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.

Continue reading below…

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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.

Continue reading below…

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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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Have you ever wondered whether medieval knights had a rulebook?

Turns out, they did.

Sometime between 1274 and 1276, the Catholic philosopher Ramon Llull wrote The Book of the Order of Chivalry, essentially a medieval guide to what a Christian knight was supposed to be, explaining everything from the virtues a knight needed and the duties he owed to others to the way he should prepare for knighthood and even what the sword, shield, helmet, horse, and rest of his equipment were supposed to remind him of.

And this is where it gets interesting, because when you read what Llull expected from a knight, you realize that medieval chivalry demanded far more than courage on the battlefield.

A knight first had to learn how to rule himself…

Before You Carry a Sword, Know What It Is For

Llull begins his book with a young squire traveling to the court of a great king, hoping to become a knight, when his horse carries him into a forest where he encounters an elderly knight who has withdrawn from the world and now lives as a hermit.

The old knight asks the young man where he is going, and when the squire explains that he wants to receive knighthood, the hermit begins teaching him what the title means.

Llull’s point becomes clear immediately: before a man receives the weapons of a knight, he needs to understand the responsibility that comes with them.

For Llull, the knight exists to uphold justice, defend the Christian faith, remain loyal to his lord, preserve peace, and use his strength in defense of those who need it, which means the sword hanging from his side is never supposed to become a license for violence or personal glory.

It has a purpose.

And that gives us the first rule:

Know what you are fighting for.

“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. It is the office of the knight to uphold and defend the Holy Catholic Faith, for which God the Father sent His glorious Son into the world to take human flesh in the glorious Virgin our Lady Saint Mary, and to honour and defend His lord, and to uphold justice. God grants honour in this world and the next to those knights who are the upholders and defenders of the office of God and of the faith through which we shall be saved. Therefore the knight who is not a defender of the Faith and of justice is not a true knight, for he fails in the very purpose for which the Order was instituted.”

Learn to Conquer Yourself

This may be the most important part of Llull’s entire vision of knighthood, because the Christian knight faces enemies on two fronts.

There are enemies who threaten the people and things entrusted to him, and then there are the passions within himself that can destroy the kind of man he is supposed to become.

Pride, lust, greed, anger, cowardice, gluttony, envy and dishonesty all matter to Llull because a man capable of defeating another man in battle can still be defeated by himself, and physical strength becomes dangerous when the man possessing it lacks the virtues required to control it.

This is why Llull connects knighthood with faith, hope, charity, justice, prudence, fortitude and temperance, drawing the knight into the wider Christian understanding of virtue.

And think about what that means for a moment.

Before you can talk about defending a kingdom, leading other men, protecting your family, or fighting for the faith, you first have to ask whether you can govern your own appetites, keep your word, control your temper, remain faithful when nobody is watching, and do what you know is right when doing it costs you something.

The first kingdom a Christian knight has to rule is himself.

“Just as all of these aforesaid practices pertain to the knight with respect to the body—riding a horse, taking part in tournaments, fencing, and other things similar to these—so justice, wisdom, charity, loyalty, truth, humility, fortitude, hope and prowess, and the other virtues similar to these, pertain to the knight with respect to the soul. For if the knight has strength of body and is without the virtues of the soul, then his strength is of no value, and he is more dangerous than useful, because he can use his strength to do evil. The knight must therefore conquer himself first: he must overcome pride with humility, lust with chastity, greed with liberality, anger with patience, and all the vices with the opposing virtues, so that his body may serve the soul and both together may serve God and the Order of Chivalry.”

Use Your Strength to Protect

Llull then gives the knight a responsibility that sits at the heart of the medieval ideal of chivalry: protect those who cannot protect themselves.

He specifically speaks about widows, orphans, women and other vulnerable people who require the knight’s assistance, because in Llull’s understanding, greater strength creates greater responsibility.

If God gives you power, that power has a purpose.

If you are physically strong, someone weaker should be safer because you are there. If you have wealth, your family should be provided for. If you possess authority, the people beneath you should receive justice. If somebody has entrusted himself to your protection, your word should mean something.

This is what separates the knight from the mere fighting man.

Both can carry a sword.

The knight is supposed to know whom the sword serves.

“It is the office of the knight to support widows, orphans and the helpless. If Chivalry, which is such an honourable office, were an office that involved robbing and destroying the poor and the helpless, and deceiving and raping widows and other women, it follows that offering aid and support to orphans, widows and the poor would be a very great and noble office indeed. Therefore the knight is bound by his office to protect the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, and to be a shield between the prince and his people, receiving the blows that would otherwise fall upon those who cannot defend themselves. For greater strength creates greater responsibility, and power given by God must be used for the defence of those who have none.”

Choose the Men Around You Carefully

Llull also spends a lot of time discussing whether a man should be allowed to become a knight in the first place, because receiving knighthood was supposed to require an examination of the candidate’s life, habits, character, and intentions.

And you can understand why.

A medieval knight could possess land, weapons, horses, servants and considerable authority over other people, so placing that kind of power in the hands of a man without character could become disastrous.

Llull therefore wanted to know what kind of man stood beneath the armor.

That same principle applies to the company a man keeps, because the men around you establish what you consider normal. If your friends expect courage, fidelity, discipline and responsibility from one another, those standards become part of the friendship, and when one man begins slipping, the others have a duty to pull him back.

So choose men who make you better.

And become the kind of man who makes your friends better too.

“In order to examine the squire the examiner must be a knight who loves the Order of Chivalry, for there are some knights who have greater love for a large number of knights rather than that they be good, and since Chivalry does not protect a multitude in number and loves nobility of courage and good manners, therefore, if the examiner loves a multitude of knights more than the nobility of courage, he will fail in his examination. The squire must be examined as to his life, his habits, his character, and his intentions, for if a man without virtue is made a knight, he will dishonour the Order and bring ruin upon those placed under his power. Likewise, a knight should keep company only with those who love the Order and practise its virtues, for the company a man keeps will either raise him to honour or drag him into dishonour.”

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Prepare Your Soul Before You Fight

When the time finally came for the squire to become a knight, Llull described the ceremony in explicitly Christian terms, with the candidate expected to confess his sins, fast, pray and spend the night in vigil before receiving his weapons.

Imagine being that young man.

You have spent years learning to ride, fight and use weapons, and now the night before receiving the title you have dreamed about, you are sent into a church to examine your conscience before God.

That tells you everything about the ideal Llull was trying to preserve.

The making of a knight began with the soul.

The ceremony reminded him that his new honor came with obligations, and when he eventually walked out carrying a sword, he was supposed to understand that his strength now belonged to an office greater than himself.

“The squire who is to receive the Order of Chivalry must first confess his sins, fast, pray, and spend the night in vigil in the church, examining his conscience before God. For the making of a knight begins with the soul, not with the body. He must understand that the honour he is about to receive comes with grave obligations, and that his strength will now belong to an office greater than himself. Only after he has prepared his soul by purifying it of sin and fixing it upon God should he receive the sword and the other arms of knighthood, so that he may go forth not as a mere fighting man but as a true knight whose body serves the soul and whose soul serves God and justice.”

Remember What Your Sword Means

This is probably my favorite part of Llull’s book.

He gives meaning to the knight’s equipment.

The sword, with its straight blade and crossguard, reminded the knight of the Cross of Christ and of his duty to uphold justice, while the shield, helmet, lance, armor, horse and even the equipment used to control the horse carried lessons of their own.

In other words, a knight effectively dressed himself in reminders.

Every time he prepared for battle, the objects around him told him something about the man he was expected to be.

There is something worth taking from that even seven hundred years later.

Keep things around you that remind you of your duties. Put the crucifix somewhere you will see it. Carry a rosary. Keep photographs of your family. Read the books that formed the men you admire. Learn the history of the civilization you inherited and surround yourself with reminders of the things you have decided are worth serving.

Because it is much easier to remember who you are when your daily life continually points you toward it.

“Everything that the priest wears in order to sing mass has some meaning appropriate to his office, and since the office of the cleric and the office of the knight belong together, the Order of Chivalry therefore requires that everything of which the knight has need in order to practise his office has some meaning through which the nobility of the Order of Chivalry is signified. Unto the knight is given a sword which is made in the shape of a cross to signify that just as our Lord Jesus Christ vanquished on the Cross the death into which we had fallen because of the sin of our father Adam, in the same way the knight must defeat and destroy with his sword the enemies of the Cross. And just as the sword cuts with both edges, and Chivalry exists in order to defend justice, which consists of giving to each one his right, therefore the knight’s sword signifies that he should uphold Chivalry and justice with the sword. The shield signifies that the knight should stand between the prince and the people, receiving the blows that would fall upon them. The helmet signifies shame, that the knight may be ashamed to do anything contrary to the Order. And so with every piece of his equipment: each is a reminder of the man he is expected to be.”

Become Wise Enough to Use Your Strength

Llull also understood that courage alone could never make a good knight, because a courageous fool can cause enormous damage.

The knight therefore needed wisdom.

He needed to understand justice, know his faith, recognize his obligations, judge when action was necessary and develop enough self-command to keep courage under the direction of reason.

This is another part of medieval chivalry that deserves more attention today, because these men were expected to cultivate the mind alongside the body.

So read.

Learn your history.

Understand your faith.

Know why you believe what you believe.

Study the men who came before you, including their victories and their mistakes, because if you intend to defend something, you should first understand what it is.

“Courage alone can never make a good knight, for a courageous fool can cause enormous damage. Therefore the knight needs wisdom. He must understand justice, know his faith, recognise his obligations, judge when action is necessary, and develop enough self-command to keep courage under the direction of reason. Just as the body of the knight is trained by riding, jousting, and the use of arms, so the soul must be trained by the study of the virtues, by knowledge of the Faith, and by understanding of the history and the civilisation he is sworn to defend. For if a man intends to defend something, he should first understand what it is, why it is worthy of defence, and how it is to be defended without destroying the very thing he seeks to protect.”

