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Western Civilisation

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.   

Archive - February 2023

Constantinople and Tours. 718 and 732. Victory over the Muslim Jihad.

Both battles are connected and linked.

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Byzantine Alternate History Series: Chapter V- Emperor Artavasdos, the ...

 

Most people don’t understand that the ‘West’ simply refers to the rump and remnant which remained of what was once a vast Christian-based collection of states, empires and cultures around the Mediterranean.  The battle of Tours in 732 and the subsequent campaigns in the 730s by Charles Martel and the Franks, ended the Muslim threat of complete domination of Europe.  This signal fact, this great accomplishment is of course under attack by post-modern ‘academics’ who write, without looking at primary sources or understanding the nature of medieval warfare that an invasion of 2 armies composing some 80.000 men was a ‘raid’.  Yet Claudius conquered Britain with a fraction of that total, with William of Normandy repeating it a 1.000 years later with 10.000 men.  The objective of the Muslim invasion of Provence and Burgundy was the destruction of Christianity in Frankish Gaul.

 

 

The Frankish eradication of the Muslim threat at Tours used to be celebrated.  Historian Godefroid Kurth in the early 20th century proclaimed Tours as, ‘one of the greatest events in the history of the world, as upon its issue depended whether Christian Civilisation should continue or Islam prevail throughout Europe.’  In 718 the Roman-Christian Byzantines defeated the Muslim hordes at Constantinople.  This victory stopped the Muslim takeover of the Byzantine empire.  Fourteen years at Tours, a similar event occurred.  The Muslim Jihad was mortally wounded at Tours and the Reconquista of Spain and parts of the Mediterranean could now commence. 

 

The two-pronged Jihad from the Muslim masses were thus arrested at both ends of Europe.

 

Orate Fratres: The Battle of Tours, 732 AD

 

Yet both victories at Constantinople in 718 and at Tours in 732 are linked.  Leo the Lion who led the Christian forces at Constantinople had to suffer a year of siege warfare, with the Muslims besieging his capital with a force comprising no fewer than 100.000 men.  The Muslims suffered through one of the harshest winters in that period, the raids of the Bulgars paid by Leo to attack the Muslim supply lines and depots, disease, starvation, and constant sallies by the defenders of the nigh impregnable city.  Only 20.000 or so Arab Jihadis survived the siege of Constantinople.  By contrast the 80.000 or so Berber-Arab Jihadis at Tours fled, routed and ruined, after a single day of combat.  Their losses were enormous probably half were killed or injured.  But if the Muslim Jihad against Constantinople had succeeded very likely the Franks would have been engaged on two fronts, against 2 enormous Muslim hordes and the outcome may have been different.

 

Spain’s first Muslim dictator or emir, bin Nusayr, is recorded as stating that he wanted the Muslim Jihad to conquer all of Europe, and he would begin in the Pyrenees and end in Constantinople.  This circuit though ambitious was certainly plausible given the disunited state of Christendom and the fact that most of Germany and large tracts of Central and Eastern Europe were pagan, not Christian, and unreliable in the extreme as allies against a Muslim Jihad.  The Muslims had destroyed Christianity from Arabia to the Pyrenees, conquering the eastern and southern parts of Christendom, and Spain.  Why not the rest of the ‘West’ and North and East of what remained?  When the Muslims under Rahman invaded France and headed for Tours in 732 AD, they brought with them their many wives, children, pack animals, moving as it were, ‘lock stock and barrel’, to colonise a new land. 

 

This gives lie to the current ‘academic’ fascination that an 80.000 man force, composed of 2 armies, was a ‘raid’.  French medievalist Dufourcq stated that the patten of Jihad was always the same, first reconnaissance, raid for booty and slaves, assess the strength of the target land in question, than launch an all-out attack with a view to conquering and colonising.  So it was with Syria, North Africa, Spain and France.  It is quite obvious that had Rahman defeated Charles at Tours, the Arab and Berber Muslims would have plundered the wealthy abbey at Tours, settled, expanded and proceeded to conquer the rest of Frankish Gaul. 

