Islam threw Christian Europe into the dark ages, bringing slavery from black Africa with it

Islam and the Dark Age of Byzantium

Islam had as debilitating an impact upon Byzantine Empire as it has on West Europe, the precipitation of the Dark Age, spanning 8th to 10th centuries...

In his 1936 book, ‘Mohammed et Charlemagne’, Belgian historian Henri Pirenne argued in great detail that the Dark Ages of Europe began rather suddenly in the middle of the seventh century; and that this sudden and catastrophic decline in civilization was due to Islam’s blockade of the Mediterranean. Up to that time, Pirenne showed, there was no evidence of a decline in Classical culture. True, the Western Roman Empire as a political entity had disappeared in 476, but the literate, prosperous and urban civilization, which we call "Classical", continued virtually uninterrupted. The Goths and other "Barbarian" peoples, who ruled the provinces of the West after 467, did not try to destroy Roman civilization and civil society. Indeed, as Pirenne showed in great detail, they did everything in their power to preserve it. They adopted the Latin language, accepted Imperial titles from the Emperor in Constantinople, and minted gold coins with the image of the Eastern Emperor emblazoned upon them.

Yet this thriving Late Classical culture came to a rather sudden end in the seventh century: city life declined, as did trade; a barter economy replaced the earlier monetary system, and what coins were issued were minted in silver rather than gold; literacy declined as papyrus from Egypt disappeared and expensive parchment took its place; and the power of kings waned, as local strongmen or "barons" seized the reigns of power in the provinces. The Middle Ages had begun.

Pirenne's great book, which was published posthumously, received a mixed reception. On the whole, it was conceded that he seemed to be on to something of great importance. Yet there was criticism, and this criticism only increased over the years.

One of the most telling arguments against Pirenne was the question of Byzantium. Historians were quick to point out that, whilst the regions of the West may have experienced a Dark Age between the seventh and tenth centuries, those of the East did not. There was no decline, they said, in Byzantium. If the Arab blockade of the Mediterranean had strangled classical urban civilization in the West, why did it not have the same effect in the East? This was a question to which there seemed no easy answer. Even Pirenne believed that Byzantium had somehow coped better with the Arabs than the West. In his time it was generally assumed that Classical Civilization survived in the East, and that the region was less "medievalised" than the West. We are, or have been until recently, informed by historians that the eighth-to-tenth-century Byzantium was, in the words of Sidnay Painter, "three centuries of glory," and that during this time "The Byzantine Empire was the richest state in Europe, the strongest military power, and by far the most cultivated" (Sidney Painter, ‘A History of the Middle Ages, 284-1500’). We are further informed that, "During these three centuries while Western Europe was a land of partly tamed barbarians, the Byzantine Empire was a highly civilized state where a most felicitous merger of Christianity and Hellenism produced a fascinating culture" (Ibid).

The above opinions, common till the latter half of the twentieth century, were partly prompted by Byzantine propaganda, which always sought to portray Constantinople as the "New Rome" and the successor, in an unbroken line of authority, of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine. Yet over the past half century, the science of archaeology has proved that picture a fabrication. As a matter of fact, we now know that the once-proud Eastern Rome was devastated by the Arab assaults. The same poverty and illiteracy that we find in the West we now find also in the East. Cities decline and the science and philosophy of the Greeks and Romans disappear. Just as in the West, a "dark age" descends. In the words of Cyril Mango, "One can hardly overestimate the catastrophic break that occurred in the seventh century. Anyone, who reads the narrative of events, will not fail to be struck by the calamities that befell the Empire, starting with the Persian invasion at the very beginning of the century, and falling to Arab expansion some thirty years later—a series of reverses that deprived the Empire of some of its most prosperous provinces, namely, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and, later, North Africa—and so reduced it to less than half its former size both in area and in population. But a reading of the narrative sources gives only a faint idea of the profound transformation that accompanied these events. ... It marked for the Byzantine lands the end of a way of life—the urban civilization of Antiquity—and the beginning of a very different and distinctly medieval world" (Cyril Mango, ‘Byzantium, the Empire of New Rome’, p. 4). Mango remarked on the virtual abandonment of the Byzantine cities after the mid-seventh century, and the archaeology of these settlements usually reveals "a dramatic rupture in the seventh century, sometimes in the form of virtual abandonment" (Ibid, p. 8). With the cities and papyrus supply from Egypt went the intellectual class, who after the seventh century, were reduced to a ‘small clique’ (Ibid, p. 9). The evidence, as Mango sees it, is unmistakable: the ‘catastrophe’ (as he names it) of the seventh century, "is the central event of Byzantine history" (Ibid).

