Desmond Seward's 'The Monks of War', 1972, Penguin books.

We are constantly told a lie that Moorish Spain was a multicultural nirvana of unbounded development and civilisation. Even the Great Obama, that most important of humans, rendered his divine opinion in various speeches which refer to 'Cordoba', the Moorish capital as an example of inter-faith success, and a glorious period of learning in which all 'faiths' learnt from each other. It makes a nice UN advertisement, but this idea is of course almost wholly false.

A simple example:  In Christian Spain in the 11th century, we find the Blast Furnace which revolutionises the manufacture of iron and steel.  No comparable technology even approaches this invention in Moorish Spain.

The Muslims invaded Spain in 710 AD because Visigothic Spain was rich, advanced, heavily engineered with crops, roads and aqueducts and urbanized. All the supposed 'achievements' by the Moors were actually Visigothic. All of the architecture save the Alhambra in Granada which was designed by a Jew, were Visigothic. The Spanish successor to Roman Hispania simply astonished the Arabs and Moors with its wealth and sophistication including of course the arts, the literature and engineering. We know this because the Arabs left records at their amazement over Spain's riches.

But today of course in our current dark age, the real history becomes rewritten and all credit for the advanced civilisation of Spain is rendered to the 'genius' of the Arabs, a group who have never in history developed an advanced society. The Arabs and Muslims were pretty good at either squatting or using 'Dhimmi' technology, money and people for the Islamic cult's benefit. That does take a certain amount of cunning and skill I suppose. But to conflate the destruction of Visigothic Spain and its use by Muslims with a 'Golden Age' is frighteningly inaccurate. As Mr. Seward reminds the reader, the life of the Dhimmi non-Muslim in Spain was one of fear, losing life, assets and money; being plundered, being raped, or being sold off into slavery:

“Every year the Christian territories were devastated, crops burnt, fruit trees cut down, buildings razed, livestock driven off and the inhabitants herded back to the slave-markets. Those who escaped were cowed by ingenious atrocities, the victims' heads being salted as trophies to impress the caliph's unruly subjects....The Reconquista was a holy war.”

Millions of Christians and Jews were either killed, enslaved or forcibly converted between 711 and 1240 AD in Spain. Millions. The Muslim Jihad was a holy war. The only way you can defeat a fanatical cult who believes that by killing, raping, murdering and expanding the totalitarian dogma of its founder, is right and 'just', is to develop the same mindset. This was a very important and necessary development for Europe's survival. Convening international talk-shops, issuing speeches about the 'real' Islam, or appealing to the 'moderates' within Moorish Spain to perhaps hold off on the yearly enslavement, slaughter and degradation of Christian subjects and assets, would likely have been ineffective to put it mildly. Appeasement would have been a loser of a strategy for the medieval Christian Spaniard. 

The Muslims view history rather simply – might makes right and Allah is always right. Christian Spain, along with Christian Syria, Christian North Africa, Christian Sicily, and Christian southern France, had been invaded by an Oriental wind-storm fuelled by promises of earthly splendours women, booty and power, and by the supernatural gifts to the ardent Jihadist of nubile virgins, boys, wine and pure water. Islam was and is completely irrational. But in that embittered mix of unbridled paganism there is a powerful animating force which compels violence. No one who has studied Islam or knows about the real Islam can deny that fact.

At Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, in southern Spain, just north of the Guadalquivir river and 100 miles north east of Cordoba, two great armies clashed. The Moorish army was thought to number over 400.000 including contingents of black slaves from Africa chained together in infantry formation. Kings Sancho of Navarre and Alfonso of Castile had assembled perhaps 100.000 men from the various Christian kingdoms and the military Orders. The young Muslim caliph Yakub chose the battlefield, a position which would block a Christian advance upon Cordoba and force the Infidel army into a narrow pass, ripe for slaughter from the mobile and lightly armed Moorish cavalry. 

The battle began badly for the Christians with their vaunted heavy armoured horse charges beaten back with great losses. The Templars of Aragon were killed to a man. But the Christian lines held when the Moors counter-attacked; Sancho and his heavy horse charged into the African mass and destroyed it, rolling up the Moorish lines right back to the caliph's tent, where he barely escaped alive and saw his entire personal body guard slaughtered. Mr. Seward:

“Al -Andalus was doomed, for the victory opened up the valley of the Guadalquivir, exposing the Cordoban heartland. Military Orders were the shock troops of the inevitable offensive, the Masters acting as strategic advisers.....Not only did the Kings use freyles [brothers] as panzers, but they employed them to consolidate the advance, endowing the brethren with vast tracts of land. Before, it had been difficult to attract settlers to the south; Moorish razzias [raids] on border villages were conducted with great slaughter.”

The military Orders are not given much in the way of commendation today. In the Reconquista of Spain, a glorious event if there ever was one in the annals of war, the 'brethren' were quite vital. They built castles and defenses along the border between the two civilisations. They were instrumental in fighting, spying and planning the counter-Jihad. They died for the cause in droves and settled land that no other Christian was willing to live in. Their economic prowess was also important as it brought back into civilisation once fertile but under the Moors, largely unproductive land.

“...their serving brothers made excellent herdsmen, and the wool, meat and hides fetched good prices. Business became still more profitable when Merino sheep were introduced from Morocco about 1300. Spanish landowners were to copy the knights' haciendas and bring them to the New World, and so the monkish frontiersmen could claim to be the first cowboys.”

The military Orders and their ‘cowboy’ monks combined with the Christian-Spanish zeal to reclaim their land for religion of Christ. It is a monumental story. Imagine if the Orders did not exist, or the people of the once rich Visigothic empire did not much care who ruled over them and which 'god' managed their fates. Spain would still be Islamic and would be as impoverished, riven, destructive and illiterate as North Africa still is today and indeed has been since the Arabs invaded Egypt in 635 AD. If Spain was Islamic today would the multi-culturalists just assume that Spain 'was always' Muslim? Would a poor, backwards Islamic Spain today be declared a positive? Probably. But there is a reason why the Islamic world in-toto is so backwards – it is called 'culture'. The Reconquista of Spain pitted an advanced civilisation – that of the Visigothic Christians – against an inferior totalitarian creed – that of Islam. Thankfully, the right side won.