The medieval peasant lived without electricity or modern comforts. Their lives were difficult, but there is something in their relationship with work and community that modern civilization has forgotten. What would happen if we recovered some of their habits?

Imagine waking in a small village somewhere in medieval England around the year 1250. The first light of the morning enters through the shutters of a modest timber house while smoke rises from the hearth. Outside, the fields are beginning to emerge from the darkness and the village is slowly coming to life. There is no alarm clock beside your bed and no telephone waiting to demand your attention. You have no news from distant countries and little reason to concern yourself with the arguments of strangers hundreds of miles away. Most of the people you know live within walking distance, and the rhythm of your existence is determined by the land around you.

Your first concern is the work that needs to be done. Depending on the season, there may be fields to plough or animals to feed. During harvest the days can be exhausting, while winter brings different responsibilities and more time spent indoors. Your household depends on the food it produces and the resources it can obtain from the surrounding countryside. One of the earliest surviving descriptions of this labor comes from Ælfric’s Colloquy, an early eleventh-century educational dialogue that records the words of a plowman:

“Master, I have to work far too much; I go out at dawn, driving the oxen to the field, and I yoke them to the plough; I dare not in the severest weather lie hid at home, for fear of my lord; and when I have yoked the oxen together, and fastened the ploughshare to the plough, I have to plough a whole acre every day, or more. I have a boy who threatens the oxen with a goad, and he is also hoarse with the cold and his shouting. Certainly I do more besides that. I have to supply the mangers of the oxen with hay, and give them water, and carry their dung outside. Yes, it is a great labour that I have to fulfil, for I am not free.”

The same text preserves the shepherd’s account of his own unending round:

“Indeed, I have. In early morning I drive my sheep to the pastures, and I stand by them, in heat and cold, with dogs, lest the wolves should devour them, and I bring them back to their folds, and milk them twice a day, and I move their folds besides. I also make butter and cheese, and I am faithful to my lord.”

On Sundays the village gathers at church. Religious festivals mark the passing of the year, and the sound of church bells reminds people of obligations that extend beyond their daily work. Life is not easy. A poor harvest can bring hunger and an illness that modern medicine could treat may become deadly. Many peasants also owe rents or labor services to a lord, and their freedom to move or dispose of property may be restricted by local custom. Yet the medieval peasant possesses something that many modern people struggle to recover: a daily existence rooted in a particular place and shaped by tangible responsibilities.

The average modern person enjoys comforts that a medieval king could never imagine. We have access to the best medical care and can communicate with people across the world in seconds. Food arrives at supermarkets regardless of the season and machines perform work that once required enormous physical effort. But these conveniences have also changed our relationship with the world. We can spend entire days indoors and consume endless information without producing anything tangible. We can live in the same building as dozens of people without knowing their names, while our entertainment is detached from the places where we live.

The medieval peasant offers a very different model of existence. Nobody should wish to recover the disease or legal dependency that characterized much of medieval rural life. But there are habits worth learning from a society in which people were closely connected to their work and the communities around them. Here is how to bring some of those habits into modern life..

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1. Live by the Sun and the Seasons Instead of Your Phone

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On October 22, 851, two young Christian sisters named Nunilo and Alodia were beheaded in Muslim-ruled Spain for refusing to abandon Christianity and embrace Islam.

They lived near Huesca and were the daughters of a Muslim father and a Christian mother. After their father’s death their mother remarried another Muslim. Under the rules applied by the authorities the sisters were counted as Muslims because of their father’s religion. Their continued practice of Christianity was therefore treated as apostasy.

Brought before the local governor, they were offered wealth and marriage if they would accept Islam, and death if they refused.

For obvious reasons, they refused.

St. Eulogius of Córdoba, a priest, recorded their reply:

“O Governor, in the same way, we order you to turn to God’s piety! Which holy piety, in viewing things by His Light, made us aware that nobody can be wealthier than Christ, nobody can be happier than a faithful Christian woman. Through whom do the just live? Through whom has the power of the saints conquered? Without Him, life is nothing; without Him, death thrives forever. To abide in Him and live in Him is true comfort. To back away from Him is eternal ruin.

“By no means will we abandon partnership with Him while we are in this life, because believing our integrity is from Him, we look forward to someday being admitted into marriage with Him. For you bestow things that perish, of which you speak to entice us. We scorn them, considering them as nothing when one thinks about it; because we were aware that everything under the sun is vanity. Nor are we disturbed by the threat of punishment, which we recognize to be powerful in the short term. Indeed, death itself, which you put forward as the ultimate terror, we long for with the most welcoming love; for through it, we trust to ascend into heaven without delay, to approach Christ, and to be held fast in his embraces, never to be torn apart.”

They were then confined with Muslim women charged with breaking their resolve. The women failed.

The sisters were brought before the authorities again and once more confessed Christ. They were beheaded on October 22, 851.

Their deaths were part of a larger wave of Christian martyrdom in ninth-century Muslim Spain. During those years dozens of Christians were executed for publicly condemning Muhammad or refusing to abandon Christianity.

St. Eulogius of Córdoba, who documented the stories of Christians who confessed Christ and denounced the claims of Muhammad, was himself beheaded by the Muslim authorities on March 11, 859.

Among the best-known were Perfectus and Isaac, whose executions took place shortly before the sisters’ martyrdom.

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Perfectus: The Priest

The story of these executions begins in 850 with a Christian priest named Perfectus.

Perfectus served at the Church of Saint Acisclus in Córdoba when he was stopped by several Muslims who asked him what he thought of Muhammad.

According to St. Eulogius, Perfectus initially refused to answer because he knew that criticizing Islam could cost him his life.

But after the men promised that he could speak freely, he openly criticized Muhammad.

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This article was written by , independent writer and editor, French Canadian native and British citizen based in Oxfordshire and the USA.

Centuries before it emerged as a place of learning, Oxford was a small Anglo-Saxon settlement at the edge of the kingdom of Mercia. It was established where a conveniently shallow stretch of the river Thames allowed oxen and other animals to ford this natural barrier, hence the name.

There are a few contenders for the location of this pivotal crossing; the most probable being near the confluence of the Thames and its Cherwell tributary, on land now belonging to the college of Christ Church. It was likely at this location, in the late 7^th - early 8^th centuries, that a pious young woman called Frideswide (circa 680 to 727 or 735) was impelled to found a priory church – or, in a different version, to develop the one founded by her father.

Mercia had only become Christian in 655, so Frideswide was an early stalwart of the faith in what later became England. As the daughter of a local king, she had the privilege of being able to devote herself to her calling. Conversely, as a princess and reputed to be beautiful and kind, she faced pressure to marry. Her most aggressive suitor was said to be Algar, prince of a neighbouring sub-kingdom. He wanted to make her his wife, notwithstanding her vocation to celibacy. His stated aim of marital conquest led her to flee Oxford, the church unfinished. She sought refuge a few miles northwest of the settlement, in a notoriously dense and thorny wood near what is now the hamlet of Binsey.

Algar eventually found her nonetheless, but he was stricken blind before he could claim her as his bride. Out of compassion for his affliction, and his subsequent repentance, Frideswide prayed to Margaret of Antioch, a 3^rd century saint who had similarly been pursued against her will. As the story goes, in answer to Frideswide’s prayer, a well opened up at her feet. With the ‘triacle’ or ‘treacle’ (‘healing balm’) water of the well, Frideswide restored Algar’s sight. Her name, combining ‘peace’ and ‘strength’, had proven to be prophetic. Algar, a changed man, went on his way.

Frideswide stayed in the Binsey area to build a chapel near the healing well, in honour of St Margaret (rebuilt in the 13^th Century). Pilgrims began to journey to Frideswide and to the Treacle Well and, when she had returned to Oxford, to the renowned well itself. It thrived as a place of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages and into the 17^th century. Before the Reformation, and before their marriage was annulled in 1533, Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII are said to have prayed there for a son and heir. Alas, poor Catherine! We can only begin to speculate on how history would have unfolded had this request been granted.

In another version, the well springs up not in connection with the Algar crisis but simply to provide water for Frideswide and her lady companions in their temporary exile in the thorny woods. The water proves to be miraculous, in addition to salubrious, and soon becomes a focus for pilgrimage. In this variant, Algar pursues Frideswide from Binsey back to Oxford. It is at Oxford that he is stricken blind, and where Frideswide heals him, without need of well or water.

If these origin stories of the cult of Frideswide sound rather like legends that’s because we have no contemporary written records, as is often the case for pre-Norman Conquest history. The documents which provide the stories above date from the 12^th century: from William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, “and two saints’ Lives known as Life A and Life B.” (Sally Welch, A Pilgrims’ Companion to Saint Frideswide’s Way, Christ Church Cathedral, p. 12.)

Long before the Catholic Church formulated its Congregation for the Causes of Saints in 1588 (initially, the Sacred Congregation of Rites), validation of sainthood relied mainly on local testimonies and episcopal approval, and so we must assume it was for Frideswide. The survival of the well at St Margaret’s church, past the worst ravages of the Reformation, testifies to the strength of her cult. It was only in 1639, when Puritanical fervour had turned its keen gaze on the well, that its protective stone structure was broken down and its cult banished. It would lay dormant for over two hundred years.

Going back to Frideswide’s time, undoubtedly her connection with the future site of Christ Church vouchsafed her legitimacy in a more formal manner. For to Oxford she did indeed return, after the Binsey interlude. She established not only a church there, but a monastery (or priory/convent/nunnery, terms vary) where she was able to live out her vocation to prayer and to the poor and the sick.

Her church was burned down in 1002, in a grisly event of the St Brices’s Day Massacre. Any potential records would also have been lost in the conflagration. King Aethelred ‘the Unready’, who had ordered the massacre (of Danes in England), then ordered the church to be re-built.

As approved by Henry I, in 1122, it became an Augustinian Priory dedicated to St Frideswide. Her relics were recovered from their burial place and moved (‘translated’) by the Augustinians to a proper shrine in 1108, then moved again to a more elaborately-built one in 1289. The Priory thus became a second, major focus of Frideswide pilgrimages. According to some accounts, it is here that Catherine of Aragon prayed for a son, rather than at St Margaret’s well.

In 1440, Frideswide was made Patron Saint of Oxford and its University by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele: feast day on 19^th October.

In 1524, Cardinal Wolsey dissolved the Priory as part of his plans to found Cardinal College. With the Reformation in full swing by 1538, the shrine was destroyed, and the saint’s bones buried elsewhere to prevent further pilgrimages. In 1546 (Wolsey having died in 1530) the King re-founded the college in his own name (King Henry VIII College) which then became the Christ Church we know today (always Christ Church; ‘Christ Church College’ is not approved usage), wherein the new church served as both college chapel and diocesan Cathedral. Also from 1546, the college acquired the land encompassing Binsey and St Margaret’s church and well.

In the 19^th century, the intense changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution inspired a Gothic Revival movement, harking back to the architecture and values of the High and Late Middle Ages. For Christ Church Cathedral that meant an interest in recovering its historical roots, therefore highlighting the foundational role of St Frideswide. Explorations and renovations connected to the movement yielded the exciting discovery - in an old well, as it happened – of fragments of the 1289 shrine and what appears to be a grave slab dating from an even earlier time (as displayed in the Museum of Oxford, on loan from Christ Church, below).

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The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848, similarly looked to the Middle Ages for inspiration, further contributing to the cultural wave of interest in the past. In 1859, as part of the renovations taking place at the Cathedral, Edward Burne-Jones was commissioned to paint a new, St Frideswide Window for the Latin Chapel where her shrine rests. It would take a long time, and a ladder, to be able to properly appreciate the visual and narrative elements of the project, individually and as they form the spectacular window in its entirety.

One Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll, a Fellow at Christ Church from the 1850s, witnessed these developments. Dodgson often took boat trips to Binsey and Godstow with Alice Liddell and her sisters, the daughters of the Dean of the college. Borrowing from St Frideswide, he included mention of the Treacle Well in the stories he told the sisters, which were published as Alice in Wonderland in 1865. This ‘nonsense’ iteration of the well features in Chapter VII: “A Mad Tea-Party”, as told by the Dormouse. Whether because of this or coincidentally, in 1874, the Reverend T.J Prout, “alumnus of Christ Church”, took it upon himself to restore and re-open the well, for his time and for posterity.

A visitor to Oxford today may come across a St Frideswide parish church on Botley Road, a Frideswide Square near the main railway station, a St Frideswide Primary School in the suburb of Cowley and, in October, a yearly marking of her patronage on her feast day. Christ Church Cathedral remains the pre-eminently rewarding destination for Frideswide and other historical interests, with the caveat that the space must be shared with ever-present groups of tourists. Laudably, in the coming year, the Cathedral will be celebrating “Frideswide at 1300”, an anniversary based on 19^th October, 727, as the day and year of her death. The Cathedral will host a series of events from February to October 2027. Some of the celebrations are in conjunction with a wide-ranging, revived pilgrimage called St Frideswide’s Way, segments of which can count towards completion of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage in Spain

For those of a more retiring or less energetic disposition, the quiet counterparts to the Cathedral, tucked away in the countryside, are worth bearing in mind. St Maragret’s church and well are a gentle, ten-minute walk from Binsey, in peaceful surroundings. The well looks a bit the worse for wear but it continues to be recognised and visited as a place of prayer and supplication. On a practical note, the water is too low to reach unaided, and there is no drawing vessel supplied, so visitors should come prepared with one. On a spiritual note, though the water appears murky – ‘treacly’ in the current sense – it is in fact clear and fresh, one might almost say miraculously so. St Margaret’s continues as a small place of worship, with Holy Communion one Sunday a month and Evening Prayer in the summer months, which may be preceded by official sprinklings from the well.

The whole of Binsey consists only of a few picturesque houses and an upscale pub called The Perch. Nearby is a lovely Thames-side path leading northward to the ruins of Godstow Abbey. To the south, by crossing the Thames on a Victorian iron footbridge, there is access to Port Meadow, a late-Saxon common land of over 300 acres for the grazing of cattle and horses. It is used for that purpose and as a popular recreational area to this day.

We cannot leave this bucolic patch of Oxfordshire, however, without highlighting the Binsey signpost.