Constantinople herself, the mighty million-strong capital of the East, was reduced, by the middle of the eighth century, to a veritable ruin. Mango quotes a document of the period which evokes a picture of ‘abandonment and ruination. Time and again we are told that various monuments—statues, palaces, baths—had once existed but were destroyed. What is more, the remaining monuments, many of which must have dated from the fourth and fifth centuries, were no longer understood for what they were. They had acquired a magical and generally ominous connotation’ (Ibid, p. 80).

So great was the destruction that even bronze coinage, the everyday lubricant of commercial life, disappeared. According to Mango, ‘In sites that have been systematically excavated, such as Athens, Corinth, Sardis and others, it has been ascertained that bronze coinage, the small change used for everyday transactions, was plentiful throughout the sixth century and (depending on local circumstances) until some time in the seventh, after which it almost disappeared, then showed a slight increase in the ninth, and did not become abundant again until the latter part of the tenth’ (Ibid, p. 72-3). Yet even the statement that some coins appeared in the ninth century has to be treated with caution. Mango notes that at Sardis the period between 491 and 616 is represented by 1,011 bronze coins, the rest of the seventh century by about 90, ‘and the eighth and ninth centuries combined by no more than 9’ (Ibid, p. 73). And, ‘similar results have been obtained from nearly all provincial Byzantine cities’. Even such paltry samples as have survived from the eighth and ninth centuries (nine) are usually of questionable provenance, a fact noted by Mango himself, who remarked that often, upon closer inspection, these turn out to originate either from before the dark age, or after it.

When archaeology again appears, in the middle of the tenth century, the civilization it reveals has been radically altered: The old Byzantium of Late Antiquity is gone, and we find an impoverished and semi-literate rump; a Medieval Byzantium strikingly like the Medieval France, Germany and Italy with which it was contemporary. Here, too, we find a barter or semi-barter economy, a decline in population and literacy, and an intolerant and theocratic state. And the break-off point in Byzantium, as in the West, is the first half of the seventh century, precisely corresponding to the arrival on the scene of the Arabs and of Islam.

Archaeology has thus come dramatically to the support of Pirenne, long after his death, and answered for him a question he could not. The impact of Islam was devastating for all of Christendom, both East and West. It was the event that terminated Classical civilization. The destruction of Classical culture in Europe was due to largely, though not completely, to the economic blockade of the Mediterranean by Muslim piracy. Yet the termination of that culture in regions such as Egypt and Syria (formally great centers of Classical and Hellenistic civilization), which came under the control of Islam, was produced by the new faith's utter contempt for the cultures and histories of the peoples it came to dominate. Right from the start, the caliphal government in Egypt established a commission, whose purpose was to seek out pharaohnic age tombs for plundering. So complete was the destruction that, perhaps, little more than a century after the Islamic conquest, no one in Egypt had any idea who built the Great Pyramid, despite the fact that very substantial histories of these monuments, and of the pharaohs, who erected it, were contained in the works of many Classical authors, most notably, of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus. Immediately prior to the Mulsim invasion, the libraries and academies of Egypt, Syria, and Babylonia, were packed with the works of these authors. Their disappearance and the disappearance of the knowledge they contained can only mean, as Christian polemicists argued for centuries, that the Muslims had deliberately destroyed a great quantity of Classical literature.

In the West of Europe and in the East, in North Africa and the Middle East, Classical civilization came to an end in the mid-seventh century. And the reason for its demise can be summed up in one word: Islam.