So How Do You Live Like a Crusader Knight?

Read the great heroes who came before you. Study their victories and their failures. Learn how they ruled themselves, kept their word, and spent their strength. The men of the past still teach the living, if we are willing to listen.

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Today we think of Gaza entirely through modern politics, but seventh-century Gaza belonged to a completely different world, because it was a predominantly Christian city within the Eastern Roman Empire, surrounded by monasteries and home to a flourishing Christian intellectual tradition.

Then the armies of the new Islamic caliphate arrived.

And among the Christians caught in the conquest were sixty Byzantine soldiers whose story survived in an early Christian martyrdom account known as the Passion of the Sixty Martyrs of Gaza. The surviving version is a Latin translation deriving from a lost Greek original, and although, like other hagiographical texts, some of its details require caution, historians value it as an early Christian account of the Arab conquest of Palestine.

A Few Years After Muhammad’s Death

Muhammad died in 632, and what followed happened incredibly quickly, because Muslim armies poured out of Arabia and began attacking the two great powers surrounding them, the Christian Byzantine Empire to the north and the Sassanid Persian Empire to the east.

Then came Yarmouk in 636, where the main Byzantine field army in Syria suffered a catastrophic defeat.

Palestine was now exposed.

Jerusalem surrendered shortly afterward, while Gaza also passed from Byzantine into Muslim hands during this first wave of conquest.

According to the Passion, when Gaza negotiated its surrender, terms were granted to the city but did not include the Byzantine soldiers defending it, and the sixty members of the garrison were consequently seized and imprisoned:

“It happened in that time with regard to the atheist Saracens that they besieged Gaza, that city beloved of Christ, and the city, forced by necessity, asked for terms. This was done. The Saracens granted terms to [the city], but without [including] the soldiers who were captured in the city. Entering the city and seizing these most Christian soldiers, they confined them to prison. The following day Ambrus ordered the holy Christian soldiers to be summoned. When they were brought to him, he [tried to] compel them to recede from the confession of Christ and from the precious, life-giving cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. When they would not agree to do this, Ambrus ordered their wives and children and arms to be separated from them and sent them again to prison.”

And this is where their story really begins.

The Sixty Soldiers Are Given a Choice

According to the Christian account, the prisoners were brought before a Muslim commander whom the surviving Latin text calls Ambrus, possibly a corrupted reference to the famous Arab commander ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs.

The soldiers were pressured to abandon their confession of Christ and the Cross.

They refused.

Their weapons were taken from them, they were separated from their wives and children, and rather than being released with the rest of the city they were returned to prison.

And they stayed there.

The account describes them being moved from Gaza to Eleutheropolis, the ancient city near modern Beit Guvrin, where they remained imprisoned for months before eventually being transported in chains to Jerusalem.

Then the Patriarch of Jerusalem Came to Them

One of the most interesting figures to appear in the story is Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, the same Christian patriarch traditionally associated with Jerusalem’s surrender during the Muslim conquest.

According to the Passion, Sophronius learned that the soldiers were imprisoned in Jerusalem and visited them during the night, encouraging them to remain faithful to Christ regardless of what happened next:

“Being held there for another three months, the aforementioned impious Ambrus, sending Saracens, brought them from prison and led them into the Holy City to be sent again to prison. Learning of this, the most holy patriarch Sophronius went to them at night, admonishing and begging that they not recede from the confession of Christ, who died for us; and that not one of them be separated with regard to the faith of our Lord Christ. In a similar manner, the first of the holy martyrs of Christ by the name of Callinicus, admonished and begged them every day that they be imitators of the forty holy martyrs. … Hearing this, the most holy patriarch Sophronius did not rest that night, begging with tears and admonishing each one concerning the faith of Christ.”

Continue reading below…

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Muhammad died in 632. Four years later Muslim armies moved into Byzantine lands.

The first caliph (supreme religious and political leader who serves as the successor to the Prophet Muhammad) was Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law and the father of Aisha (you know, the 6 year-old he married). In the last months of his rule he ordered the first Muslim armies into Byzantine Syria: “By Allah, I shall destroy the Romans and the friends of Satan with Khalid bin Al Walid.”

Abu Bakr died in August 634. By the time of Yarmouk the caliph was Umar.

Under these early caliphs, Muslim armies moved into both Byzantine and Persian lands.

The Sword of Allah - Khalid ibn al-Walid - won many victories and brought Syria under Muslim control. By 635 Damascus was under Muslim rule.

Heraclius (Emperor of Byzantine) saw the danger and gathered a Byzantine army to take Syria back.

Old sources said the Byzantine army numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Modern estimates put both sides in the tens of thousands. The Byzantine force included Byzantine troops, Armenians, and Christian Arab auxiliaries under the Armenian general Vahan.

They faced the Muslim army led by Khalid ibn al-Walid, with many of Muhammad’s companions in its ranks.

Before the armies finally clashed, there was one last meeting under a flag of truce. Vahan blamed the Arabs’ harsh desert life and poverty for their invasion and offered them food and clothing if they withdrew from Byzantine territory. The Sword of Allah couldn’t care less. He answered:

“It was not hunger that brought us here, but we Arabs are in the habit of drinking blood, and we are told the blood of the Romans is the sweetest of its kind, so we came to shed your blood and drink it.”

Vahan launched into a tirade:

“So, we thought you came seeking what your brethren always sought—plunder, extortion, or mercenary work. But, alas, we were wrong. You came killing men, enslaving women, plundering wealth, destroying buildings, and seeking to drive us from our own lands. Better people had tried to do the same but always ended up defeated. As for you, there is no lower and more despicable people—wretched, impoverished Bedouins. You commit injustices in your own nation and now ours. What havoc you have created! You ride horses not your own and wear clothes not your own. You pleasure yourselves with the young white girls of Rome and enslave them. You eat food not your own, and fill your hands with gold, silver, and valuable goods [not your own]. Now we find you with all our possessions and the plunder you took from our coreligionists—and we leave it all to you, neither asking for its return nor rebuking you. All we ask is that you leave our lands. But if you refuse, we will annihilate you!”

Khalid was unmoved. He began reciting the Quran and speaking of Muhammad. Then he called on Vahan to proclaim the shahada—“there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger”—and thereby embrace Islam. He added the further requirements: “You must also pray, pay zakat, perform hajj at the sacred house [in Mecca], wage jihad against those who refuse Allah, befriend those who befriend Allah and oppose those who oppose Allah. If you refuse, there can only be war between us… And you will face men who love death as you love life.”

Vahan’s reply was final: “Do what you like. We will never forsake our religion or pay you jizya.”

The talks, obviously, ended.

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When someone in the Muslim camp remarked on how many Romans there were and how few Muslims, Khalid answered:

“Do not say that! How few are the Romans and how numerous are we! An army’s strength lies not in numbers of men but in Allah’s help, and its weakness lies in being forsaken by Allah.”

The Battle begins…

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Ivan IV has gone down in history as one of Russia’s most brutal rulers, remembered for his violent temper, and the famous story that he killed his own son during an argument.

So I am not going to tell you that Ivan was secretly some gentle and misunderstood king, because he wasn’t.

But there is another side to his story that receives less attention in the West, and it concerns the centuries-long struggle between Christian Russia and the Muslim khanates that emerged from the remains of the Golden Horde (Mongols).

The Muslim Tatar forces of the Golden Horde and its successor khanates repeatedly slaughtered entire populations, burned major Russian centers, and enslaved large numbers of Russian Orthodox Christians over centuries of raids and domination.

As the Franciscan friar and papal envoy John of Plano Carpini, who traveled through the devastated Russian lands only a few years later in 1246, recorded in full:

“They went against Russia and made a great slaughter in the land of Russia; they destroyed cities and fortresses and killed people; they besieged Kiev, which was the capital of Russia, and after a long siege they took it and killed the inhabitants of the city. From this, when we were traveling through that land, we found innumerable heads and bones of dead people lying about in the fields. For this city had been very large and very populous, and now it is reduced almost to nothing: there are scarcely two hundred houses there, and the people are kept in the heaviest slavery.”

In 1552, Ivan went after Kazan. He led a huge army to the city, surrounded it, and used artillery to break through its defenses. Then his troops stormed the city. It was one of the biggest victories of his reign.

Four years later, Russia took Astrakhan too. This gave Moscow control over much of the Volga.

And if you have ever seen photographs of St. Basil’s Cathedral standing beside the Kremlin in Moscow, you have already seen the most famous monument to that victory.

Ivan built it to commemorate the conquest of Kazan…

Before Ivan, Russia Lived in the Shadow of the Tatars

To understand why Kazan was such a big deal, we need to go back a few centuries. For generations, medieval Russia lived under the power of the Mongol-Tatar states that grew out of the Mongol (Genghis Khan) conquests of the 1200s.

The most powerful of these was the Golden Horde, which later became Muslim. Over time, Moscow became stronger and eventually broke free from Tatar rule. But that didn’t mean the threat was gone. When the Golden Horde fell apart, several smaller Tatar states took its place, including the khanates of Kazan, Crimea, and Astrakhan.

Kazan was especially important because it was located along the Volga River and was fairly close to Moscow’s territory. Because of that, Russia and Kazan were constantly dealing with each other through wars, raids, trade, diplomacy, and competition for influence.

For Russian communities near the frontier, Tatar raids were a real danger. Settlements built defenses, and people could be captured and taken away during slave-raiding attacks. Fortified towns like Bui even served as places where people could take shelter during raids. So when Ivan eventually conquered Kazan, it greatly reduced this threat coming from the east.

Ivan inherited this world when he became ruler of Moscow.

And he eventually decided that defending the frontier was not enough.

Ivan Turns East

Ivan first tried to conquer Kazan in 1547–48, but the campaign failed when an early thaw made it extremely difficult to move his cannons and supplies. He tried again in 1549–50, but once again failed to take the city.

