11-12th Century Ottoman-Muslim persecution of Christians

After the Muslim victory at Manzikert in 1071 A.D., the enslavement, slaughter and rape of Christians inside and near to the Muslim state reached biblical levels.  A French priest wrote in the late 11^th century, “Far and wide (Muslim Turks) ravaged cities and castles together with their settlements.  Churches were razed down to the ground. Of the clergymen and monks whom they captured, some were slaughtered while others were with unspeakable wickedness given up….”  The Muslim Turks had taken over the most fertile and important manpower areas of the Byzantine empire after Manzikert.  Entire areas and populations were forced to accept the Muhammandan cult or face depredations, enslavement, rape or even death. 

There was no tolerance and no golden age.  Byzantium’s Emperor Alexios I Comnenos (1081-1118) lamented that, “The holy places are desecrated and destroyed…Noble matrons and their daughters….violated one after another like animals….even bishops are defiled with the sin of sodomy…”  The Muslims sought out to not only destroy Christian Byzantium but to defile, mock, degrade and absolutely debase it and its adherents in the most demonic ways imaginable.  No criticism of such savagery exists today of this sordid chapter in history.  None will be tolerated.

The atrocities committed by Muslims post-Manzikert included the lands of Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Armenia.  Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem, wrote Michael the Syrian, were easy prey for the Muslim Turks.  Many female pilgrims were raped, some in the view of the pilgrimage group until the woman died from the repeated assaults.  Other pilgrims were simply murdered, and their few possessions taken.  Some others were tortured for sport.  The Turks were simply following centuries of examples set by Muslim Arabs.  It was nothing new.  For example Caliph Hakim Allah (996-1021) ordered the destruction of 30.000 churches in Egypt and Syria including the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  A persecution that was one of an endless array enacted by Muslims against Christians.  However, by the 1090s after Manzikert, the Christophobia enacted by Muslims seemed to reach a crescendo.  The demonic assaults against Christians and their edifices and culture were so lurid and so evil that even the usually apathetic Western states and its Church took notice.

The Muslim Turk and their endemic, obsessive Christophobia is the context for Pope Urban II’s November 27 1095 call for a religious war, a Crusade to save the Church in the East.  Pope Urban II said inter-alia, “They (Muslim Turks) have completely destroyed some of God’s churches and they havre converted others to the uses of their own cult.  They ruin altars with filth and defilement….They are pleased to kill others by cutting open their bellies, extracting the ends of their intestines, and tying it to a stake….And what shall I say about the shocking rape of women?  Rise up and remember the manly deeds of your ancestors…Deus le Veult”  God wills it said Urban.  God demands a Crusade to save Christianity and those afflicted by the demonic assaults of Muslims.  Save Christian siblings demanded Urban II.  Can you imagine anyone in the modern Catholic Church stating even a jot or iota of these sentiments today?  The modern Church would blame the victims.

By 1095, the Western world had changed.  The states and empires of the West, forged in the smithy of Christianity, were by this time advanced civilisations.  They were wealthy, agriculturally ahead of the rest of the world, technology and invention abounded in all spheres of life, it was the age that would birth universities, eyeglasses, blast furnaces and the heavily armoured mounted knight, basically an impenetrably tailored muscular warrior on a protected steed, an early form of mobile tank. 

Western civilisation had been at the mercy of the Muslim Jihad for centuries.  Its coastal areas depopulated and raided.  Most of Spain and southern France taken, occupied, and devastated.  The once Romano-Christian areas of North Africa which before the Muslim Jihad were appendages of the Christian Roman empire and tied by trade and culture to the eternal city, were conquered, occupied, looted and destroyed by Muslims.  The once rich societies and their economies eviscerated never to recover which is why North Africa is a mess and a wasteland in the modern era.  By 1095 the feudal warrior states of Western Christianity had had enough of Muhammad’s cult and its endless frenzied and psychotic Jihad.  As St Augustine stated, “It is the injustice of the opposing side, that lays on the wise man the duty to wage war.”  Nicely stated and true.  The only way to end the Muslim Jihad is to annihilate it in war.