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The Siege of Christendom: Threatens all our civilization again.
The first five centuries, extending from the Incarnation to the conversion of Clovis and the establishment of Catholic Gaul, the end of the five centuries during which all our ancestry turned from Paganism to Catholicism and during which the Empire was baptized, were centuries in which we suffered great damage: disorder, barbarism threatening our race, the fall of the arts, of great verse and of high unified administration, the worsening of roads, much loss
It is a period of five centuries-the 6th,7th,8th,9th and 10th-which have been commonly called the “The Dark Ages,” but which may more properly be called “The Siege of Christendom.”
It was the period during which the Graeco-Roman Empire, already transformed by Catholicism, fell into peril of destruction at the hands of exterior enemies.
It was assaulted from the north, from the east, and from the southeast in two separate fashions. Hordes of wholly pagan barbarians, some issuing from Scandinavia, many Mongols, many Slavs, fiercely thrust at the boundaries of Christendom with the hope of looting it as their prey and therefore ruining it.
These between them formed the eastern attack, coming from the districts we call today Sweden and Norway and Denmark, Poland and the Russian plains, Hungary and the Danube valley.
The struggle against these enemies of the Christian name and culture, who so nearly overwhelmed us, was at last successful.
The siege was raised, we carried the influence of civilization outward among those who had been our savage opponents, and we ended by taming them until they were incorporated into a new and expanded Christian civilization.
That was the work of the Christian Church in the West, the Church under the direct authority of the Western Patriarch at Rome (who is also universal primate) and of the Latin liturgy.
What happened on the southeast was quite different. There, that is, against the Greek-speaking part of the Empire, directly ruled from Constantinople, the attack took the strange form of a sudden enthusiastic movement, which was both religious and military.
It took the form of a swarm of light desert cavalry riding out from the sands of Arabia and swooping down on Greek-speaking and Greek-administered civilizations, Syria (including Palestine) and Mesopotamia, Egypt, and then, from Egypt, following up all along the southern shores of the Mediterranean between the sea and the Sahara.
It reached the Atlantic itself in Morocco, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and passed northward, overran Spain and even crossed the Pyrenees.
To these mountains it was beaten back after its first northern extreme had been reached in the middle of France.
This attack from the southeast was the Mohammedan attack, not pagan as was the other to the north, not savage, but from the beginning, incorporating in its conquest all the elements of civilization, developing a high literature of its own, and turning at last from a heresy, which it was in its beginnings, to what was virtually a new religion and a new type of Society-Islam.
In the south, however, the siege of Christendom by its enemies was successful. It was never raised.
It was undertaken at first by very small numbers, but under the inspiration of a religious zeal –Mohammedanism-and with the exceptional opportunity they had, the attackers took over that part of Christendom, the Greek part, which they attacked.
They took over its culture, its arts, its buildings, its general social structure, its land survey (on which the taxes were based) and all the rest of it.
But the attackers imposed their new heresy which gradually became a new religion and which held power over government and society wherever the attack broke our eastern siege-line and occupied Christian territory.
The result was a complete transformation of society which rapidly grew into a violent contrast between the Orient and Europe.
Mohammedanism planted itself firmly not only throughout Syria but all along North Africa and even into Spain, and overflowed vigorously into Asia eastward.
The opportunity for the attack on this sector was exceptional. The high Greek civilization centralized in Constantinople and its wealthy Imperial Court, defended by highly trained professional army, possessing great revenues as well, might have seemed superficially far better able to resists assaults than was Western Europe, with its conditions already half-barbaric through the long
material decline, with its lack of regular armies and its divisions into half-independent local groups.
But as a fact the blow delivered against the Greeks, the Christendom of the southeast, cracked the shell and had more immediate and more profound consequences than the mere raids of the east and north.
The opportunities given for the attack from the southeast were fourfold.
First, debt was universal (as it is with us today); secondly, taxes were very heavy; thirdly, a large proportion of the population were slaves (as it is with us today); fourthly, both law and theology, that is, both social practice and religious rules had become more complex than the masses could follow.
A new reforming enthusiasm invading the Empire could take advantage of all these four weaknesses: it could promise the indebted farmer, the indebted municipal authority, the wiping out of their debts; it could promise the heavily burdened small taxpayer relief from his burden; it could promise freedom to the slave and it could promise a simple-a far too simple-new set of rules for Society and a new set of practices in religion.
It was this forth appeal, the appeal to simplification, especially to simplification of religion and morals, which had the greatest force.
It worked in Syria and Egypt at that moment just as it worked nine centuries later in the West during the Reformation.
This intense enthusiasm for reform arose almost wholly from the personal driving-power of one man, an Arab camel driver called Mohammed.