Instead of giving up, Ivan prepared much more carefully for his next attempt. He built the fortress of Sviyazhsk near Kazan, giving his army a strong base for future attacks.

Then, in the summer of 1552, Ivan tried again. This time, he was determined to finish the war.

The Russian army marched toward Kazan with cannons and siege equipment. Ivan also presented the campaign as more than just a fight for territory. In sixteenth-century Russia, the war could be seen as a religious struggle too—defending Orthodox Russia while fighting against the Muslim Khanate of Kazan.

“Therefore strive together to suffer for piety, for the holy churches, for the Orthodox Christian faith, summoning God’s merciful aid with the purest trust in Him, and strive on behalf of our brothers, those Orthodox Christians who have been made captive for many years without reason and who have suffered terribly at the hands of the infidels of Kazan. Let us remember the words of Christ, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Let us therefore pray to Him with a full heart for the deliverance of the poor Christians, and may He protect us from falling into the hands of our enemies who would rejoice over our destruction. I therefore bid you serve us as much as God will help you. Do not spare yourselves for the truth. If we die, it is not death, but life! If we do not make the attempt now, what may we expect from the infidels in future? I myself have marched with you for this purpose. Better that I die here than live to see Christ blasphemed and the Christians, entrusted to me by God, suffering at the hands of the heathen Tatars of Kazan. No one can doubt that God will hear your continuous prayers and grant us His aid. I shall bestow great rewards on you, and I shall favor you with my love, and provide you with everything you need, and in every way I shall reward you to the extent that God in His mercy offers His aid.”
— Ivan IV, addressing his army before the decisive phase of the 1552 campaign (as recorded in contemporary chronicles)

But this wasn’t simply a war between Christians and Muslims. Politics in the region were much more complicated than that. Christian and Muslim rulers sometimes worked together when it benefited them, and Ivan himself negotiated with Muslim leaders as well as fighting them.

Still, Kazan was mainly a Muslim Tatar state.

And Ivan wanted to conquer it.

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The Siege of Kazan

By late August 1552, the Russian army reached Kazan and surrounded the city. The defenders knew they could be fighting for the survival of their entire khanate.

Ivan’s army had one major advantage: artillery.

Russian cannons pounded Kazan’s defenses while military engineers dug tunnels underneath them. They placed explosives under important defensive positions and blew up parts of the walls, slowly making it harder for the city to hold out.

A Muslim account describing the earlier Russian attack in 1550 gives us an idea of just how terrifying these sieges looked from Kazan’s side:

“The Pharoah-mannered and the Nimrod-figured Ivan the Faithless, that infidel without religion, that haughty and spiteful polytheist, that malefactor of the time, and that gilded celestial mischief-maker, one of two Satans and the leader of a cursed army, approximately eight hundred thousand in number, came with countless heavy soldiers and an abominable army armed with numerous cannons and muskets… and they surrounded the borders of the well-protected province of Kazan and camped around the city and put a siege on it. The infidel army was no less than a swarm of ants and crickets. They were the descendants of Gog and Magog, not Adam… The battle in this way continued for ten days and it was like the Day of Resurrection.”
— Sharīf Ḥājjī-Tarkhānī, report on the 1550 siege (from Islamic Culture in the Khanate of Kazan)

Then, at the beginning of October, the final attack began.

Explosives blasted holes in Kazan’s defenses, and Russian soldiers rushed through the openings. Brutal fighting broke out across the city as the defenders desperately tried to hold their ground.

Prince Andrei Kurbsky, who fought in the campaign, later described just how intense and chaotic the fighting became:

“Let each man tell of his own deeds; I will briefly and truthfully narrate what I had before my own eyes at that time and what I did… Both Christians and Tatars fought fiercely and long; the walls and the gates were constantly bombarded from cannon; Streltsy fired their hand gonnes [guns], and from the city they fired from cannons and gonnes; and the battle was big and severe; because the boom of artillery, crashing of hand gonnes, men’s shouts and clatter of swords and spears not a single word could be heard even near; and it was great thunder and blasts of fire from cannons and gonnes and smoke… And when they [Russian soldiers] brought the prisoners whom they had captured alive to our tsar, he ordered them to be led out in front of the trenches and be bound to stakes, so they might beg and warn their comrades within the fortress to hand over the city of Kazan to the Christian tsar… But having listened to these words in silence, the Tatars began to shoot from the walls of the fortress, not so much on our men, as on their own men, saying: ‘We would rather see you killed from our Mussulman hands, than slaughtered by the uncircumcised Giaours!’”

By October 2, 1552, the battle was over.

Kazan had fallen.

The independent khanate was gone. Much of the city was destroyed, many people were killed, and Kazan’s lands were absorbed into Ivan’s growing Russian state.

For Russia, this was a huge turning point.

Then Came Astrakhan

Ivan wasn’t finished with the former lands of the Golden Horde. Just four years after conquering Kazan, Russia moved farther down the Volga and conquered Astrakhan in 1556. This gave Moscow control farther toward the Caspian Sea and over an extremely important trade route.

Think about how quickly this happened. Kazan fell in 1552. Astrakhan followed in 1556. In just a few years, Russia had gained control over most of the Volga and dramatically expanded its territory.

This was a major turning point. Moscow was now ruling large territories filled with Tatars and other peoples who had different languages, cultures, and religions.

For Ivan and Orthodox Russia, the conquest of Kazan was seen as a huge victory—one worth celebrating.

So Was Ivan Really “Not That Terrible”?

This is where the story gets more complicated.

Ivan could absolutely be terrible. His later reign included political terror, executions, brutal wars, and the infamous attack on Novgorod.

But describing his entire reign as nothing more than madness and violence also misses why he became such an important figure in Russian history.

Under Ivan, Russia expanded dramatically. He conquered Kazan and Astrakhan, gained control of the Volga, and helped turn Muscovy into a much larger state.

In a statement recorded in the chronicles around the time of these campaigns, Ivan described his responsibility like this:

“I have been appointed Tsar by God through the mediation of the Virgin and all the saints, and I am the shepherd over the Orthodox land and its people, and this has come about in order that I might govern God’s people, being unwaveringly faithful to the Orthodox Christian faith, and that I might protect them from all the evils they may encounter and take care of all their needs, because I am their Tsar by God’s favor and they must have fear of me and be obedient in all things… Those who suffer truly will receive glory on earth and laurels in heaven.”

And the struggle wasn’t over. The Crimean Khanate was still powerful and had strong ties to the Ottoman Empire. In 1569, Ottoman and Crimean forces even tried to push back Russian expansion and retake Astrakhan, but the campaign failed.

As you probably know by now, I have very little patience for the modern version of Christianity that calls “doormat Christianity,” the idea that being Christian means surrendering before your enemies, feeling embarrassed by your own civilization, or confusing passivity with virtue.

Christians have enemies in two senses: spiritual and physical, and Scripture speaks to both. Against the spiritual enemy, the Christian fights with prayer, faith, repentance, truth, and the Word of God; against a physical enemy who comes to kill, conquer, or destroy, Christian charity does not require helplessness. Christ Himself told His disciples, “he who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one” (Luke 22:36), and when they answered that they possessed two swords, He replied, “It is enough” (Luke 22:38).

Our forefathers understood that distinction. They could pray for their enemies while defending their people from them, forgive personal injuries while resisting invasion, and fight the spiritual battle for souls while taking up the physical sword when their families, churches, and homelands required protection.

And when Muslim armies came against Christendom, they did exactly that.

Fortunately, many of them left us their own words.

Here is what they said…

John of Capistrano to the Christian defenders during the night assault on Belgrade, July 21–22, 1456:

“Behold, my sons, now is the acceptable time, now is the time of the crown, now is the time of redemption from sin. Defend the name of Jesus Christ manfully and boldly; charge against the enemy of Christianity; fight to defend the Catholic faith. Behold, the dogs are ready to erase the name of Christ from the earth, and to invade, occupy and strike down Christendom. Trust now that God will help his cause… Do not fear those who kill the body, but who cannot kill the soul… Blessed is the one who is struck for the love of Christ; more blessed is the one who sheds his blood for Christ’s defense; and most blessed is the one who lays down his life and dies for Christ’s honor. Whether you conquer on earth or are conquered, you will be victorious in heaven. Oh Hungarians! … strengthen Christians in their weakness; come to the aid of Christendom; take a stand against your enemies.”

Vlad III, letter to King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, 11 February 1462, explaining why he broke peace with the Sultan:

“Know that we have done all that we could… to harm those who kept urging us to leave the Christians and to take their side… that we have broken our peace with them, not for our own benefit, but for the honor of the Holy Crown of Your Majesty, and for the preservation of Christianity… Because by no means do we want to leave unfinished what we began, but to follow this through to the end. Because we will not flee before their savagery, but stand by all of the Christians… if [God] grants us victory over the Infidels, the Enemies of the Cross of Christ, it will be the greatest honor, benefit, and spiritual help for Your Majesty… and for all true Christians. Because we will not flee before their savagery, but by all means we will fight them. And if, God forbid, it ends badly for us, and our little country is lost, Your Majesty will not benefit from this either, because it will be a loss for all Christianity.”

