The History of Jihad- From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE JIHAD ADVANCES

  INTO EUROPE

  Jihad in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

  I. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

  The Coming of the Ottomans

  No sooner had the last Crusader state in the Holy Land been extinguished than the Muslims began to move toward realizing Saladin’s aspiration to take the jihad back to the homes of the Crusaders. The Seljuk sultanate of Rum had been weakened by the Crusades and a Mongol invasion, and ultimately dissolved into a group of smaller Turkish states in Asia Minor. The chieftain of one of these, a warrior named Osman, began conducting jihad raids into Byzantine territory. Osman was a fiercely pious Muslim. Legend had it that after he spent one night devoutly reading the Qur’an instead of sleeping, an angel came to him with a message from Allah: “Since thou hast read my eternal word with so great respect, thy children and the children of thy children shall be honoured from generation to generation.”1

  Osman began to win those honors in 1301, just ten years after the Muslim conquest of the last of the Crusader states, when his jihadis routed a Byzantine force at Bapheus, near Nicaea. Osman, motivated by the Islamic doctrine that land once ruled by Muslims belonged by right to Islam forever (succinctly stated in the Qur’an in the command “drive them out from where they drove you out,” 2:191), was determined to recapture Nicaea itself, which had been the capital of the sultanate of Rum but had been retaken by the Byzantines in 1147.2

  The great warrior did not, however, realize that aspiration before he died in 1324. His successor, Orkhan, succeeded in conquering Nicaea in 1331, and continued Osman’s work of consolidating the Turkish states of Asia Minor under his rule. The resulting sultanate and future caliphate and empire bore the name of its first leader, Osman, and became known in English as the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were able to gain control over the other small Turkish states of the region because, it was said, of their indefatigable commitment to jihad.3 Their rigor was reinforced by Islamic scholars of the day such as Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), who declared that a Muslim ruler who did not enforce all the precepts of Sharia forfeited his right to rule.4 The Ottomans scrupulously avoided such challenges to their authority.

  Disunity

  In 1332, when King Philip VI of France was considering mounting a new Crusade, a German priest named Brocardus wrote to warn him about the Assassins:

  The Assassins…are to be cursed and fled. They sell themselves, are thirsty for human blood, kill the innocent for a price, and care nothing for either life or salvation. Like the devil, they transfigure themselves into angels of light, by imitating the gestures, garments, languages, customs and acts of various nations and peoples; thus, hidden in sheep’s clothing, they suffer death as soon as they are recognized.… So execrable is their profession, and so abominated by all, that they conceal their own names as much as they can. I therefore know only one single remedy for the safeguarding and protection of the king, that in all the royal household, for whatever service, however small or brief or mean, none should be admitted, save those whose country, place, lineage, condition and person are certainly, fully and clearly known.5

  But a much greater threat to the Christians came from within. The Muslims were aided in their jihad, as jihadis so often were throughout the history of Islam, by shortsighted Christians. Then, as now, business considerations frequently overrode concern among Christians about what the jihadis were doing. In 1335, the Republic of Ragusa concluded a commercial treaty with the Ottomans, giving the people of Ragusa the right to market their wares within Ottoman domains and to sail the seas without worrying about Ottoman pirates. The Sultan could not write, so he marked the treaty with his thumbprint.6 Four years later, the Byzantine emperor Andronicus III Paleologus sent the monk Barlaam, who had been born in Italy, to Avignon to meet Pope Benedict XII and appeal to him for an ecumenical council to heal the schism between the churches, and for a new Crusade against the Ottomans.

