The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  In the same year however, Temesvar and Szolnok were taken by the Turks, a loss blamed on mercenary soldiers within the Hungarian ranks. When the Ottomans turned their attention shortly afterwards to the northern fortress town of Eger few expected the defenders to put up much resistance, particularly as the two great armies of the Ottoman lords Ahmed and Ali, which had crushed all opposition previously, united under Eger.

  Eger was an important stronghold and key to the defense of the remainder of Hungary: North of the town lay the poorly reinforced city of Kassa (present day Košice), the centre of an important region of mines and associated mints, which provided the Hungarian Kingdom with large amounts of quality silver and gold coinage. Besides allowing a take-over of that revenue source, the fall of Eger would also have enabled the Ottomans to secure an alternative route for further westward military expansion, possibly opening a more direct route to Vienna.

  A tiny force of Hungarian troops and foreign mercenaries, together with civilian townspeople (including women), numbering altogether no more than just over 2,000 souls, were all that stood against the mighty Turkish army of perhaps 40,000 men which now appeared before the fortress walls. The Ottoman forces were armed with 16 large siege guns and about 150 medium and smaller pieces, as against the defenders’ 6 large cannons and around a dozen smaller ones. The attack began almost immediately with a massive bombardment, and this was followed on the second day by a major assault. There was desperate fighting on the walls and the women of the town proved themselves equal to the men in courage and resourcefulness. Assault after assault was repelled by the desperate courage of the townspeople, with even the wounded dragging themselves from their sickbeds and helping in various ways, some of them suicidal. The Turks tried mining under the walls, but these mines were met by counter mines from the defenders. Eventually, after an epic 39-day siege the Turks abandoned the attack and retreated south.[1]

  Fig. 15. The Siege of Eger

  The defense of Eger in Hungary is one of the most heroic actions in European military history, but is virtually unknown outside of Hungary.

  The defense of Eger and Güns rank among the most heroic military actions in European history, on a par at least with the actions of the 300 Lacedaemonians who stood at the Pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC. They delayed the Turkish advance towards Vienna at a crucial period when the Ottomans might well have captured the Habsburg capital, from which vantage point they would have been well placed to press the attack into the rest of Germany and France. Yet these events are virtually unknown in Western Europe, where their importance is neither understood or appreciated. It is a good bet however that had these events been part of English history they would no doubt have already been the subject of dozens of popular novels, plays and Hollywood movies.

  Yet in spite of the appalling losses the sultan’s armies suffered in Hungary, he invariably returned the following year with equally colossal armies: The Ottoman’s resources seemed inexhaustible and their determination adamantine.

  Now, in 1571, it became clear that the Ottomans had decided once again to turn their attention southward. The vast fleet which the sultan had gathered was aimed at Italy. Had it been permitted to sail unimpeded to the peninsula it is likely that the Turks would have swept all before them. The whole of Italy, including Rome, might swiftly have fallen, and these forces, pushing northward, would have joined others coming from Croatia in the east. A catastrophe was about to unfold, and preventative action was necessary. Yet the great fleet gathered by the Holy League was of inferior size to that of the Turks, and its commanders bickered amongst themselves. Victory was something they could hardly dare to hope for. In the end however superior tactics prevailed, and the battle was a clear victory for the Christians, who nonetheless lost ten galleys and 8,000 men. The Turks, by contrast, lost 200 ships and sustained 30,000 casualties. Although a decisive watershed in the Christian-Islamic conflict in the Mediterranean, the victory at Lepanto did not prevent the Ottomans from putting to sea with an equally large fleet the following year. Such were the resources and such was the determination of the Turkish holy warriors.

  It is difficult for modern Europeans, particularly natives of northern Europe, to comprehend the impact of these events upon the psyche of Italians, Spaniards, Hungarians and Austrians of the time. We are used to seeing the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in central and southern Europe as the dawning of the Renaissance, as the beginning of the great revival of European civilization, as the harbinger of the Age of Science and of Discovery. It is true of course that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did constitute an epoch of massive technical and economic progress. There was much ferment in art, music, literature, science, and technology. No doubt some of this – as has often been claimed – had been stimulated by the arrival in the West of Greek scholars fleeing Constantinople after its capture by the Turks. This was also an age of unprecedented discovery, as European caravels probed the southern reaches of the Atlantic, then reached across the ocean to the Americas. But, hard as it may be for us to imagine, the rosy picture of advancement and exuberant optimism which we now have of this epoch was not shared by the people of the time. Even as Cortes and Pizarro conquered the vastly wealthy lands of Mexico and Peru in his name, the Emperor Charles V gloomily awaited the dissolution of Christendom. “We set out to conquer worthless new empires beyond the seas,” lamented Busbequius, the Belgian whom the king of the Romans sent as ambassador to the sultan of Turkey, “and we are losing the heart of Europe.”[2] Christendom, he wrote, subsided precariously by the good will of the king of Persia, whose ambitions in the east continually called the sultan of Turkey back from his European conquests.[3]

  We know now, of course, that the Turks had reached the apex of their advancement in the time of Charles V, and that their history, from then onwards, would be one of continual retreat in the face of an increasingly powerful and confident Europe (though they were able to strike at the heart of the Empire one more time in the latter years of the seventeenth century). But this was not known by the contemporaries of Charles V, and a sense of gloom prevailed throughout his dominions. All seemed lost, or on the verge of being lost. The great fear that had haunted Christendom since the seventh century – that it would be overwhelmed by Islam – seemed on the verge of realization. Indeed, it was the very advance of Islam which had reorientated Europe westwards in the first place during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and eventually led to the epoch-making discovery of the Americas.