Skanderbeg (Gjergj Kastrioti) in his final address to his princes and nobles, near the end of his life (1468 tradition):

“The sovereign and chiefest virtue, and the true and most perfect religion… is this. First to reverence, to serve, and to adore God most high and omnipotent… and next, not only to love dearly, and to have a continual care and regard of the good and benefit of our country: but if need be, to spend even our lives, and to shed our best blood for the preservation and safety of the same… Ever since that time have I held and endured the wars against a most periured and faithless nation, and against the rage and fury of the Ottomans for the particular safety and defence of our crown and kingdom, and for the dignity of the public estate and weal of Christendom… you have endured all travails and labours even to the last gasp, for the safety and dignity of the Christian religion and the Catholic faith… even so hereafter when I am dead and gone, let that be the only and the whole desire of your hearts…”

Skanderbeg rallying the Albanian princes at the assembly of Lezhë:

“Let us make shewe unto the posteritie, and let us make it knowen unto all ages to come hereafter, that we are men worthie of a Christian Empire… Vp then (noble and most Catholique Princes) let us set aside all delaies… let us leauie and muster our souldiers, and let us lead on our forces, that when the infidels come in sight… we be not then unprouided…”

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Pope Callixtus III, vow shortly after his election (1455):

“I, Pope Calixtus, vow to Almighty God and the Holy Trinity that by war, maledictions, interdicts, excommunications, and all other means in my power, I will pursue the Turks, the most cruel foes of the Christian name… I will do everything in my power, even, if need be, with the sacrifice of my life… to reconquer Constantinople… to deliver the Christians languishing in slavery, to exalt the true Faith and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East.”

Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont, 1095 (as recorded by chroniclers such as Robert the Monk):

“As most of you have heard, the Turks and Arabs have occupied more and more of the lands of the Christians. They have killed and captured, destroyed the churches… If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impurity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ’s heralds… to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends… Christ commands it.”

From the Cantar de Mio Cid (Poem of the Cid), describing battle against the Moors:

“The Moors cried, ‘Mohammad!’ The Christians, ‘Saint James!’ In a moment, thirteen hundred Moors lay dead on the field.”

13th-century Castilian prayer for war against the Saracens, associated with the Reconquista under Ferdinand III’s era:

“Lord Jesus Christ son of the living God… look kindly on your servant our king and on his army… And grant that, by virtue of your name and of your most victorious Cross, they should powerfully conquer the Muslim people, who always disparage you. And concede that, the barbaric ferocity having been trampled underfoot, they may return to their homes with honour and joy.”

King Ferdinand III of Castile to his mother and court, declaring war on the Moors (early 13th century):

“It is time, unless I should seem weak and ineffectual, to serve God against the enemies of the Christian faith. The gate is indeed open and the way is clear. There is peace in our kingdom while discord and capital hatreds, divisions, and quarrels are newly arisen among the Moors. Christ, God and Man, is on our side, but on the side of the Moors is the unfaithful and damned apostate, Muḥammad. What is there to do? I beseech you… that it may please you that I should go to war against the Moors.”

Pope Innocent III writing to Ferdinand III about the war in Spain:

“Although the affair begun against the Saracens of Spain is the business of all the faithful because it pertains to Christ and to the Christian faith, there is no doubt that it pertains especially to you and to the other kings of Spain because they [the Saracens] remain in occupation of your land, to the very grave injury to all Christendom.”

Chronicler description of Ferdinand III’s entry into Córdoba after its conquest (1236):

“King Fernando III enters the city and in the main minaret, where the name of the perfidious one [Muhammad] used to be invoked, he began to exalt the wood of the vivifying Cross, and all began to acclaim with him, with joy and tears, ‘God help us!’ Then the royal insignia was placed next to the Lord’s cross, and a voice of joy and delight was heard… as the priests and monks intoned the Te Deum.”

Pope Pius II (Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini) in his oration Constantinopolitana clades at the Diet of Frankfurt, 1454:

“Oh, what great and intolerable shame on the Christian people! I believe that the heart of every Christian who hears about this will be moved and enflamed with anger. Is there any Christian who will not cry from sorrow when hearing it… Let us reach a decision that will allow us not only to defend what remains of Christianity but even to recover what has been lost.”

Pope Pius II later exhorting the Christian powers:

“The Turks do not refuse to die for their damnable sect, while we cannot bear even the smallest expenses or labours for the sake of the Holy Gospel. If we continue like that, it is our end. Unless we are brave, we shall perish.”

From a First Crusade chronicler (Raymond of Aguilers tradition) on the capture of Jerusalem:

“This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labors and sorrows into joy and exultation; this day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith. ‘This is the day which the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it,’ for on this day the Lord revealed Himself to His people and blessed them.”

Aristakes of Lastivert (Armenian chronicler, d. c. 1080) on the sack of Arzden:

“Like famished dogs, they hurled themselves on our city, surrounded it and pushed inside, massacring the men and mowing everything down like reapers in the fields, making the city a desert. Without mercy, they incinerated those who had hidden themselves in houses and churches.”

Anna Comnena (Byzantine princess and historian, The Alexiad) on the Turkish devastation of Anatolia:

“The cities were obliterated, lands were plundered, and the whole of Anatolia was stained with Christian blood.”

Anonymous Georgian chronicler on the Turkish invasions:

“Holy churches served as stables for their horses. The priests were immolated during the holy communion itself. The virgins were defiled, the youths circumcised, and the infants taken away.”

Fulcher of Chartres (eyewitness of the First Crusade) on the treatment of Christians inside Antioch:

“Alas! How many Christians—Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians—who lived in the city, were killed by the maddened Turks. With the Franks looking on, they threw outside the walls the heads of those [Christians] killed, with their petrariae and slings. This especially grieved our people.”

William of Tyre on the condition of Christians in Jerusalem under Turkish rule before the First Crusade:

“Jerusalem’s Christians endured far greater troubles under the Turks, so that they came to look back upon as light the woes which they had suffered under the yoke of the Egyptians and Persians… Even while the Christians were in the very act of celebrating the holy rites, the Turkish enemy would violently force an entrance into the churches… Utterly without reverence for the consecrated places, they sat upon the very altars and struck terror into the heart of the worshippers with their mad cries and whistlings. They overturned the chalices, trod underfoot the utensils devoted to the divine offices… The Lord Patriarch… was dragged from his seat by hair and beard and thrown to the ground.”

Michael the Syrian (Jacobite Patriarch, 12th century) on Turkish treatment of Christian pilgrims:

“As the Turks were ruling the lands of Syria and Palestine, they inflicted injuries on Christians who went to pray in Jerusalem. They beat them, pillaged them, and levied the poll tax. Moreover, every time they saw a caravan of Christians, particularly of those from Rome and the lands of Italy, they made every effort to cause their death in diverse ways.”

Fight for Christendom. You owe it not only to your ancestors, your family, and your homeland—but above all things, you owe it to Christ.

According to the traditional account, the surviving Christian men were presented with a choice: renounce Christianity and embrace Islam, or die. Around eight hundred refused, and on August 14 they were taken to a hill outside the city and executed.

At the time, this was about much more than one small Italian city. Constantinople had fallen only twenty-seven years earlier, and the Ottoman Empire was advancing deeper into the Mediterranean and southeastern Europe.

The sultan behind that expansion was Mehmed II, remembered to history as Mehmed the Conqueror. He was still only twenty-one years old when he captured Constantinople in 1453.

Now his armies had crossed the Adriatic. And for the first time since the rise of Ottoman power, they had established themselves on Italian soil.

The Siege Begins

According to the decree later issued by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the Ottoman fleet approached Otranto on July 28, 1480, carrying roughly 15,000 men aboard around 140 vessels. The city’s Aragonese defenses were badly stretched because troops from the Kingdom of Naples were committed elsewhere in Italy.

The Ottomans demanded surrender.
Otranto refused.

What followed was roughly two weeks of bombardment as Ottoman artillery battered the city’s defenses until, on August 12, the attackers finally broke through.

Many inhabitants had withdrawn toward the citadel and cathedral as the defenses collapsed. Ottoman soldiers poured into the city. The archbishop of Otranto, Stefano Agricolo, was killed, along with clergy and other inhabitants, while survivors were captured.

The Eight Hundred

According to the Catholic account, the following day Gedik Ahmed Pasha ordered the surviving males - traditionally numbered at around eight hundred - to be brought before the Ottoman authorities.

They were told to apostatize.

One of them was a man named Antonio Primaldo, described in the sources as either a tailor or cloth worker. He became their spokesman.

Chronicler Giovanni Michele Laggetto recorded the moment in his Historia della guerra di Otranto del 1480:

And turning to the Christians Primaldo said these words: “My brothers, until today we have fought in defense of our homeland and to save life and for our earthly rulers; now is the time for us to fight to save our souls for the Lord, who having died for us on the cross, it is convenient for us to die for Him, by remaining safe and constant in faith, and with this earthly death we will gain eternal life and the glory of martyrdom.” At these words they all began to shout with one voice with great fervor that they wanted a thousand times to die with any type of death rather than deny Christ.

The others agreed. They had survived the siege, watched their city fall, and were now prisoners of the victorious army. There was no Christian force left inside Otranto capable of rescuing them.

They nevertheless refused to abandon Christianity.

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The Hill of Minerva

The captives were taken outside Otranto to the Hill of Minerva. There they were executed.

Antonio Primaldo was traditionally remembered as the first to die, followed by the other prisoners until roughly eight hundred Christian men had been killed. The place later became known as the Hill of the Martyrs.

Their remains were eventually recovered after Christian forces retook Otranto, and many were placed in the city’s cathedral, where the bones associated with the martyrs remain displayed today.

Mehmed II was pushing hard for further west expansion, and grabbing Otranto gave the Ottomans a foothold in Italy.

Europe was pretty freaked out… Constantinople had fallen in 1453, they had already taken the Balkans, and Albanian resistance was basically done after Skanderbeg died in 1468. It looked like they might keep going deeper into Italy.

Then Mehmed suddenly died, and that changed everything.

Mehmed II died on May 3, 1481, while preparing another campaign. His death produced a succession struggle between his sons Bayezid and Cem, disrupting Ottoman priorities at exactly the moment the Italian bridgehead required reinforcement.

The Kingdom of Naples seized the opportunity. Christian forces besieged Otranto, Ottoman control weakened, and in September 1481 the city returned to Christian hands. The Ottoman occupation had lasted little more than a year.

Five Centuries Later

In 2007 the Catholic Church formally recognized the martyrdom of Antonio Primaldo and his companions, stating that they preferred death to repudiating their Christian faith.