The weathered wood marks an opposition between the direction of St Margaret’s and the direction of the pub: ‘The Church’ one way, ‘The Perch’ the other. The easy rhyme makes it sound like a light-hearted dilemma. In truth, though, the spiritual basis of British culture on the one hand, and the social, cultural core of that culture on the other, are now under various forms of serious or even civilisational threat. Efforts to support and revitalise both may become needed pilgrimages of a kind unforeseen by ancient saints. Where the fate of the Church is concerned, in particular, smothered as it is by neo-paganism, politicisation or indifference, and an imported, hostile religion, we may all be required to stand, like Frideswide in her day, as stalwarts of the faith.

Le Pen is presented by many of her supporters as a politician who could save France from the consequences of mass migration. Same with Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Nigel Farage in Britain.

All three face fierce criticism from their political opponents and the mainstream media. They keep getting accused of racism, extremism, and “islamophobia” while their supporters argue that they are among the few politicians willing to defend their countries’ national identities.

But what exactly are they defending?

That question became particularly interesting yesterday when Le Pen appeared on CNews and Europe 1 to discuss her political program ahead of the 2027 French presidential election.

During the interview she made the following statement:

“Yes, Islam is compatible with the Republic. I’ve said it ten times.

However, those who seek to impose Sharia law in France will find me standing in their way. Muslims, on the other hand, have no reason to worry.”

She also addressed French Muslims who were considering leaving the country if she became president:

“French Muslims who are planning to leave if I am elected are mistaken. It is their country. They are French.

We are not like La France Insoumise. We respect all French people.”

In other words, Muslims should enjoy freedom of religion while anyone seeking to replace French law with an Islamic political system should be opposed.

Donald Trump has made similar statements for years. He has repeatedly separated the personal practice of Islam from Sharia as a system that must not override U.S. law. In an August 2026 appearance on The Glenn Beck Show, Trump said he would “absolutely” support banning Sharia law in the United States:

“On Sharia law, I would absolutely say that’s not this country. There’s no Sharia law. And you do have pockets of it, as you know… You go to London, you go to Paris. It’s almost like a second way of life. It is ridiculous… I would absolutely prohibit the Sharia law thing and it is happening in this country a little bit and when we see it we take it out and you have to take it out. You have one system.”

Le Pen’s recent statements tracks this line: personal religious practice is compatible with the Republic; replacing French law with Sharia is not. French Muslims who are simply citizens practicing their faith “have no reason to worry.”

But can you be a practicing Muslim without believing in Sharia?

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After the First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1099, thousands of Christian pilgrims began traveling to the Holy Land, but the roads were still dangerous, and many were attacked along the way.

Around 1119, a French knight named Hugues de Payens and several friends decided to do something about this by founding a religious brotherhood dedicated to protecting pilgrims.

King Baldwin II of Jerusalem gave them quarters on the Temple Mount, near the site traditionally associated with Solomon’s Temple, which is how they became known as the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or simply the “Knights Templar”.

What makes them especially fascinating is that they were both monks and warriors, taking religious vows of poverty and obedience while devoting their lives to the military defense of Christianity.

In 1129, the Council of Troyes formally recognized the order. Theologian St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote in his treatise In Praise of the New Knighthood:

This is, I say, a new kind of knighthood and one unknown to the ages gone by. It ceaselessly wages a twofold war both against flesh and blood and against a spiritual army of evil in the heavens. When someone strongly resists a foe in the flesh, relying solely on the strength of the flesh, I would hardly remark it, since this is common enough. And when war is waged by spiritual strength against vices or demons, this, too, is nothing remarkable, praiseworthy as it is, for the world is full of monks. But when the one sees a man powerfully girding himself with both swords and nobly marking his belt, who would not consider it worthy of all wonder, the more so since it has been hitherto unknown? He is truly a fearless knight and secure on every side, for his soul is protected by the armor of faith just as his body is protected by armor of steel. He is thus doubly armed and need fear neither demons nor men. Not that he fears death—no, he desires it. Why should he fear to live or fear to die when for him to live is Christ, and to die is gain? Gladly and faithfully he stands for Christ, but he would prefer to be dissolved and to be with Christ, by far the better thing. Go forth confidently then, you knights, and repel the foes of the cross of Christ with a stalwart heart. Know that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ, and in every peril repeat, “Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” What a glory to return in victory from such a battle! How blessed to die there as a martyr! Rejoice, brave athlete, if you live and conquer in the Lord; but glory and exult even more if you die and join your Lord. Life indeed is a fruitful thing and victory is glorious, but a holy death is more important than either. If they are blessed who die in the Lord, how much more are they who die for the Lord!

Bernard further argued:

The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls. Neither does he bear the sword in vain, for he is God’s minister, for the punishment of evildoers and for the praise of the good. If he kills an evildoer, he is not a mankiller, but, if I may so put it, a killer of evil. He is evidently the avenger of Christ towards evildoers and he is rightly considered a defender of Christians. Should he be killed himself, we know that he has not perished, but has come safely into port. When he inflicts death it is to Christ’s profit, and when he suffers death, it is for his own gain. The Christian glories in the death of the pagan, because Christ is glorified; while the death of the Christian gives occasion for the King to show his liberality in the rewarding of his knight. In the one case the just shall rejoice when he sees justice done, and in the other man shall say, truly there is a reward for the just; truly it is God who judges the earth. I do not mean to say that the pagans are to be slaughtered when there is any other way to prevent them from harassing and persecuting the faithful, but only that it now seems better to destroy them than that the rod of sinners be lifted over the lot of the just, and the righteous perhaps put forth their hands unto iniquity.

Over the following decades, the Knights Templar grew into one of the most powerful organizations in Christendom, receiving huge donations of land and money from European nobles who wanted to support the defense of the Holy Land.

The Popes granted the order special privileges that placed it directly under papal authority, allowing the Templars to build commanderies throughout Europe and use the income from their estates to finance castles and soldiers in the Crusader states.

They also developed sophisticated financial services, helping transfer money across long distances and lending big sums to European monarchs, while their famous white mantles bearing red crosses became one of the most recognizable symbols of the Crusades.

But despite their military discipline and considerable resources, the Templars could not prevent the gradual loss of the Christian territories in the Holy Land.

In 1187, Saladin defeated the Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin and recaptured Jerusalem, leaving the remaining Christian strongholds vulnerable to Muslim attacks.

Then, in 1291, the Mamluks captured Acre, the last major stronghold of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.

The surviving knights withdrew to Cyprus, bringing nearly two centuries of Templar military involvement in the Holy Land to an end.

Although the order continued hoping for another crusade, European rulers questioned whether such a powerful independent military organization was still necessary, and some even suggested merging the Templars with the Knights Hospitaller.

The Templars refused to give up their independence, and their wealth and special privileges had attracted the attention of King Philip IV of France, who was determined to strengthen his own authority over the kingdom..

Philip IV and the Wealth of the Templars

Philip IV became king of France in 1285, and over the following decades his expensive wars placed enormous pressure on the royal treasury, leading him to introduce controversial taxes and look for new ways to raise money.

In 1306, he expelled the Jews from France and confiscated their property, while his struggle with Pope Boniface VIII had already reached a dramatic confrontation in 1303, when royal agents seized the pope at Anagni.

Philip also owed the order money, although historians still debate how much his financial difficulties influenced his decision to move against the Templars compared with his desire to strengthen royal authority.

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Friday, October 13, 1307

An excerpt from Raymond Ibrahim’s “The Two Swords of Christ”:

On Friday, October 13, 1307, after King Philip IV of France had heard tell of “a bitter thing, a lamentable thing, a thing horrible to contemplate, terrible to hear, a heinous crime, an execrable evil, an abominable deed, a hateful disgrace, a completely inhuman thing, indeed remote from all humanity,” all Templars in his domains, including Master James of Molay, were arrested and thrown in dungeons.

They were charged with heresy, including by denying Christ, spitting and urinating on the cross during their induction ceremony, engaging in homosexual activities and sorcery, worshipping demonic idols—some smeared with the fat of children they had roasted, no less—and even “worshipping a certain cat that appeared amongst them.”

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In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic with three ships, hoping to find a new route to Asia, but instead reached the Caribbean and began a new chapter in the history of Europe and the Americas. What many people do not realize is that his voyage was connected to the centuries-long conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim world that controlled trade routes to the East. For generations, European merchants depended on trade networks that connected the Mediterranean with the wealthy markets of Asia, but many of these routes passed through territories controlled by Muslim rulers, who profited from the trade.

Then, in 1453, the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, bringing the ancient Christian capital of the Byzantine Empire under Muslim rule and strengthening Ottoman control over trade in the eastern Mediterranean. European rulers already had good reasons to search for alternative routes to Asia, and the growing power of the Ottomans made the prospect even more attractive. While the Portuguese explored the possibility of sailing around Africa, Columbus proposed something much more ambitious: reaching Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic.

The rulers who eventually agreed to finance his expedition were Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain, who had just completed the Reconquista by capturing Granada, the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula, in January 1492.

Only a few months after bringing nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in parts of Spain to an end, they sent Columbus across the Atlantic.

As Columbus wrote in the opening of his journal:

“In this present year 1492, after Your Highnesses had brought to an end the war with the Moors who reigned in Europe ... Your Highnesses ... determined to send me, Christopher Columbus, to the said regions of India.”

The Fall of Constantinople

Christian leaders at the time did not hold back. Cardinal Bessarion wrote:

“The head of all Greece, the splendor and glory of the East, the school of the best arts, the refuge of all good things, has been captured, despoiled, ravaged, and completely sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage of enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts.”

Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) put it this way:

“We ourselves allowed Constantinople, the capital of the East, to be conquered by the Turks. And while we sit at home in ease and idleness, the arms of those barbarians are advancing to the Danube…. In the Eastern imperial city they have massacred the successor of Constantine, along with his people, desecrated the temples of the Lord, sullied the noble edifice of Justinian with their hideous cult of Muhammad.”

Trade was another reason for these voyages, as European merchants wanted direct access to the spices and other valuable goods coming from Asia, which passed through several merchants before reaching Venice and other trading cities of the Mediterranean.

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople did not bring this trade to an end, and merchants continued making considerable profits from it, but European rulers wanted to find routes that would allow them to trade with Asia without depending on intermediaries.

Finding a direct sea route would not only open new commercial opportunities but also allow Christian kingdoms to build alliances with rulers beyond the Mediterranean and extend their influence into parts of the world they had previously struggled to reach.

Portugal Searches for a Way Around Africa

Long before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, the Portuguese were already exploring the western coast of Africa, hoping to gain access to African gold, discover a sea route to the wealthy markets of Asia, and find Christian allies beyond the territories controlled by Muslim rulers.

One of their most interesting ambitions was to find the legendary Christian ruler known as Prester John, whom many Europeans believed ruled a powerful kingdom somewhere beyond the Islamic world. They hoped that an alliance with him would help Christian Europe in its long struggle against Muslim powers.

According to contemporary accounts, Prince Henry the Navigator was particularly interested in finding this kingdom, and he welcomed news that brought his explorers closer “to the Indies and to the land of Prester John.” He also hoped to find Christian rulers in Africa who might help Portugal in its wars against the Moors.

Portuguese explorers continued sailing farther south along the African coast until, in 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa, proving that ships could reach the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic without passing through the Mediterranean.

But Columbus believed there was another way to reach Asia, and instead of following the Portuguese around Africa, he proposed sailing directly west across the Atlantic.

He was convinced that the distance between Europe and Asia was much shorter than it actually was, having underestimated the size of the Earth and the big stretch of ocean separating the two continents.

Ferdinand and Isabella Complete the Reconquista

In January 1492, the Christian kingdoms of Spain finally brought to an end a struggle their ancestors had fought for centuries, when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile captured Granada, the capital of the last Muslim kingdom on the Iberian Peninsula.

The surrender marked the end of the Reconquista and nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule in parts of Spain. On January 2, the Catholic monarchs entered Granada, and Christopher Columbus was there to witness the occasion.

In the account of his first voyage, Columbus recalled seeing the royal banners raised over the Alhambra, before explaining how Ferdinand and Isabella commissioned him to sail west in search of a route to Asia.

Columbus had spent years trying to convince European rulers to finance his voyage, but his proposals were repeatedly rejected or delayed until Ferdinand and Isabella finally agreed to support him.

In April 1492, they signed the Capitulations of Santa Fe, granting Columbus the titles of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy and governor of the lands he discovered, along with a share of the profits from his expedition.

The potential rewards were enormous, but Columbus also believed his voyage could serve a religious purpose, opening the way for the spread of Christianity into lands Europeans had not yet reached.

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What Columbus Himself Said

The account of Columbus’s first voyage shows how tightly he tied the trip to the religious goals of Ferdinand and Isabella.

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A century earlier, in 632, “Prophet” Muhammad died, and his Arab followers expanded beyond Arabia. By the early eighth century, they controlled much of the (formerly) Christian territory of North Africa, and crossed into Spain.

The Visigothic kingdom collapsed after the invasion of 711, and most of the Iberian Peninsula came under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate.

Now, exactly 100 years after Muhammad’s death, Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees into what is today France, threatening to bring even more of Christian Europe under Islamic rule.

Charles Martel stopped them.

The Muslim Conquest Reaches France

To understand the Battle of Tours we have to go back twenty years. In 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and defeated the Visigothic king Roderic. He ordered their fleet burned, and said, “We have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves here, or we perish.”

Eight years later the Muslims occupied Narbonne and established a permanent base north of the Pyrenees. From there they launched further attacks into Europe while the Frankish rulers struggled to stop them.

In 721 a Muslim army besieged Toulouse and Odo defeated it outside the city. The victory showed that the invaders could be beaten but Narbonne remained under Muslim control and the fighting continued..

Then in 732 Abd al-Rahman attacked again. His army crossed the western Pyrenees into Aquitaine where Odo tried to resist near Bordeaux but suffered a nuclear defeat. The Chronicle of 754, written by a Christian living under Muslim rule in Spain only a generation later, described the scale of the slaughter:

“He gave battle to Duke Eudes beyond the Garonne and the Dordogne, and put him to flight—so utterly that God alone knew the number of the slain and wounded.”

With Odo’s forces broken the Muslim army advanced farther into Frankish territory. They plundered, enslaved, raped, and destroyed churches.