  “Most holy father,” said Barlaam to Benedict, “the emperor is not less desirous than yourself of a union between the two churches: but in this delicate transaction, he is obliged to respect his own dignity and the prejudices of his subjects. The ways of union are twofold; force and persuasion.” Force, he said, had been tried when the Latins “subdued the empire, without subduing the minds, of the Greeks,” and at the supposed reunion Council of Lyons in 1274, where the Byzantines had not had a say. Barlaam advised that “a well-chosen legate should be sent into Greece, to convene the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; and, with their aid, to prepare a free and universal synod.” He reminded the pope that “the empire is assaulted and endangered by the Turks, who have occupied four of the greatest cities of Anatolia. The Christian inhabitants have expressed a wish of returning to their allegiance and religion; but the forces and revenues of the emperor are insufficient for their deliverance: and the Roman legate must be accompanied, or preceded, by an army of Franks, to expel the infidels, and open a way to the holy sepulchre.”7

  Pope Benedict was unmoved. He sent back a haughty refusal, insultingly addressing the emperor of the Romans as the “moderator of the Greeks,” and the Eastern patriarchs as “the persons who style themselves the patriarchs of the Eastern churches.”8 He appeared thoroughly untroubled by the prospect of the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and the advance of the jihad into Europe. Not until the days of Pope Francis would the See of Rome have an occupant more useful to the jihad force than Benedict XII.

  There was never any shortage of blinkered Christians. In the early fourteenth century, the Byzantine emperor Andronicus II hired a corps of Catalan mercenaries; the Byzantines had engaged mercenaries for centuries, with varying degrees of success. This time, it was an unmitigated disaster: the Catalan mercenaries quarreled with their Byzantine employers, caused unrest in Constantinople, and finally turned openly against them, asking the Turks—the people they had come to fight—for help in creating their own state at Gallipoli, on the European side of the Hellespont.9

  The Ottomans, of course, were only too happy to help the ostensibly Christian Catalans and quickly established substantial forces in Thrace and Macedonia. The leader of this detachment, Halil, agreed to withdraw, but then reneged when the Byzantines demanded that his forces surrender the booty they had seized in Thrace. In an initial clash, Halil and his jihadis soundly defeated the forces of Byzantine emperor Michael IX Paleologus, who had to flee for his life, leaving behind his imperial helmet, which Halil promptly donned to mock the great emperor of the Romans.10 Finally Michael was able to summon a force of Serbians that drove Halil and his men from Europe, only to have one of his successors invite the Turks back several decades later.

  Allying with the Jihad

  In 1345, the Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus asked for help from the Turks amid a dynastic dispute that had escalated into a full-scale civil war. Orkhan agreed to help if John gave him his daughter, Theodora, in marriage. Expediency swept away all considerations of outraged pride and of the travesty of a Christian princess’ being given in marriage to a non-Christian sovereign; John either had to agree or give up his claim to the imperial throne, and he wasn’t about to do that.

  Gibbon described the bizarre scene as the daughter of the Christian emperor was given in marriage to a warrior king whose coreligionists had been trying to destroy that Christian empire for nearly seven hundred years:

  A body of Turkish cavalry attended the ambassadors, who disembarked from thirty vessels, before his camp of Selybria. A stately pavilion was erected, in which the empress Irene passed the night with her daughters. In the morning, Theodora ascended a throne, which was surrounded with curtains of silk and gold: the troops were under arms; but the emperor alone was on horseback. At a signal the curtains were suddenly withdrawn to disclose the bride, or the victim, encircled by kneeling eunuchs and hymeneal torches: the sound of flu
tes and trumpets proclaimed the joyful event; and her pretended happiness was the theme of the nuptial song, which was chanted by such poets as the age could produce.

  Without the rites of the church, Theodora was delivered to her barbarous lord: but it had been stipulated, that she should preserve her religion in the harem of Bursa; and her father celebrates her charity and devotion in this ambiguous situation.