A glimpse into the bloody barbaric pagan world before Christianity

Child sacrifice and ritual murders rise in Uganda as famine loomsSurge in deaths and kidnaps among poor linked to witch-doctors and organ trafficking hmmmmmmmmm
.........this isn't about money or lack thereof, folks.

When James Katana returned from a church service to his village in the Bugiri district of eastern Uganda he was told that his three-year old son had been taken away by strangers.

"We were looking for my child for hours, but we couldn't find him," he said. "Someone rang me and told me my son was dead and had been left in the forest. I ran there and saw him lying in a pool of blood. His genitals had been cut off, but he was still alive." A witch-doctor is now in police custody, accused of the abduction and attempted murder of the boy.

Despite the mutilation and terror the child experienced, police say he was one of the lucky ones. Uganda has been shocked by a surge in ritualistic murders and human sacrifice, with police struggling to respond and public hysteria mounting at each gruesome discovery.

In 2008 more than 300 cases of murder and disappearances linked to ritual ceremonies were reported to the police with 18 cases making it to the courts. There were also several high-profile arrests of parents and relatives accused of selling children for human sacrifice.

In January this year the Ugandan government appointed a special police taskforce on human sacrifice and announced that 2,000 officers were to receive specialist training in tackling child trafficking with the support of the US government. Since the taskforce was set up there have been 15 more murders linked to human sacrifice with another 200 disappearances, mainly of children and young adults, under investigation.

"This year we have had more occurrences of people attempting to sell their children to witch-doctors as part of ritual ceremonies to guarantee wealth and prosperity," said Moses Binoga, acting commissioner of the anti-human sacrifice and trafficking taskforce.

Both police and NGOs are attributing the surge to a new wave of commercial witch-doctors using mass media to market their services and demand large sums of money to sacrifice humans and animals for people who believe blood will bring great prosperity.

"Cases of child sacrifice have always existed, mainly in the Ugandan central region, but there is a new strain of traditional healers in Uganda and their geographical spread is mainly attributed to increased unemployment and poverty," said Elena Lomeli. She is a volunteer with the British charity VSO who is supporting ANPPCAN Uganda, a child abuse NGO, in its work with victims in the capital Kampala. "My experience working with victims suggests that the abusers are greedy people who want to get rich quick. In rural areas, people can sacrifice their own child. In urban areas, educated and rich people will look for somebody else's."

Looming food shortages and famine hitting Uganda's poorest in the north and east are also feeding the demand for sacrificial rituals. "These are not poor people paying for these rituals, they are the wealthy elite taking advantage of the desperate poor," said Binoga. "In January a 21-year-old woman was jailed for 16 months for kidnapping a child and trying to sell him to a witch-doctor for a large sum. These cases are on the increase."

Ugandan police are increasingly linking the sudden increase in cases to organ trafficking. The anti-human trafficking taskforce said many of the bodies found in the past few months were missing organs such as kidneys, hearts and livers, a detail not consistent with many traditional ritualistic practices.

In May a report released by the US State Department said Uganda had become an international hub for human trafficking and highlighted the increased trade of children in the east of the country for their body parts . "We are investigating the possibility that some of these murders are the work of an international organ trafficking ring who are making these murders look like human sacrifice," said Binoga.

Despite the rise in cases, Ugandan police have secured a number of convictions and point to the high-profile trial of Kato Kajubi, a businessman accused of sacrificing a 12-year-old boy to guarantee the success of a new venture.

"According to our judicial system we can't charge people for these specific crimes, we have to charge them with murder, kidnap and intent to murder but these cases take about six months to process," said Binoga. "But many cases are going through the courts and a message has been sent. This year we have charged 10 people with homicide related to sacrificial practices, but we need parliament to pass a specific law to help us fight these crimes."

Government officials have warned that perceived police inaction over the ritual murders could lead to political instability as mob justice takes over.

