The History of Jihad- From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  On June 15, 1389, the jihadis engaged Christian forces in battle at Kosovo. As in the early days of jihad, the Muslims prevailed against a stronger, larger force of Serbs and Bulgarians, burning June 15 into the Serbian national consciousness as a day of mourning forever after. The jihad force was composed largely of janissaries. Said Gibbon:

  The Janizaries fought with the zeal of proselytes against their idolatrous countrymen; and in the battle of Cossova [Kosovo], the league and independence of the Sclavonian tribes was finally crushed. As the conqueror walked over the field, he observed that the greatest part of the slain consisted of beardless youths; and listened to the flattering reply of his vizier, that age and wisdom would have taught them not to oppose his irresistible arms.27

  The fulsome praise was premature. As Murad traversed the bloody battleground, stepping over the corpses, a Serbian soldier suddenly appeared and stabbed him before his men could react. At the moment of his great triumph, he was dead.

  But, of course, the jihad in Eastern Europe and against the Byzantines continued. Perhaps anticipating further inroads against the Byzantines, Murad’s successor, Bayezid I, bestowed upon himself the title Sultan of Rum, that is, of the Roman Empire, and played the various claimants to the Byzantine imperial crown against each other, seeking always to weaken them all, and ultimately to subvert the small remnants of the Christian empire altogether.28 To remind the Byzantines that they were vassals of the sultan, Bayezid demanded that John V Paleologus’ son Manuel live at his court. John had to comply, and at the sultan’s court, Manuel was subjected to regular mockery and humiliation.29 When John began work to strengthen the walls of Constantinople, Bayezid forced him to stop almost immediately by threatening to have Manuel blinded.30

  When John V Paleologus died in 1390, which some attributed to the constant humiliations to which Bayezid had subjected him, Manuel managed to escape from the sultan’s court and take his place as Emperor Manuel II Paleologus. Bayezid continued to taunt him from afar, reminding him that by this time his “imperial” holdings consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople itself. He forced Manuel to set up an area in Constantinople where Turkish merchants could hawk their wares, as well as, more ominously, erect a mosque staffed by a cadi, a judge of Islamic law.31 He even demanded, and received, Manuel’s agreement to set aside a quarter of the city to be settled by Muslims.32

  In 1391, he forced Manuel, as his vassal, to march with him into central Asia Minor in order to fight the Isfendiyarids, another Muslim dynasty that controlled part of the territory south of the Black Sea. Manuel wrote from this desolate area and revealed his own desolation:

  Certainly the Romans had a name for the small plain where we are now when they lived and ruled here.… There are many cities here, but they lack what constitutes the true splendor of a city…that is, human beings. Most now lie in ruins…not even the names have survived.… I cannot tell you exactly where we are.… It is hard to bear all this…the scarcity of supplies, the severity of winter and the sickness which has struck down many of our men…[have] greatly depressed me.… It is unbearable…to be unable to see anything, hear anything, do anything during all this time which could somehow…lift our spirit.… The blame lies with the present state of affairs, not to mention the individual [i.e. Bayezid] whose fault they are.33

  To forestall help coming to the Byzantines from Hungary or others in Europe, Bayezid worked to strengthen the Ottoman position in southeastern Europe, conquering Thessaly and Bulgaria in 1393. In 1394 he began a new siege of Constantinople, which turned out to be the longest ever, lasting eight years. Bayezid summoned Manuel and some key members of the Byzantine imperial court to his presence, planning to kill them all; most of them, however, managed to get out alive, including the emperor himself, who thereafter ignored all of the sultan’s summonses to appear.34

  At Nicopolis in western Greece in 1396, Bayezid defeated a force of a hundred thousand Christian Crusaders that had been gathered by King Sigismund of Hungary. Flush with victory, Bayezid boasted that he would soon lay siege to Buda in Hungary, and then move on to conquer Germany and Italy for Allah, finally putting a cap to it all by feeding his horse with a bushel of oats placed on the altar of St. Peter’s in the Vatican.35 But instead, the would-be conqueror of Europe suffered an attack of gout and had to return home.

  Tamerlane versus Bayezid

  Manuel tried to get help from everywhere he possibly could. A hundred years earlier, there had been talk of a Christian alliance with the Mongols against the Muslims; nothing had come of it, but maybe it wasn’t too late: in 1399, Manuel appealed to Timur the Lame, or Tamerlane, the Mongol conqueror of Central Asia.36 The Mongols had converted to Islam in the early fourteenth century, and Tamerlane was a zealous jihadi. However, he had not hesitated to fight against the Tughlaq sultanate of Delhi, and he regarded the Ottomans in the same way, writing with stinging contempt to Bayezid:

