Byzantium and a response to the Muslim Jihad in the 10th and 11th centuries

Christian Byzantium and Christian Constantinople were the wealthiest, most sophisticated, advanced, cultured and educated entities in the world in the 11th century.  This ‘golden age’ far outshone anything offered by the Muslim slave empires, either current or past.  A Turkish epic from this period, declared in reverential awe the splendours of Christian Byzantium and the need to destroy it for the sake of Jihad: ‘….of all the places I have seen, I never saw a place like the land of the Rum (Byzantium)…May they pull down its monasteries and set up mosques and madrassas in their places.’

The Arab domination of the Meccan moon cult empire fast waned after 750 AD with the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate.  It was replaced by the Persian Muslim bureaucracy, with the military, the most important tool for social order, mostly of non-Arab origins.  Many of the soldiers were slaves.  The slave armies were voracious and vicious.  In 838 AD, Armorium a rich Christian city near Armenia was assaulted by 80.000 or more Muslim slave soldiers, the walls were breached, the citizens raped and slaughtered, the pillage and looting monumental and thousands of white Christians became Muslim slaves (Michael the Syrian).  The Muslims wrote that the bodies were heaped everywhere.  Many Christians were roasted alive in public.  Of the 70.000 citizens of Armorium, half were murdered, and the other half fell into slavery.  It must have been a golden age of enrichment for the Armorians.

The destruction of Armorium had a tremendous effect on the entire Byzantine empire.  The emperor during that period, Theophilus I, was from Armorium.  The Muslims had chosen Armorium to be destroyed specifically to terrorise the emperor.  He died 3 years after the annihilation of his home city, aged 28.  The Byzantine military under a General named Bardas, took the offensive in 866 AD attacking the Muslims in modern day Iraq and along the coasts of the Levant and Egypt.  Cyprus was liberated and a Muslim army eviscerated in Mesopotamia.  The rise of a Bulgar empire during the 10^th century distracted Byzantium from the Muslim threat, and forced it into a long era of wars, raids, treaties and expenditure. 

Emperor Nikephorus II Phokas, in the early to mid-10^th century, resumed the Christian Crusade against the Muslims.  He was described as a great general, a Herculean figure, a powerful man in body and mind, severe in piety and religion, austere and brutal.  He was born along the Anatolian frontier, an area devastated by the Muslims.  He well knew the consequences of ‘enrichment’.  Nikephorus won a long list of battles against the Muslim Jihad, including the liberation of Crete and wide swathes of Anatolia and Syria.  He ordered his men to burn any copies of the execrable Muslim handbook of Jihad – the Koran. 

The incessant warring had led to high taxation, and the usual Byzantine court of intrigues, disloyalty and gamesmanship was evident.  Nikeophorus’ downfall was his wife’s doing.  Dissatisfied with her monkish husband, famed for his all-night vigils and fasting, she became the lover of his nephew one John Tzimikes, who with a group of his men, murdered Nikephorus aged 57, late one night in 969, cutting off his head.  Tzimikes became emperor and continued the Christian onslaught, taking many cities including Nazareth in Palestine and Syria.  He met the same end as his predecessor, succeeded by Basil II, one of the great Christian conquerors in history.  Under Basil II the Byzantine empire reached its greatest apogee of power.  Basil II was known as the Bulgar slayer, reducing the empire and power of the Bulgars, as well as that of the weakened Muslim caliphate to the south and east. 

Before the rise of the Ottomans, who would prove along with Tamerlane and the Mongols, to be an apogee of Muslim fanaticism, cruelty, ruthlessness and Jihad, the Christian Byzantine empire had achieved a century of great success, rolling back the Muslims in Asia, the Levant and the western Mediterranean.  But as usual in history, apathy, civil discord, court intrigues, murders, depositions, corruption and immorality became endemic, post an era of expansion, success and peace.  After Basil II internal dislocations and power seeking, including overt and covert civil wars within the civil bureaucracy took precedence.  The threat of the Muslim Jihad was ignored.  The military and related investments suffered.  The lack of societal rigour, belief and commitment to the survival of the Christian empire ensured complacency and naivety.  The threat of the Muslim Turk and its slave army was ignored, and its potency underestimated.