 

Charlemagne, the Muslim Jihad, White Slavery

The 9th century was a brutal one for Christendom

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Charlemagne Biography - Facts, Childhood, Family Life & Achievements

 

Modern ‘$cience’ and ‘reason’ states that the medieval period was an unbroken sea of Darkness, an age of the broken, the depraved, the hair shirted fanatic, the unreasonable mystic, the ‘denier’ of rationality, the mentally infirm and debauched, and illiterate toothless idiots who talked to non-existent ‘friends’.  The reign of Charlemagne or Charles the Great is hard to align with such a belief system.  The Carolingian renaissance of the 9th century has its antecedents dating back to Clovis and the early 6th century, informed by the transformation of the Roman Empire, now deceased, into separate units, with extending ties of trade, commerce and ideas, a Europe which was revitalised once the dead weight of the Roman military state was lifted.  Windmills now so much in vogue, are hardly new.  They proliferated along with water mills post the Roman implosion as one example and benefit amongst many, in the ending of a parasitical tyrannical system.

 

In the 8th century, the Muslims were still threatening from the south, the Magyar or Huns from the east, and the first Viking raids from the north were commencing late in the century, much of that propelled by the white slave trade with the Muslim caliphs around the Mediterranean. In this milieu on Christmas day in 800, Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo III as first Holy Roman Emperor.  Modern history was thus initiated. 

 

Charlemagne effectively unified the ‘West’ or the rump of Christendom that was still free of the Muslim yoke.  He was the quintessential Christian warrior, a crusader, who also built churches, schools, hospitals, orphanages, roads, cities, aqueducts, and artistic works.  He is also remembered for maintaining cordial relations with the new Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, one Harun al Rashid, who had just taken over from the Ummayad dynasty, disgraced by the massive failures to take Constantinople (718).  Einhard the biographer of Charlemagne stated he did this largely to make life tolerable for Christian dhimmis living in Muslim occupied territory of what was once a vast Christian empire.  This included sending money and supplies to the beleaguered Christian populations in Muslim lands.  Charlemagne also made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem where he built a hostel for travelling Christians, along with a library and church.

 

Charlemagne did campaign against the Muslims in Spain building a buffer zone around the Pyrenees and down the coast to Barcelona.  This allowed him and the Holy Roman Empire the space and time needed to conquer the Frisians and Saxons and continue the Christianisation of Germany.  The Muslims in Spain and North Africa directed their efforts elsewhere, realising that the might of the Franks could not be assaulted.  In 846 post Charlemagne’s death, a Muslim fleet landed at Rome’s port, Ostia, and attacked the city.  Unable to break in, they sacked and pillaged the surrounding countryside including the holy basilicas of St Paul and St Peter where Charlemagne had been crowned.  The tombs of Peter and Paul were scandalised and vandalised, the basilicas stripped of their treasures and gold.  Thus began a decades long investment and raiding on the Italian Tyrrhenian coast, with white slaves and easy treasure being the main objectives.  Italian cities and families began to move inland to hilltop and mountaintop villages, a migration forced by Saracen depredation.  Exorbitant ransom was paid to eject the Muslims from the Italian coastal areas including Ostia, which only served to stimulate more attacks.

 

Deterred by the power of the Frankish empire, the Muslims vented the energies of Jihad in the Western Mediterranean and on Italy and Sicily.  In the 9th century the Muslims conquered the Balearics, Corsica, Crete, Cyprus, Malta, Sicily and Sardinia.  All were utterly annihilated with massive destruction and endless thousands of white Christian slaves taken.  In Crete in 826 for example, Muslims forced all Christians to convert to Muhammadanism, or be enslaved.  The capital city Candia was turned into a white slave market. 

 

The imposition of jizya or enormous taxation and its economic and social destruction, was matched by the thousands of destroyed churches and Christian buildings.  Not only were Muslims content and amused by the evisceration of Christian culture, they absolutely delighted in profaning the same.  In Salerno Sicily, during the Muslim siege, a virgin Christian nun was raped every evening on the altar in a Christian cathedral.  These depredations and depravity are rarely mentioned today.