Odo now realized he could not stop Abd al-Rahman alone. So he turned to a man who was previously his political enemy: Charles Martel.

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The Man Who Stopped Them

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Six short books that you can (realistically) finish this month, from Augustine and C. S. Lewis to Chesterton and St. Benedict. Some are theology and philosophy, others history and fiction, but all six touch on the things we talk about here all the time: the ideas that shaped the West.

Now let’s get into the books…

1. On Christian Doctrine by St. Augustine (a. 160 pages)

Written across the late fourth and early fifth centuries, On Christian Doctrine is Augustine’s guide to understanding and teaching Scripture, but it becomes a much broader discussion about knowledge, and the proper purpose of learning.

One of Augustine’s most interesting ideas is that Christians should not be afraid of learning simply because it comes from outside Christianity. Truth belongs to God wherever it is found, and Augustine famously compares this to the Israelites taking the gold of Egypt and putting it toward a better purpose:

Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God’s providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils. These, therefore, the Christian, when he separates himself in spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men, ought to take away from them, and to devote to their proper use in preaching the gospel. Their garments, also—that is, human institutions such as are adapted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life—we must take and turn to a Christian use.

Augustine refuses to make us choose between faith and learning. The intellect should be cultivated and knowledge should be pursued, but both ultimately have to be ordered toward something higher than themselves.

If you are interested in classical education, start here.

2. The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis (a. 100 pages)

This might be the most important short book on the list.

Published in 1943, The Abolition of Man began as a series of three lectures in which C. S. Lewis examined education, morality, and what happens when a civilization stops believing that good and evil are objectively real.

Lewis saw something deeply wrong with an education that trained the intellect while weakening the moral imagination. His famous description of modern education producing “men without chests” refers to people whose reason and appetites remain, but whose character has never been properly formed:

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Lewis understood that education is never simply about transferring information. We are always teaching young people what deserves admiration and what deserves contempt, what is worth loving and what is worth rejecting.

It is barely a hundred pages, but there is enough in here to think about for years.

3. The Great Heresies by Hilaire Belloc (a. 160 pages)

If you want a short introduction to some of the great religious conflicts that shaped Western history, Belloc is always entertaining.

In The Great Heresies, he looks at several movements that challenged Christianity across the centuries, including Arianism, Islam, the Albigensians, and the Protestant Reformation.

Hilaire Belloc warns that the West should not assume its centuries-long struggle with Islam is over simply because Islam appears politically weak in the present:

It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our 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 recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain the complicated instruments of modern war? Where is the political machinery by which the religion of Islam can play an equal part in the modern world? I say 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.

His larger point is that ideas have consequences, and theological disagreements can eventually transform entire civilizations. Change what people believe about God and man, and sooner or later you change their culture and understanding of society as well.

Belloc is opinionated, provocative, and certainly not neutral, which is part of what makes him so enjoyable to read. You do not have to agree with every conclusion to appreciate the larger question he is asking:

What happens to a civilization when its fundamental beliefs change?

4. The Ball and the Cross by G. K. Chesterton (a. 200 pages)

Now something completely different written by Belloc’s best friend, G. K. Chesterton.

The Ball and the Cross begins with two men who absolutely cannot stand each other.

One is a devout Catholic.

The other is a committed atheist.

After the atheist publishes an attack on Christianity, the Catholic becomes so outraged that he challenges him to a duel, and the two spend much of the novel desperately trying to fight each other while everyone around them desperately tries to stop them.

G. K. Chesterton argues that words are worth fighting over precisely because words carry meaning, and meaning ultimately determines what we believe to be true:

Why shouldn’t we quarrel about a word? What is the good of words if they aren’t important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn’t any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn’t there be a quarrel about a word? If you’re not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only things worth fighting about.

It sounds ridiculous because it is.

But underneath the comedy, Chesterton is making a good point about a society that has become so indifferent to questions of truth that it considers two men willing to fight over their beliefs more insane than the people who believe in nothing strongly enough to fight for it.

Like most Chesterton, it is funny and strange, but also serious when it needs to be.

If you want one work of fiction on this list, make it this one.

5. The Rule of Saint Benedict by St. Benedict (a. 100 pages)

Written in the sixth century as a guide for monastic communities, The Rule of Saint Benedict lays out a way of life built around prayer and work.

There is nothing flashy about it (and that is precisely the point).

Benedict is concerned with how people actually live together: when they pray and work, how authority should be exercised, etc.

He presents the Christian life as a battle against our own will, fought through prayer and obedience in service of Christ the true King:

Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master, and incline the ear of thy heart, and cheerfully receive and faithfully execute the admonitions of thy loving Father, that by the toil of obedience thou mayest return to Him from whom by the sloth of disobedience thou hast gone away. To thee, therefore, my speech is now directed, who, giving up thine own will, takest up the strong and most excellent arms of obedience, to do battle for Christ the Lord, the true King. In the first place, beg of Him by most earnest prayer, that He perfect whatever good thou dost begin, in order that He who hath been pleased to count us in the number of His children, need never be grieved at our evil deeds. For we ought at all times so to serve Him with the good things which He hath given us, that He may not, like an angry father, disinherit his children, nor, like a dread lord, enraged at our evil deeds, hand us over to everlasting punishment as most wicked servants, who would not follow Him to glory.

The Rule went on to shape countless monasteries across medieval Europe, and those monasteries became important centers of worship and education.

You can read the whole thing in a day.

6. The Book of the Order of Chivalry by Ramon Llull (a. 100 pages)

And finally, something for anyone interested in knights and medieval chivalry.

Written by the medieval philosopher Ramon Llull in the thirteenth century, The Book of the Order of Chivalry asks a simple question:

What is a knight actually supposed to be?

Ramon Llull argues that a true knight is defined not by his title, but by his duty to defend the faith, uphold justice, and protect the weak:

The office of the knight is the aim and purpose for which the Order of Chivalry was begun; thus, if the knight does not practise the office of knighthood he is contrary to his Order and to the aforesaid beginnings of Chivalry, and because of this contradiction he is not a true knight even though he may be called a knight, and such a knight is baser than the weaver or the trumpeter who does practise his office. The duty of a Knight is to support and defend the Holy Catholic Faith. The duty of a Knight is to support and defend his earthly lord, for neither a king nor any high baron has the power to uphold righteousness among his people without aid and help. The duty of a Knight is to support and defend women, widows and orphans, and sick or enfeebled men. Moreover, he ought to establish towns and cities in order to guarantee justice to the people. Since nobility of courage has chosen the knight over those who are beneath him in servitude, nobility of habits and good manners befit the knight, for nobility of courage could not achieve the high honour of Chivalry without appropriate virtues and good habits.

That makes the book super interesting because it shows us chivalry as medieval writers wanted it to be understood:

1. The knight is not simply a warrior.

2. He is supposed to be a certain kind of man.

Of course, real medieval knights did not always live up to that ideal, just as people rarely live perfectly according to the ideals of their own age.

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As I mentioned in Friday’s email, today I’m finally announcing our next project.

For obvious reasons, the announcement is behind the paywall and exclusively for those who support our publication. This is something I’ve been working on for a while, and I’m incredibly excited to finally share it with you.

Join us (or miss out on what everyone else will be talking about)..

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Hey friends, before we dive into today’s article on Pope Benedict and the Regensburg Address, just a quick update: our book club has voted to read Moby-Dick next!

We’ll be reading it over three discussions, with our first one covering Chapters 1–40 on October 13 at 12pm ET. So grab a copy and start reading… I’m really looking forward to this one.

Also: on Sunday, I’ll be announcing something HUGE that I’ve been working on for a while. Stay tuned for that, and now enjoy today’s piece!

Two decades ago, Pope Benedict XVI lectured at the University of Regensburg (Germany) and challenged the Islamic world to debate the place of reason in religion. The result? Muslim wailing, gnashing of teeth, and violence, directed at Christians in general and Catholics in particular. Islamic political leaders fulminated, variously, that the leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination didn’t understand “real Islam”; that he must “retract his erroneous, ugly and unfortunate remarks and apologize to the Islamic world”; even that the UN should criminalize “defamation of Islam.” Numerous Islamic clerics agreed that Benedict simply didn’t understand Islam, had “insulted its religion and prophet” and even “threatened world peace.” Even some Christian leaders—like fellow Catholic Cardinal Bergoglio—later Benedict’s successor as Pope Francis I—criticized the lecture, stating that “[his] statements don’t reflect my own opinions.”

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Unreasonable (and clueless about denominational differences) Muslim mobs engaged in actual, not just verbal, attacks—attacking Anglican and Orthodox churches in the Palestinian territories. Assyrian Christian churches were also bombed in Iraq and an Assyrian priest decapitated (a favorite tactic of Islamic fundamentalists). Somali Muslims killed a nun working at a Mogadishu hospital. A Pakistani terrorist group called for killing Pope Benedict.

What in God’s name did the head of the Catholic church say that was so inflammatory to Muslims?

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This article was written by Timothy Furnish, a Lutheran Christian (conservative but not fundamentalist); PhD in Islamic, World and African history (Ohio State, 2001); former US Army Arabic linguist and, later, civilian consultant to US Special Operations Command; author of books on the Middle East and Middle-earth; history professor; and sometime media opiner (as, for example, on Fox News Channel’s “War Stories: Fighting ISIS“).

Islam has been called a Christian heresy for centuries — first by the Church father St. John of Damascus, an Arab Christian who lived during the Muslim conquests. Other notable Christian thinkers since — Martin Luther, Hilaire Belloc, and C.S. Lewis among them — have agreed. Why?

Because Islam’s founder, Muhammad, and the compilers of its holy book, the Quran, clearly cribbed from the Bible — both the Old and New Testaments, as well as the apocryphal “gospels” that didn’t make the canonical cut. In fact, a great many biblical figures and events turn up in the Muslim holy book, as well as in hadiths — extra-Quranic sayings attributed to Muhammad. These figures include Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jonah, John the Baptist, Mary, and Jesus — but in the Quran, they’re all given a quite different spin. Raymond Ibrahim deconstructed the Islamic Mary recently for The Stream; as for her Son, Muhammad’s `Isa little resembles our Lord and Savior Jesus, since Islamic texts deny the Incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

It’s probably in the realm of eschatology that the world’s second-largest religion most clearly plagiarized the largest. Here’s the Islamic version.

As the end times unfold, with civilization and “true religion” (Islam) crumbling, several familiar evil entities from the book of Revelation will appear:

• al-Dabbah, “the Beast”

• Yajuj wa-Majuj, “Gog and Magog”

• al-Dajjal, “the Deceiver” or antichrist, who will lead the armies of darkness (non-Muslims, especially Jews)

Then `Isa (Jesus) will return, having been taken to Heaven while still alive in the first century. He will kill the Dajjal and then support the main Islamic eschatological figure, the divinely guided al-Mahdi, as he takes over the world and establishes a global caliphate.

Belief in the Mahdi Transcends Muslim Denominational Differences

Both Sunnis and Shi`is believe in this Mahdi, despite his appearance only in hadiths, not the Quran. (Timothy has written two books on the topic: Holiest Wars and Ten Years’ Captivation with the Mahdi’s Camps.)

While the doctrine is intrinsic to Twelver Shiism (and formally incorporated into the government in the largest Twelver state, Iran), it’s less institutionalized in Sunnism — but still quite strong, as Pew data on this topic has shown. The biggest difference is that for Twelver Shiis, the Mahdi has already been here as the twelfth imam, or leader, of their community, descended from Muhammad. However, he “disappeared” in the ninth century AD and will return as Allah deems appropriate — when Islam’s need is dire.

For Sunnis, the true Mahdi will step onto the stage of history as a great Muslim military and political leader, whose successes will eventually reveal him as Allah’s anointed.

Many Mahdis in Islam’s Past

So for the Muslim world writ large, neither Mahdi has come yet. But there have been legions of pretenders to the throne across the centuries in both Sunni and Shi`i societies, many of whom gained a considerable following — and some of whom actually seized power. (Timothy examined eight of the most prominent Sunni ones in Holiest Wars.)

Perhaps the most successful was Ibn Tumart, the twelfth-century Mahdi who convinced many people of his calling and took over much of what is now Morocco and Algeria.

Another such leader, Ibn Abu Mahallah, cropped up in the early seventeenth century in the same region, but fared less well. Ditto for the late nineteenth-century Mahdis in Algeria, who mainly fought the French.

In late fifteenth-century India, Muhammad Jawnpuri claimed the title and led warriors against the Mughal Empire. So did Sayyid Ahmad Barelwi in late nineteenth-century India.

The second most effective Mahdi was Muhammad Ahmad of Sudan, whose 1880s movement threw out the Ottomans and British (led by Major General Charles Gordon) and established a state that lasted until 1898. In early Republican Turkey, a chap named Mehmet declared himself the Mahdi but was quickly squelched by the Turkish Army.

The most recent alarming outbreak of Mahdism was in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) in 1979, when armed followers of Muhammad al-Qahtani took over the Great Mosque of Mecca and called for the overthrow of the Saudi royal family. They were eventually put down by hired French forces.

Also Many Mahdis in Modern Islam

But since then, several other self-proclaimed Mahdis have materialized in the Muslim world. (Timothy has written about 11 of these in the last six years at his website, The Occidental Jihadist.) Two were in the KSA, two in Egypt, one each in Bangladesh, Iraq, Morocco, and Sudan — and four in Turkey, as of late 2024, when Mustafa Çabuk “declared himself the Mahdi.”

This was in northwestern Turkey, the same area where Mehmet, the Mahdi in 1930, lived.

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Çabuk had some 200 followers, who took “loyalty oaths” to him as Mahdi. He and 20 of them were arrested on “charges of establishing a criminal organization for profit and qualified fraud.” After being charged, “the false Mahdi Mustafa Çabuk” was taken to Istanbul and “admitted to Bakırköy Mental and Neurological Diseases Hospital to determine whether his mental health was intact.”

This is very similar to what transpired with Adnan Oktar, or “Harun Yahya,” who for several decades oversaw a cult of followers who revered him as the Mahdi. Timothy traveled to Istanbul and interviewed him in 2006. Oktar was arrested in 2018 and later sentenced to life in prison, partly as a result of being implicated in the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey.

