The Saracens (613 On)
The name Saracen applied
originally to nomadic desert peoples from the area stretching from modern Syria
to Saudi Arabia.
In broader usage the name applied to all Arabs of the Middle Ages. These
desert nomads erupted suddenly in the seventh century and established a
far-reaching empire within a century and a half. Their conquest was fueled by
faith and high morale. Following the teachings of the prophet Mohammed, their
intent was to change the religious and political landscape of the entire
planet.
By 613 the prophet Mohammed was
preaching a new religion he called Islam. Largely ignored in his home city of
Mecca, he withdrew to Medina,
built up a strong following there, and returned to attack and capture Mecca.
Following his death in 632, his teachings were collected to form the Koran,
the Islamic holy book. In 634 his followers began their jihad, or holy war.
Within five years they had overrun Egypt,
Palestine, and Syria.
Their tolerance of Jews and Christians eased their conquest because these
people had been suffering some persecution under the Byzantines.
In the next 60 years, both North
Africa to the west and Persia
to the east fell to Islam. In the early eighth century, Saracens from
Tangiers invaded the Iberian Peninsula and conquered
the Visigoth kingdom established there after the fall of Rome.
In Asia they took Asia Minor
from the Byzantines and attempted to capture Constantinople
with a combined attack from land and sea. The great walls of the city
frustrated the land attack and the Saracen fleet was defeated at sea. In the
west, Charles Martel of the Franks stopped a Saracen invasion of modern France
in 732 at Poitiers.
Frustrated in the west, the
forces of Islam turned east. By 750 they had conquered to the Indus
River and north over India
into Central Asia to the borders of China.
In 656 the Muslim world fell
into civil war between two factions, the Sunnites and the Shiites. They
differed on several points, including who should be caliph and interpretation
of the Koran. The result of the 60-year war was that the Islamic state broke
into pieces, some governed by Sunnites (the Iberian Peninsula)
and others by Shiites (Egypt
and modern Iraq).
The new Islamic states acted independently, thereafter.
Muslim Spain developed into one
of the great states of Europe during the early Middle
Ages. Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in relative harmony, and a
rich culture rose out of these multiple influences. There was a flowering of
the arts, architecture, and learning. By 1000, however, Muslim Spain had
divided into warring factions. This civil war facilitated the slow reconquest
of the peninsula (the Reconquista) by the emerging states of Castile
and Aragon,
completed finally in 1492.
Asia Minor
and the Middle East were conquered by Muslim Turks in
the early eleventh century. In response to a call for aid from the
Byzantines, a series of Crusades was launched from Europe
to regain Palestine from the
Turks. The independent Muslim states in the area lost Palestine
and the Eastern Mediterranean coast to the First
Crusade. In the last part of the twelfth century, the great Saracen leader
Saladin succeeded in uniting Egypt,
Syria, and
smaller states, and he retook Jerusalem.
The Muslim states remained
independent long after the Middle Ages and eventually developed into the
modern Arab nations of the Middle East and North
Africa. They went into economic decline, however, when the
European nations opened trade routes of their own to Asia
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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