The depraved, horrific slave/rape history of the Vikings, until Christianity spread across Scandinavia and SLAVERY CEASED IMMINENTLY

Part I Origin of Vikings
Peter Klevius hypothesis (2005-06) on how Islamic slavery created the Vikings and the origin of Russia

IS 1400 YRS OF ISLAMIC SLAVERY/RAPETIVISM/GENOCIDES THE WORST CRIME EVER AGAINST HUMANITY?
Origin of footbinding

also compare Klevius hypothesis on how Siberia created modern humans

The page should preferably be considered within KLEVUX macro social understanding (of which sex segregation is a crucial concept)

Philosophy/AI: EMAH - the even more astonishing hypothesis
Anthropology: Demand for resources - on the right to be poor
Out of Africa as "pygmies" and back as global "mongoloids"
Sociology: Definition of religion
Definition of feminism/sex segregation
Definition of (negative) human rights
Angels of Antichrist - kinship vs. social state
History: Origin of Islam


Background

Islam doesn't only support slavery but was itself, from start (first Islamic slaves were Arabs), the very essence of slavery. To understand the origin of Islam as Koranic slavery one has to understand the pre-Islamic trade routes going through the Arabian peninsula

The medieval expansion of Islam has been a forgotten analytical tool for most historians when it comes to historical dynamics such as e.g. Mongols, Vikings etc. But whereas the Mongol invasions were originally initiated as an "attacking defence" against Islamic invasions/atrocities, the Vikings started as slave traders serving Islam. The pattern could actually have been exactly the same as in Africa had it not been for a powerful Christianity in between (again, note that Klevius isn't a Christian nor even "religious" in any meaning resembling mideastern monolitheisms - see Klevius definition of religion).

In Goodbye to the Vikings? (2006) Richard Hodges (known from the "Islamic Origins" Institute) "re-reads" early Middle Age history from the distorted position as one more in a long row of populist re-readers with pro-Islamic intentions. This is perhaps why he misses entirely the whole point of Islamic slave trade as the basis not only for Islam itself but also for the understanding of Islam's influence in medieval Europe!

In one of his many popular science books archaeologist and associate professor Mats G. Larsson, allegedly interested in the Viking age, writes (1998) that in exchange for francian swords and "other goods" huge amounts of arabic coins began streaming in via Staraja Ladoga and Birka. Does this signal an enormous lack of scientific understanding or is it just pure political correctness (extremely deep and widespred in Swedish universities)?! The very fact that some swords are found there tells very little abt what was the real commerce abt. Especially considering "slave remains" are rare!


FROM HARAM TO HAREM
-The Islamic balancing of the proportion "infidels" and "muslims" in the wake of expansion
has to be understood in the light of Koranic Islam as a blueprint for slavery/rapetivism

Nine months after a forced or institutionalized rape a captured/traded slave girl had transformed from being a victim of sexual abuse/assault to a muslim mother and educator of her (Islam's) child(ren) under the sword of Sharia. From sexual plesure for the rapist patriarchs to a cultural fosterer of more of the same! That's the simple formula underlying Islam's "success" in conquest.

Islam proponents often brag that Islam doesn't use missionaries. Well da, you can't eat the cake and still have it, can you! This is why Islamic slave trade routes historically are actively rooted in "infidel" land. Of course, there were enough helpless slave girls etc available in most parts were the Islamic slave trader planted their nets/raids etc, but the tremendous expansion combined with the eagerness of scared people to convert to Islam for the sake of protection from Islam, constituted a real threat against Islam's economic base. Read more abt this on Origin of Islam.

Usually it's argued that it's unknown what triggered the Viking expansion. Historians have, for example, suggested technological innovations, positive climate change and due population growth.
Others have proposed the 785 destruction of the Frisian fleet by Charlemagne, as interrupting the flow of goods from Central Europe to Scandinavia, hence paving the way for Viking traders/raiders. Yet others emphasise centralisation of power in fewer hands in the aftermath of turmoil in Scandinavia. However, here it will be argued that none of the factors above, alone or combined, can even remotely compete with an explanation based on Islam's tremendous increase in slave trading during the advent of the Viking Age. The more one looks into it the more convincing the picture. So why hasn't it been offered before? The simple answer is that whereas white racists didn't like the image of Viking "heroes" killing defenceless white families and robbing their minor daughters (and some sons although these were often taken back to Sweden as 'trälar") and making a huge industry in selling them as sex slaves to Islam, today's racist/sexist pro-Islamists don't like it either!