However, the plot thickens with Çabuk. Besides his crimes against Islam and Turkish law, he and his Mahdists were charged with “conducting illegal excavations.” For what? According to an Oct. 11 story on the English-language version of the Turkish news site Haberler.com:

The suspects were searching for an ‘ark of the covenant’ in the area they dug. The suspect Mustafa Çabuk, who claims to be the Mahdi mentioned in the hadiths, alleges that the location of the ark was revealed to him by angels.

I’ve been studying Mahdism since my doctoral work at Ohio State in the 1990s, and this is the first time I’ve heard or read of a self-proclaimed Mahdi emulating Indiana Jones or Joseph Smith. But it makes weird sense. Several hadiths state that the Mahdi will procure the Ark from its hiding place, either in Antioch or the Sea of Galilee. This will prove his claim to be sent from Allah — which would make the Mahdi and his followers “top men,” I suppose. Too bad Çabuk’s folks were digging in the wrong place.

Turkish Mahdism Could Be Quite Dangerous

Turkey is still secular (officially). Yet according to the aforementioned Pew polling, it has the third-highest number of people (68%) who believe in the Mahdi’s imminent return — trailing only Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Recep Erdoğan may see himself as a modern Ottoman sultan, and members of his government, including probably Erdoğan himself, seem to be looking for the true Mahdi over against false ones. Just four years ago, a senior military advisor to Erdoğan, who also was the head of a powerful Turkish private security firm, was forced to resign after saying publicly that his company was paving the way for the coming of the Mahdi.

Turkey isn’t some barren, bleak, fundamentalist-ruled backwater like Afghanistan. It’s a modern country with the second-largest military in NATO, enormous cachet in the Muslim world as the heir to the Ottoman Empire, and the largest non-oil-based Muslim economy in the Middle East. Self-styled Mahdis in much poorer and weaker states have wreaked havoc. Imagine what such a leader could do at Turkey’s helm.

Islam’s messianic heresy of Mahdism has proven to be both a political and military problem for Muslims and their neighbors for centuries. The belief is deeply embedded in Islam, and it isn’t going away.

One final note: Mahdis tend to appear at the approach of a new Islamic century. November 28, 2076 will be New Year’s Day, Hijri year 1500. So over the next 50 years, we can expect to see a plague of Mahdis. Let’s hope they remain one-offs consigned to mental hospitals. But if history is any guide, they won’t be.

[Originally published at The Stream, October 22, 2024.]

When it comes to churches, Islamic history is a testimony to Islamic doctrine: under Muslim rule, from the 7^th century to the present, tens of thousands of churches that were once spread across thousands of miles of formerly Christian lands, were attacked, plundered, ransacked, destroyed and/or converted into mosques. Such a large number is consistent with the fact that, at the time of the Muslim conquests, half of the world’s entire Christian population lived in those lands invaded and subjugated by Islam.

According to one medieval Muslim historian, over the two-year-course of a particularly ruthless Christian persecution campaign, some 30,000 churches were burned or pillaged in Egypt and Syria alone. Major church attacks during Abbasid rule include when “the Muslims in Jerusalem made a rising [in 936] and burnt down the Church of the Resurrection [believed to be built atop the tomb of Christ] which they plundered, and destroyed all they could of it.” Nearly a century later, Caliph Hakim bi-Amr Allah (r. 996-1021) ordered that the already ravaged Church of the Resurrection be torn down “to its very foundations, apart from what could not be destroyed or pulled up, and they also destroyed the Golgotha and the Church of Saint Constantine and all that they contained, as well as all the sacred gravestones. They even tried to dig up the graves and wipe out all traces of their existence.”

In the fourth century Constantine built the original Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the places associated with Golgotha and the empty tomb. For generations afterward, Christians traveled across great distances to pray at the sites where the central events of their faith had taken place, at a time when Islam did not yet exist.

After Muhammad’s death, Arab armies expanded beyond the Arabian Peninsula and conquered some of the oldest territories of the Christian world. Syria fell during the 630s, Jerusalem surrendered around 637, and Egypt soon followed, placing ancient centers of Christianity under Islamic rule more than four centuries before the beginning of the Crusades.

Patriarch Sophronius lived long enough to witness this transformation of Jerusalem, and he viewed the conquest as a disaster for the Christian East. When Caliph Umar entered the Holy City, Sophronius saw the conquest through biblical prophecy and described the destruction of churches, the killing of Christians, and the victories of the invading armies in deeply religious terms:

Why are the troops of the Saracens attacking us? Why has there been so much destruction and plunder? Why are there incessant outpourings of human blood? Why are the birds of the sky devouring human bodies? Why have churches been pulled down? Why is the cross mocked? Why is Christ … blasphemed by pagan mouths? … [T]he vengeful and God-hating Saracens, the abomination of desolation clearly foretold to us by the prophets, overrun the places which are not allowed to them, plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add victory to victory.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre remained in Christian hands for a time, and Christians were still able to worship at the site. Their ability to do so, however, depended on the permission of Muslim rulers, and that permission was not guaranteed to last.

Al-Hakim Ordered To Demolish The Tomb

Al-Hakim became Fatimid caliph in 996, and during his reign restrictions against Christian religious life became increasingly severe. Churches were confiscated or destroyed and Christian public life was restricted, while the Church of the Holy Sepulchre eventually became one of the most important targets of this wider campaign.

The tomb looks like this. It's inside a shrine called the Edicule.

The Holy Sepulchre had already suffered an attack in 936, when Muslims in Jerusalem rose against the church, plundered it, and burned parts of the structure. Under al-Hakim, however, the destruction went much further, as the already damaged sanctuary was ordered to be torn down completely.

One of the closest accounts of the event comes from Yahya ibn Sa‘id of Antioch, a Christian historian writing in Arabic within living memory of the destruction. According to Yahya, the demolition began on 28 September 1009 and targeted not only the church itself, but also the sacred places and objects surrounding it:

And so Yarukh sent his son Yusuf and al-Husayn ibn Zahir al-Wazzan, in company with Abu’l-Fawaris al-Dayf, who seized all the movable goods that were there. After that, [the church itself] was cast down as far as the foundations, except for what it was impossible to destroy or difficult to uproot and carry away. Then the Skull (Golgotha), Calvary, the church of St Constantine, and all the other buildings enclosed within their walls were destroyed, and the sacred remains (holy relics) were completely annihilated. Ibn Abu Zahir attempted to remove the Holy Sepulchre and to cause all trace of it to disappear; he broke and demolished the major part of it. There was in the vicinity (of the Holy Sepulchre) a monastery of monks, known under the name of the monastery of al-Sari, which was also demolished.

He Was Not The Only Madman

Al-Hakim is sometimes presented as an erratic ruler whose personal behavior explains the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, but the attack did not occur in isolation. During the same period, Christian churches and institutions across Fatimid territory were targeted, while their property and endowments were confiscated.

The Muslim historian al-Maqrizi later described the extent of these policies, recording both the destruction of churches and the seizure of Christian property:

And in his [al-Hakim’s] time, hardships such as one never saw befell the Christians…. He then laid his hands on all endowments of the churches and of the monasteries, which he confiscated to the public treasury, and wrote to that effect to all his provinces. He then burnt the wood of a great many crosses, and forbade the Christians to buy men or maid servants; he pulled down the churches that were in the street Rashida, outside the city of Misr [Old Cairo]. He then laid in ruins the churches of al-Maqs outside Cairo, and made over their contents to the people, who plundered them of more goods than can be told. He threw down the convent of al-Qosseir, and gave it to the people to sack…. He then set about demolishing all churches, and made over to the people, as prey and forfeit, all that was in them, and all that was settled on them. They were then all demolished, all their furniture and chattels were plundered, their endowments were forfeited to others, and mosques were built in their place…. The emir also wrote to the intendants of the provinces to support the Muslims in their destruction of the churches and of monasteries. And the work of demolition in Egypt was so general in the year 1012, that according to statements on which one can rely, as to what was demolished at the end of the year 1014, both in Egypt and in Syria and the provinces thereof, of temples built by the Greeks—it amounted to more than 3,000 churches [the original Arabic says 30,000]. All the gold and silver vessels in them were plundered, their endowments were forfeited; and those endowments were splendid and bestowed on wonderful edifices.

The pattern described in the sources remains clear. Churches and monasteries were destroyed, their property and endowments were confiscated, and these pressures contributed to some Christians converting to Islam.

The conflict affecting the Christian East had begun centuries before al-Hakim came to power, and it did not disappear with his death in 1021. Within a generation of the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, Christian communities farther north would face another period of conquest and violence..

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The Turks Came..

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In either late 1579 or the very first days of 1580, one of Albion’s greatest sons was born in Willoughby, a small village in Lincolnshire. While we know not the day of his birth, we do know the date of his baptism: on January 6, 1580, John Smith was baptized.

There was little reason to suspect that this crying baby boy had a great deal of greatness in him. His parents weren’t particularly poor or rich; they farmed land rented from Lord Willoughby, and made enough to send him to a grammar school in Lincolnshire. They had aspirations for the boy–perhaps he could be apprenticed to a Hanseatic merchant after he learned his letters–but nothing so bold as what he envisioned. To John, neither the plow nor the ledger would do. He would learn his letters, and later use them to great effect, but his daily bread would not come from the sweat of his brow nor any talent at trade. He was to be a knight.

Or so he dreamt as he was raised on the farm, educated for a few years, and then sent off as a merchant’s apprentice. This was a step up for the family, and no small thing in those days. But the bold boy was no spirit that could be confined to a counting house. To the open seas and adventures of a great spice merchant, perhaps, but not to the stool on which he sat as he tracked the little details of trade in his ledger and thought of rising about the station of his yeoman parents or the dismal life of money he was staring in the face.

Then, with the death of his father–who he could not dishonor by departing from the prestigious, if dull, apprenticeship that had been arranged for him–Smith’s chance came. The Spanish sought to hold onto the Low Countries, and the Protestant Dutch who lived in those lands had no intention of letting them. England, by now a fiercely Protestant nation under the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was not directly involved in this war against his Most Catholic Majesty Phillip II. But Albion’s sons could win their spurs as soldiers of fortune, and that’s what a 16-year-old Smith decided he’d do.

Racing across the Channel, Smith joined the army of Henry IV of France as a mercenary, fighting on the side of Dutch Independence and facing a renewed apprenticeship, this time in the art of war. Here, in the mud and blood of Flanders, he learned the practical mechanics of early modern war. These were the days of plate armor and firearms, of pike and shot, of the Medieval and the modern. He saw the discipline it took for men to stand under fire, the damage cannons could do to fortifications, and the cruelty of bitter religious conflict. This was to prove the perfect training ground, for all the wars in which he fought in the future were to be similarly cruel wars between alien groups seeking to dominate each other not for king and country, but for God.

Winning his spurs and earning his salt in Henry’s service, Smith made a name for himself. He was not yet famous, but he was known, and his mettle had been tested and found perfectly stern rather than wanting. He could fight, and his fellows knew it. Driven by the sense of restless adventure that was to so define his life, he travelled Europe and lost a small fortune to French con men, was thrown overboard and left on a deserted island by Catholic travelers, and wared with Mediterranean pirates before eventually tromping off to grander battlefields in the East, where Christian fought Muslim in a merciless battle for the bloodlands between Orient and Occident. Here, on the tattered edge of the Holy Roman Empire, he served first in Hungary, then in Transylvania as Hapsburg and Wallachian battled Ottoman and Moldovan in a slugging match over strategic land.

It was in these bloody campaigns that Smith rose to fame. Serving alongside Count Meldritch at the Siege of Regall, Smith and the Christian army found themselves locked in a demoralizing stalemate with the Turks, who were holed up in a heavily fortified stronghold. During the monotony of the siege, the Turkish commander–a fellow named Turbashaw–sent out an offer of single combat. He would fight any Christian champion in full view of both armies. Smith, eager for glory, accepted the challenge. As both sides watched, the two champions rode out onto the field, then raced towards each other, lances levelled. Smith’s lance smashed into the Turk, crashing against his armor and unhorsing him. Wheeling about, Smith raced back to unhorsed Turbashaw, hopped off his own horse, and used his falchion to cleanly decapitate the Turk. The army of Christ roared with applause at the gory trophy as the Muhammedans sat outraged.

It didn’t end there. Infuriated by Smith humiliating Muhammed’s army with such a display, a second Turk challenged him to single combat, again in full view of both armies: give back Turbashaw’s head, or lose your own, a warrior named Grualgo roared. Smith accepted, and it was back to battle. Again lances shivered, but this time Grualgo–though wounded in the arm–remained atop his horse. The champions wheeled about and raced at each other again, firing their pistols at point blank range. Smith was smacked in the breastplate, but it held firm. Grualgo was seriously wounded, and toppled from his steed. Smith once again brought his falchion to bear upon the wounded Turk; a second head was taken.

This the Turks could not abide, and when Smith issued a boastful challenge, it was accepted by Bonny Mulgro. When the charge came, lances proved ineffective for both men, and so they resorted to the battle-axe. Though Smith initially had the worst of it, losing his axe in the slugfest that followed, he managed a daring blow that left Mulgro seriously injured and unhorsed, and soon a third Turk’s head had been taken.

This was a tremendous string of victories that were as enlivening to the Christians as they were disconcerting and demoralizing to the Muslims. Further, they were enough to win Smith entry into the ranks of the elite: the mercenary was knighted, and his coat of arms emblazoned with three Turks’ heads to commemorate his victory. This noble crest was granted to him by Prince Sigismund Báthory of Transylvania.

But “pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” and such was the case for Smith as for all men. The next year, Smith was ambushed and defeated by the Tatars in the bloody Battle of Rotenturm. His force annihilated, Smith was seriously wounded and captured on the field. Soon sold as a slave to a wealthy family in Constantinople, at that point called Istanbul, he became the property of a nobleman’s mistress. Her name was Charatza Trabigzanda, and she fell into a trance-like infatuation with this English knight and his tales of chivalric combat, happier days in England, and all the rest he had seen.

This affection appears to have been discerned by Charatza’s suspicious mother, and so Smith was sent north to her brother, Bashaw Bogall. As he governed a remote estate near the Sea of Azov, it was thought that there Smith might be kept safe and made to convert. Neither was true. Ignoring his sister’s wishes, Bogall treated Smith with the utmost brutality. The enslaved English mercenary-turned-knight was beaten, whipped, and driven into the fields to work the estates of this frontier tyrant. But though beaten and enslaved, Smith was still strong in spirit, and he sat waiting for an opportunity to make his way to freedom.

