Serge Trifkovic

The Crusades 1095-1270 AD

Second wave

First wave

Bat Ye’or

There have been two big waves of Jihad; the Arab waves which started in the 7th century and in the cause of only one century had Islamised huge territories, mainly Christian territory from Portugal to Armenia but also Persia. Iraq was at the time Christian in the north and Jewish/Christian in the south.

634 AD Battle of Basra (Christian/Jewish)

635 AD Damascus Conquered

636 AD Ctesiphon Conquered

637 AD Jerusalem Conquered

641 AD Alexandria Conquered

666 AD Sicily Conquered

670 AD Kabul Conquered

698 AD Carthage Conquered

711 AD Southern Spain Conquered

720 AD Narbonne (South France) Conquered

732 AD Battle of Poitiers – Muslim Advance Halted

1064 AD Armenia Conquered

1071 AD Battle of Manzikert

1331 AD Nicaea Conquered

1453 AD Constantinople Conquered

1460 AD Greece Conquered

1389 AD Battle of Kosovo

1521 AD Belgrade Conquered

1683 AD Siege of Vienna – Muslim Advance halted

The second wave of Islamisation started in the eleventh century with the Turkish tribes. All the regions of Eastern Europe, Anatolia which was the seat of the Christian Byzantine Empire (Now Turkey), Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania. All the countries around the Mediterranean which once were Christian became the Islamic Empire.

This Turkish wave lasted from the eleventh century until the seventeenth century where the Ottoman army was stopped at the gate of Vienna in 1683.

The Crusades are not understood in the Muslim world today very differently to the way they are understood in the Western academia and among the Western elite class. Both talk of the Crusades as an aggressive war of conquest by Christian Europe against peaceful innocent Muslims. One may ask however what those Muslims were doing in the holy land in the first place. What happened was that Muhammad and his successors laid a series of wars of conquest and in one such onslaught in 624 AD the holy land – Palestine, Jerusalem was conquered by Muslims. Then Seljuk Turks started interfering with the ability of Christian pilgrims to go to the Holy Land, Jerusalem. When their physical safety was no longer guaranteed, the western Christians acted not only as re-conquerors of the Holy Land that had been once theirs, they also acted quite rightly one might say as protectors of their holy places. A defensive war in the case of the Muslims is even a war of conquest. They are obligated to spread Islam but a land which had once been Muslim in particular must be re-conquered and the Jihad is the rightful name of that war of re-conquest. They could never accept the Crusader states in Antioch and Jerusalem because they were ” dar al-harb ” or “ the House of War ” – reinstated into ” ” Dar al-Islam ” or ” the House of Islam ”. This is a contemporary aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which many Westerners are not fully aware of.

Exactly the same psychology that prompted Saladin and others to fight the Crusaders is now motivating Hamas. In both cases it is not only a matter of the nationalistic desire of Arabs to expel Europeans and Jewish settlers. It is also the Quranic obligation of all good Muslims to make sure the land once ruled by Muslims will be reverted to their rule again.

From the British historian Hilaire Belloc’s – The Great Heresies – 1938

”… It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.” ”The suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic – but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past: - one might say that they are blinded by it…” ”But not so very long ago, less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence… Vienna was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland… on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history --

September 11, 1683,

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