Then, on May 12, 2013, Pope Francis canonized them. Speaking during the canonization Mass, he summarized the tradition:

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Four years earlier, he fought at the Battle of Lepanto (a super important victory for Christendom), where the fleet of the Holy League confronted the Ottoman navy on October 7, 1571.

Cervantes got shot multiple times, and permanently lost the use of his left hand. He was incredibly proud of having fought there, later describing Lepanto “as one of the great events of his life”.

Then, in 1575, while sailing back toward Spain, his ship was attacked by Algerian corsairs.

They captured him and took him across the Mediterranean to Algiers.

For the next five years, he lived as a slave awaiting ransom…

From Lepanto to Algiers

Algiers belonged to the Ottoman political world, although its corsair society possessed “considerable autonomy”, and Christian captives could be sold, put to work, held for ransom, or incorporated into households according to their circumstances.

Cervantes became one of them.

His captors believed he might be worth a lot of money because letters found on him made him appear more important than he actually was. This helped keep him alive while making his release more expensive.

But Cervantes had absolutely no intention of spending the rest of his life there…

He Tried to Escape Again and Again

He tried to escape.
Then he tried again.
And again.
And again.

One attempt involved Cervantes and other captives hiding in a cave outside Algiers while waiting for a ship that was supposed to carry them back to Christian territory. The plan collapsed after betrayal, and Cervantes assumed full responsibility rather than snitching on his friends.

According to the sworn testimony recorded in the Información de Argel (October 1580), when the Turks were binding the group, Cervantes declared loudly so that both Turks and Moors could hear him:

“None of these Christians who are here are guilty in this business, because I alone have been the author of it and the one who induced them to flee.”

Taken alone before Hasan Pasha, he repeated that he alone was responsible and begged that any punishment fall only on him. Despite death threats, a rope placed around his neck, and hands bound behind his back as if for hanging, he refused to name any other Christian.

Another scheme involved trying to arrange a larger escape by sea. That failed too. His captors eventually placed him under heavier confinement, recognizing that they had an unusually determined prisoner on their hands.

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Christian Captives in a Muslim City

Cervantes was surrounded by other Christian captives in Algiers.

Some waited for relatives or religious orders to gather enough money for ransom, while others faced years of labor and confinement. Cervantes later drew heavily upon this environment… Four of his surviving plays deal with Christian captives held by Muslims, with Los tratos de Argel and Los baños de Argel drawing closely upon the Algerian setting he knew personally.

Even Don Quixote contains one of the most famous examples…

The Captive’s Tale

Around the middle of the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes introduces a character called the Captive, who begins telling the company about his life.

The similarities to Cervantes:

• The man is a Christian soldier.

• He fights at Lepanto.

• He becomes a captive of Muslims.

• He experiences the world of Ottoman and North African slavery.

• He dreams of freedom.

And he describes Christian captives being held in the baños of Algiers while ransom negotiations take place.

In one passage, the Captive recalls life under Hasan Pasha:

“And though hunger and nakedness might trouble us at times, and indeed almost always, nothing afflicted us so much as to hear and see at every turn the till then unheard-of and unseen cruelties which my master inflicted upon the Christians. Every day he hanged some one, impaled another, and cut off the ears of a third; and this upon so small a pretext, or on none at all, that the Turks themselves acknowledged he did it merely for the sake of doing it, and because his natural disposition inclined him to cruelty.”

A little later the same narrator says:

“The only one who held his own with him [Hasan] was a Spanish soldier named Saavedra, to whom, though he did things which will remain in the memory of those people for many years, and all for the recovery of his liberty, his master never gave a blow, nor ordered one to be given him, nor even spoke an ill word to him.”

(The character is not simply Cervantes writing straightforward autobiography, and the events of the Captive’s Tale should not be treated as a literal day-by-day account of his own captivity. But Cervantes was writing from a world he knew intimately.)

Who Ransomed the Captives?

His family spent years trying to raise enough money to ransom him, but it was simply too much money. In 1580, the Trinitarian friar Juan Gil arrived in Algiers carrying ransom funds, and after negotiations and additional money were assembled, Cervantes was finally redeemed.

On September 19, 1580, after nearly five years in captivity, he became a free man.

Imagine the moment.

Cervantes survived Lepanto, capture at sea, years in Algiers, repeated failed escapes, threats of punishment, and the possibility of being transported farther east into Ottoman territory, and now, at thirty-three years old, he could finally return to Spain.

In Don Quixote he later crystallized the value of that hard-won freedom:

“Liberty, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that Heaven has bestowed upon man; no treasures the earth contains or the sea conceals can equal it; for liberty, as for honour, one can and should risk one’s life; and, on the other hand, captivity is the greatest evil that can befall a man.”

Then He Started Writing..

Cervantes returned to a simple life.

His military service did not make him rich, his employment brought further difficulties, and his life continued taking strange turns…

Then, in 1605, he wrote the first part of Don Quixote.

He was fifty-seven at the time.

The second part followed in 1615.

It would eventually become one of the foundational works of modern European literature.

By the way, last September we read Don Quixote in our book club, Athenaeum, with a great group of people.

We’ve also read many other great books together like Confessions, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Count of Monte Cristo, and more.

If you’re interested in the classics…

We just started our most exciting read-along yet inside our book club.

The Brothers Karamazov.

If you’ve been on the fence about joining the Athenaeum Book Club, now’s the time. You do not want to miss this.

We had our first discussion on August 4, covering Books 1–4. Our next discussion is on August 18, covering Books 5–9.

Take out a paid subscription if you want to join our “inner circle” and participate in the discussions directly. You’ll get:

- Live book club discussions (biweekly)
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Of course, you may also read along for free and tune into the live broadcasts. Let’s make this our biggest read-along ever!

See you inside

Today, Egypt is overwhelmingly Muslim, while the descendants of that ancient Christian civilization - the Copts - form a tiny minority.

So how did one of the great centers of early Christianity become a predominantly Muslim nation?…

The Arab Conquest

It all started in the year 639. Only a few years after the death of “Prophet” Muhammad, Arab Muslim armies under the command of Amr ibn al-As crossed the desert from Palestine and entered Byzantine Egypt. The campaign lasted nearly three years. The fortress of Babylon near modern Cairo fell after a long siege, and Alexandria, the great Mediterranean capital, surrendered by treaty in 642.

The overwhelming majority of Egyptians, however, remained Christian for generations afterward. Arabic historians such as al-Baladhuri record that treaties were concluded with many communities, permitting them to keep their churches and continue their worship in exchange for accepting Muslim authority and paying the jizya, the special tax required of non-Muslim subjects. Outwardly, Egypt still “looked” like a Christian country.

But the political foundation shifted completely. The Byzantine administration that had ruled for centuries was gone, and a new order based on Shariah law now held the land.

Life as a Dhimmi

With the new rulers came the dhimmi system, the legal framework that defined the place of Christians and Jews under Islamic governance. They were permitted to practice their religion, but only under conditions that marked them as subordinate. Every adult Christian man was required to pay the jizya. As it says in the Quran:

“Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture—[fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.”

Beyond the tax itself, Christian communities lived under a varying set of restrictions. Some governors ruled with relative pragmatism and left church affairs largely alone. Others enforced the regulations more strictly. Medieval chronicles, both Christian and Muslim, describe periods when churches were closed or demolished, public crosses were forbidden, Christians were barred from certain offices, and distinctive clothing was required so that non-Muslims could be instantly recognized. The experience changed from one dynasty to the next - Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk - but the underlying legal distinction between Muslim and dhimmi never disappeared.

The near-contemporary Coptic bishop John of Nikiou, writing toward the end of the seventh century, recorded the immediate impact on ordinary Egyptians. After describing the new burdens of forced labor, extra deliveries of food, and the excavation of canals, he concluded:

“And the yoke they laid on the Egyptians was heavier than the yoke which had been laid on Israel by Pharaoh, whom God judged with a righteous judgement, by drowning him in the Red Sea with all his army after the many plagues wherewith He had plagued both men and cattle.”

Conversion Came Gradually

For hundreds of years after the conquest, Christians still formed the clear majority of the population. Most modern historians place the tipping point somewhere between the tenth and the twelfth centuries, when the balance finally shifted.

The process worked through many channels at once. Some families converted to escape the annual jizya and the social disabilities that came with it. Others sought advancement in the new administration, where Arabic replaced both Greek and Coptic as the language of government and record-keeping. Intermarriage with Muslim families led the next generation into Islam. Still others were forced to convert or die. Each conversion, whether pragmatic or sincere, reduced the Christian share of the population by a little more. Over the span of centuries those shifts accumulated until the landscape had changed.

The Muslim historian al-Maqrizi, writing in the fifteenth century but drawing on earlier records, described how waves of pressure produced the expected result. After recounting one especially severe campaign of church destruction and violence under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, he observed:

“Under these circumstances a great many Christians became Muslims.”

In another passage he noted that when the greater number of churches in Upper Egypt were pulled down and mosques built in their place, “more than four hundred and fifty Christians became Muslims in one day.” The pattern repeated across the medieval period: periods of relative calm followed by sudden intensification of restrictions, demolitions, and forced measures, each time thinning the Christian ranks a little further.

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The Copts Endured..

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Most people assume hospitals have existed since the ancient world. The Greeks had physicians, Rome had medicine, and civilizations long before Christianity knew how to treat wounds, and care for the sick.

All of that is true.

But that is not the same thing as a hospital.

The Greeks had healing sanctuaries associated with Asclepius, while the Romans developed valetudinaria for soldiers and other groups. What emerged in the Christian Roman Empire during the fourth century represented an institution organized around receiving the sick, poor, stranger, and abandoned as people worthy of care in themselves. Scholars debate exactly where we should draw the line between hospice, poorhouse, infirmary, and “hospital”, but one institution appears again and again in the history of the hospital.