It came when Bashaw Bogall set about beating Smith during the threshing season. They were alone, and Smith sensed it was time to act. Taking up his threshing bat, he battered his tormenter with it until yet another noble Turk had fallen to his blows. Pausing barely a moment to hide the body and gather up some food, Smith raced off and headed for freedom in Muscovy. For days he travelled, the iron collar of thralldom still about his neck as he sought desperately to reach Christian lands. After more than two weeks of flight, the iron-collared and exhausted Englishman reached a Muscovite garrison at Ecopolis, upon the river Don. He was questioned and found honest by the governor, who struck off his badge of slavery and aided him, and so the knighted hero made his way back to England by way of the Easternmost Christian kingdom, seeing a land entirely alien to all but a few of his kinsmen in those days.

He arrived back in England in 1604, just in time for a new adventure.

Queen Elizabeth had died just a year before he returned, and before she died, the Queen had decided to plant the Protestant flag in the new world to combat the grasping global power of Spain. The Roanoke colony had failed in confusion and disaster during the days of Drake, and a new attempt at colonization was called for: the Virginia Company.

This band of “gentlemen adventurers,” as the subscribers of its stock were called, had determined that they would plant the flag of England upon the shores of Virginia, named for the virgin queen, Elizabeth. The Spaniards had tried and failed to settle a Chesapeake colony, and the Britons thought they could do better. Gradually, an expedition was pieced together despite the new king, James, being hesitant to risk the recent peace with Spain.

Amongst those men involved in the risky, patriotic enterprise was Captain Bartholomew Gosnold. A navigator and privateer, in many ways a maritime version of Smith, Gosnold was one of the few Englishmen who had seen the New World. Indeed, he had travelled along the coast of what was to become New England in 1602, and was part of the inner circle of investors and planners of the attempt to built a plantation–or colony–in North America.

The company formed was the Virginia Company. Backed by lords, it was to carry Protestantism to the New World and serve as a center of profit in addition to being a base of English power across the mighty Atlantic. It was to ship back such materials as could currently only be gotten from Muscovy and the Baltics–particularly timber–to reduce English reliance on them, and find the same incredible wealth in gold the Spanish had discovered in and extracted from their colonies. Such, at least, were the hopes.

Smith, with his sense of adventure and proven record as a fighter of pagans, was one of the military men chosen to serve on the mission. A logistician as well, he proved invaluable as the Virginia company bumbled through preparing an expedition over the course of 1605 and 1606. Finally, it was ready. Respected by imperial promoters like Halkuyt and Hudson, close with Gosnold, a knight in his own right, Smith was chosen to be one of seven members of the governing council in Virginia, when the expedition arrived at the colonists’ new Chesapeake home. A secret until the party arrived in what was to become the Old Dominion, this was to prove most useful to Smtih. In fact, it’s probably the reason he wasn’t executed.

All this and much more having been arranged over years of painstaking work, Captain John Smith boarded the Susan Constant in December 1606, and sailed off to a painful debacle.

The trouble began before the party left England’s territorial waters. Poor winds meant they were stranded offshore before even having made it to Ireland, and sitting in a crammed ship boded well for no one’s humors. The provisions were eaten down, the men made sick, the ships battered for days, then weeks, as the captain waited for the weather to improve. Finally, it did, and the three-ship force set off again in search of what they hoped would be riches and glory.

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Instead, they got sea-sickness and internal conflict, the latter problem of which grew worse when they arrived in the West Indies. Smith, a proud man with much to be proud about, clashed with the gentlemen’s sons on board with him. Men like Edward Maria Wingfield were not the sorts who he thought could earn their keep in the world to which they were headed, and he clashed with them as the leaking, poorly provisioned ship found its way to the island of Nevis, in the Caribbean. There the conflict grew out of control, and the proud captain faced execution. For some reason that has been lost to history, Smith was spared though the gallows was constructed. He was, however, arrested, and the party set off from Nevis to the Chesapeake in a foul humor.

The conflict continued, Smith raging as he sweltered in the hold. And then his fortunes changed in an instant: on the night of April 26, 1607, Cape Henry was spotted. The sealed tin box with the expedition’s leaders could now be opened, and to the surprise of all, the ornery mercenary was one of the seven rulers of the colony. Begrudgingly, his fellow rulers let him out of the hold.

This deliverance was less than it seemed. The colony that was soon planted was an utter debacle from the start. It faced an Indian attack the moment it went ashore for the first time, and after regrouping settled on a pestiferous and febriferous peninsula thought to be more defensible. This muddy spit of unwholesome land was to be called Jamestown.

Though chosen for its defensibility rather than its healthfulness, Jamestown was initially not even defended. The London Directors, safe in secure in their civilized home, had commanded that the Virginia adventurers were to make peace rather than war with the heathens they encountered so that they could be led to Jesus. Smith found this absurd, knowing as he did from years of experience that difference between men meant war between them as well. Was Protestant England not planting its flag in this sweltering and mosquito-ridden land so that Catholic Spain could be countered? Why would the savages who had fired upon the English from the first be any different?

Nevertheless, orders were orders and the colonists tried to make peace with those Indians they encountered, something that soon led to conflict, and the Indians sensed weakness. Smith had forced the colony to accept partially barricading the neck of the peninsula, and this proved the salvation of the settlers: the Indians crept up to it and attacked, letting fly with a cloud of arrows at the unarmored and largely unarmed English; they had left their cannon and most of their muskets aboard the ships so as to show their peaceful intentions. Those who could fought with all their might, and managed to delay the Indian attack long enough for a naval cannon to be fired. The ball cracked a tree and this frightened the attacking Indians, who scattered. At this point, the lesson of war’s unavoidability was at least somewhat learned, and the Jamestown settlement was fortified, with weaponry brought ashore. Orders or not, the English would not consent to die like sheep.

In all this, the party largely worked as one unit. Some were less accustomed to work than others, but were willing to share in fighting and fortification. Gentlemen and artificers both desired to live, after all, and martial glory was universally respectable.

But they were not all willing to farm. In fact, nearly none of them knew how. So once a tenuous peace had been struck, the gentlemen’s sons largely stopped working. They went off to search for gold, or similar riches, and left the others to do the work of scratching out a crop…one that was desperately needed, as the weeks of laying at anchor and riding out storms off England had left the expedition even more painfully short of provisions than it would otherwise have been.

Only fool’s gold was ever found, and the refusal of much of the party to work – with those who did work generally having no idea how to farm, as they were urban poor from London rather than stolid country farmers (the expedition lacked even a plow, apparently) – meant the English were soon starving.

Smith had no intention of starving, though he also wasn’t going to return to the farming life he had left behind as a 16 year old lad, so set about trying to get some food from the Indians. Always one to recommend war rather than peace with the newly discovered pagans, he spent December of 1607 on an armed foraging expedition, and was soon ambushed by a formidable hunting party led by Opechancanough, relative of the powerful Werowocomoco, or Great Powhatan, as he is better known. Though his men were killed in the attack, Smith managed to put up a stern fight while using his native guide as a human shield. He was nevertheless taken captive, once his pistols were no longer usable, and taken to Powhatan’s court. There he was fed a lavish feast before two large, dark boulders were pulled into the smoky circle.

Suddenly, a gang of towering and painted warriors seized Smith and dragged him to a rock, forcing his head upon it while raising their clubs above his head. Into the scene darted an adventurous little girl, Matoaka, better known by her playful moniker, Pocahontas. This 11 year old daughter of Powhatan broke from her attendants and flung herself across the English captive, her face upon his, between his brains and the clubs that would bash it out. All froze, and looked to Powhatan for guidance. He chose what his daughter wanted–and perhaps had wanted this from the start, and set her upon this task to give him and excuse for mercy–and Smith was allowed to live. Not only that, but he received some food to take back to Jamestown.

Starting in the spring of 1608, Smith set about mapping the new Chesapeake home he was sharing with his fellow colonists. Perhaps to escape the other Council members with whom he was feuding over their refusal to force the men to farm rather than dig for ever-absent gold, perhaps to avoid the difficult duty of securing the ever-dwindling storehouse over which he was supposed to be in charge, or maybe because he simply had an unquenchable thirst for exploration, he set out on two long voyages with a dozen men rowing him, producing maps of such remarkable accuracy that they were used seriously until the mid-19th century, and continue being used for archeological purposes into the present day.

The first expedition involved the charting of the James and York rivers, along with some Indian diplomacy involving the other tribes in the region. The second expedition involved mapping the massive, winding systems of the Potomac and Patapsco rivers where no Englishman had ever set foot. It was during this northern push that Smith met and negotiated with the formidable Susquehannock tribe, known for its prowess. Smith managed to extract something of an agreement with the natives, who were apparently impressed by his courage and the military technology the English possessed. Smith, awed by their towering statures and intimidating dress of wolf pelts, was similarly desirous of a treaty with them. Nothing much ever came of this other than something of a pelt trade, but the English at least escaped the meeting with their lives.

By the time the battered, open barge in which Smith and his motley, hungry crew of a dozen had sailed for months as he mapped the rivers of their new home finally rattled back to Jamestown, these two expeditions had allowed him to chart three thousand miles of shoreline, and the English had a better sense of their water-centric home. Smith also showed the English, through his negotiations with the Indians while on these journeys, how the threat of force and provision of trade goods made for a better strategy than questing hopelessly after a Christian peace. The corn he got for beads kept the colony alive, if only barely.

Smith’s fellow council members were unimpressed, however, and when he was made President of the Council in September 1608, shortly after returning, he inherited governance of a colony that was near-completely broken. It was running low on food, producing nowhere near enough, and was the scene of frivolous gentlemen bowling in the weed-choked streets or digging up barrels of pyrite, which they hoped was real goad, while it raced towards starvation.

Feuding with figures like Gabriel Archer and John Ratcliffe who desired a more passive approach to colonial governance, Smith managed to pull the colony through 1608 by requiring that every man who wished to be fed from the meagre supplies available work to feed the colony. “He who does not work, neither does he eat,” was the Biblical passage on which Smith based this dictatorial rule

This turned the colony away from the gold-hunting and Indian proselytizing the colony’s directors wanted, but his demands for a fortified storehouse, sturdy houses, and agricultural plots at least meant some of the men survived. So too did he carry the sword and torch to Indian settlements, refusing to make peace with those who acted aggressively toward English settlements. Out of this skirmishing and raiding he got enough corn and security to keep the colony from flatlining, but little more.

His dictatorial authority lasted until the summer of 1609, when an influx of new settlers sent by the Virginia Company and new letters of authority for Archer and Ratcliffe weakened his grip on the still-struggling colony. Smith was doubly annoyed with the situation, as the company had sent over far too few supplies and far too many more useless colonists who didn’t know how to farm. Starvation in the hopelessly overcrowded and semi-besieged fort was thus once again on the horizon, and Smith sought to prevent it with the usual mix of trade and raiding.

During one such voyage, this one in October of 1609, disaster struck. Somehow, the gunpowder pouch strapped to his hip caught fire as he slept in an open boat, and the resultant explosion ripped a large chunk of flesh from his thigh and burned him severely. He threw himself into the freezing water and sizzled, barely alive.

Somehow, he survived the dire wound and schemes of his enemies, and made it back to England. Stripped of his authority by Archer and Ratcliffe, he arrived in chains, inches from death.

This was not the end of Smith, nor of Virginia. It was to muddle through the starving time as he explored the coast of New England–he discovered both Cape Cod and Plymouth while mapping what became America’s northern coast, and then turned his pen to castigating his enemies in the colony and Virginia Company. Those letters he had learnt so many years before came in useful as he wrote narratives of his expeditions that left few of his contemporaries unscathed, and most of them slandered.

The end of his association with Virginia came not with his maps nor his pen, but when a young man named John Rolfe brought his bride back to England. Her name was Lady Rebecca, which she adopted after being baptized. Originally, she had been known as Pocahontas. Coldly, she rebuked Smith for leaving her–she had presumed him dead–and it does not appear that the two ever reconciled. She soon died of disease, and Smith passed away in June 1631 in London, at the relatively young age of 51. He died quietly in his bed, a stark contrast to his life of violence and exploration.

Smith: The Perfect American Model

Though America did not yet exist when he was born in Lincolnshire in 1580, there are few great men of history who feel so distinctly American as John Smith, for he broke many of the molds of the old world and built many of the tendencies that were to define a certain sort of American as we began our great ascent as a nation.

For what was John Smith but a man who straddled old and new? Raised on a farm, he set out to do something bolder. He fought as a mercenary in a war of religion in the Low Countries, and after winning his spurs served in what he thought to be a crusade against the Ottomans in Transylvania. He was a slave of the Turks, and carved out the plantation colony that would bring slavery to America. He discarded the mewling and detached religiosity of those English who demanded the Indians be preached to rather than fought, and raised his well-honed blade to fight them. He spent his life in quest of a great fortune, yet he loved and desired gentility. He was an explorer, and cherished Merry Old England.

Smith was thus a composite of what classic Americans became.

While a Christian, he was much more interested in fighting the Indians to take their territory than in converting them and living with them. This was American policy after the horrific and underhanded 1622 Massacre that almost destroyed Virginia; he was just ahead of the curve in recognizing the need to fight and relative desirability of taking rather than asking. Whereas Canada was to make peace with and protect the “First Nations” as its settler population grew, America nearly exterminated the Indians before allowing a few to live on reservations, as degraded curiosities. Such is much closer to what Smith would have thought necessary, and done.

Like the frontiersmen, explorers, and settlers that were to define America for centuries to come, Smith could never quite settle down. He always wanted to explore, to discover, to chart new places and bring new territory under his dominion. With the map and the sword he set out, and those who followed were to do the same with the musket.

Smith also had much less tolerance for charity than the settled Europeans, and his approach to starvation and poverty was one that became what America was known for until the New Deal: in this land of plenty, a land where anything grew and game abounded, every man was expected to figure out eating for himself. There would be no grand charity, no public storehouse to feed all in need, no food for impoverished worker or distressed gentleman. While England had its poor laws and workhouses, America was to have no such thing, and no such relief. Only those who worked or had enough money to avoid working ate in America until the 20th century; the land of plenty was a much unkinder place for the indolent than settled Europe, as Smith would have wanted.

