The Impact of Islam

by Emmet Scott

  Another author, again, generally unknown in the West, writes,

  “… the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula accomplished by the Turks over the course of about two centuries caused the incalculable ruin of material goods, countless massacres, the enslavement and exile of a great part of the population — in a word, a general and protracted decline of productivity, as was the case with Asia Minor after it was occupied by the same invaders. This decline in productivity is all the more striking when one recalls that in the mid-fourteenth century, as the Ottomans were gaining a foothold on the peninsula, the States that existed there — Byzantium, Bulgaria and Serbia — had already reached a rather high level of economic and cultural development....The campaigns of Mourad II (1421-1451) and especially those of his successor, Mahomet II (1451-1481) in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania and in the Byzantine princedom of the Peloponnesus, were of a particularly devastating character. During the campaign that the Turks launched in Serbia in 1455-1456, Belgrade, Novo-Bardo and other towns were to a great extent destroyed. The invasion of the Turks in Albania during the summer of 1459 caused enormous havoc. According to the account of it written by Kritobulos, the invaders destroyed the entire harvest and leveled the fortified towns that they had captured. The country was afflicted with further devastation in 1466 when the Albanians, after putting up heroic resistance, had to withdraw into the most inaccessible regions, from which they continued the struggle. Many cities were likewise ruined during the course of the campaign led by Mahomet II in 1463 against Bosnia — among them Yaytz, the capital of the Kingdom of Bosnia...But it was the Peloponnesus that suffered most from the Turkish invasions. It was invaded in 1446 by the armies of Murad II, which destroyed a great number of places and took thousands of prisoners. Twelve years later, during the summer of 1458, the Balkan Peninsula was invaded by an enormous Turkish army under the command of Mahomet II and his first lieutenant Mahmoud Pasha. After a siege that lasted four months, Corinth fell into enemy hands. Its walls were razed, and many places that the sultan considered useless were destroyed. The work by Kritobulos contains an account of the Ottoman campaigns, which clearly shows us the vast destruction caused by the invaders in these regions. Two years later another Turkish army burst into the Peloponnesus. This time Gardiki and several other places were ruined. Finally, in 1464, for the third time, the destructive rage of the invaders was aimed at the Peloponnesus. That was when the Ottomans battled the Venetians and leveled the city of Argos to its foundations.”[5]

  The wars of conquest were only the beginning of sorrows for the peoples of the region. From then on they must endure the hardships of life as dhimmis. In practice, their condition was little better than that of slaves. Indeed, in many respects it was considerably worse: For whereas a slave was property, and therefore of some value to someone (it was in the owner’s interest to keep the slave reasonably well-fed and clothed), the dhimmi Christian might be exploited and ill-used by any Muslim he encountered. As in other Muslim-dominated lands, so it was in the Ottoman territories. Since a Christian’s testimony carried no legal weight when opposed to that of a Muslim, even trivial disagreements between Christian and Muslim neighbours might rapidly escalate into an issue which could cost the Christian his property and his life. Furthermore, Christian women and girls, especially attractive ones, stood in perpetual danger of the unwanted and potentially catastrophic attention of Muslim neighbours and officials. And the kidnap and forcible marriage of Christian women and girls was an ongoing crucifixion endured by dhimmi communities and the Balkans for centuries.

  The Ottoman view of the Christian peoples of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, Wallachia and Hungary was that of an endlessly exploitable resource. Their best sons were taken by force and trained as Muslim warriors and their most attractive women frequently torn from their families, and often their husbands, to be enjoyed by the sultan, as well as by minor officials and even by ordinary Muslims. And the rest of the population was crushed under an intolerable weight of taxation, one which kept the whole region in a state of perpetual economic stagnation and grinding poverty. Devastating famines were frequent occurrences.

  In view of all this, the reader will not be surprised to learn that the Turks made little or no effort to convert their Christian subjects to Islam: indeed, they did not even want them to convert. For as soon as a household or village became Muslim it was cut-off as an exploitable resource: The jizya tax ceased, and the communities’ sons and daughters were no longer available for use and abuse. Equally unsurprisingly, however, there were significant numbers of converts, and even more who went through a sham conversion: Whole families and communities in the Balkans, but especially in Albania and Bosnia, made public professions of conversion to Islam, often posing as Muslims for several generations, whilst keeping alive the family knowledge that they were not “real” Muslims. This of course carried its own dangers, since having been recognized as Muslims, any perceived “apostasy” to Christianity carried the death penalty. Yet it was a risk many Christian families were willing to take, if it could ease the burden of their lives under the Ottomans.

  Fig. 10. Vlad Tepes, “The Impaler”

  Vlad has become notorious for his impalement of victims, which is now widely viewed as an example of medieval European barbarism. However, the punishment was unknown in Europe before Vlad’s time, and he learned it from the Turks, with whom he spent several years in his youth as a hostage.

