Don Pelayo, Spain and the Muslim Jihad of the 8th century

“I will not associate with the Arabs in friendship nor will I submit to their authority.  Christ is our hope that through this little mountain, which you see, the well-being of Spain and the army of the Gothic people will be restored.”

Don Pelayo, c. 717 in the Asturias northern Spain, the last Christian area in Spain, conquered by the Muslims 710-717 A.D.

Don Pelayo and his small army of some 300 men, thwarted the complete Muslim takeover of Spain, by setting up a miniature Christian redoubt in the Pyrenes.  Today, Pelayo would be labelled a racist, Islamophobe, Nazi, and White Christian supremacist.  In the 8^th century he was simply a realist who well knew the insufferable slavery, rape and destruction that the Muslim Jihad would bestow on the Iberian peninsula and all Christians who were conquered, or who had submitted to the paganism of the Muhammadan cult.  The ‘Chronicles of 754’ provide the depictions and laments of a Spain pulverised, crushed, ruined and plundered by the Muhammadan forces.  Today this is called enrichment.

Musa bin Nusayr, after the 710-11 invasion, led Muslim armies north, with the Chronicles of 754 weeping, “He ruined beautiful cities, burning them with fire; condemned lords and powerful men to the cross; and butchered youths and infants with the sword…He terrorised everyone.”  This unholy terror is now deemed to be a ‘Golden Age’, one of light, brightness and endless Muslim ingenuity and invention.  The Chronicles asked, exuding pain and suffering from their very words, “Who can relate such perils?  Who can enumerate such grievous disasters?...it would be beyond human nature to express the ruin of Spain and its many and great evils.”  Today this mass rapine, slaughter and devastation is lauded as a necessary antidote to the ‘dark ages’ of Christian superstition and stupidity, where the ‘noble’ Muslims were educating, teaching and imploring the ‘dark age savages’ to affix their miserable society to ‘civilisation’. 

Pelayo ruled the small kingdom of the Asturias, until his death in 737.  In 722 at Covadonga a momentous clash took place, which provided the germination for the Christian Reconquista.  Pelayo entrapped a huge Muslim army, with sources varying and as usual with medieval assessments, probably exaggerating the size at between 60.000-100.000 men, in a remote mountain pass.  The Christians manned the heights and rushed forth from caves and hiding places from above and from the sides of the vast Muslim horde, exacting great carnage with missiles and showers of rocks.  The Muslims who fled were pursued and relentlessly slaughtered.  This existential struggle with Muhammadanism found expression in the absolute destruction of the Muslims at Covadonga, saving Christian Spain, and probably southern France from Jihadic domination.

The Muslims sent in many large forces during the 720s and 730s against the small Christian kingdom but were repulsed with much bloodshed on each occasion.  By 750 the entire north-western part of the Iberian peninsula was once again Christian.  The Jihad was however relentless.  Every single year the Mahometans would issue forth and attempt to raid and destroy the Christian cities, villages and farms in the Asturias realm.  Perennial war created a no-man’s-land, roughly along the Duero river.  This tortured territory was rendered almost a desert by the Muslims.  Historian Louis Bertrand states:

“To keep the Christians in their place it did not suffice to surround them with a zone of famine and destruction.  It was necessary also to go and sow terror and massacre among them…it was a holy war against infidels…This was one of the capital causes of the deforestation from which the Peninsula still suffers….”

As with all areas of Muslim invasion, Spain was obliterated.  Anyone who has travelled around Spain will notice the lack of forest and foliage cover in many areas of the country, especially in those locales which demarcated a border with Christian states in the Middle Ages.  The Mahometans desecrated everything including flora and fauna.  Terror was their modus operandi, and today the hugely intelligent and well-informed, term this massive, unrequited devastation, a ‘golden age’.

Of especial interest for Muslim desecration was anything connected to Christianity.  Buildings with a cross, churches, monasteries, hospitals, libraries, schools, abbeys, and related icons, paintings, statues, crosses, reliquaries, gold and silver plates, anything of any value which was connected to the Christian faith, was seized, violated, melted down or pulled down.  The quantity of art, books, scientific and technological treatises, theological and philosophical vellum and parchments, jewellery, fine designs, architectural wonders and even engineering and inventions, destroyed by the Muslim Jihad in Spain, during just the 8th century is incalculable.  Quite literally a veritable fortune of civilised production was annihilated by the Mahometans.

The spoilation, ruin, conversion and often the firing of Churches was a yearly event.  In Cordoba, always lauded as the ‘cradle’ of the mythical ‘Muslim golden age’, al-Rahman (d 788) pulled down all the Christian churches.  He also took all the bodies that the Christians called ‘saints’ and burnt them.  Christian churches were targets for destruction under the Umayyad rule Muhammad I (852-886) and al Mansur (d 1002), both of whom encouraged Muslims to wilfully and wantonly burn down Christian buildings.  The ‘Great Mosque’ of Cordoba was built from the massive and pulled down Cathedral of St Vincent and the mosque was designed, built, and erected by Christian slaves.  The conversion of churches into mosques, or their complete destruction as Muslim policy.  So much for the inter-faith myth.

A vital and alluring feature of the Muslim Jihad in Spain was to collect White slaves.  The ‘richness and beauty of the young girls’ and the accumulation of sex slaves, to feed the harems of Muslims across North Africa and the Middle East was a distinguishing enticement for the Jihad.  During the 8^th century it is recorded that the northern Christian areas, to stave off the yearly Jihad raid, bribed the Muslims not with gold, silver or produce, but with nubile young women – hundreds, sometimes thousands of them at a time, given yearly.  Cordoba became a White slave entrepot during the 8^th and 9^th centuries, famous for the beauty of its slave-women, reduced in Muslim literature with contempt to whores, prostitutes and harlots, where White women are depicted as nothing more than lascivious machines, desiring only copulation with their Muslim masters. 

Muslim Spain in the 8^th and 9^th centuries was a sordid and ruinated mess.  In the northern lands clung the last of the Christian kingdoms.  The rest of the peninsula was Mahometan, with Sharia Dhimmitude imposed, with Christians and non-Muslims enjoying only slave and chattel status.  Thousands of White slaves were taken in raids and in ransom each year by the Muslims to fill the sexual appetites of their cult and its orgies.  Entire cities, villages, countryside’s and forested areas were destroyed.  Churches and any building associated with Christianity effaced, converted to a mosque or set to fire.  The rich, Romano-Visigothic-Christian empire was desolated and ripped apart.  Yet today this mammoth dislocation, effacement and eradication is greeted with clapping, joy and amazement and pronounced as a ‘golden age’.