Finally, Smith represents the same conflicted view of European nobility that long characterized America and Americans. On one hand, he desperately wanted to be part of the genteel society he saw but was not part of as a young man. Chivalry, wealth, prominence, it all appealed to him, and he set off to become such a man. This is why he was an adventurous mercenary: it was the way to obtain such status, not trade, and it somewhat worked. He got his coat of arms, and became well-respected, in certain corners, at least. But he could never quite make himself amenable to the lax, indolent nature of the gentlemen and their sons. His hostility to their gaming and bowling in Jamestown’s muddy streets, his forcing them to set to work farming, his constant feuding with his superiors by birth all showed his inner will and desire that his merit would trump their birth. The Virginia gentry that followed him was little different. Men such as Byrd, Lee, Fitzhugh, Corbin, Custis, and all the rest came to America because such an adventure was the way they could escape lives of dull middle class merchantdom and become part of a respected landed elite. Byrd would have been a goldsmith if not for his uncle Stegge inviting him to Virginia, and Lee would have been a London merchant or clothier had not he set out for the change of glory in the New World. Such men and their sons sought to be a gentry, but also found themselves annoyed with the haughtiness of their British superiors, something that eventually led to Revolution. The gentry of the Carolinas, patroons of New York, and even Gilded Age elite were little different: they loved the culture of the British landed elite to a certain extent, but always had a bit of the striver in them, and a different sense of where merit and talent fit in the order of things. Smith, in his feuding with such men as Wingfield, began that proud American tradition.

So, when you think of Smith and his courage, raise a toast to him. He’s from whom we’re descended, if spirit and tradition if not in blood.

This article was written by Will Tanner. He writes about history and what we should learn from it at The American Tribune, and tells the stories of the lives of great men on his YouTube channel, The Old World Show. Please follow him to hear more such stories as these!

There have been so many disgusting and frankly cringe examples of what Raymond Ibrahim calls “doormat Christianity” that I don’t even know where to begin.

On September 11 the “Archbishop” of Canterbury Sarah Mullally presented an “interfaith” award to Pakistani Muslim cleric Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi at Lambeth Palace. The ceremony took place on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 when nearly 3,000 people were murdered in attacks orchestrated by Osama bin Laden.

Now this is where things get strange.

In 2007 Ashrafi publicly praised bin Laden as Saifullah or the “Sword of God” while describing him as a mujahid who fought against the Russians and the West. Ashrafi has also defended Pakistan’s blasphemy laws which have long been associated with the persecution of Christians and other religious minorities.

Reuters reported him saying:

“We are pleased to award the title of Saifullah [sword of God] to Osama bin Laden after the British government’s decision to bestow the title of ‘Sir’ on blasphemer Rushdie. This is the highest title for a Muslim warrior. If a blasphemer can be given the title ‘Sir’ by the West despite the fact he’s hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah.”

We are not done yet, it gets even weirder..

The Award Was Named After a Crusader

The award itself is named after Hubert Walter.

Hubert Walter was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1193 until 1205. Before becoming archbishop he went east on the Third Crusade and served alongside Richard the Lionheart.

The historical Hubert Walter even became an intermediary between Richard and Saladin while the Crusade continued. He helped negotiate with Saladin and later entered Jerusalem with Christian pilgrims.

How did the Church of England give such a prominent award to someone without apparently knowing about his previous comments on Osama bin Laden?

Then They Took the Award Back

Six days later Lambeth Palace withdrew the award.

On September 17 the Archbishop’s office announced that previous comments made by Ashrafi “have come to light” and that the Hubert Walter Award was therefore being withdrawn.

The full statement read:

“Last week the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation was presented to Maulana Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi in a ceremony at Lambeth Palace. The award was given for Imam Ashrafi’s longstanding support for religious minorities in Pakistan, particularly the Christian community – support that is valued by many Christians in Pakistan including its Anglican Church. It is a longstanding principle of interfaith dialogue and co-operation that we must engage with one another across deeply-held differences, and that remains the case. However, previous comments made by Imam Ashrafi have come to light that have led Lambeth Palace to reconsider this award and we can now confirm today that the award has been withdrawn. We have contacted Imam Ashrafi to make him aware of this decision. We continue to pray for the Christian community in Pakistan, and for all those working for interfaith dialogue and harmony in Pakistan and around the world.”

So the Church eventually corrected the decision.

But apparently nobody responsible for choosing the recipient discovered these comments until after the Archbishop of Canterbury presented him with the award and the photographs were already taken.

One of those photographs shows Mullally standing beside Ashrafi and his wife after the presentation.

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Tomorrow, we’ll continue with an article about Captain John Smith, famous for beheading three Ottomans in battle and later becoming one of the founders of Jamestown, Virginia.

I’m also working on an article about “Doormat Christianity,” in which I discuss the recent controversy involving Muslims reciting hateful Quran verses during the opening Mass at the Catholic University of Leuven.

I’ll also cover Trump’s September 22 speech at the United Nations on the persecution of Christians.

Today, many people still think of the Middle Ages as a thousand-year period when almost nobody could read.

There is some truth to this idea because people in medieval Europe were generally less literate than people today. Books were expensive, and education was not available equally to everyone. This was especially true in the early Middle Ages, when the ability to read Latin was mostly limited to priests, monks, and other members of religious communities.

However, it is difficult to know exactly how many medieval people could read. Literacy was not simply a matter of being able or unable to read. Some people could read but could not write well. Others could read their local language but could not understand Latin. Even the medieval word litteratus often meant that someone was educated in Latin, rather than simply able to read.

Historian Michael Clanchy explained this clearly when discussing how the word was used in medieval England:

Medieval people lived in the shadow of the former Roman Empire and so Latin remained the principal language of record, long after it had ceased to be anyone’s mother tongue, across the whole medieval millennium from 500 to 1500. To be “literate” (litteratus) meant to know Latin. This was the language of the medieval Bible and hence of the church and clergy in the west, just as it continued to be the principal language of law and government. England was exceptional in developing a written Anglo-Saxon vernacular which functioned alongside Latin or independently of it. The earliest texts extant in Old English are the laws of King Aethelberht of Kent, which were written down between 597 and his death in 616. Along with laws went title-deeds which might combine Latin and English: the clauses of conveyance were in Latin, while the details of the boundaries of the property were written in English so that they could be read aloud in court directly from the document and followed on the ground by witnesses.

As such the more interesting question is how far reading and writing actually reached into medieval European life.

The Monastery Was a Beginning

After Roman political rule ended in Western Europe, much of the Latin literature and learning of the ancient world survived through religious institutions. Monasteries became important centers for copying and studying texts. Religious communities needed books for worship, while educated members of the clergy used them for theology and administration.

This is where the common image of medieval monks copying manuscripts comes from.

However, by the Carolingian period, writing was already being used outside monasteries as well. Charlemagne believed that poor writing could lead to poor understanding of religion. He made this connection in a document known as De litteris colendis:

Be it known, therefore, to you, devoted and acceptable to God, that we, together with our faithful, have deemed it expedient that the bishoprics and monasteries entrusted by the favor of Christ to our control, in addition to the order of monastic life and the relationships of holy religion, should be zealous also in the cherishing of letters, and in teaching those who by the gift of God are able to learn, according as each has capacity. Although right conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge goes before conduct. Therefore each one ought to study what he desires to accomplish, in order that so much the more fully the mind may know what ought to be done, as the tongue speeds in the praises of all-powerful God without the hindrances of mistakes. We have begun to fear that, as skill in writing was less, wisdom for understanding the Holy Scriptures might be much less than it rightly ought to be. And we all know well that, although errors of speech are dangerous, far more dangerous are errors of the understanding.

Two years later the Admonitio generalis turned that fear into a school program:

And let schools be established in which boys may learn to read. Correct carefully the Psalms, the signs in writing (notas), the songs, the calendar, the grammar in each monastery or bishopric, and the catholic books; because often some desire to pray to God properly, but they pray badly because of the incorrect books. And do not permit your boys to corrupt them in reading or writing. If there is need of writing the Gospel, Psalter, and Missal, let men of mature age do the writing with all diligence.

Historian Rosamond McKitterick argued that writing was not used only by priests and monks. In her study of Frankish society in the eighth and ninth centuries, she showed that writing had already become a normal part of everyday society:

Literacy and the use of the written word in the early middle ages have hitherto been thought to have been confined to a clerical elite, while society at large conducted its affairs orally. There was undoubtedly some continuity and much change in the functions of writing and possession of literate skills from the late Roman to the Carolingian periods; there is certainly sufficient evidence to dispose of any Pirenne-like thesis of the decline in literacy outside a clerical elite by the eighth century and a rebirth of literacy in the eleventh century. The Franks in particular increased their resort to literate modes for legal and administrative business from the mid-eighth century. The written word became a fundamental element of Carolingian culture, and Frankish society in the Carolingian period was transformed into one largely dependent on the written word for its religion, law, government and learning.

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Then Europe Built Universities

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The city was under siege for almost two months. Its defenders were exhausted, and Ottoman mines threatened the remaining fortifications. Outside the walls, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha still commanded the Ottoman army that came to capture the Habsburg capital.

But help finally arrived. King John III Sobieski stood on the hills above Vienna with a Christian relief army made up of Polish troops and soldiers from the Holy Roman Empire.

Vienna survived the night.

On the morning of September 12, the people of Vienna looked toward the Kahlenberg and saw the army they waited weeks to see. Christian troops came down the mountain while their artillery opened fire on the Ottoman positions.

Some people in Vienna climbed onto the city walls to watch.

After almost two months trapped inside the city, they could finally see the battle that might save them.

A contemporary English pamphlet, printed in London in 1683, described the moment when the people of Vienna first saw it:

After a Siege of Sixty days, accompanied with a Thousand Difficulties, Sicknesses, Want of Provisions, and great Effusion of Blood, after a Million of Cannon and Musquet Shot, Bombs, Granadoes, and all sorts of Fire Works, which has changed the Face of the fairest and most flourishing City in the World, disfigured and ruined most part of the best Palaces of the same, and chiefly those of the Emperor; and damaged in many places the Beautiful Tower and Church of St. Stephen, with many Sumptuous Buildings. After a Resistance so vigorous, and the Loss of so many brave Officers and Souldiers, whose Valour and Bravery deserve Immortal Glory. After so many Toils endured, so many Watchings and so many Orders so prudently distributed by Count Staremburgh, and so punctually executed by the other Officers. After so many new Retrenchments, Pallizadoes, Parapets, new Ditches in the Ravelins, Bastions, Courtins, and principal Streets and Houses in the Town: Finally, after a Vigorous Defence and a Resistance without parallel, Heaven favourably heard the Prayers and Tears of a Cast-down and Mournful People, and retorted the Terror on a powerful Enemy, and drove him from the Walls of Vienna, who since the Fifteenth of July last early in the Morning, to the Twelfth of September, had so Vigorously attacked it with Two hundred thousand Men; and by endless Workings, Trenchings, and Minings, reduced it almost to its last gasp. Count Staremburgh, who sustained this great Burden, assisted by so many Gallant Officers, having given Notice to the Christian Army, by Discharge of Musquets from the Tower of St. Stephen, of the Extremity whereto the City was reduced, they discovered on the Twelfth of this Month, early in the Morning, the Christian Troops marching down the Neighbouring Mountains of Kalemberg, and heard continually the Discharges of their Artillery against the Turks, who being advanced thither, were fortified with Parapets of Earth and great Stones, to hinder the Descent of the Christian Army.

The Battle of Vienna began before their eyes.

The Christians Came Down the Mountain

The relief army faced an immediate problem because the country between the Kahlenberg and Vienna was difficult ground for an attacking army; Ottoman troops therefore built positions along the approaches and prepared to contest the descent.

The fighting started early.

Charles of Lorraine commanded the Imperial forces on the Christian left while Sobieski led the Polish wing farther south; troops from the Empire filled the center as the entire army moved toward Vienna.

Among them marched around 11,300 Bavarians.

Their ruler was Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria who was only twenty-one years old; despite his youth the elector personally joined the relief of Vienna and fought in the battle on September 12. Bavarian troops received the task of attacking toward Nussdorf and Heiligenstadt as the Christian army pushed closer to the city.

Max Emanuel therefore witnessed his first great war against the Ottomans at Vienna.

It would not be his last.

The Bavarian Elector Came to Fight

This was not simply a Polish rescue of Vienna.

Sobieski commanded the coalition, while Charles of Lorraine played an important role in planning the relief. Soldiers came from several German territories as well, including the Bavarian forces under Max Emanuel.

Only two years earlier, the young elector met Emperor Leopold I during a pilgrimage to Altötting. In January 1683, Bavaria and the emperor formed a defensive alliance as the Ottoman threat grew. When the Ottomans besieged Vienna, Max Emanuel led his troops east and joined the army preparing to rescue the city.

Now that alliance became real on the battlefield.

The twenty-one-year-old elector stood with his soldiers outside Vienna, with the Ottoman army below.

The Bavarians advanced toward Nussdorf while the rest of the Christian army moved forward beside them. With every position they captured, they came closer to Vienna.

Inside the city, the defenders could hear them coming.

Starhemberg Came Out to Meet Them

Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg directed the defense of Vienna for nearly two months.

By September, his men lived and fought among damaged walls while Ottoman engineers continued digging beneath the fortifications. The relief army arrived at a critical moment. Vienna could not afford to wait much longer.

But as the battle moved closer to the city, Starhemberg did something remarkable…

The same account from 1683 describes the moment when Vienna’s defenders met the Christian relief forces in the trenches:

During these hot Skirmishes on the Mountains, the Christians lost near 100 Men, among whom the Serjeant Major of the Regiment of Schultz, Prince Maurice of Croy, Captain of the Regiment of Grana, the Prince his Brother, Mareshal Lieutenant of the Field, was wounded there in his Shoulder: They fired then continually against the Approaches and Batteries of the Turks, with the Artillery from our Bastions and Ramparts; the Besiegers, animated by the presence of the Grand Visier, answered vigorously from theirs, and great Vollies of Musquets were discharged from both sides, intermingled with great quantities of Granado’s. The Grand Visier, who was in the Approaches, gave them hopes of carrying the place; Prince Lewis of Baden and Collonel Heusler entred their Trenches, at the same time Count Staremburgh sallied and seconded them, and repulsed the Janizaries, who saved themselves, with the Grand Visier, whose Son was either killed or taken Prisoner, and himself wounded, as ’tis said. Towards the Evening the Turks seeing the Christians Masters of their Camp over against the Scotch Bastion, and that our Cavalry had entred it, planted Two Pieces of Cannon and shot against them, a while after, seeing themselves surprized, they quitted their Approaches and all their Artillery, consisting of Seventy five Pieces of Cannon, Fourteen Cannons for Battery, and some Mortar Pieces being comprized therein.