  The fall of the Balkans and Constantinople to the Turks during the fifteenth century was viewed with alarm at the opposite end of the Mediterranean. For centuries the people of Spain had held a front line of the bloody clash with Islam. The war against the followers of Muhammad became the virtual raison d’être of Spanish kings. It was a perennial project: Not an obsession, more like a normal part of life. It was taken for granted that there could never be peace with the Islamic world. How could it be otherwise, when making war against the infidel world was a religious duty for every Muslim? The Spaniards, more than any other people of Europe, were aware that jihad was a state of permanent war which excluded the possibility of a true peace. In an earlier age the crusaders had come to understand this, and it was reiterated in the fourteenth century by the Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, whom we quoted in Chapter 2. Ibn Khaldun was a native of Andalusia, but what he wrote about jihad would have been understood by every monarch of Spain, Christian and Moor. Thus for the kings of Castile the survival in the Iberian Peninsula of any region from which Islam could launch attacks was seen as a real and ever present threat, and the reduction of Islamic Spain to the southern strongholds of Andalusia did not make Christians feel any more secure. Now the threat was not from North Africa but from Turkey. And indeed the advancement of the Turks westwards towards Italy during the fifteenth century made such a possibility into a nightmarish probability. Thus Granada had to be reduced, no matter what the cost. And ev
en after that, the Spaniards did not feel secure. The war against Islam would continue, as it always had. The Ottomans were threatening Italy and the entire western Mediterranean, Spain herself could be next.

  It was of course the rise of Ottoman power in the eastern Mediterranean which had during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries first prompted Europeans to look towards the Atlantic, there to find a way to the Spice Lands of the east which bypassed the Islamic world altogether. These efforts were led initially by the Portuguese who, particularly under Henry the Navigator, sought to find a way to the Indies by circumnavigating Africa to the south. These voyages, which focused the attention of Europeans upon the Atlantic, were eventually to lead to the discovery of the Americas. Columbus believed the circumference of the earth to be much smaller than it is and imagined that across the Atlantic he would find – where in fact America is – eastern Asia and the Indies. Such a short route to China would facilitate a direct alliance between that country and Spain. The idea, according to Louis Bertrand, was to “take Islam in the rear,” and “to effect an alliance with the Great Khan – a mythical personage who was believed to be the sovereign of all that region, and favourable to the Christian religion …”[4] Bertrand was very insistent on this point, which he emphasized in half a dozen pages. The voyage of discovery was to begin a new phase, he says, in “the Crusade against the Moors which was to be continued by a new and surer route. It was by way of the Indies that Islam was to be dealt a mortal blow.”[5]

  So certain was Bertrand of the connection between the exploits of the conquistadors in the Americas and the war against Islam that he actually describes the conquest of America as the “last Crusade.”

  The record of the conquistadors in the New World needs no repetition here: It is one of cruelty and greed on a truly monumental scale. Yet the habits of the Spaniards here, habits which gave rise to the “Black Legend,” were – at least in the opinion of Bertrand – learned at the school of the caliphs. In Bertrand’s words: “Lust for gold, bloodthirsty rapacity, the feverish pursuit of hidden treasure, application of torture to the vanquished to wrest the secret of their hiding-places from them – all these barbarous proceedings and all these vices, which the conquistadores were to take to America, they learnt at the school of the caliphs, the emirs, and the Moorish kings.”[6]

  Indeed all of the traits associated with the Spaniards, for which they have been roundly criticized by Anglo-Saxon historians, can be traced, according to Bertrand, to the contact with Islam.

  Whether or not Bertrand is correct in this regard is a moot point, and it is a question we shall address again presently. For the moment, it is sufficient to note that the very discovery of the New World was connected with the conflict with Islam; with the need to bypass Muslim territory for trading purposes, and with the desire to establish contact, and alliance, with anti-Muslim powers in eastern Asia.

  [1] Incredibly, very little in English has been written about these epic engagements. A reasonably good account is found in Peter F. Sugar (ed.) A History of Hungary (Indiana University Press, 1990). Much has of course been written in Hungarian, e.g. Geza Gardonyi, Egri Csillagok, 2 Vols. (Europe Konyvkiado, Budapest, 1985).

  [2] Trevor-Roper, op cit., p. 17.