  Dost thou not know, that the greatest part of Asia is subject to our arms and our laws? That our invincible forces extend from one sea to the other? That the potentates of the earth form a line before our gate? And that we have compelled Fortune herself to watch over the prosperity of our empire. What is the foundation of thy insolence and folly? Thou hast fought some battles in the woods of Anatolia; contemptible trophies! Thou hast obtained some victories over the Christians of Europe; thy sword was blessed by the apostle of God; and thy obedience to the precept of the Koran, in waging war against the infidels, is the sole consideration that prevents us from destroying thy country, the frontier and bulwark of the Moslem world. Be wise in time; reflect; repent; and avert the thunder of our vengeance, which is yet suspended over thy head. Thou art no more than a pismire; why wilt thou seek to provoke the elephants? Alas! They will trample thee under their feet.37

  Bayezid was used to terrorizing and lording it over the emperors of the Romans; he wasn’t used to being addressed the way he addressed them. He wrote back to Tamerlane with his own boasts:

  Thy armies are innumerable: be they so; but what are the arrows of the flying Tartar against the cimeters [scimitars] and battle-axes of my firm and invincible Janizaries? I will guard the princes who have implored my protection: seek them in my tents. The cities of Arzingan and Erzeroum are mine; and unless the tribute be duly paid, I will demand the arrears under the walls of Tauris and Sultania.38

  In his rage and wounded pride, Bayezid could not resist adding a personal insult:

  If I fly from thy arms, may my wives be thrice divorced from my bed: but if thou hast not courage to meet me in the field, mayest thou again receive thy wives after they have thrice endured the embraces of a stranger.39

  It was the ultimate insult one jihad warrior could give to another: the implication that he was not man enough either to fight or to hold on to his wives. Tamerlane answered on the battlefield, invading Asia Minor and soundly defeating Bayezid at Ankara in 1402.40

  Tamerlane then granted clemency to his beaten rival, even as (in another move characteristic of jihadis throughout history) he blamed him for the conflict:

  Alas! The decree of fate is now accomplished by your own fault; it is the web which you have woven, the thorns of the tree which yourself have planted. I wished to spare, and even to assist, the champion of the Moslems; you braved our threats; you despised our friendship; you forced us to enter your kingdom with our invincible armies. Behold the event. Had you vanquished, I am not ignorant of the fate which you reserved for myself and my troops. But I disdain to retaliate: your life and honour are secure; and I shall express my gratitude to God by my clemency to man.41

  Tamerlane’s clemency to Bayezid was more proclaimed than actual. Outdoing Bayezid’s own humiliation of the Byzantine emperors, Tamerlane had Bayezid displayed in an iron cage, and used the Ottoman sultan as an ottoman, as well as a mounting block when he got on his horse. He commandeered Bayezid’s harem, and perhaps remembering Bayezid’s boast about his w
ives, forced one of the sultan’s wives to serve at his table while naked. After enduring eight months of this, Bayezid died.42

  When Bayezid died, Tamerlane was in Asia, on his way to bring the jihad to China. Given the news that Bayezid had died, he wept and claimed that he had planned to restore Bayezid to the throne, with greater grandeur than ever.43

  Last-ditch Attempts to Save the Byzantine Empire

  The claim was easy to make when Bayezid was dead. In any case, Tamerlane’s desire to destroy all rival Muslim leaders won for the Byzantine Empire a bit of much-needed time, although Tamerlane ensured that no one would think he was allying with the Christians when he also besieged and conquered Smyrna, defeating a force of Christian Knights Hospitaller. Ships arrived to reinforce the knights after Tamerlane had already entered the city and laid waste; the great commander ordered that his catapults be fitted with the bloody severed heads of the knights the jihadis had killed inside Smyrna. After a barrage of these heads filled the sky and hit the men on the ships, the reinforcing vessels turned back in horror and disarray.44

  Emperor Manuel had in 1399 embarked upon an extensive four-year tour of Western Europe, meeting with the pope and with the crowned kings of England, France, and elsewhere. Lofty promises were made, but little actual help was forthcoming, in part because the Western Europeans were keen for Manuel to accept the authority of the pope, which the emperor could not do without alienating a substantial number of his own people. Manuel said this of the Ottomans to his chamberlain Phranzes:

  Our last resource is their fear of our union with the Latins, of the warlike nations of the West, who may arm for our relief and for their destruction. As often as you are threatened by the miscreants, present this danger before their eyes. Propose a council; consult on the means; but ever delay and avoid the convocation of an assembly, which cannot tend either to our spiritual or temporal emolument. The Latins are proud; the Greeks are obstinate; neither party will recede or retract; and the attempt of a perfect union will confirm the schism, alienate the churches, and leave us, without hope or defence, at the mercy of the Barbarians.45

  Yet Manuel kept trying. In 1424, when he was seventy-four years old, he yet again sought help from the Hungarians against the Turks and was, once again, unsuccessful. The Ottomans forced him to agree to pay tribute to the sultan, reinforcing the status of the Byzantine Empire as a mere vassal of the Ottoman sultanate.