Like all the Arabs around him in that desert region outside the jurisdiction of the Christian Empire under Constantinople, he was born a pagan. But having wandered far afield he was deeply stirred by the religious systems, Christian and Jewish, which he came across in the civilized world.
Certain main tenets appealed to him intensely; he summed them up in a body of doctrine which remained his own.
He became passionately attached to the idea of the personnel omnipotent God, the creator of all things, to His justice and His mercy, to the corresponding double fate of mankind, Heaven or Hell, to the reality of the world of good, as well as of evil, spirits, to the resurrection and immortality of human beings.
All this group of simple fundamental Catholic doctrine he not only accepted but was permeated by. He was struck with awe at the contemplation of Christ and regarded Our Lord as the very first of the moral teachers and renovators of the spiritual life. And he paid deep veneration to Our Lady.
But a priesthood (which to his mind was a useless social complexity), the whole sacramental system which went with a priesthood, and that central essential pillar of Christendom, the Mass, he rejected altogether.
He also rejected Baptism, retaining or accepting circumcision not only as a Jewish rite but as common among his own people. He allowed a relaxed sexual morality, concubinage and a plurality of legitimate wives, as also very easy divorce.
We must presume that this powerful zealot was sincere, that he felt vouchsafed within him a divine revelation and a mission to spread it by his burning enthusiasm.
He felt himself to be in the line of the greater prophets, the last and the greatest of them all. There may have been an element of the charlatan and deceiver about him, as his enemies’ believed in part.
But for the main, for his right to his mission and his claim to be the supreme prophet of God we must believe that he was sincere. At any rate the band of men whom he convinced and gathered around him established a new heresy (for it was essentially a Christian heresy at first, though arising just outside the boundaries of Christendom) {and} fiercely propagated it by arms-a spirit which strongly appealed to the Arab temper.
The seed took vigorous root, and shortly after Mohammed’s death the band of mounted warriors, burning to spread the intense doctrine he had framed for them, burst through the confines of civilization where the desert meets the cultivated land east of Jordan.
Their success was amazing.
They took Damascus, which is the key of all the Near East, and in the valley of the Yarmuk they defeated the regular Christian Byzantine Army sent against them, though it vastly exceeded them in numbers.
They swept over Syria and Mesopotamia, organizing their new power everywhere, offering freedom to the slaves and the debtors, and relief to the taxpayer wherever these would accept the religion of Mohammed.
And the simplicity of the religion powerfully aided their effort.
Men desiring freedom from thralldom and from debt and from the weight of the imposts, joined them everywhere in great numbers.
There arose a governing Mohammedan nucleus which alone had armed power and which vastly exceeded in number the original cavalcade that had set out from the Arabian sands.
The great majority of the population remained, of course, still attached more or less directly to their Catholic traditions or those of their local heresies.; their practices of liturgy were tolerated by the new masters, but they no longer had any political power and all the armament was in the hands of those who were now their superiors.
The system of Mohammedan government over great regions of Christian culture spread with amazing rapidity; it swamped Egypt, using henceforth the revenues of the great wealth in the Delta and the Valley of the Nile.
It passed over and dominated the Greek-speaking , Punic-speaking and Latin-speaking cities of the North African shore lying between the Mediterranean and the desert.
The triumphant invasion did not cease even when it reached the Atlantic; it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, it overran the Spanish peninsula, it crossed the Pyrenees and attempted to do to Western Christendom what it had done to Eastern.
The great wave broke when its crest had reached the center of Gaul.
In a vast battle fought halfway between Tours and Poitiers the Christians under the leadership of one of the wealthiest and greatest of the Gallo-Roman families mixed with German blood-the family from which Charlemagne was to come- threw back the invasion to the Pyrenees.
But beyond the Pyrenees this strange new Arabian thing , though a small minority in numbers, was supreme over government and arms.
The pace of that expansion was so astonishing as to be still claimed by the Mohammedans as miraculous and as proof of their prophet’s divine mission.
The original battle of Yarmuk, when the first Byzantine army had been astonished into sudden defeat at the hands of quite unexpected foes, took place in 634.
The battle between Tours and Poitiers in the heart of France was fought in 732. Not a hundred years, little more than a long lifetime, had sufficed for this prodigious expansion.
The siege of Christendom on this side , to the southeast and the south, had indeed succeeded; save Spain itself, it was never raised.
On the contrary, the pressure against Christendom in the east was to remain continuous and at last to threaten all our civilization again.
The Mohammedan was at the gates of Vienna less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Had he taken Vienna, he would have reached the Rhine.
From The Foundation of Christendom by H. Belloc,
Europe's Largest Muslim Population by Country
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