It was created by a bishop by the name of Basil of Caesarea.

Around 372 AD, he built a hospital outside Caesarea in Cappadocia so big that his friend Gregory of Nazianzus described it as practically a new city. Modern scholarship treats Basil’s Basileias as one of the earliest institutions for which substantial evidence survives that resembles the charitable hospital tradition that developed across the Christian world.

To understand why that happened, however, we have to begin with Christianity’s understanding of the sick.

Christ Was in the Sick Man

The Christian argument was simple… Christ had already told them what to do.

In Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself with the hungry, the stranger, the naked, and the sick:

“I was sick and you visited me.”

Here’s the explanation:

“As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”

That idea had consequences.

The sick person was no longer someone unfortunate enough to have become ill. Caring for him became an act performed for Christ himself, and as Christianity spread through the Roman world, this conviction produced organized forms of charity alongside the Church’s preaching and worship.

The evidence becomes even more interesting because one of our witnesses was no Christian admirer.

He was trying to destroy Christianity.

Even the Pagan Emperor Noticed

In 361 AD, Julian became Roman emperor.

Julian had been raised Christian, rejected the faith, embraced traditional pagan religion, and spent his short reign attempting to revive the old cults. Yet he faced a frustrating problem: Christians had become exceptionally good at caring for people.

Around 362, Julian wrote to Arsacius, the pagan high priest of Galatia, instructing him to imitate Christian charitable institutions. He ordered hostels established for strangers and arranged huge distributions of grain and wine for the poor.

Then he explained why:

“In every city establish frequent hostels in order that strangers may profit by our benevolence; I do not mean for our own people only, but for others also who are in need of money. I have but now made a plan by which you may be well provided for this; for I have given directions that 30,000 modii of corn shall be assigned every year for the whole of Galatia, and 60,000 pints of wine. I order that one-fifth of this be used for the poor who serve the priests, and the remainder be distributed by us to strangers and beggars. For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort, and the Hellenic villages to offer their first fruits to the gods; and accustom those who love the Hellenic religion to these good works by teaching them that this was our practice of old.”

This is an emperor hostile to Christianity complaining that Christians cared for pagan poor so effectively that paganism looked bad by comparison. Julian therefore ordered his own priests to establish hostels and charitable services in response.

The Christians had made charity part of their public identity.

Basil took the idea further…

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Basil Builds a City for the Sick

Basil became bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia in 370 AD.

He was already one of the greatest Christians of his generation: theologian, monk, defender of Nicene Christianity, organizer, preacher, and eventually one of the great Doctors of the Church.

But Basil also possessed an concern for the poor.

During a severe famine in Cappadocia around 368–369, he preached against wealthy men who hoarded grain while their neighbors starved, and organized relief.

Then came the project for which he became famous…

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That’s exactly what we are going to talk about today..

The Book of Revelation opens with seven letters addressed to seven churches:

• Ephesus.

• Smyrna.

• Pergamum.

• Thyatira.

• Sardis.

• Philadelphia.

• Laodicea.

Today, very little remains of those churches.

Now… what happened?

Early Christianity

A lot of people don’t realize this, but Christianity didn’t come from Europe - it came from the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, places like modern-day Syria, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt were the heart of Christianity centuries before Europe converted. You could argue these regions were more important to (early) Christianity than Europe.

Most of the Middle East (with the exception of places like the Arabian Peninsula) was overwhelmingly Christian. Over the centuries, following the Islamic conquests beginning in the 7th century, much of the region became Muslim.

Take Asia Minor, for example. This was one of the most important centers of the early Church. The Apostle Paul founded churches in some of the largest cities of the Roman Empire. St. John is believed to have spent the last years of his life in Ephesus, and according to ancient Christian tradition, the Virgin Mary lived there under his care.

The New Testament shows just how central this region was. Paul’s letters to the Ephesians, Galatians, and Colossians were all written to churches in Asia Minor.

The Great Fathers of the East

Asia Minor was home to some of the greatest saints and theologians in Christian history.

One of the earliest was St. Polycarp of Smyrna, a disciple of the Apostle John who belonged to the generation that learned directly from Christ’s apostles. When Roman authorities ordered him to renounce his faith, Polycarp answered:

“Eighty-six years have I served Him, and He has done me no wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

He was martyred around AD 155, becoming one of the most revered figures of the early Church.

The fourth century brought another great generation.

St. Basil the Great served as Bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia and became one of Christianity’s most influential leaders. His brother, St. Gregory of Nyssa, emerged as one of the Church’s greatest theologians and philosophers. Their close friend, St. Gregory of Nazianzus defended the doctrine of the Trinity with such brilliance that history remembers him simply as “the Theologian.”

The Great Councils

Asia Minor also hosted the most influential councils in Christian history.

The first was the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. Bishops from across the Christian world gathered to defend the faith against Arianism and declared that Christ is “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” The Nicene Creed, still recited by hundreds of millions of Christians today, was born here.

More than a century later, the Council of Ephesus met in AD 431. There, the bishops affirmed the unity of Christ’s person and declared that Mary could rightly be called Theotokos, meaning “Mother of God.”

Just twenty years later, the Council of Chalcedon met in AD 451, further clarifying the Church’s teaching on the nature of Christ.

These councils laid the theological foundations of Christianity. Their decisions continue to shape the beliefs of the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, and many Protestant denominations nearly 1,700 years later.

The Rise of Islam

The seventh century marked a turning point in Christian history.

At the time, the Byzantine Empire stretched across the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. These lands were home to many of Christianity’s oldest churches, monasteries, and centers of learning.

Everything began to change with the rise of Islam.

After the death of Muhammad in AD 632, Arab armies rapidly expanded across the Middle East, conquering Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa within just a few decades. Asia Minor remained under Byzantine rule, becoming the frontier between the Byzantine Empire and the expanding Islamic world.

For centuries, Muslim armies launched repeated campaigns across the Taurus Mountains into Anatolia, while Byzantine emperors fought to defend the peninsula. The region became one of the medieval world’s great borderlands, where the fate of the Byzantine Empire (and much of eastern Christianity) was decided.

The Turning Point

The decisive change came in 1071.

The Battle of Manzikert ended in a crushing Byzantine defeat against the Seljuk Turks. Emperor Romanos IV fell into captivity, and Byzantine authority across much of Anatolia collapsed. Turkish tribes settled throughout the countryside, establishing new towns and new centers of power.

The Byzantine princess and historian Anna Komnene, writing a generation later in The Alexiad, described the immediate aftermath:

“...the fortunes of the Roman Empire had sunk to their lowest ebb. For the armies of the East were dispersed in all directions, because the Turks had over-spread, and gained command of, countries between the Euxine Sea [Black Sea] and the Hellespont, and the Aegean Sea and Syrian Seas [Mediterranean Sea], and the various bays, especially those which wash Pamphylia, Cilicia, and empty themselves into the Egyptian Sea [Mediterranean Sea].”

The First Crusade temporarily restored parts of western Asia Minor to Byzantine rule, but the larger transformation continued.

Generation after generation, the demographic character of the region changed.

Greek-speaking Christian communities became smaller.
Turkish-speaking Muslim communities grew larger.

By the fourteenth century, the intellectual and official Alexios Makrembolites, a high-ranking Byzantine courtier and writer who lived through the successive waves of Turkish settlement and raiding, recorded the human cost:

“Have we not been delivered to the sons of Agar as sheep for the slaughter? Have they not invaded our whole land and laid it waste? Do they not dwell in our illustrious and honored cities, do they not treat as slaves their inhabitants, refined and sheltered from misery in the past? Have we not been scattered all over the earth as captives; after innumerable slaughters, is its expanse not pitifully strewn with our bones? Have our bodies not been thrown out as food to the birds of the sky and to the animals of the earth? Not long ago the survivors among us were routed by disorder and confusion and consumed. For this reason, have not our cities and our countryside been devastated and abandoned by their inhabitants?”

A contemporary patriarchal document of 1369, reflecting on one of the seven churches themselves, captured the fate of Sardis:

“Time... alters and changes all and... causes prosperity to progress towards extinction.... The great metropolis of Sardes... had for so long attained such glory and fame... and its most beautiful order and culture, so that it was numbered among the first and the greatest metropolitanates... and at the tip of the tongues of all, as a pleasing delight and ornament of those many cities that are in Asia. But [time] brought her to such degradation, by consent of God that is, and so disposed her affairs as not to preserve even the outline or some small trace of a city, transferring it from a garden of luxury into a plain of destruction and extinction.”

An official ecclesiastical notitia of the same era summed up the broader collapse across Anatolia:

“What a frightful decline! Read all [of the following] and you shall greatly lament.... Of these, many were made desolate and were completely obliterated by those who rule us. And neither is a metropolitan to be found in the metropolitanates, nor an archbishop in the archbishoprics, nor a bishop in the bishoprics, nor priest in church, nor monk in monastery or pious foundation or cell, nor other Christian layman in castle or land.... Fifty-one metropolitanates, eighteen archbishoprics, and four hundred and seventy-eight bishoprics are desolate.... And not only were those metropolitanates, archbishoprics, bishoprics, the monasteries and churches obliterated; But also the provinces of the three patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.... Because the churches of their provinces have been obliterated completely and Christ’s people, that is the Christians, have been utterly destroyed.”

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The End of an Ancient Christian World

The twentieth century brought the greatest upheaval.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the First World War, the Greek-Turkish War, and the population exchange of 1923 transformed Asia Minor more than any previous century. Hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians left lands their families had inhabited for generations, while Muslims from Greece moved in the opposite direction.

George Horton, the American Consul-General in Smyrna and a writer who had served more than thirty years in the Near East, was an eyewitness to the catastrophe of September 1922. In The Blight of Asia he recorded what he had seen and understood:

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Look, The Western Spirit isn’t just about the long conflict between Islam and the West (even though that’s what im most interested in). It’s also about the books that shaped our civilization. So expect more of these kinds of essays.