In The Role of Migration in the History of the Eurasian Steppe (2000), when considering the causes of the Viking expansion, all attention is domestic and not a single word is offered towards external causes like the simple fact that new demands (Islamic slavery) signalled through old trade/raid routes (e.g. Russian river ways) may have considerable effects on even small communities if they are capable of delivering what is demanded. Perhaps Scandinavian fur traders just happened to have their wives/daughters with them (as we know the Vikings sometimes had) and someone (the Bolgars?) told them that similar, pretty slaves would mean big business with the muslims.


Facts

- Eurasian river-systems from nort to south and vice versa have been crucial, not only in the evolution/spreading of modern humans (also see Klevius anthropology blog) but also as extremely useful channels for trading/raiding.
- Viking boats were shallow-draught, light and perfect for light "cargo" that could walk by itself on difficult passages.
- From e.g. the Annals of Xanten we know that at least at one occasion in 837, in Walcheren, only females were abducted as slaves by the Vikings.
- Viking age emerged after the expansion of Islam.
- The Kazars stopped the Muslims in the east at the time when Charles Martel defeated them in the west (around 730).
- Viking age ended/transformed in conjuction with the decline of Islamic Cordoba, Abbasid etc and with the progression of empowered Christinity
- Koran/Islam clearly sanctions slavery (in fact, one may argue that Islam is institutionalized slavery/rapetivism).
- Muslims preferred white slave girls, i.e. these were the most valuable of all slaves (and, of course, both easy to handle and abuse during long journeys - I suggest reading Artur Lundkvist's well-informed novel Slavar för Särkland/i.e. someting like Slaves for Baghdad, 1978 - see exerpts below)..
- some 100.000 Arab/Islamic (mostly Abbasid) coins from the Viking age have been found in Sweden. A majority of them at Gotland in the Baltic sea, i.e on the island known for its 'russ' horses and a probable home harbour for Viking Rus, the "founder" of Russia (in fact he was asked to help the Russians against his fellow Viking looters).
- there was a huge increase in trade activity compared to pre-Viking age Scandinavia. Furthermore economic historians as well as historians of finance are beginning to agree that the trading of slaves connected to Islam has been greatly under-estimated.
- although slave taking/trading etc existed before, Islam made it a "religion"/"social state" (see Klevius Angels of Antichrist - kinship vs social state) /big business that the caliphates rested on.
- the Vikings were widely feared of in Europe but not in Arab/Islamic land..
- Viking slave trading stopped via Christianity and the creation of a feudal system, i.e. bridging to the so called Hansa period around the Baltic sea.

Koran 33:50: "Prophet, We have made lawful to you the wives to whom you have granted dowries and the slave girls whom God has given you as booty."

Ibn Sa'd in Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir: Muhammed liked Mariyah (a slave girl),who was of white complexion, with curly hair and pretty.


Concepts and possible facts

Some Finnish, Baltic and Russian researchers now argue that the eastern Viking slave route predated the western one. Note that the very word Viking is often poorly conceptualized in different writings. Klevius Viking concept is: The north-European product of a pronounced increase in slave trading that was caused by Islam's pronounced increase in demand for slaves, as well as elaborate channels (incl. Jews etc) for this trade..

- Varjager (the name given for the Eastbound Vikings (from around 850 - but note that Vikings were present in Russia before 750) possibly comes from the Finnic-Ugric word for thieve 'wargas" (Finnish 'varkas' or 'varas'). Also compare Swedish 'varg' wolf, and 'jägare' hunter (wolves hunt/loot as a pack don't they).
- Valkyrie may mean 'chosen at slaughter', i.e. girls taken captive when the rest in raided villages were killed or expelled


Klevius' hypothesis on the "Viking age"

The so called Viking age (8th to 11th century) was initiated by Islam's demand for white slave girls and was finished by Christianity/feudalism (a bias comment: Klevius has never been a Christian or even believer in any mideast "monolitheist religion"). People wanted protection from Viking raids which fact, together with the fact that Islam threatened Europe from opposite directions, paved the way for Christian missionary/fortifications. Interestingly eastbound and westbound Vikings met in Miklagård (Constantinople). Furthermore it seems that the long transition period from Viking "paganism" to Viking Christianity may be explained as a result of commercial.pragmatism and long distances.

