By 717 A.D. Christendom was nearly destroyed.  The ‘West’ was a rump of a once singular cultural empire, with Christian states in the Pyrenes and north remaining free of the Muslim Jihad and domination.  Syria, Egypt and North Africa, once prosperous Christian lands were now lying in waste and ruin, ruled over by various Muslim emirs, with millions enslaved, hundreds of thousands killed in battle, and millions more being forced to convert to Muhammad’s cult.  Tens of thousands of Churches were pulled down, libraries including Alexandria which was the largest ever in the ancient world torched and industry and agriculture spoilt and decimated.  The real prize of the Jihad, Constantinople, the Christian capital of the Byzantine empire and the wealthiest city in the world, eluded the Muslim Jihad.

Muslim sources defined the Roman-Christian empire and its capital as ‘slaves of the cross’, and its emperor a ‘Roman dog’.  Muhammad in divinely sanctioning Jihad targeted Christianity and especially Constantinople as its primary objective (see 9:29, with Sura 9 being a chapter devoted to war and terrorism against Christianity).  Abu Sufyan (b. 602), who was a general at the Muslim victory at Yarmuk in 637 A.D was desirous of conquering the Roman dogs.  Sacking and plundering Georgia and Armenia, taking tens of thousands of slaves and slaughtering at least 50.000 in battle, Sufyan began the long process of raiding and controlling Constantinople’s hinterland upon which it depended for men, food and industry.  The first siege of Constantinople lasted from 674-678 but was defeated.  Theophanes a contemporary Christian historian wrote that ‘the deniers of Christ’ numbered over 100.000 Ghazi or warriors but were destroyed, with their fleets burnt and scattered by the use of ‘Greek fire’ an early napalm, which issued from the Byzantine biremes or rowed-galley warships.  The Christian victory over the Muslim hordes in 678 AD at Constantinople quite likely saved Western civilisation and Europe.  Few know of it today.

One of the allures of for the Muslim Jihad were the ‘beautiful’ White women of the Christian Roman empire, always depicted in Arab and Muslim literature as lascivious, wanton, prone to prostitution.  Abut al-Jahiz (b 776), a Muslim chronicler at the court in Damascus, wrote that the White Christian Byzantine woman was the ‘most shameless in the world’.  They were adulterous, prone to sexual escapades and not much better than a prostitute.  Muslim sources routinely declare that White women enjoyed being sex slaves and the sexual toys of men.  Even nuns were depicted as whores offering themselves clandestinely to monks.  In today’s ‘modern’ world the allure of sex slavery for the Muslim Jihad is almost completely ignored even though in the Ukraine modern Muslim Jihadi’s were inspired to fight against NATO citing the beautiful and fetching women of the Ukraine as potential prizes.  Millions of White women, just from Eastern Christendom, the Balkans, central Europe, Ukraine and Russia have been sold into sex chattel slavery over 1400 years.  The Viking onslaught from the 8^th to 11^th centuries was in large part to furnish Moslem caliphates and empires with White sex slaves.  Dublin was established as a sex-trading centre to feed the insatiable Muslim demand for White slaves.  Many entrepots in the East along the major rivers of Russia and the Ukraine provided the same.  No one in the ‘modern West’ believes that knee-bending for the millions of White men and women sold as sex chattel is necessary. 

The evisceration of the Muslim Jihad at the walls of Constantinople in 678 A.D. allowed the Byzantines to reconquer former Christian territory.  The Jihad however resumed in 705 A.D. under Caliph Al-Walid ‘the great hater of Christians’, who started the new effort by demolishing the great Basilica dedicated to John the Baptist in Damascus, a city now long controlled by the Muslims.  Walid raided and razed Anatolia and its cities and towns.  He invaded Armenia and hauled off endless booty and White slaves back to Damascus sending thousands in slavery to Arabia.  He began to fell entire cedar forests in Lebanon to rebuild the Muslim navy for an assault on Constantinople.  By 715 A.D. Walid had assembled 200.000 Muslim Jihadis to attack the Christian capital, some 120.000 by land, and 80.000 by sea.  However, he died in 715 A.D. and was succeeded by Suleiman who had the same ambition of annihilating the great Christian capital.  Suleiman instructed his Muslim emirs in places like Egypt to ‘milk’ the Christian ‘camels’, to finance his vast forces being assembled and trained to slaughter and end the Christian Byzantine empire.  In many places hot irons were seared into the heads of Christians who had to pay not only the Jizya tax to allow their very survival and existence, but also the surfeit of other taxes to the Muslim Jihad.  If a Christian was discovered without this ‘sign’ he would have his arms severed, and after was beheaded.

Suleiman’s brother Muslama was tasked with taking Constantinople.  He attacked across Anatolia with his 120.000 man army, with ‘both sword and fire, he put an end to Asia Minor’, according to Muslim sources.  By the summer of 717 A.D. leaving a trail of absolute devastation, dead bodies, burning cities and towns behind, the Muslim Jihad under Maslama reached the walls of Constantinople.  Catapults, battering rams and the siege engines of war were deployed along the walls of the city, hauled to their stations over hundreds of miles by an endless train of mules and camels.  Unable to make an impression on the walls, the Muslim army awaited the great navy, carrying some 80.000 more men, which arrived around September 1.  The Christians surprising the Muslims, immediately sent out their Navy from behind the heavy chain which guarded the Dardanelles against the Muslim Jihadi fleet.  Within a short period of time, most of the Muslim navy was afire, or sinking.  The Christian ships withdrew behind the chain after this surprising victory.

The Muslim army however was still entrenched around the city and showed no interest in leaving.  The siege continued throughout a cold and cruel winter.  Disease, frost and famine started to decimate the Muslim army.  By the spring it was in disarray, greatly reduced in numbers, with extraordinarily low morale.  The Muslims were reduced to eating camels, horses and mules and plague roared through their camps.  In the early spring of 718 a massive 800 ship fleet arrived from Alexandria in support of the Muslim siege.  Most of the slaves rowing these galleys were conscripted and enslaved Coptic Christians.  Remarkably, they rebelled, left the fleet and found refuge in the city.  This deprived the Muslim fleet of its manpower and mobility.  Again, the Christian navy attacked and as before the Muslim fleet was completely routed with most of its ships set on fire or sunk. 

The Christian navy this time pursued the fleeing Muslim fleet and destroyed most of what remained.  Paid with Byzantine gold, the non-Christian Bulgars, in their empire to the north of the Byzantines, attacked the weakened and sick Muslim army, killing more than 20.000 Jihadis.  The new Caliph Omar II ordered the Muslim army back to Damascus on August 15 718 A.D.  A massive summer storm destroyed what remained of the Muslim fleet and out of the 200.000 ghazis who attacked Constantinople in 717 A.D., maybe 30.000 straggled back to Damascus by land.  Leo, the Byzantine empire, his army and fleet saved western civilisation according to historian A. Vasilev, ‘By his successful resistance Leo saved not only the Byzantine Empire and the eastern Christian world, but also all of western civilisation’.  Vasilev is right.