Here are 8 more works that helped shape the mind of the West.

Let’s get into them..

1. Virgil’s Aeneid

Rome’s national epic and the greatest poem of Latin literature. Virgil tells the story of Aeneas, the Trojan hero who flees the burning ruins of Troy to found the Roman people. Written under Augustus, it became the central school text of the Roman Empire and later of medieval and Renaissance Europe.

“Easy is the descent to Avernus: night and day the door of gloomy Dis stands open; but to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil! … Some few, whom equal Jove has loved, or shining worth has raised to heaven, the sons of the gods, have achieved it.”
(Aeneid VI.126–131, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough)

“Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.”
“Perhaps one day it will be a joy to remember even these things.”
(Aeneid I.203)

2. Plato’s Republic

The most influential work of political philosophy in the Western tradition. Through Socrates, Plato asks what justice actually is, whether the just man is happier than the unjust, and what kind of city - and soul - is truly ordered. The allegory of the cave, the philosopher-king, the discussion of the forms… these ideas never stopped poking at people.

From the Academy to the medieval universities to the modern classroom, the Republic is still the book every other political theory has to measure itself against.

“The just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others. He sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and is at peace with himself.”
(Republic 443d–e, trans. Benjamin Jowett)

“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils—no, nor the human race, as I believe—and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.”
(Republic 473c–d)

3. Augustine’s Confessions

The first great spiritual autobiography of the West. Written at the end of the fourth century, Augustine lays out his restless search for truth - through rhetoric, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and finally Christian faith. That famous garden conversion scene and his meditations on memory, time, and the restless heart have shaped Christian writing ever since.

No later writer on the inner life - from Dante to Pascal to Newman - really escaped his influence.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
(Confessions I.1, trans. Henry Chadwick)

“Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you they would have no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.”
(Confessions X.27)

4. Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy

Written in prison while he waited to be executed under Theodoric the Ostrogoth. This dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy became one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. Kings, monks, and scholars kept turning to it for comfort and clarity. Dante put Boethius among the great teachers in Paradise.

It asks the hardest question: how can a just God allow the innocent to suffer?

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”
(Consolation II.4, trans. V.E. Watts)

“All fortune is good fortune; for it either rewards or disciplines the good, and either punishes or corrects the bad. Therefore all fortune is good, since it is either just or useful.”
(Consolation IV.7)

5. Cicero’s On Duties (De Officiis)

Written in the last months of his life after Caesar’s assassination. Cicero’s handbook of moral and political duty became the most influential Latin prose work of antiquity. Medieval and Renaissance schoolboys learned their Latin from it.

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It’s a practical philosophy of honour, justice, and what you actually owe in public life.

“We are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share.”
(On Duties I.22, trans. Walter Miller)

“The foundation of justice is good faith—that is, constancy and truth in promises and agreements.”
(On Duties I.23)

“There are two kinds of injustice: the first is found in those who do an injury, the second in those who fail to protect another from injury when they can.”
(On Duties I.23)

6. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War

The first truly scientific history of the West. Thucydides was an Athenian general who lived through the war between Athens and Sparta. He refused myth and flattery. He recorded speeches, analysed power, and laid bare the realities of fear, honour, and interest.

Hobbes translated him. The American Founders studied him. Statesmen still go back to the Melian Dialogue and Pericles’ Funeral Oration.

“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
(Melian Dialogue, V.89, trans. Rex Warner)

“In peace and prosperity both states and individuals are actuated by higher motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious necessities; but war, which takes away the comfortable provision of daily life, is a hard master and tends to assimilate men’s characters to their conditions.”
(III.82)

7. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations

The private notebook of a Roman emperor ruling at the height of the empire while fighting on the northern frontiers. Written in Greek for his own use, the Meditations offer a stoic philosophy of duty, mortality, and self-command that still hits hard.

From medieval monks to modern soldiers and statesmen, people have found in these pages a model of the philosophical life under pressure.

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
(Meditations IV.3)

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
(Meditations II.1)

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
(Meditations X.16)

8. Beowulf

The earliest major work of English literature and the greatest surviving epic of the northern Germanic world. Composed in Old English sometime between the seventh and tenth centuries, it tells of Beowulf’s battles against Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon.

Preserved by Christian monks, the poem fuses pagan heroic values with a Christian sense of fate, courage, and how fleeting earthly glory really is. Tolkien’s scholarship and modern translations finally put it back where it belongs among the classics.

“Behaviour that’s admired is the path to power among people everywhere.”
(Beowulf lines 24–25, trans. Seamus Heaney)

“It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.”
(Beowulf lines 1384–1389, Heaney)

By the way - we are about to start our most exciting read-along yet inside our book club.

The Brothers Karamazov.

If you've been on the fence about joining the Athenaeum Book Club, now's the time. You do not want to miss this.

We are reading it over the next 6 weeks, and now is the last call to join. First discussion is on August 4 (today), covering Books 1-4 (you don't have to have read all of that by then, just a few chapters is enough).

Our group read Crime and Punishment in May, and followed the harrowing yet illuminating journey of Raskolnikov. But The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's final and greatest work, takes his moral and spiritual ideas to their utmost height. Many consider it the greatest psychological novel ever written.

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That is, of course, bullshit.

From its earliest centuries, many of Christianity’s greatest thinkers received a classical education before their conversion. St. Justin Martyr studied philosophy. St. Basil the Great encouraged young Christians to read Greek literature. St. Augustine spent years immersed in Cicero, Virgil, and the Latin classics before becoming one of Christianity’s greatest theologians.

Indeed, Augustine credited one pagan author with awakening his desire for wisdom.

Reflecting on his youth in the Confessions, he recalled reading Cicero’s now-lost dialogue Hortensius:

Among such as these, in that unsettled age of mine, learned I books of eloquence, wherein I desired to be eminent, out of a damnable and vainglorious end, a joy in human vanity. In the ordinary course of study, I fell upon a certain book of Cicero, whose speech almost all admire, not so his heart. This book of his contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called Hortensius. But this book altered my affections, and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord; and made me have other purposes and desires. Every vain hope at once became worthless to me; and I longed with an incredibly burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise, that I might return to Thee. For not to sharpen my tongue (which thing I seemed to be purchasing with my mother’s allowances, in that my nineteenth year, my father being dead two years before), not to sharpen my tongue did I employ that book; nor did it infuse into me its style, but its matter.

Augustine eventually rejected Cicero’s philosophy where it conflicted with Christianity, but he never rejected the pursuit of wisdom that Cicero had inspired.

The Monks Saved More Than Christian Books

The preservation of classical learning did not end with Augustine.

As the Western Roman Empire gave way to the early Middle Ages, monasteries became some of Europe’s most important centers of learning. Within their scriptoria, monks copied not only the Scriptures but also the writings of Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Ovid, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, and countless other authors whose works might otherwise have disappeared.

Without those generations of copyists, much of classical civilization would have been lost forever.

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Why Every Christian Should Read The Classics

Modern Christians sometimes ask why they should read Homer or Plato when they already have the Bible.

St. Basil addressed this question in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature. He compared pagan authors to flowers visited by bees:

We must be conversant with poets, with historians, with orators, indeed with all men who may further our soul’s salvation. Just as dyers prepare the cloth before they apply the dye… so indeed must we also, if we would preserve indelible the idea of the true virtue, become first initiated in the pagan lore, then at length give special heed to the sacred and divine teachings… Just as the bee takes the honey from the flower and leaves the rest, so should the Christian take from the pagan writers what is useful and true, and leave what is harmful.

The Church Fathers read the great books of the ancient world with open eyes and careful judgment. They neither idolized them nor discarded them. They received what was true, rejected what was false, and allowed the best of classical wisdom to serve the higher light of the Gospel.

That way of reading is still the best guide for any Christian who wants to read the classics today..

And if you are looking for a place to put that approach into practice with others, we just crossed 45,000 readers over at the Athenaeum Book Club!!

We had no idea so many people would want to be part of this project, but here's why we think it's happening:

– People are tired of surface-level, short-form content

– They crave depth and genuine conversation with others

– They know that deep reading of great literature is our best weapon against the technological forces seeking to hijack our mental faculties

That said, we never thought we'd find such a thoughtful, intentional group of people so quickly. We hope you'll be with us for a long time!

Our plan is to grow stronger every day, and to build a deep online resource to help as many people as possible discover the beauty and significance of the Great Books and the Great Conversation.

We are about to begin Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which we will read over the next 7 weeks. This will undoubtedly be one of our most important read-alongs so far.

The first discussion, focusing on Books 1–4, is on August 4, at noon ET. Please join us (remember, all sessions are recorded if you can’t make it live)!

Note: you don’t have to have read all of Books 1-4 by then, but the more you have read, the more you’ll get out of the session.

Thanks to every one of you for being here and making it possible for us to do this work.

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JOIN OUR BOOK CLUB!

If you’re new here, definitely join our book club discussions if you can. They take place biweekly, and have been nothing short of electric of late. And if you can’t make it, everything is recorded!

Welcome!

Few ideas have become as established in modern history as the claim that Islam was/is tolerant.

Open any history book, and you are likely to encounter some version of the same argument. While Christian Europe supposedly languished in religious intolerance, Muslim rulers welcomed Christians, protected their religious freedoms, and presided over a multicultural society where different faiths coexisted “peacefully”. This narrative has become so familiar that it is never questioned.

In this article, we’ll examine where that idea comes from and compare it with the historical record.

But first, it is worth defining what historians actually mean when they speak of Islamic “tolerance.”

Unlike the modern understanding of religious equality, classical Islamic law never viewed Christians as equal members of society. Instead, they belonged to a legal category known as the dhimmi—literally, “protected people.” Protection, however, came with conditions. Christians could retain their religion only if they accepted permanent political and social subordination under Muslim rule and paid the jizya, the poll tax prescribed in the Koran.