 

By the early 10th century, the once Romano-Christian Mediterranean had become a Muslim ‘lake’, the hunting ground of slavers, brigands and Jihadis.  Ibn Khaldun the celebrated Muslim historian boasted that the Christians could not float a plank, and could do nothing to resist the Muslim fleets.  The nature of the Muslim Jihad changed with the rise of Charlemagne and the Frankish Holy Roman Empire.  The ‘easy’ riches found in Spain, southern France and the costs of Italy and the Mediterranean islands had been thoroughly plundered and taken.  White slaves, women for the sex harems, young boys as eunuchs and warriors, men as galley rowers or slaves for mines, were now preferred.  Hence the Viking onslaught in the north, partnered with the Muslim Jihad in the south.  The Vikings enslaved many tens of thousands of White Christians and sent them south to the Muslim caliphates.  This is a little remarked upon fact, certainly not to be found in the endless documentaries now seeking to rebrand the Vikings from vicious pagan warring criminals, into peaceful, humble, shy farmers.

 

Muslim invasion of Francia, Tours and Martel

Christians saving civilisation from the Muslim Orcs.

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CHARLES MARTEL (c688-741) Photograph by Granger

 

 

 

‘Modern’ science’ states that the Muslim evisceration of Spain was a beatific golden age.  Rapes, raids, beheadings, economic devastation, and the destruction of any building including large Cathedrals, bearing a cross or any sign of being Christian, was a high-water mark in man’s ‘evolution’, perhaps even surpassing the pagan-slave civilisation of Rome.  Nothing was built by the Muslims in Spain.  Cordoba’s existing city wall extended.  Churches turned into mosques.  The Alhambra in Granada designed and built by Christian slaves is the only building that the Muslimophile can point out for architecture elegance, built entirely on the bodies of dead Christians and their confiscated lands and money.  The ‘modern’ world’s remarkably ignorant view would have made little impression on those who lived in Spain from 710 to 1492 under the Muslim yoke, or prey to its Jihad and rapine.  Visigothic Spain in the 7th century was one of the wealthiest areas on the planet.  Muslims squatted, ate, drained and used that vast wealth, which by the 11th century ensured that Spain was falling into economic and social decline wherever the Muslims dominated.  Muslim-dominated Spain was essentially a slave empire with ‘Dhimmitude’ or knave status for White Christians a norm, subject to sur-taxation, the enslavement of girls for the harem, or the abduction of young boys to serve in the Jihad.

 

Spain was just a steppingstone into the heart of Europe.  The publicly declared intention of the Muslim Jihad was to extinguish Christianity in Europe and establish a moon-cult Caliphate.  In 719, the Muslim governor of Spain al Khawlani, invaded southern France and took Narbonne sitting near the Mediterranean.  He used it as a base to raid the areas of Provence and the Pyrenes, acquiring slaves, booty and spilling the blood of the local Franks.  Late in 719 the Muslims attempted to take Toulouse, but were defeated in a significant encounter, which bought the Franks time and about a decade to build a reply to the Muslim Jihad.  The Christian victory over the Muslim Arabs at Constantinople in 718, was matched in importance by the Christian victory at Toulouse, under Eudes or Odo the Great, the Duke of Acquitaine, and his Christian knights.  

 

After this battle Aquitaine declared independence from the Frankish empire.  Eudes made an alliance with a Muslim-Berber chieftain sited in the Pyrenes in order to protect his independence from Charles Martel and the Franks.  Muslims are forbidden to make alliances with the Infidel.  In 731, the new Muslim Arab governor, one Abdul Rahman, invaded the Berber’s lands.  Rahman pointed his vast army to the land of the Franks.  Eudes attempted a stand at Bordeaux, was defeated, and the city put to the sword, with its population raped, its women sent to harems in Damascus and its men enslaved.  Eudes attempted another defence at the Garonne river, only to see his men slaughtered. He fled to Paris, to Charles Martel and his Franks, a man and empire he had recently seceded from.