Trafficking, slavery and rapetivism/sex segregation need to be morally justified. This is why Islam rests on the racist "infidel" concept. Furthermore, to avoid any criticism the concept is said to come from a god who can't be questioned because he is cut off from the earthly via Mohammed and his "interpretors"..

Islam as an idea to conquer and sponge on human capital not only rests on, but is the result of the conditions in a pre-Islamic world. So yes, slavery existed before Islam, as did trading and looting, wars etc. But the point here is that certain Arabs (who couldn't/didn't want to do anything else), started campaigning an elaborated system - KORAN/ISLAM - of sponging based on slavery and institutionalized rapetivism (the first been enslaved being poor nomad Arabs). As we do know, this led to a tremendous expansion along existing trade routes and, as a consequence, to a great demand for slaves (especially young girls) and a corresponding increase in commerce/finance due to the wealth of.silver/gold that the Islamists had robbed from Africa, Central-Asia etc. It might be worth mentioning that the reason why Islam is said to not have missionaires is the fear of "infidel" shortage! However, as shown by M. Gordon and others, Muslims have throughout history had no problems enslaving other Muslims.

The word "valkyrie" comes from the Old Norse valkyrja (plural "valkyrur"), from the words "val" (slaughter) and "kyrja" (to choose). Literally the term means choosers of the slain. Cognate forms include the Old English "wælcyrige" and the German "Walküre." If this interpretation is rewersed (and I see no reason why not - but if you know, please tell me on the blog) we get:'girl chosen from the slain! Of course this doesn't affect the hypothesis either way but its an appealing thread, and, at least, a good title for the already known change from malign (raven on slain corpses) to benign (beauty, pleasure, fertility etc) that is recorded at the beginning of the Viking age.

Note that the secondary meaning of the 'valkyries' as "after death compensation" may also have been strengthened by contacts to the Islamic story abt young gils waiting for sexually please the slain jihadists. Also note that the lack of Islamization of the Vikings may be related to the simple and pragmatic fact that the Vikings had to cross/deal with Christians and Jews on their way down (look at your Europe map and compare it with European history of the time!).


From Slavar för Särkland (Artur Lundqvist, 1978) excerpts summarized and translated by P. Klevius

p 173 Flocks of slaves on their way to the Baghdad caliphate which seemed never to get enough of them.

p 180 In Baghdad it's hard to disinguish between male and female hookers - but no one seems to care whether the front or rear hole should be utilized.

p 180.What they see in Baghdad annoys them. The miserable state of the people doesn't in any sense exclude pompousness and a behavior like the whole world belonged to them.

p 181 Even males sit down piing hence showing fat asses resembling unbaked dough. Fleshy and powerless bodies in an unhealthy sense with hanging bellies and jumping cheeks.

p 188 Slave trader: And this young girl isn't yet used at all, just check for yourself. She can give her master great pleasure now and later on when her body gets the female form.

p 189 Viking Ulving starts doubting his mission in this traffic. He hasn't really seen the full picture before now.

Klevius comment: Perhaps there's also something to consider for those who haven't, even today, seen (or blinked) the full (slave/rape)picture of Islam!


Klevius etymology: The ancient Persian word for god 'khoda' connects to Finnish 'koti' and Finno-Ugric 'kota' (=home/house/seed vessel - see Klevius definition of religion and the Vagina gate), Saami 'goahti'. German Gott (god) and Swedish gott (good) as well as Gotland (pronounced Gottland).


