Havoc
474-783 AH
1081-1381 CEASSAULT FROM THE WEST
Really, there were two catastrophes, one little, one big. The little one came
from the west. At this time, the Muslim world knew as little of western Eu-
rope as Europeans later knew about the African interior. To Muslims, every-
thing between Byzantium and Andalusia was a more or less primeval forest
inhabited by men so primitive they still ate pig flesh. When Muslims said
"Christians," they meant the Byzantine church or the various smaller
churches operating in Muslim controlled territory. They knew that an ad-
vanced civilization had once flourished further west: a person could still make
out traces of it in Italy and parts of the Mediterranean coast, which Muslims
regularly raided; but it had crumbled during the Tune of Ignorance, before
Islam entered the world, and was now little more than a memory.
This Muslim view was not far wrong. Europe had been in terrible shape
for a long time. Under attack for centuries from Germanic tribes, from
Huns, from Avars, from Magyars, from Muslims, from Norsemen and
others, it had sunk to a level of bare subsistence. Almost everybody in Eu-
rope was a peasant. Almost every peasant did backbreaking labor from
133