 

After eviscerating the forces of Eudes, the Muslims under Rahman do what Muslims do best.  They plundered the land of its riches.  Gibbon refers to the ‘rich soil’ of the Churches and monasteries, their wealth and objects being stolen or set to fire.  Some Bishops were burnt alive as a warning to others.  By early 732 the Muslims controlled all the major towns and ports between the Pyrenes and the Rhone river.  Rahman had a force of 80.000 men, and he divided them into 2 armies with the objective of taking Tours, the wealthiest Basilica in Western Christendom, containing illimitable riches.  Between the coast and Tours, endless numbers of towns fell, slaves taken, women raped, many sent on to the harems in the Middle East, men made eunuchs or slaves, and gold and silver taken.  For the big brains in the ‘modern’ world, 80.000 Muslim men destroying an entire region of Francia is ‘just a raid’, of no great import, and those happy, laughing endearing Muslims had no intention of ‘staying’ or controlling these Christian areas – which begs the question of what they were doing in Spain.

 

Exactly 100 years after the death of the mad brigand and false prophet Muhammad, an enormous Muslim force, laden with booty and slaves, was in the vicinity of St Martin Of Tours and one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Western Christianity.  The Muslim force was largely composed of Berbers, non-White North Africans, who fought as light calvary.  Moors or Arab Muslims fought mostly on horseback with scimitars and lances, trained to attack, and largely ignorant of defensive manoeuvrers.  The Franks under their leader or Mayor of the Palace, Charles Martel, were largely a heavy infantry force.  A typical infantry man under Martel would bear 70 pounds of iron.  The Franks would be organised into deep phalanx formations, using shields, spears and bearing swords, axes, including the famous throwing axe the francisca and daggers. 

 

Near Tours Martel chose the high ground flanked by dense woods, both for protection and to hide the numbers of his much smaller force.  So burdened with booty that he was forced to start shipping much of it south, Rahman, with the autumn winter chills in the air, decided to attack on October 10 732.  The Muslims frenetic charges were direct and head on.  They were largely ineffective against the massed ranks of the heavy Frankish infantry situated on a hillside flanked by forests.  The Franks would have had a wall of locked shields, punctuated by long spears which would seek out the underbellies of horses or the body of a lightly armoured Muslim rider.  Charles the Frankish leader found himself surrounded but enacted such a great slaughter at the besieging Muslims, gaining his freedom, that he was nicknamed the Hammer.  As night fell the Franks regrouped expecting another great clash on the morrow.

 

But during the night the Muslim hordes had fled.  Their leader Rahman had been killed.  No one knows how many Muslims died but probably no fewer than 20.000 against relatively few Frankish dead.  The Berbers always wary of Arab Muslims and their duplicity, and usually treated by the same as badly as Infidels were treated, had decided that some booty and life were preferable over fighting Frankish heavy infantry.  The Franks did not chase the Muslims, knowing that their victory was due to the heavy shield wall and ranks of armour.  The Muslims devastated the land as they headed south, taking more slaves and plunder and setting villages, town and churches alight. 

 

Martel had to fight more large battles to evict the Muslims from Francia.  The most significant occurred in 737 near Narbonne where he destroyed the Muslim occupying forces, and in 739 not far away from Narbonne, where the last vestiges of Muslim overlordship were extinguished and the Jihadis were driven back across the Pyrenes.  Indeed, until his death in 741 AD Martel was on a yearly campaign to denude Francia of the Muslim pestilence.

 

The carnage enacted by the Muslims on Francia, in just a decade is hard to calculate.  Tens of thousands would have been killed, far more taken as slaves, with many women feeding the insatiable appetites of Muslim harems across North Africa and the Middle East.  Untold scores of towns and villages were plundered and destroyed.  Hundreds of churches and monastic buildings set to fire or pulled down, their riches stolen or melted down.  The land foraged and ‘scorched’ to supply food and material for 80.000 or so Jihadis.  The destruction would last generations and as with every other area subjected to the Muslim Jihad, social, economic and cultural degradation was immense.  Yet for the ‘modern world’, these brave, resolute Christians, using advanced technology and armour, though outnumbered and often surprised by the alacrity of the Muslim light calvary, who were now in the 730s starting to fight back against the Jihad and in effect saving civilisation, are casually dismissed as ‘dark agers’, ‘superstitious people’ and ‘backwards’.  The exact opposite descriptions in reality apply to these Christians.  They mounted a considerable and ferocious defence of civilisation against the hordes and Orcs of Muhammad.