  After his peaceful establishment on the throne of Constantinople, the Greek emperor visited his Turkish ally, who with four sons, by various wives, expected him at Scutari, on the Asiatic shore. The two princes partook, with seeming cordiality, of the pleasures of the banquet and the chase; and Theodora was permitted to repass the Bosphorus, and to enjoy some days in the society of her mother.11

  Belying this pleasant scene, Orkhan had insisted that his treaty with the Byzantines should allow him to sell his prisoners of war as slaves in Constantinople. Gibbon recounted: “A naked crowd of Christians of both sexes and every age, of priests and monks, of matrons and virgins, was exposed in the public market; the whip was frequently used to quicken the charity of redemption; and the indigent Greeks deplored the fate of their brethren, who were led away to the worst evils of temporal and spiritual bondage.”12

  Their fate was a more reliable indication of what John VI Cantacuzenus had gotten into than the wedding banquet. Ottoman warriors of jihad soon arrived in Europe to help John, crossing over the Dardanelles in 1348 and occupying Gallipoli in 1354. But how much the cordial scene at the wedding ran contrary to reality quickly became apparent. When Genoa went to war with the Byzantines soon after the treaty between John and Orkhan was concluded, Orkhan switched sides without hesitation and aided the Genoese against the Byzantines.13 The warriors of jihad, after all, had been trying to conquer the Byzantine empire since 711; if the Genoese were working to weaken the Byzantines, the jihadis could count them as friends.

  The Genoese and Venetians concluded treaties with the Byzantines in 1355. The treaties included the promise that they would defend the Christian empire against its enemies, but specifically exempted “Morat Bey and his Turks,” that is, Murad, Orkhan’s son and the effective ruler of the sultanate during his father’s dotage.14 Genoa and Venice had business interests with the Ottomans that precluded their going to war with them. Genoa even entered into a pact of friendship with “the magnificent and powerful lord of lords, Moratibei.”15 Yet consistency was not the Genoese’s strong suit. Both Genoa and Venice tried to play both sides against each other; in 1356, they joined an alliance “against that Turk, son of unrighteousness and evil, and enemy of the Holy Cross, Morat Bey and his sect, who are attempting so grievously to attack the Christian race.”16

  It was rare for the Christians of the West to express such concerns. Nor did they do much to stop Murad from attacking “the Christian race.” In 1357, jihadis under Murad’s command captured the imposing Byzantine fortress of Adrianople, the third most important city in the Byzantine Empire, after Constantinople and Thessalonica.

  That same year, pirates kidnapped the son of Orkhan and Theodora. Demonstrating his power over the Byzantines, Orkhan ordered the emperor John V Paleologus to rescue him personally. John duly besieged Phocaea on the west coast of Asia Minor, where the pirates were holding the young man, but ultimately the troops under John’s command refused to continue the siege, and the emperor had to report shamefacedly to Orkhan that he could not complete the task he had been ordered to do.17

  The Janissaries

  With the Ottomans now ruling over a substantial population of Christians, in 1359, Murad founded the janissary corps, a crack force of young men who were seized as boys from their Christian families, enslaved, and forcibly converted to Islam. This was the seizure and enslavement of twenty percent of the Christian children from predominantly Christian areas of the Ottoman Empire. These boys, once seized from their families, were given the choice of Islam or death. Those who chose Islam were, after rigorous training, enrolled in the janissary corps, the emperor’s crack troops.

  All of this was in accord with Islamic law. It was Murad’s vizier, or chief minister, who reminded him that the Qur’an entitled him to take twenty percent of the spoils of war that the Muslims had won: “And know that anything you obtain of war booty, then indeed, for Allah is one fifth of it and for the Messenger and for near relatives and the orphans, the needy, and the traveler, if you have believed in Allah and in that which We sent down to Our Servant on the day of criterion, the day when the two armies met. And Allah, over all things, is competent.” (8:41) Who stood in the place of Allah and his Messenger but the caliph? And the twenty percent of the spoils meant that Murad and the Muslims were entitled to the labors of twenty percent of the young Christian boys in the lands they had conquered.