For nearly two months, Starhemberg fought to keep the Ottomans outside Vienna.

On September 12, he fought his way out of the city.

For the defenders watching from the walls, this was an extraordinary moment. The two Christian forces finally began to meet. Sobieski fought his way toward Vienna, while Starhemberg and his men attacked outward from the city.

Kara Mustafa now faced enemies from both sides.

Kara Mustafa Still Wanted Vienna

The grand vizier did not give up the siege when the relief army appeared.

Ottoman artillery continued to fire at Vienna while Ottoman troops fought the Christian army coming from the west. Kara Mustafa tried to keep pressure on the city and stop Sobieski at the same time.

For several hours, the Ottomans fought for every part of the ground between the Kahlenberg and Vienna.

By the afternoon, however, the battlefield began to open in front of Sobieski.

That was exactly what the Polish king needed.

His cavalry could finally move.

Sobieski’s Son Rode Beside Him

Sobieski did not enter the battle alone.

His sixteen-year-old son Jakub joined him during the campaign and stayed close to his father during the fighting. In a letter to his wife after the battle, Sobieski proudly wrote about how the boy remained beside him despite the danger.

This makes the scene very different from the heroic paintings of Vienna.

Sobieski was a fifty-four-year-old king preparing to lead thousands of cavalry against the Ottoman army. Beside him rode his teenage son.

The king noticed his son’s courage.

After the battle, he made sure his wife Marysieńka knew about it.

During the campaign, Jakub also became friends with the young Elector of Bavaria. The two young princes came from different parts of the coalition, but both experienced the great victory at Vienna while still young men.

Then their fathers’ generation prepared to decide the battle…

Then Thousands of Horsemen Went Forward

Late in the afternoon, the cavalry began to move.

Polish horsemen advanced together with allied cavalry, while Christian infantry continued to push forward across the battlefield. Sobieski rode with the attack, with his son still close to him.

The Ottoman position was already growing weaker.

Then the cavalry attacked.

The horsemen charged toward Kara Mustafa’s position. Ottoman troops began to leave their defenses, and soon their retreat turned into a general flight toward Hungary.

Kara Mustafa saw what was happening.

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On the night of September 13, Sobieski wrote to his wife from the captured grand vizier’s tents. He described how the Ottoman collapse looked from the battlefield:

When the vizier saw he would be unable to resist, he called his sons to him and wept like a child. Then he said to the khan: “Save me, if you can!”. And the khan responded: “We know the king, we cannot resist him and must think of ourselves, of how we might save ourselves”. The heat is so terrible that we survive almost solely on drink. Only now has a great number of carts laden with powder and lead [ammunition] been discovered; I have no idea what they [the Turks] are going to shoot with. Right now a message has come that the enemy abandoned the last few light cannons. So we are about to mount our horses and ride straight towards Hungary to pursue the enemy and, as I already mentioned long ago, God willing, we shall greet each other not nearer than at Stryj; where would Mr Wyszyński please have the chimneys completed and old buildings renovated. This letter is the best gazette, of which please have a dispatch made [addressed] to all the world, having written que c’est la lettre du Roi à la Reine. The princes of Saxony and Bavaria have sworn to follow me to the very ends of the world. We must ride two miles in great haste, for the stink from corpses, horses, cattle and camels is terrible. I have sent a few words to the king of France, saying that to him, as to au Roi très Chrétien, I report de la bataille gagnée et du salut de la chrétienté.

The German Princes Found Sobieski

Once the Ottoman army began to collapse, the commanders of the Christian coalition started to find one another across the battlefield.

Sobieski later described these meetings with great pride.

In his letter to Marysieńka, he told the story in detail:

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By that evening, the situation inside Vienna was becoming very serious.

The Ottoman army began its siege in July, led by Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha. By September, Ottoman soldiers dug trenches very close to Vienna’s walls. They also placed explosives under the defenses and launched many attacks, leaving fewer and fewer soldiers to defend the city.

An English report published in London in 1683 described what Vienna was like after almost two months of fighting:

After a Siege of Sixty days, accompanied with a Thousand Difficulties, Sicknesses, Want of Provisions, and great Effusion of Blood, after a Million of Cannon and Musquet Shot, Bombs, Granadoes, and all sorts of Fire Works, which has changed the Face of the fairest and most flourishing City in the World, disfigured and ruined most part of the best Palaces of the same, and chiefly those of the Emperor; and damaged in many places the Beautiful Tower and Church of St. Stephen, with many Sumptuous Buildings. After a Resistance so vigorous, and the Loss of so many brave Officers and Souldiers, whose Valour and Bravery deserve Immortal Glory. After so many Toils endured, so many Watchings and so many Orders so prudently distributed by Count Staremburgh… Heaven favourably heard the Prayers and Tears of a Cast-down and Mournful People… who since the Fifteenth of July last early in the Morning, to the Twelfth of September, had so Vigorously attacked it with Two hundred thousand Men; and by endless Workings, Trenchings, and Minings, reduced it almost to its last gasp.

But outside the Ottoman camp, help was on the way.

For weeks, a relief army gathered northwest of Vienna. Polish King John III Sobieski and Charles of Lorraine led it. Polish soldiers joined troops from the Holy Roman Empire, and together they began the difficult journey through the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods) toward the city.

These troops came from different Catholic powers, each with its own leaders and interests. But for now, they all shared the same goal: reach Vienna before Kara Mustafa and the Ottoman army captured it.

Vienna Was Waiting for Them

When the Ottoman army reached Vienna in July, Emperor Leopold I left the city. Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg stayed behind and took charge of Vienna’s defense.

The Ottoman army was much larger than Vienna’s defending force, so Starhemberg knew his soldiers could not defeat it in an open battle. Instead, they needed to defend the city walls and hold out for as long as possible.

Starhemberg’s main goal was simple: keep Vienna from falling until help arrived.

In mid-August, while still inside the besieged city, he wrote to the Duke of Lorraine:

God be thanked, we have had once the good Fortune to hear that one of our Letters is come to your Highnesses Hands… And to let you see how it is with us at present, give me leave to tell you, That we have disputed every Foot of Ground with the Enemy, and that they have not gained any thing upon us, but what hath cost them very dear; having been as often vigorously repulsed, as they have attempted to Lodge themselves… The Bastions Leb and Delacour are also doubly retrenched, and I am now busie at this very hour to make a Principal Retrenchment behind the two said Bastions… I can assure you, to render me worthy of the Confidence your Highness, and especially his Imperial Majesty my Master, ground on my Services, I will never deliver up the Place, but with the last drop of my blood. Withall I find that our men are no ways daunted at the sight of the Turks, who are easily overcome, if attaqued with Courage, and God be thanked one of ours is able to beat ten of theirs.

As July turned into August, the Ottoman army moved closer to Vienna by digging trenches and tunnels. Every piece of land they captured brought them closer to the city’s defenses. Vienna’s defenders tried to repair damaged walls and stop the Ottomans from digging tunnels underneath them.

The constant fighting was exhausting both sides.

By late August, Vienna’s situation was becoming more desperate, and its calls for help became more urgent. In another letter to the Duke of Lorraine, Starhemberg included a report from a miner that showed just how little time the city had left:

At this Instant my Miners Informed me, that they hear the Enemy working beneath them, under the Bastion of the Court. they must have passed the Ditch under ground, and there is no more time to be lost.

The relief army was on its way.

But reaching Vienna would not be easy. The difficult land between the army and the city stood in its way.

Sobieski Needed to Cross the Wienerwald

On September 10, the Christian relief army began its final march toward Kahlenberg, the hills overlooking Vienna. The journey was difficult because the soldiers and their heavy artillery needed to move through thick, wooded land.

Sobieski later wrote that the war badly damaged the surrounding countryside. Food was hard to find, and there was little grass or other feed for the horses. Even so, the army kept moving because every delay gave the Ottomans more time to break through Vienna’s defenses.

On September 11, Sobieski continued toward Kahlenberg while his troops slowly climbed the difficult hills behind him.

Sobieski was already an experienced military commander. Nine years earlier, he defeated an Ottoman army at Khotyn. His reputation helped make him the leader of the relief army, which included soldiers from Poland and the Holy Roman Empire.

But even an experienced commander could not make the difficult journey easier. Moving heavy cannons through the rough terrain was especially hard, and the army left some behind. By the evening of September 11, parts of the army were still struggling to reach the ridge.

Finally, the first soldiers reached the heights overlooking Vienna.

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Vienna Finally Received a Sign

As the Christian troops approached Kahlenberg, they met a group of Ottoman soldiers who arrived too late to take control of the area. Saxon soldiers fired at them, and the Ottoman troops pulled back.

It was only a small fight compared with the huge battle that would take place the next day.

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Malta was a small island, but it was in a very important location in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, between Sicily and Ottoman North Africa. From Malta, the Knights could attack Ottoman ships and help Christian forces at sea. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had already forced the Knights out of Rhodes in 1522, and now he wanted to remove them from Malta too.

When the Ottoman fleet arrived near Malta on May 18, their army seemed much stronger than the defenders. Different historical sources give different numbers for the Ottoman army, so we do not know exactly how many soldiers there were. However, Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette had only a small number of Knights, along with Maltese defenders and other soldiers.

De Valette was about seventy years old when the siege began. He had spent most of his life fighting in the Mediterranean. He prepared Malta’s defenses around the Grand Harbour and waited for help to arrive from Sicily. The big question was whether this help would arrive before the Ottomans defeated the defenders.

Before the fighting began, de Valette spoke to his fellow Knights. His words made it clear that they were facing a very serious and dangerous battle:

“It is the great battle of the Cross and the Koran which is now to be fought. A formidable army of infidels are on the point of invading our island. We, for our part, are the chosen soldiers of the Cross, and if Heaven requires the sacrifice of our lives, there can be no better occasion than this.”
— Grand Master Jean Parisot de Valette, speaking to the Order on the eve of the siege

First They Had to Take St Elmo

Instead of attacking the main Knights’ positions at Birgu, the Ottoman commanders first attacked Fort St Elmo. The fort protected the entrance to the Grand Harbour, so the Ottomans needed to capture it to use their ships more freely.

At first, they expected the attack on Fort St Elmo to be fairly quick. Instead, the fighting lasted for weeks.

Every day, Ottoman cannons heavily damaged the fort. Ottoman soldiers attacked again and again, while the number of defenders became smaller. Even though the fort was being destroyed, the defenders refused to give up. When possible, new soldiers came from Birgu to help, while wounded men were taken back to Birgu.

By late June, it was clear that Fort St Elmo could not survive much longer.

Still, the remaining defenders stayed and continued fighting. Francisco Balbi di Correggio, an Italian soldier who fought with the Spanish forces and later wrote an important eyewitness account of the siege, described what happened on the night before the final Ottoman attack:

“That same night our poor brothers in St. Elmo, realizing that no relief could reach them, made themselves ready to die in the service of Jesus Christ.”
— Francisco Balbi di Correggio, La verdadera relación (1567)

When the Ottomans launched their final attack on June 23, almost all the defenders of Fort St Elmo were killed. The Ottomans finally captured the fort, but it had taken them about a month—much longer than they had expected.

The victory was costly. The Ottomans lost many soldiers, and the famous Ottoman commander and corsair Turgut Reis died during the fighting.

Even after losing Fort St Elmo, the Knights still controlled their main defensive positions across the harbour.

Now that St Elmo had fallen, the Ottomans could focus their attacks on Birgu and Senglea.

The Siege Moved Across the Harbour

After Fort St Elmo fell, the Ottomans focused their attacks on Birgu and Senglea, where de Valette had gathered most of his remaining forces. Ottoman cannons constantly fired at the walls, while soldiers tried to break through the damaged defenses.

The defenders did not simply hide behind the walls. They repaired damaged areas whenever they could and built new defenses behind weak points. This meant that even when the Ottomans broke through one defense, they could find another barrier waiting for them.

On July 15, the Ottomans launched a major attack on Senglea, while also attacking Birgu. Large numbers of Ottoman soldiers reached the defenses, and the fighting became extremely fierce. However, the Christian defenders managed to hold their positions, and the Ottomans failed to break through.

Another major attack came in August. This time, Ottoman soldiers managed to enter part of Birgu’s defenses. The situation became so dangerous that de Valette himself rushed toward the fighting.

Balbi wrote that a knight ran to de Valette in the main square and warned him that the Ottoman soldiers had already entered the Post of Castile, an important part of Birgu’s defenses.

“Unmoved, the Grand Master turned to his knights and said: ‘Let us all go and die there, for this is the day.’ Having said this, with admirable courage, he took his helmet from a page and his pike from another, and went towards the Post of Castile followed by all the reserves.”
— Francisco Balbi di Correggio, diary entry for the great August assault

Although de Valette was wounded during the fighting, he refused to leave his men or move to safety. Later writers recorded what he supposedly said when his companions begged the elderly Grand Master to move away from the dangerous fighting:

“And how can an old man like me end his life more gloriously than when surrounded by his brethren and fighting the battles of the Cross?”
— Jean Parisot de Valette, reported by later historians drawing on siege testimony

The defenders eventually regained control of the damaged area, and the Ottoman attack failed once again to defeat the Knights.

By this point, the siege had continued for much longer than the Ottomans had expected.

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Some people claim that “Christianity destroyed the civilization of Greece and Rome.” They claim the Church replaced classical learning with theology, and that it only came back during the Renaissance.

That is, of course, bullshit.

In fact, the accusation is so old that one of the greatest books in Christian history was written partly to answer it.

