Islâm, slavery, and death; Jews and Christians were allowed to purchase a limited toleration by the
payment of tribute, but were otherwise kept in degrading bondage. History records no soldiers of
greater bravery inspired by religion than the Moslem conquerors, except Cromwell’s Ironsides,
and the Scotch Covenanters, who fought with purer motives for a nobler cause.
The Califs, Mohammed’s successors, who like him united the priestly and kingly dignity,
carried on his conquests with the battle-cry: "Before you is paradise, behind you are death and
hell." Inspired by an intense fanaticism, and aided by the weakness of the Byzantine empire and
the internal distractions of the Greek Church, the wild sons of the desert, who were content with
the plainest food, and disciplined in the school of war, hardship and recklessness of life, subdued
Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, embracing the classical soil of primitive Christianity. Thousands of
Christian churches in the patriarchal dioceses of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, were ruthlessly
destroyed, or converted into mosques. Twenty-one years after the death of Mohammed the Crescent
ruled over a realm as large as the Roman Empire. Even Constantinople was besieged twice (668
and 717), although in vain. The terrible efficacy of the newly invented "Greek fire," and the unusual
severity of a long winter defeated the enemy, and saved Eastern and Northern Europe from the
blight of the Koran. A large number of nominal Christians who had so fiercely quarreled with each
other about unfruitful subtleties of their creeds, surrendered their faith to the conqueror. In 707 the
North African provinces, where once St. Augustin had directed the attention of the church to the
highest problems of theology and religion, fell into the hands of the Arabs.
In 711 they crossed from Africa to Spain and established an independent Califate at Cordova.
The moral degeneracy and dissensions of the Western Goths facilitated their subjugation. Encouraged
by such success, the Arabs crossed the Pyrenees and boasted that they would soon stable their
horses in St. Peter’s cathedral in Rome, but the defeat of Abd-er Rahman by Charles Martel between
Poitiers and Tours in 732—one hundred and ten years after the Hegira—checked their progress in
the West, and in 1492—the same year in which Columbus discovered a new Continent—Ferdinand
defeated the last Moslem army in Spain at the gates of Granada and drove them back to Africa.
The palace and citadel of the Alhambra, with its court of lions, its delicate arabesques and fretwork,
and its aromatic gardens and groves, still remains, a gorgeous ruin of the power of the Moorish
kings.
In the East the Moslems made new conquests. In the ninth century they subdued Persia,
Afghanistan, and a large part of India. They reduced the followers of Zoroaster to a few scattered
communities, and conquered a vast territory of Brahminism and Buddhism even beyond the Ganges.
The Seliuk Turks in the eleventh century, and the Mongols in the thirteenth, adopted the religion
of the Califs whom they conquered. Constantinople fell at last into the hands of the Turks in 1453,
and the magnificent church of St. Sophia, the glory of Justinian’s reign, was turned into a mosque
where the Koran is read instead of the Gospel, the reader holding the drawn scimetar in his hand.
From Constantinople the Turks threatened the German empire, and it was not till 1683 that they
were finally defeated by Sobieski at the gates of Vienna and driven back across the Danube.
With the senseless fury of fanaticism and pillage the Tartar Turks have reduced the fairest
portions of Eastern Europe to desolation and ruin. With sovereign contempt for all other religions,
they subjected the Christians to a condition of virtual servitude, treating them like "dogs," as they
call them. They did not intermeddle with their internal affairs, but made merchandise of ecclesiastical
offices. The death penalty was suspended over every attempt to convert a Mussulman. Apostasy
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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