  Manuel II Paleologus Becomes Notorious

  Manuel II Paleologus, little remembered after his death, shot to fame nearly six hundred years later, when on September 12, 2006, in Regensburg, Germany, Pope Benedict XVI dared to enunciate some truths about Islam that proved to be unpopular and unwelcome among Muslims worldwide. Most notoriously, the pope quoted Manuel on Islam: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”46

  Manuel was not speaking of an abstract threat he had read about in books. Every day of his life, he was confronted by the ever-advancing and implacable menace of jihad. All his life, he had experienced Islam and jihad firsthand, as well as the contempt that Islam mandated for non-Muslims: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, harsh to unbelievers” (Qur’an 48:29). His life was many times in imminent danger from the warriors of jihad. He no doubt heard of the misery of many Christians who, because of the Ottoman conquests, found themselves subject to harsh rulers who believed they had a divine mandate to subjugate the Christians and relegate them to second-class status in society, if not death. In the twenty-first century, Manuel’s words were denounced as “Islamophobic”; yet, no one among his contemporaries would assert something so naïve and unrealistic.

  Pope Benedict also quoted Manuel saying: “God is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats.… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.”47

  Benedict’s quotations of the long-dead emperor were not received by reasonable souls, at least among the descendants of those who had menaced Manuel II Paleologus and his people throughout that unfortunate emperor’s lifetime. Muslims rioted and, in several countries, murdered Christians who had, of course, nothing whatsoever to do with what Pope Benedict had said. Several days after the Regensburg address, a group of Muslim clerics in Gaza issued an invitation to the pope to convert to Islam, or else: “We want to use the words of the Prophet Muhammad and tell the pope: ‘Aslim Taslam’”—that is, embrace Islam and you will be safe.48 The implication, of course, was that the one to whom this “invitation” was addressed would not be safe if he declined to convert.

  Many Christians in Eastern Europe would receive that “invitation” in the years following Tamerlane’s siege of Smyrna. But the Byzantines made one more attempt to stave off the inevitable when they agreed to travel to Italy for another attempt at reunion with the Latin Church. The council convened in Ferrara in April 1438, with the emperor John VIII Paleologus and the patriarch Joseph II of Constantinople present, heading up a large Byzantine delegation. Their appearance was impressive, but the Byzantines were in desperate straits and had no bargaining position at all. As the council’s deliberations went on, transferred to Florence in January 1439 to avoid the Black Plague, the Byzantine delegation gave in on every one of the theological issues that had formally divided the two Churches since the Great Schism of 1054. Finally they agreed to a reunion with the Latin Church based essentially on acceptance of all the Western Church’s doctrines.

  One Byzantine bishop present, Mark of Ephesus, refused to go along and argued strenuously against the council’s conclusions; he proved to be an apt representative of the popular feeling about the council back in Constantinople, where it was generally considered illegitimate and never gained significant support among the people. Lukas Notaras, megadux of the Byzantine Empire—that is, commander-in-chief of the imperial navy and de facto prime minister—summed up a widespread opinion with the succinct phrase “Better the turban of the Sultan than the tiara of the Pope.”49

  It may seem incredible considering the carnage that followed the Muslim conquest that anyone could have seriously held such a view, but Lukas Notaras said this before the Muslim conquest of Constantinople. The Crusader sacking of Constantinople in 1204 was still a fresh memory for many Byzantines, and the subsequent establishment of a Latin patriarchate, combined with the intransigence of the Latins at Florence, led many Byzantines to believe that the sultan would at least allow them to maintain their religion and culture, while the pope would not—a not unreasonable surmise. Many Byzantine emperors had made accords with the Ottomans. No doubt many believed that the jihadis were a problem that had been managed in the past and could continue to be managed, while the pope’s demands were absolute.

  And so the reunion that was concluded at the Council of Florence, although officially proclaimed, never gained significant traction in the East. Nor did the expected military help make any difference. Pope Eugenius IV did call a new Crusade, but there was no enthusiasm for it in Western Europe. The Eastern European states of Poland, Wallachia, and Hungary did manage to assemble a Crusader army of thirty thousand men, only to see it crushed by Murad II and his jihadis at Varna in Hungary in November 1444. King Ladislas of Hungary was killed in the battle; his head was sent back to Bursa, the Asia Minor city that had served as the first capital of the Ottoman sultanate, where it was carried through the streets as a trophy of the Muslims’ victory over the Crusaders.50

  The Fall of Constantinople

  In 1451, Murad II’s son succeeded his father as the sultan Mehmet II and brought to the sultanate his intense desire to be the conqueror of Constantinople. It w
asn’t long before he got his wish. After over seven hundred years of trying, the warriors of jihad finally entered the great city on May 29, 1453. When they did, they made the streets run with rivers of blood. Historian Steven Runciman notes that the Muslims “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit.”51

  Muslims raided monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundered private houses. They entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. The Muslims then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.

  The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in July 1453, saying that Constantinople had been

  …sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.52