In 410, an army of Visigoths under Alaric entered Rome and sacked the city. Although Rome was no longer the political capital of the Western Empire, the shock was enormous. For centuries Rome conquered other peoples. Now Rome itself was being conquered.

And some pagans knew exactly whom they wanted to blame.

Rome abandoned the old gods, they argued. Christianity spread through the Empire, emperors converted, pagan sacrifices declined, and now disaster followed. Rome became Christian, and Rome fell.

St. Augustine heard the accusation from North Africa. A few years later, around 413, he began writing his answer.

It became The City of God.

Augustine Answered Them With Rome Itself

Augustine’s answer was wonderfully simple: if Christianity caused Rome’s disasters, who caused all the disasters that came before Christianity?

The pagan Rome his opponents remembered so fondly was hardly an uninterrupted age of peace and prosperity. Rome fought countless wars, endured civil conflict, political murder, famine, invasion, and rebellion, and watched emperors assassinated and overthrown long before Christianity became the religion of the Empire. Augustine spends the early books of The City of God going back through Roman history and reminding his readers of precisely this:

Let them then, along with us, call to mind with what various and repeated disasters the prosperity of Rome was blighted, before ever Christ had come in the flesh, and before His name had been blazoned among the nations with that glory which they vainly grudge. Let them, if they can, defend their gods in this article, since they maintain that they worship them in order to be preserved from these disasters, which they now impute to us if they suffer in the least degree. For why did these gods permit the disasters I am to speak of to fall on their worshippers before the preaching of Christ’s name offended them, and put an end to their sacrifices? … In short, not to recapitulate the many instances I have cited, and not to add to their number others which it were tedious to enumerate, this one thing I am persuaded of, and this every impartial judgment will readily acknowledge, that if the human race had received Christianity before the Punic wars, and if the same desolating calamities which these wars brought upon Europe and Africa had followed the introduction of Christianity, there is no one of those who now accuse us who would not have attributed them to our religion. How intolerable would their accusations have been, at least so far as the Romans are concerned, if the Christian religion had been received and diffused prior to the invasion of the Gauls, or to the ruinous floods and fires which desolated Rome, or to those most calamitous of all events, the civil wars!

But there is another reason The City of God is so interesting for this argument. Augustine answered the defenders of pagan Rome using an extraordinary knowledge of pagan Rome itself. He discusses Virgil, Cicero, Sallust, Varro, Plato, and the history and philosophy of the ancient world throughout the work. The Christian bishop supposedly belonging to a religion that destroyed classical learning was sitting in North Africa reading classical authors and using them to write one of the foundational works of Christian civilization.

Cicero Helped Lead Augustine Toward Wisdom

And Augustine’s relationship with classical literature went much deeper than simply quoting pagan authors when they proved useful.

When he was nineteen, Augustine encountered Cicero’s now-lost Hortensius. Years later, in the Confessions, he remembered what happened:

In the ordinary course of study, I lighted upon a certain book of Cicero, whose language, though not his heart, almost all admire. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called Hortensius. This book, in truth, changed my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord, and made me have other hopes and desires. Worthless suddenly became every vain hope to me; and, with an incredible warmth of heart, I yearned for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise that I might return to Thee. Not, then, to improve my language—which I appeared to be purchasing with my mother’s means, in that my nineteenth year, my father having died two years before—not to improve my language did I have recourse to that book; nor did it persuade me by its style, but its matter. How ardent was I then, my God, how ardent to fly from earthly things to Thee! Nor did I know how Thou wouldst deal with me. For with Thee is wisdom. In Greek the love of wisdom is called “philosophy,” with which that book inflamed me.

Augustine says Cicero awakened in him an “incredibly burning desire” for wisdom. Cicero did not convert him to Christianity, and Augustine eventually rejected pagan philosophy wherever he believed it contradicted Christian truth. But he never needed to pretend that a pagan author had nothing to teach him simply because he was pagan.

And Augustine was hardly an exception. St. Basil encouraged young Christians to read Greek literature, and generations of Christian scholars continued to study the ancient authors. Basil wrote:

Now this is my counsel, that you should not unqualifiedly give over your minds to these men, as a ship is surrendered to the rudder, to follow whither they list, but that, while receiving whatever of value they have to offer, you yet recognize what it is wise to ignore. … When they recount the words and deeds of good men, you should both love and imitate them, earnestly emulating such conduct. But when they portray base conduct, you must flee from them and stop up your ears, as Odysseus is said to have fled past the song of the sirens, for familiarity with evil writings paves the way for evil deeds. Therefore the soul must be guarded with great care, lest through our love for letters it receive some contamination unawares, as men drink in poison with honey. … So we, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth, and shall pass over the rest. And just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious.

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If the date sounds familiar, there is a good reason.

Sixty-five years earlier, another Ottoman sultan attacked the same city.

In 1456, Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, marched against Belgrade with a large army and powerful cannons. He expected another major victory. Instead, he faced John Hunyadi, and a strong Christian defense.

The defenders defeated the Ottoman army in one of the most important Christian victories of the fifteenth century. Mehmed was wounded, his army was forced to retreat, and Belgrade remained under Christian control.

A few days later, Hunyadi described the victory in a letter written from the damaged fortress:

“We are able to write of this news to Your Lordship: that the emperor of the Turks had come with his mighty power, and with many machines, to lay siege to the fortress of Belgrade. Indeed, he came with such power and skill as no human eye has ever seen, nor mind could comprehend, and in fact he so destroyed the fortress through the blows of his cannons such that it is no longer a fortress, but a field; indeed the walls have been torn down to the ground. On the most recent Wednesday, after the hour of vespers, they stormed the fortress in a marvelous way, such that it lasted all through the night and into the next day up to midday, such that we engaged them twice in the middle of the fortress, as if in an open field. Then at last we charged against them beyond the fortress and fought with them into the evening. With God’s help we drove the emperor of the Turks himself from the aforesaid fortress. We captured all of his cannons and engines. And on this last Friday he took to flight with those who were left, alone, in the middle of the night, confused and defeated.”

Writing to Pope Callixtus III from Belgrade on July 22, 1456, Capistrano recalled how close the city came to being abandoned:

“Most blessed father, after kisses for your sacred feet, joy and exultation! Glory to God in the highest, by whose mercy it has happened that we have not been destroyed. We were in such tribulation, and in such dire straits, that everyone thought we could no longer resist the power of the Turks. Even general Hunyadi himself, truly the terror of the Turks and a most powerful defender of Christians, judged that it would be best to abandon the fortress of Belgrade. For the savage Muhammadans so strongly and incessantly assaulted the citadel, destroyed the walls with so many machines, and fought against us so fiercely that our strength began to fail, and that our soldiers, especially, began to lose heart. But amid tribulation the Lord revived us: after we had driven them from the city, our most savage enemy deceptively retreated, seeking to set an ambush for us as we pursued them.”

For more than sixty years after Mehmed II’s defeat, Belgrade remained in Christian hands.

John Hunyadi’s son, Matthias Corvinus, became king in 1458 and spent much of his reign strengthening the Hungarian crown, building one of the most formidable armies in Central Europe.

But after Matthias died in 1490, the kingdom became weaker. Political divisions grew, royal power declined, and the defenses along the Ottoman frontier suffered.

The new king, Vladislaus II, was made to swear on entering the realm that he would maintain its liberties and “make no such innovations as the late King Matthias made.” Nearly all of Matthias’s fiscal and military reforms were undone. The standing force known as the Black Army dissolved; unpaid fragments turned to banditry. Royal revenues were looted so thoroughly that the king was reduced to selling Matthias’s books and works of art.

By the time the young Louis II ruled Hungary, the kingdom was far less prepared to defend Belgrade than it was in Hunyadi’s time. Border guards went unpaid, fortresses fell into disrepair, and attempts to raise taxes for the frontier were blocked. No attack on the scale of 1456 struck Hungary in almost seventy years; the long war of raids did not produce captains able to command an army large enough to meet a sultan in person.

Louis himself, who turned fifteen in the summer of 1521, was “evidently unqualified to assume practical command.” An eyewitness in the later camp at Mohács wrote: “There is no good in what the lords discuss, although they are in council every day, but can never decide anything. Almost all the lords have already left… and they are at odds with each other, and it is feared that we will lose this realm.”

Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire continued to grow. Mehmed II was followed by Bayezid II, then Selim I, and finally, in 1520, by Selim’s young son, Suleiman. The Venetian envoy Bartolomeo Contarini saw him within weeks of the accession and sent home a portrait that reads:

“He is twenty-five years of age, tall, but wiry, and of a delicate complexion. His neck is a little too long, his face thin, and his nose aquiline. He has a shadow of a mustache and a small beard; nevertheless he has a pleasant mien, though his skin tends to pallor. He is said to be a wise Lord, fond of study, and he shows good judgment.” Some in Europe, remembering Selim the grim conqueror, first mistook the son for “a meek lamb” after “an angry lion.”

That impression did not last.

The Gateway to Hungary

When Suleiman I became Ottoman sultan in 1520, he inherited a powerful empire that expanded for generations. Constantinople fell in 1453, Serbia came under Ottoman control, and Ottoman armies now held much of the Balkans.

But Hungary was still a major obstacle.

And Belgrade stood in the way.

A look at the map explains why Belgrade was so important. The city stands where the Sava River meets the Danube, controlling important routes between the Balkans, Hungary, and Central Europe. For any Ottoman ruler who wanted to move north, capturing Belgrade was essential.

That is why Suleiman made Belgrade one of the first major targets of his reign.

In the summer of 1521, the Ottoman army advanced toward the city.

A Serbian chronicle described how Ottoman forces began closing in around Belgrade:

“(The Turks) crossed the river Sava as if on dry land, that is, by a bridge to the other side of Srem, and others swam across in boats, so that it was not possible even for those mighty rivers to hold back the Ishmaelites… And they surrounded on every side the famous Belgrade and the other neighboring towns and flew like winged snakes, burning villages and towns.”

The situation Suleiman faced was very different from the one Mehmed II faced in 1456. Hungary was politically divided, its southern defenses grew weaker, and Belgrade had no powerful relief army like the one Hunyadi brought sixty-five years earlier.

The fortress that once stopped Mehmed now faced Suleiman in much more difficult conditions.

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The Siege Begins..

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As the chronicler Bartolf of Nangis records, the king of Egypt gathered “a very great army and sent it to conquer Jerusalem and everyone living in it, and in the whole land of Israel, to destroy and annihilate the Franks.”

The new Christian kingdom was in a pretty dangerous position. It was surrounded by powerful Muslim states and didn’t have many people to build a large army. To the south was the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt, which controlled the fortress of Ascalon and regularly used it to launch attacks into King Baldwin’s lands. Meanwhile, the rulers of Damascus—the Burid dynasty—were another major threat from the northeast.

And in the summer of 1105, these enemies came together.

The Fatimids marched north from Egypt with an army of infantry and cavalry. They were joined by forces from Damascus, including around 1,300 Turkish horse archers. These fighters were fast, fought on horseback, and could fire lots of arrows while moving, which gave the Crusaders a different kind of problem from the Egyptian troops they were used to fighting.

It’s hard to know exactly how big the Muslim army was, but estimates range from around 6,000 to 16,000 men. Baldwin, meanwhile, gathered about 500 knights and 2,000 infantry, making it one of the biggest armies he had put together since becoming king.

The alliance between Damascus and Cairo is described in Muslim sources. The historian Ibn al-Qalanisi, whose account was later studied and reconstructed by historian Michael Brett, describes the campaign like this:

Al-Afdal collected a substantial force of Arabs, giving them much money, and sent them off with his troops under his son Sharaf al-Ma‘ali. He also wrote to the Atabeg Zahir al-Din, lord of Damascus, to help him. Zahir al-Din could not come himself since he was besieging Bosra, whose lord Irtash ibn Taj al-Dawla had urged the Franks to attack the Muslims. Thus the Atabeg left Damascus for Bosra, but he did send an army to the aid of Ibn al-Afdal, which joined the Egyptians outside Ascalon. They encountered the Franks on 14 Dhu’l-Hijja (end August) between Jaffa and Ascalon. The Franks charged the Muslims, so that they were routed, and the governor of Ascalon was killed and various commanders captured, although many on both sides were killed before they retired. The wheel of fortune had spun for the Franks, and the army of Damascus returned to Bosra.

Baldwin already knew just how dangerous fighting at Ramla could be.

Three years earlier, in 1102, he had seriously underestimated a Fatimid invasion and rushed into battle with only a few hundred knights. It almost ended in disaster. Most of his force was wiped out, and Baldwin himself barely escaped. He eventually managed to get back to Jaffa after a dangerous journey through territory controlled by the enemy.

So in 1105, Baldwin wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. This time, he prepared carefully.

On Friday, August 25, Baldwin left Jaffa and headed toward Ramla, leaving about 300 men behind to protect the city. He reached Ramla the next day and waited there for Patriarch Evremar of Jerusalem, who was bringing another 150 infantrymen and something the Crusaders believed was even more important: the True Cross.

The Crusaders believed this was a piece of the actual Cross on which Jesus had been crucified. Carrying such a sacred relic into battle made the fight feel like much more than just a military conflict. For the Crusaders, it gave the battle a deeply religious and spiritual meaning, and they believed God was on their side.

Fulcher of Chartres, a chaplain in the Kingdom of Jerusalem and one of the closest Christian writers to these events, later described what the Crusaders did that morning. His account makes it very clear just how religious the whole campaign was:

When Baldwin faced the Turks at Ramla again in 1105… the patriarch put on his pontifical vestments and took in his hands the glorious Cross of the Lord which was usually carried on such occasions.… For God Almighty, who is never unmindful of His servants, did not wish those infidels to destroy His Christians.… Then we praised and glorified God in whom we found great strength and who brought [victory]. There was present with us the Cross of the Saviour, mighty against the enemies of Christ. Against it by the grace of God, the pomp of the pagans could not prevail. As if confounded by the presence of the Cross, not only did they cease [to stand], but they were put to flight.

The Fatimid army, meanwhile, had advanced from Ascalon and established itself around Ibelin, only a short distance away.

And so Baldwin waited until Sunday.

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Sunday Morning, August 27

Imagine being one of Baldwin’s soldiers that morning. You wake up knowing that in just a few hours you could be dead, and somewhere nearby is an enemy army much larger than yours…

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