  For the Christians of the Balkans who refused to renounce their faith – the vast majority – life was a perpetual crucifixion. From various parts we hear of the desperate measures taken by villagers and peasants (and townsfolk) to prevent the kidnap of their sons and daughters. In Herzegovina and other areas, for example, boys would frequently have their fingers cut off by family members to make them useless as soldiers of the sultan.[6] Girls, on the other hand, who could be taken into the sexual slavery of the harem, or raped before their marriage in a Turkish version of droit de Signeur, were frequently tattooed on their hands with a cross – a symbol anathema to the Muslims which often prevented their abduction.

  Fig. 11. Areas of Europe affected by Muslim slave-raiding between the 14th and 18th centuries

  From Greece, accounts survive of the horrific tortures undergone by priests and monks at the hands of the Ottoman soldiery; even to the extent of mutilation involving the removal of jaws and cheek bones with a saw and skinning prisoners alive.[7]

  The Turks conquered the Balkan lands piecemeal: one relatively small territory at a time was gobbled up in the endless annual campaigns of conquest waged by the sultans against the infidel. One feature of Turkish rule, particularly in the more outlying regions, was the complete destruction of all Christian places of worship. Thus in Hungary, in Croatia, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in northern Serbia, hardly a single medieval Christian church survives.

  Along with the destruction of churches came a vicious economic exploitation, and this pertained even to regions deep within Ottoman territory. It is a well-recognized fact that the centuries of Ottoman rule were ones of economic stagnation and depression. There was little or no investment by the sultans in Christian territories; no effort at all was made to encourage existing industries or to set up new ones. Even agriculture was neglected, and large tracts of formerly productive land frequently fell into disuse, to be overgrown with weeds and brush. Medieval towns and villages of the Balkans were in danger of going the same way as the Roman cities of the Middle East and North Africa. All this was an inevitable consequence of Islamic attitudes, which themselves grew from the idea that “the faithful” had a right to subsist off the wealth and work of the infidel. Such predatory and parasitic attitudes positively discouraged wealth creation and hard work. The more wealth one created, the more would be confiscated by the Ottoman state.

  But there was one form of economic activity which did flourish under the Ottomans: the slave trade. Indeed, the growth of Ottoman power in the fourteenth ce
ntury signaled a massive revival of the slave trade in Europe and elsewhere. The Ottomans themselves acquired European slaves from the territories under their control and more especially from border regions, which were raided incessantly. But Christian slaves were also now acquired from much further afield. Throughout North Africa Muslim rulers sent out fleets of raiders to scour the coasts of southern Europe for captives, whilst in eastern Europe Islamicized Tartars from the Crimea (the Khanate of Crimea) and from present-day Khazakhstan and eastern Russia (the Nogai Horde) launched incessant raids against Russian and Lithuanian/Polish peasant communities on a vast front.

  The worst of the raiding in Russia occurred from 1441 onwards, when the Crimea, or Crimean Khanate (a kingdom much larger than the Crimean Peninsula), became independent. According to historian Alan Fisher, up to three million Slavic peasants were enslaved by Tartar raiders operating from the Crimea between 1441 and 1774, when the Russians conquered the territory.[8] Almost all of these were sold into the Ottoman Empire as eunuchs, harem women and galley slaves. These raids, virtually unknown amongst Westerners, are recognized by historians as playing an enormous role in retarding Russia's economic and cultural development. They largely prevented the settlement and peopling of the Ukrainian steppe lands, a vast area which was eventually to become the bread basket of Russia and to support a large segment of the Russian population.

  The slave-raids occurred on an annual basis, and reading contemporary accounts of them is harrowing. Consider for example the words of S. Herberstein, ambassador from Emperor Charles V to Muscovy in the 1520s, when he describes Mehmet Ghirey’s slave-hunting expedition of 1521:

  “He took with him from Muscovy so great a multitude of captives as would scarcely be considered credible; they say the number exceeded eight hundred thousand, part of whom he sold in Kaffa to theTurks, and part he slew. The old and infirmed men, who will not fetch much at a sale, are given up to the Tatar youths, either to be stoned, or to be thrown into the sea, or to be killed by any sort of death they might please.”[9]

  Mikhalon the Lithuanian wrote around 1550 in his book De moribus Tatarorum Lituanorum et Moscorum, “The Crimean Tatars have much more slaves than livestock. Therefore they supply them also to other lands. Many ships loaded with arms, clothes and horses came to them one after another from beyond the Pontus and from Asia, and left always from them with slaves. … So these plunderers always are in possession not only of slaves for trade with other people but also have slaves for their own estates and to satisfy at home their cruelty and waywardness. In fact we often find among these unfortunate people very strong men, who, if not castrated, are branded on the forehead or on the cheek, and are tormented by day at work and by night in dungeons.”[10]