As Koran 9:29 commands:

“Fight those among the People of the Book who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.”

That final phrase—“feel themselves subdued”—is crucial because it reveals that jizya was never about taxation. It was intended to demonstrate the superiority of Islam and the inferior status of those who refused to embrace it.

Indeed, one of Islam’s foremost jurists, Al-Mawardi (972–1058), explained that the purpose of the tax was to leave non-Muslims “in a state of humiliation“ while allowing them to continue living under Muslim authority.

This brings us to the first myth.

Myth One: Christians Were Equal Citizens

Modern writers describe the dhimmi system as an early form of religious pluralism.

John Esposito, professor of religion at Georgetown University, for example, writes that Christians and Jews enjoyed religious freedom in exchange for paying a poll tax that provided protection and exempted them from military service. Similar descriptions appear throughout contemporary textbooks, presenting jizya as little more than a medieval “administrative tax”.

The historical record tells a rather different story.

Under the Pact of Umar—a foundational document governing the treatment of Christians under Islamic rule—Christians “agreed” not to build new churches, repair ruined ones in Muslim neighbourhoods, display crosses publicly, ring church bells loudly, carry weapons, imitate Muslim clothing, or publicly express their faith.

One version states:

“We shall not build in our cities or in their vicinity any new monastery, church, convent, or monk’s cell, nor shall we repair those that have fallen into ruin.”

Another declares:

“We shall rise from our seats when Muslims wish to sit.”

Whether every clause appeared everywhere is beside the point. Muslim jurists across the centuries repeatedly cited the Pact as the legal foundation for regulating non-Muslim communities, and many of its restrictions appeared throughout the Islamic world from Spain to Persia.

Far from establishing equality, Islamic law explicitly created two classes of society: Muslims and everyone else.

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Myth Two: Islam Protected Churches

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Even though he barely ruled for a year, the Conqueror of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, is very well known.

We have all heard of him, but did you know he had a younger brother? That’s the guy that turned Jerusalem into a kingdom, Baldwin of Boulougne.

Without him, it would have collapsed..

Baldwin was born around 1060 into the House of Boulogne. As the youngest son of Eustace II and Ida of Lorraine, it was clear he wouldn’t inherit any land. His path was set for the Church. Chroniclers say he studied for it and even held a canonry at Cambrai.

But he didn’t like it very much..

Long before Urban II called the Crusade in 1095, Baldwin left the clergy. He took up the sword and rode east with his brothers Godfrey and Eustace when the call to liberate Jerusalem came.

In 1098, while the main army pushed south, Baldwin headed east toward Edessa (Armenian city).

It looked like an odd choice at the time. Jerusalem was the prize everyone dreamed of. But Baldwin understood that the Crusaders needed safe ground if they hoped to hold anything they captured.

Edessa offered that.

Its ruler, Thoros, governed a mostly Armenian Christian population surrounded by enemies. To strengthen his position he adopted Baldwin as heir (very bold move):

Fulcher of Chartres, who rode with Baldwin as his chaplain, described the moment:

“When we had trudged a day’s march from this place [Marash] and were no more than three days from Antioch of Syria, I, Fulcher, departed from the army and with lord Count Baldwin, brother of Duke Godfrey, turned into the country on the left… [Thoros] promised that if Baldwin would help him… Baldwin, as if he were his son, would possess the city and his whole land in inheritance forever… After we had been there fifteen days, the citizens of the city wickedly plotted to kill their prince… It was said, and it was done.”

Weeks later Thoros was killed, and Baldwin became the first Count of Edessa in March 1098. The Crusaders now had their first real state in the East.

Edessa gave the Franks access to food and Armenian allies.

That changed everything..

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While Baldwin secured Edessa, the main army stormed Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. The joy was overwhelming. Raymond of Aguilers, who saw it happen, wrote:

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That doesn’t mean everyone reached the same conclusions. They certainly didn’t. But it does mean that long before the modern vocabulary of “Islamophobia” existed, some of the West’s most influential theologians, philosophers, statesmen, and presidents had already written extensively about Islam, usually in response to the events of their own time.

Now the question is this: what did they say, and why did they say it?

John of Damascus

One of the earliest Christian writers to engage directly with Islam was John of Damascus, who lived during the eighth century under Umayyad rule. Unlike later Europeans, John wasn’t writing from a distance. He lived among Muslims, worked in the Umayyad administration, and was intimately familiar with Islamic teachings and practices.

In his work On Heresies (specifically the section on the “Heresy of the Ishmaelites”), he described Islam as a Christian heresy rather than an entirely new religion. He criticized Muhammad’s claims to prophecy and traced what he saw as the origins and errors of the new faith. His writings became enormously influential throughout the medieval Christian world because they represented one of the first systematic Christian responses to Islam.

Here is a substantial excerpt:

“There is also the superstition of the Ishmaelites which to this day prevails and keeps people in error, being a forerunner of the Antichrist. They are descended from Ishmael, who was born to Abraham from Agar, and for this reason they are called Hagarenes and Ishmaelites. They are also called Saracens, which is derived from Sarah, because they say that Sarah sent them away empty-handed. These used to be idolaters and worshiped the morning star and Aphrodite, whom they called Chabar in their own language, which means ‘great.’ So until the time of Heraclius they were very idolatrous and worshiped the same things as the idolaters. From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he gave out that he had received the book from heaven. Having written some ridiculous compositions in this book of his, he gave it to them as an object of veneration.”

John went on to critique specific Islamic doctrines, including the denial of the Trinity and the crucifixion, and certain practices such as polygamy and the direction of prayer.

Thomas Aquinas

Five centuries later, Thomas Aquinas returned to the subject in his monumental work Summa Contra Gentiles. Writing in the 13th century, amid ongoing conflicts between Christian and Muslim powers in Spain, Sicily, and the Holy Land, Aquinas sought to engage Muslim thought on philosophical and theological grounds.

He argued that Christianity and Islam differed fundamentally in the way they presented their claims. In Book I, Chapter 6, he contrasted the methods of the prophets and apostles with those of Muhammad:

“The point is clear in the case of Muhammad. He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law. It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.”

Whether one agrees with Aquinas or not, his argument reflected the medieval world in which he lived, where Christian kingdoms and Muslim powers had spent centuries fighting across multiple theaters.

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Martin Luther

The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther also wrote extensively about the Ottoman Empire as Ottoman armies advanced into central Europe, reaching the gates of Vienna in 1529.

Luther rejected the idea that Christians should fear the Turks as invincible conquerors, yet he also regarded the Ottoman advance as one of the greatest military and spiritual threats facing Europe. In his 1529 treatise On War Against the Turk, he urged Christians to prepare both spiritually and militarily, believing that the conflict was as much a test of Christian character as it was a political struggle. He viewed the Turks not merely as political enemies but as instruments of divine judgment and, theologically, as destroyers of true Christian doctrine.

In one extended passage he wrote:

“Mohammed is a destroyer of our Lord Christ and His kingdom, and if anyone denies concerning Christ, that He is God’s Son and has died for us, and still lives and reigns at the right hand of God, what has he left of Christ? Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Baptism, the Sacrament, Gospel, Faith and all Christian doctrine and life are gone, and there is left, instead of Christ, nothing more than Mohammed with his doctrine of works and especially of the sword. That is the chief doctrine of the Turkish faith in which all abominations, all errors, all devils are piled up in one heap.”

Luther also emphasized that victory over the Turks required first defeating “the Turk’s god, the devil” through repentance and reform within Christendom itself. His views were shaped by the reality that Ottoman armies had reached the frontiers of the Holy Roman Empire during his lifetime.

Miguel de Cervantes

Few writers had more personal experience of the Mediterranean conflict than Miguel de Cervantes.

Before writing Don Quixote, Cervantes served as a Spanish soldier. In 1575, while returning home by sea after the Battle of Lepanto, his ship was captured by Barbary corsairs. He spent five years as a slave in Algiers, making several unsuccessful escape attempts before religious orders finally raised the ransom needed to secure his freedom in 1580.

That experience profoundly shaped his writing. In Don Quixote, through the voice of the Captive (a character widely understood to draw heavily on Cervantes’ own ordeal), he described the world of Barbary slavery and the constant threat posed by the corsairs:

“He spoke to me in the language used throughout all of Barbary and even in Constantinople among captives and Moors—a language that is neither Moorish, nor Castilian, nor of any other nation, but a mixture of all languages, through which we all understood one another.”

Cervantes’ captivity gave him intimate knowledge of the daily realities of life under Barbary rule - the galleys, the bagnios (slave prisons), the renegades who converted to Islam, and the constant danger of being sold or ransomed. For many Europeans of his era, the conflict with the Barbary States was not theoretical. It affected merchants, sailors, fishermen, and ordinary families throughout the Mediterranean.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams

America’s first sustained encounter with Muslim-ruled states came only after independence.

Without the protection of the Royal Navy, American merchant ships became targets for the Barbary States. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met the ambassador from Tripoli in London to ask why American ships were being attacked despite having done nothing to provoke Tripoli.

Jefferson later recorded the ambassador’s explanation in a letter to John Jay (March 28, 1786). That conversation became one of the most cited diplomatic exchanges in early American history:

“The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Jefferson eventually concluded that paying tribute would only invite further demands, a view that helped lead to the First Barbary War in 1801.

Alexis de Tocqueville

After studying the Qur’an and observing French involvement in North Africa, Alexis de Tocqueville reached conclusions that reflected both his philosophical interests and the colonial context of nineteenth-century France.

In a letter (widely cited from his correspondence), he wrote:

“I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.”

Whether modern readers agree or disagree, the quotation illustrates that Tocqueville regarded religion not merely as a matter of private belief but as something with profound political and social consequences.

Theodore Roosevelt

Few American presidents read more history than Theodore Roosevelt.

Reflecting on the long conflict between Christian Europe and Muslim powers, Roosevelt wrote in Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916):

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