  Gibbon recorded that the vizier suggested that “the duty might easily be levied, if vigilant officers were stationed in Gallipoli, to watch the passage, and to select for his use the stoutest and most beautiful of the Christian youth.”18 Murad liked the idea. “The advice was followed: the edict was proclaimed; many thousands of the European captives were educated in religion and arms; and the new militia was consecrated and named by a celebrated dervish. Standing in the front of their ranks, he stretched the sleeve of his gown over the head of the foremost soldier, and his blessing was delivered in these words: ‘Let them be called [Yengi cheri, or new soldiers]; may their countenance be ever bright! their hand victorious! their sword keen! may their spear always hang over the heads of their enemies! and wheresoever they go, may they return with a white face!’”19 “Yengi cheri” became “janissaries” in the West.

  Some Christian families actually welcomed the seizure of their children, for this at least was a way out of the miserable life of the dhimmi and a chance to advance in Ottoman society. Nevertheless, Godfrey Goodwin, historian of the janissary corps, painted a romanticized but still inescapably grim picture of the recruitment of these young Christians:

  Whatever ambitions families might or might not have, it was an unhappy day when the troops trudged into the village, hungry and thirsty. The priest was ready with his baptismal rolls and so were the boys with their fathers; in theory mothers and sisters were left to weep at home. Then each of the recruits had to be examined both physically and mentally.… Once the selection process was completed, the roll was drawn up in duplicate.… Now was the time for tears and some farewells must have been poignant but the boys tramped the dusty roads side by side with friends and all had the excitement of starting out on an adventure. They could dream of promotion and fortune while the peasants returned to their fields, doubtless to weep longer than their sons.20

  Gibbon noted what a terrifying force was thereby created:

  Such was the origin of these haughty troops, the terror of the nations, and sometimes of the sultans themselves. Their valour has declined, their discipline is relaxed, and their tumultuary array is incapable of contending with the order and weapons of modern tactics; but at the time of their institution, they possessed a decisive superiority in war; since a regular body of infantry, in constant exercise and pay, was not maintained by any of the princes of Christendom.21

  At first these boys were torn from their homes and families only at irregular intervals—sometimes every seven years and sometimes every four—but after some time, the devshirme became an annual event.22 By the time it ended, in the late seventeenth century, around two hundred thousand boys had been enslaved in this manner.23

  The janissaries became the Ottoman Empire’s most formidable warriors against Christianity. The collection of boys for this corps in some places became an annual event: Christian fathers were forced to appear in the town squares with their sons; the Muslims took the strongest and brightest young men, who never saw their homes again unless they happened to be part of a Muslim fighting force sent to that area.

  The Christians in the West, if they knew about this at all, were unmoved either by the
devshirme or by the ongoing plight of the Christians in the East. For all too many, the Great Schism overrode all other considerations and militated against a sense of perspective. Even the great Renaissance scholar and poet Petrarch wrote in the 1360s to Pope Urban V: “The Osmanlis are merely enemies, but the schismatic Greeks are worse than enemies.”24

  And so the Muslims were in Europe to stay, and they continued their jihad to expand their European domains. With Europe disunited and distracted, and the Byzantines essentially their vassals, they were able to seize ever-larger tracts of European land: Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Croatia, and more.

  The Vassal Byzantine Emperors

  In 1362 in Adrianople, which he renamed Edirne, Murad proclaimed himself the caliph of all the Muslims. It would take over a century for this claim to gain significant traction, but ultimately the Ottoman caliphate would be the last one to command the allegiance of a significant percentage of Muslims worldwide.

  Like Orkhan before him, Murad delighted in reminding John V Paleologus of his vassal status. When John’s son Andronicus formed an alliance with Murad’s son Sauzes (Gibbon said they had “an intimate and guilty friendship”) and both rebelled against their fathers, Murad unhesitatingly had Sauzes blinded and demanded that John do the same with Andronicus.25 The emperor, said Gibbon, “trembled and obeyed,” but ensured that the operation was performed so ineptly that Andronicus ended up blind in only one eye.26