Note the river link from Bay of Finland to the Viking (Rus)-Arab trade center in Bulgar. Also note that Staraja Ladoga is est. at 750 (even earlier by some Finnish and Russian researchers) and that Vikings were using Volga down to Abbasid at least in the early 9th century, probably far earlier. Furthermore, because of the Avars the Djnepr route was more difficult up to around 800. Old trade routes to Bulgar Volga were intensified and more directed on slave girls than on fur when Islam announced its slave girl hunger (see Rapetivism and the origin of Islam) via the Bulgars. Here one also has to carefully consider the facts that 1) the northern areas were quite sparsely populated hence not allowing for great fleets, armies, economies etc from the beginning, 2) that existing types of boats and routes were utilized/optimized in congruence with the islamic slave demand 3) that white slave girls were extremely high in value among Abbasid muslims, as well as 4) easy to pick up along the Finnish, Baltic and Russian rivers. As a consequense of this lucrative raiiding/trading in small scale Viking groups a more influential Viking aristocracy emerged and merged with Slavs etc eventually ending up as great armies in other parts of Europe.

Europe’s Dark Age and Islam’s Golden Age: Two Facets of The Same Fiction?

Popular history books tell us that Euruope's Dark Ages (8-10th century) was Islam's Golden Age --- a Golden Age without any hard facts...

Brilliant article regarding the mysterious years of the early middle ages, and the revisionism regarding the religious struggles therein

According to the history books, the Early Middle Ages, the period stretching roughly from the first quarter of the seventh century to the first quarter of the tenth, was a crucial time for Europe and the Middle East. For Europe, this was the very darkest phase of the so-called Dark Ages, an era during which the light of Classical Civilization was finally extinguished. However, for the Middle East, which from about 635 onwards became Muslim, it was a very different story. The next three centuries, far from constituting a “Dark Age”, became a veritable Golden Age. This was to be the high point of Islamic civilization: three centuries during which the Islamdom led the world in science, philosophy, wealth and culture. As Europe floundered in poverty and darkness, with cities abandoned and violence everywhere, Muslim rulers such as Harun al-Rashid and Al-Mamum presided over a flourishing and enlightened urban civilization.

That, at least, is the story told in all the textbooks. But proper examination of facts suggests that this is mostly, if not completely, a myth. In reality, neither the European Dark Age nor the Islamic Golden Age has any basis in fact: These are little more than two facets of a single fictitious historical narrative, a narrative which has however been around for many centuries; one that derives from the written histories of early Islam and of Europe. Until the nineteenth century, no-one had any real reason to question this version of events. After all, the Islamic world, at least by the beginning of the eleventh century, did seem to be far ahead of Europe. Did we not get our numeral system (“Arabic numerals”) from the Arabs, as well as algebra, alcohol, and a host of other techniques and technologies? All the evidence seemed to indicate that the Muslim world was, in the centuries preceding the eleventh, advanced and sophisticated, while Europe was mired in a primitive barbarism.

But this view has now faced a serious challenge: For, in the twentieth century, a whole new body of evidence became available to historians; evidence unavailable to previous generations of scholars: The evidence of archaeology. And what archaeology tells us has been devastating to the traditional view.

By the mid-twentieth century, archaeologists had begun to put together a fairly comprehensive picture of the archaeology of Europe and the Near East. Indeed, several areas of the Near East, such as Egypt, Palestine and Iraq, were and remain among the most thoroughly excavated regions of the earth.

Medievalists had, of course, been very interested in throwing light on the somewhat romantic though apparently fabulously wealthy and cultured Islamic world of the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries. Strange and wonderful tales were told of this epoch, though all agreed it was an age of high civilization. This was the age of the Omayyad and Abbasid Caliphs; the romantic epoch of Scheherazade and Harun Al-Rashid, the fabulously opulent Caliph of Baghdad, who is said to have donned the disguise of a commoner and wandered by night through the dimly-lit streets of the metropolis—a city of reputedly a million people. This epoch, and this alone, is said to have marked the age of Islam’s cultural ascendancy. Consider the following description from an English historian of eighth-tenth century Cordoba, typical of the genre: “In Spain … the foundation of Umayyad power ushers in an era of unequalled splendour, which reaches its height in the early part of the tenth century. The great university of Cordova is thronged with students … while the city itself excites the wonder of visitors from Germany and France. The banks of the Guadalquivir are covered with luxurious villas, and born of the ruler’s caprice rises the famous Palace of the Flower, a fantastic city of delights” (H. St. L. B. Moss, The Birth of the Middle Ages; 395-814, Oxford University Press, 1935, p. 172). All agree that, in later years, from the late eleventh century onwards, the Islamic world began to fall rapidly behind the West.

