire in the world at that time to subdue his tiny country. Despite this, few English language studies of his remarkable feat have been written. The British General of French and Indian War fame, James Wolfe’s comment on Scanderbeg recognizes the historical importance of the Albanian resistance to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, but since his complaint, over two and a half centuries ago, that he could only find mention of Scanderbeg in Richard Knolles’ The Generall Historie of the Turkes, relatively few works on the subject have appeared in major languages.
Writing of Scanderbeg in 1905, William J. Armstrong said, “the exploits even of the renowned paladins of the crusades, whether Godfrey or Tancred or Richard or Raymond, pale to insignificance by similar comparison. Only the legendary feats of King Arthur and his knights, or of the Guardsmen of Dumas suggest a parallel of wondrous achievement.”
As Brackob rightly depicts, Skanderbeg as an image is similar to Saint George or the Archangel Michael, a militant fighter for Christendom, the leader of a holy crusade against the Turkish Infidels. To commemorate the 500th anniversary of Scanderbeg’s death, in 1968, Pope Paul VI declared: “This Holy See is pleased to join in the praise of this man of great nobility, a faithful son of the Church and a son whom sovereign pontiffs before us have praised possibly more glowingly than any other man of his time. For twenty-five years, he saved his country from the assault of enemies. He defended his country threatened by the greatest danger, at the head of an army which the rampart and defence of Christianity.”
Saving Civilisation
Brackob correctly concludes that Skanderbeg defended Europe for a quarter of a century and, it can rightly be said, helped to save Western Civilization from being overrun by Islam. Although the challenges have changed over the centuries, the clash of civilizations, which the history of the Albanian struggle to fend off the Islamic onslaught represents, continues today.
Methods
Geography played an important role in the success of Scanderbeg’s resistance to the Ottomans. The mountains served as a natural shield against the Islamic invaders; in his History of Mehmed the Conqueror, the Greek chronicler Kritoboulos, a contemporary of these events, testified to this fact: “there were but one or two passes through the mountains into the country, they guarded these with strong garrisons, and kept their land inviolate from enemies, and free from injury, unless a large force should invade it and forcibly occupy the mountains and the passes, and so open a door into the whole country.”
Skanderbeg’s genius lay in his system of organization which created greater possibilities for defence, making it easier to raise armies, while assuring the distribution of labour to meet the needs of the local community. It also created the basis of a type of feudal organization, as local communities were obligated to provide labour or goods to the ruling family in return for the social order and protection which it provided. Thus, the origins of a distinct Albanian feudalism can be found in the extension of these familial ties and the need to organize to ensure social order and defence.
Albania’s important geographical position
Flourishing cities dotted the coastline of Albania during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The major ports were Durazzo, which had been an important harbour since its founding in the seventh century B.C., and Valona, the principal port in the southern part of the country. These coastal cities had a developing middle class whose prosperity depended largely upon Venetian trade with the interior. Ever since the Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the thirteenth century, Venice had sought to gain control over the coastline to exploit the rich economic resources of Albania.
Already in the thirteenth century Albania had become an important wheat exporter to Venice, Ragusa, and Constantinople meaning that the country was producing a significant surplus of grain.
The growing threat posed by the Ottomans, however, finally led Venice to seize control of Durazzo in 1392, and most other major coastal cities of northern and central Albania the following year. Venetian administration was established in these cities, and commerce was placed solely in the hands of Venetian merchants, thus destroying the native merchant class,
Venetian rule imposed heavy taxes and labour obligations upon the peasants in the coastal areas leading to major uprisings in 1399 and 1405. The causes of these rebellions lie in the fact that Venetian administration upset the traditional relations between the peasants and the native nobility.
The Ottomans
Sultan Mehmed I launched a campaign against Albania in 1415, reasserting Ottoman authority over the central and southern parts of the country. In the south, the timar system was extended, while in the central part of the country the aristocracy maintained their lands by paying tribute.
Ottomans imposed the devshirme, which led to the conscription of their most able-bodied children into military service, depriving the village community of valuable labour and violating local tradition. The peasants also blamed the Ottomans for the increasing fiscal burden they had borne since the beginning of the century. Free peasants in the mountainous regions actively opposed efforts to incorporate their villages into the timar system as they struggled to maintain their independence.
Between 1433 and 1436 Albanian rebellions defeated three separate Ottoman armies sent by Murad II to quell the uprisings. Finally, in 1436, the Sultan sent a large army, again led by Ali Bey, that crushed most of the uprisings; “[They] pillaged and destroyed the lands of John Castriota, the men were put to the sword, while the women were made slaves,” Oruç records, “They completely conquered Janina and Kanina and returned with great plunder... The son of Evrenos bey conquered the vilayet of the Albanians and was satiated with plunder from pillaging.” Only George Araniti managed to maintain a small pocket of resistance in the mountains of central Albania. Widespread opposition to the Ottomans remained, leading to a new revolt in Berat in 1437, but this new uprising was quickly suppressed by the Sultan’s forces.
Enter the former Muslim slave and Ottoman general, the great Christian Skanderbeg and his 25-year resistance which bought Italy and Europe valuable time, while defeating and erasing much of the Ottoman military. Much of this history is sadly forgotten. More here.