  [3]Ibid.

  [4] Bertrand, op cit., p. 163.

  [5]Ibid.

  [6]Ibid., p. 159.

  10

  Conclusion

  In his book What Went Wrong? Bernard Lewis surveys a thousand years of Islamic backwardness, poverty, and oppression. Almost every page is packed with examples of how all of these things derived from attitudes which have their origins in Islam. Having done all that, he gets himself into a terrible muddle at the end: Looking at how modern Arabs and Muslims have sought to apportion blame for their predicament on outsiders, he then states that, “A more sophisticated form of the blame game finds its targets inside, rather than outside the society. One such target is religion, for some specifically Islam. But to blame Islam as such is hazardous and rarely attempted. Nor is it very plausible.”[1] It’s not plausible, he says, because, “For most of the Middle Ages, it was neither the older cultures of the Orient nor the newer cultures of the West that were the major centers of civilization and progress, but the world of Islam in the middle. It was there that old sciences were recovered and developed and new sciences created; there that new industries were born and manufacture and commerce expanded to a level previously without precedent. It was there, too, that governments and societies achieved a degree of freedom of thought and expression that led persecuted Jews and even dissident Christians to flee for refuge from Christendom to Islam.”

  The survey of medieval Islam undertaken in the present volume gives the lie to the above statements: Medieval Islam was never tolerant, and if persecuted Jews fled there, they fled even more frequently to Christendom. Nor was the House of Islam the major center of civilization and progress during “most of the Middle Ages.” It was, for a very brief period (and just how brief that time may have been is one of the topics covered in the Appendix to the present study) the wealthiest and perhaps the most technically advanced civilization on earth, but that wealth and technical knowledge was almost entirely derived from the great civilizations of the Middle East which Islam absorbed in the middle of the seventh century, namely Byzantine Egypt and Syria and Sassanid Persia. Other things, such as “Arabic” numerals, paper-making, etc., came from the great civilizations of the Orient, China and India. They may have reached Europe through the filter of the Islamic world; but they did not originate there, and they would undoubtedly have reached Europe whether Islam existed or not. And the suggestion that the arrival of this knowledge in the West at least suggests the existence of normal trading relations between Europe and the House of Islam during the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries is unfounded: A crucial technique may be transmitted from one society to another by a single knowledgeable individual. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that much of the “Islamic” knowledge reaching Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries arrived here with small groups of refugees from Islamic oppression. Such, for example, were the Spanish Jews who arrived in England with William the Conqueror in 1066: they were fleeing the horrific violence launched against their coreligionists in Spain by Muslim mobs earlier in the same year. It was a Syrian refugee from Islam, Kallinikos (Callinicus), who had, in an earlier age, provided the Byzantines with the knowledge of “Greek Fire,” with which they destroyed attacking Muslim fleets.

  The truly Islamic thing which Muslims brought to Europe in the tenth century was a massive revival in the slave trade. The devastation wrought by Muslim slave-raiders over the centuries in Europe and elsewhere would need an extremely large volume in itself to catalog. As we saw in Chapter 2, large areas of southern Europe were turned into war-zones in the tenth century by this activity, whilst large areas of northern and eastern Europe were similarly blighted at the same time by the attentions of Scandinavian pirates – who were also motivated by Arab gold. The arrival of Arab piracy in the Mediterranean brought to a definitive end the peace of the region. From now on, the “Middle Sea” (or Mare Nostrum, as the Romans called it), would no longer be a highway, but a frontier, and a frontier of the most dangerous kind. War and piracy became the norm – in some areas for the best part of a thousand years. And this is something that has been almost completely overlooked by historians, especially those of northern European extraction. For the latter in particular, the Mediterranean is viewed through the prism of classical history. So bewitched have educated Europeans been by the civilizations of Greece and Rome, that they have treated the more recent part of Mediterranean history – over a thousand years of it – as if it never existed. The visitor to Mediterranean lands, perhaps on the Grand Tour, was shown the monuments of the classical world: here Caesar fought a battle; there Anthony brought his fleet, etc. The thirteen hundred years between modern time
s and the time of the Caesars tended to be completely ignored or even whitewashed.

  This distorted and romanticized view of the Mediterranean and its past, which ignored the savagery and fear of the past millennium, was particularly characteristic of writers of Anglo-Saxon origin, with whom there was the added problem of religious antagonism. With the Reformation, English-speakers tended to take an increasingly negative view of medieval Europe and her civilization – and a correspondingly positive view of Europe’s enemies and adversaries. This process was exacerbated by the Enlightenment, during which time the term “Dark Age” came to be widely applied to European history after the fall of Rome and before the fifteenth century Renaissance. Medieval Spain, which from the fourteenth century possessed its own and particularly egregious version of the Inquisition, became the focus of Enlightenment Europe’s loathing. The Spaniards, who had fought a very long war against the Iberian Muslims, were increasingly seen as ignorant savages, whereas their Muslim opponents fared much better.