  In the words of Daniel Pipes, “The Crimean Khanate existed as a slave-hunting outpost of the Ottoman empire. Its whole economy was based on slave raids and slave trade. As one scholar points out in his work The Crimean Tatars and their Russian captive Slaves, ‘From the beginning of the 16th century until the end of 17th century the Crimean Tatar raider bands made almost annual forays into agricultural Slavic lands searching for captives to sell as slaves … the slave trade was the most important basis for the Crimean Tatar economy in the 16th and 17th centuries. During these centuries, the Crimean Khanate remained the main supplier of Slavic slaves, almost all of which were captured in southern Poland or Muscovite Russia, and brought back to the Crimea by their raiders. Most of their raids seemed neither to have had any military purpose, nor politico-territorial ambitions. The taking of captives and the selling them as slaves for the Crimean Tatars was purely an ‘economic’ activity. R. Hellie refers to the Crimean Tatar’s raiding activities as their ‘industry’.... “Slave raiding into Muscovy reached crisis proportions after 1475, when the Ottomans took over the Black Sea slave trade from the Genoese and the Crimean began slave raiding as a major industry, especially between 1514 and 1654....The sale of slaves brought great profit to the Crimean raiders, because they were in great demand from the Ottoman Empire.’”[11]

  The above-quoted writer continues: “The Crimean raiders have to hand over ten percent of their human booty to the government as a kind of custom tax at the frontier of the Crimean Khanate. Most captives were usually driven to Kaffa, the largest slave market of the Crimea under the direct administration of the Ottoman Empire, and were sold there to the slave merchants. ... Nearly seventy percent of the slaves sold in Kaffa were driven onto ships and dispatched to Istanbul. ... When they arrived, the Ottoman officials first examined the new ‘cargos’ and chose the best slaves: the most beautiful women for the sultan's harem, the most handsome and the strongest men for his palace service. The remaining ones were purchased either by the government for navy, or by the slave merchants of Istanbul...”

  Pipes comments: “It is estimated that c.1,000,000 Poles were captured by the Tatar slave-hunters to be sold into Moslem slavery and a corresponding number of Russians. The problem of slave hunting was so acute and desperate for the Russian state that there existed a special 'Ministry of Ransom' and a special permanent tax was collected to redeem Slavic slaves from the Tatar/Turkish captivity whose horrors are hard to imagine today for a civilized person that is rarely confronted with contemporary historical sources and grim realities.”[12]

  Daniel Pipes, like Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom, is a critic of Islam; yet, as with them, none of the facts he cites is controversial or has been countered by politically-correct historians. These simply downplay the same material or decline to mention it altogether. As might be imagined, the activities of the Crimean and Nogai slave-raiders had a devastating effect on Russian society and its economic development. For one thing, it long prevented the exploitation of the immensely fertile grasslands of the Ukraine. These vast territories were known simply as the “Waste Lands” during this period. Even regions to the north of the Ukraine, in the forested (and farmed) lands of Muscovy proper, had to be partially evacuated because of the slave-raids. Instead of utilizing their energies to improving agriculture, the Russians had to spend three centuries creating defensive works and training peasants in the use of arms. Normal economic activity only proceeded southwards in the wake of painfully slow military operations. It was the threat posed by the Muslim slavers which gave rise to the Cossacks, tribes of Slavic peasants trained in horsemanship, who formed a vanguard in the fight against the Tartars and Turks. As the Cossacks pushed southwards, so did farming and settlement.

  The long struggle between the Slavs and the Islamic predators who preyed on them was to have a long-lasting effect on the character of the Russian people, a topic we shall examine presently.

  Another vast new “theater” of the slave-trade with the Ottomans opened during the fourteenth century in the Mediterranean. In this region of course Muslim slave-raiding had never really ceased after its high-point in the tenth century, when fleets of Saracen pirates scoured the trade-routes in search of Christian victims. After the Genoese and Pisans had retaken several of the Mediterranean islands from the Arabs, including Sardinia in 1016 and Corsica shortly thereafter, Saracen piracy slackened. It was dealt a further blow by the Norman conquest of Sicily in 1091. Yet none of these things, even the possession of large and well-armed fleets by the Genoese and the Venetians, could entirely free the Mediterranean from Muslim pirates. Indeed, so serious had the problem again become in the fourteenth century that the Genoese were compelled to appeal to the French for assistance in clearing the seas of this pestilence. The “crusade” which the French launched in 1390 against the pirates of Mahdia in Tunisia was, as we have already mentioned, an abject failure, and their activities continued unabated in the years that followed.

  Things in fact took a turn for the worse in the sixteenth century when the whole of North Africa came under the sovereignty of Ottoman Empire, either as directly administered provinces or as autonomous dependencies. Spurred by the demand for white-skinned slaves in the Ottoman pro
vinces of the east, North African pirates intensified their activities, capturing thousands of ships and rendering, within a few decades, long stretches of coast in Spain and Italy almost completely uninhabited. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, it is estimated that the Barbary pirates captured and enslaved anything between 800,000 to 1.25 million Europeans.[13] Their predation extended throughout the Mediterranean south along West Africa and even, on one occasion at least, South America. They also on occasion raided far into the North Atlantic, taking slaves from the coasts of France, the Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, and even Iceland. But their main theater of operation was the western Mediterranean, where islands such as Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearics suffered intensely. And their raids also inflicted severe damage upon coastal towns and villages in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Most of the captives were sold in the slave markets of North Africa and the Ottoman heartlands in Constantinople and Anatolia.