An insightful look into 10^th century Europe. It is my contention that by 900 AD Europe was the richest, best-fed, best-educated and most agriculturally productive geographic entity in the world. It was 'Christendom' which formed the modern world, developed technology and science, and allowed freedom to come to the fore of the political-economy. Free-will, free-association, freedom of speech, free assembly, and the mandate to use rationality only arose in Christendom – no where else.

Collins would likely agree with this assessment. Some interesting facts from the 10^th century on why and how Christendom saved the world.

in the tenth century probably less than 25 percent of European land was owned by the church and monastic orders and that kings and magnates controlled 40 percent or more. Ordinary people owned about 30 to 35 percent, but the constant insecurity and chaos meant that they were still subservient to the local strongman because they needed his protection.

The Secular state was always more powerful than the Church and incessantly desired its subservience to state power.

Italy seems to have been an irresistibly attractive prize for the Germans. It was not only the warmer climate and brighter light, the economic prosperity and the developed resources, particularly in northern Italy, that attracted them. It was also the influence the emperors could exercise over the papacy, which indirectly gave them even more power over the church in Germany.

and: retaining their educational role, monasteries in the ninth century had become increasingly secularized owing to their social and economic clout. Patrick J. Corish points out, “They became associated with the established major dynasties, and in consequence became centers of secular power.....Monastic armies fought with kings and against kings.

Yet the benefices of monasticism, Church technological developments, public and court schools, medicine, hospitals and even the idea of peace-days in which war was outlawed, all added magnificently to the heritage and expansion of Christendom.

Irish monks who “saved civilization” and learning in the West, a project that continued through the Carolingian period and on into the tenth century. The ability to reform itself was one of monasticism’s great strengths, and one of the great reforms of Western monasticism emanated from the monastery of Cluny in southern Burgundy and spread across Western Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Irish monks preserved Latin and Greek learning well before the great days of Muslim al-Andalus, and these same monks, from the seventh century onward, spread that learning and culture across Continental Europe and England via their missionary work.

And what of the poverty of the Moslem-fascist political project in Spain?

In traditional Islam there was no clear separation of what today we would call religion and the state. The key question of who should lead the community was left unanswered. At first the caliphs saw themselves as the successors of Muhammad. They claimed “to be khalifat all?h....vice regents of God. They assumed the protection and endowment of Muslim worship, the organization of mosques and the defence of the pilgrimage. They claimed authority in legal and doctrinal...

Islam, isolated and convinced of its own superiority, felt it had nothing to learn from Christian Europe. We will return to this knowledge transmission when we consider Gerbert of Aurillac. All of this suggests the need for a more nuanced appreciation of al-Andalus. In the end the greatness of Moorish Spain was something of a mixed blessing.

al-Andalus simply wasn’t the kind of tolerant paradise that Lewis imagines, especially for Christians. It was a highly stratified society with a strict demarcation of roles, including for a period the wearing of identifying badges for Jews and Christians. Mozarabic Catholics were cowed, second-class citizens in what had originally been their own country.

Catholics and Jews were constantly reminded of their second-class status. They were dhimmi, “protected ones,” or “people of the book.” Dhimmi were granted a special residential status to live in Muslim-dominated countries in return for paying jizya, a poll and land tax. Generally, there was no outright persecution of Christians until the time of the vicious dictator al-Mans?r (976–1002).

the hadith (sayings ascribed to Muhammad) says, as “the one who fights for the faith of Allah” than of actually gaining territory. Over the course of Abd al-Rahm?n’s campaigns against the Christians, he achieved some victories. One Moorish chronicler says that after a battle in July 920 at Valdejunquera, southwest of Pamplona, there were so many heads of the Christian dead to take back to Córdoba to set up around the city walls that the mule trains could not carry them.

And, Al-Andalus was far from an open, tolerant society even for Muslims.

Anyone who has studied the disaster of Moslem Spain – the millions killed, dispossessed, or taken as sex chattel; the forcible conversions, the endless raids against Infidels, obscene taxes on non-Moslems, the lies about how large or grand Cordoba was; knows the above to be true. The Reconquista which was effectively over in 1250 except for the statelet of Granada which paid a ransom to survive, is one of the greatest epics in Western history.

At least Collins has the intelligence and factual confidence to impart the truth.