On the word of the written histories, then, archaeologists expected to find, from Spain to eastern Iran, a flourishing and vibrant culture. An Islamic world of enormous cities endowed with all the wealth of antiquity and the plunder gathered in the Muslim wars of conquest. They hoped to find palaces, public baths, universities and mosques; all richly decorated with marble, ceramic and carved stone.

In fact, they found nothing of the sort.

The archaeological non-appearance of the Islamic Golden Age is surely one of the most remarkable discoveries to come to light in the past century. It has not achieved the sensational headlines we might expect, for the simple reason that a non-discovery is of much less interest to the public than a discovery. Then again, as archaeologists searched in vain through site after site, they imagined they had just been unlucky; that with the next day’s dig, the fabulous palaces and baths would be uncovered. And this has been the pattern now for a hundred years. In fact, the entire Islamic world is a virtual blank for roughly three centuries.

Normally, we find one or two finds attributed to the seventh century, then nothing for three centuries, then a resumption of archaeological material in the mid- or late-tenth century. Take, for example Egypt, the largest and most populous Islamic country during the Early Middle Ages. The Muslim conquest of the country occurred in 638 or 639, and we should expect the invaders to have begun, almost immediately, using the wealth of the land to begin building numerous and splendid places of worship, but apparently they didn’t. Only two mosques in the whole of Egypt, both in Cairo, are said to date from before the eleventh century: the Amr ibn al-As (641) and the Ahmad ibn Tulun (878). However, the latter building has many features found only in mosques of the eleventh century, so its date of 878 is disputed. Thus, in Egypt, we have a single place of worship, the mosque of Amr ibn al-As, dating from the mid-seventh century, then nothing for another three-and-a-half centuries. Why, in an enormous country with up to, perhaps, five million inhabitants, should the Muslims wait over 300 years before building themselves places of worship?

And it is the same throughout the Islamic world. No matter where we go, from Spain to Iran, there is virtually nothing between circa 650 and 950. Spain, as we have seen, is supposed to have witnessed a flowering of Islamic culture and civilization in the two centuries after the Arab conquest of 711; and the city of Cordoba is said to have grown to a sophisticated metropolis of half-a-million people or more. We recall the description of a flourishing and vastly opulent metropolis painted by the writer quoted above. Yet the same author admitted that “Little remains of the architecture of this period.” Little indeed! As a matter of fact, the only Muslim structure in the whole of Spain dating from before the eleventh century is the so-called Mosque of Cordoba; yet even this, strictly-speaking, is not an Islamic construction: It was originally the Visigothic Cathedral of Saint Vincent, which was converted, supposedly in the days of Abd er-Rahman I, to a mosque. Yet the Islamic features that exist could equally belong to the time of Abd er-Rahman III (latter tenth century), whom we know did conversion work on the Cathedral, adding a minaret and a new façade (Louis Bertrand, The History of Spain, p. 54). Most of the Islamic features in the building actually come after Abd er-Rahman III, and there is no secure way of dating anything in it to the eighth century.

The poverty of visible Islamic remains is normally explained by the proposition that the Christians destroyed the Muslim monuments after the city’s re-conquest. But this solution is inherently a suspect. Granted the Christians might have destroyed all the mosques, though even that seems unlikely, but they certainly would not have destroyed opulent palaces, baths, fortifications, etc. Yet none of these—none, at least, ascribed to the eighth to early tenth centuries—has survived. And even granting that, such a universal and pointless destruction did take place, we have to assume that at least under the ground, we would find an abundance of Arab foundations, as well as artifacts, tools, pottery etc. Indeed, in a city of half-a-million people, as Cordoba of the eight, ninth and tenth centuries is said to have been—the archaeologist would expect to find—a superabundance of such things. They should be popping out of the ground with almost every shovel-full of dirt.Now Cordoba has been extensively excavated over the past seventy years or so, often specifically to search for Arab/Moorish remains. What then has been found?

According to the prestigious Oxford Archaeological Guide, the city has revealed, after exhaustive excavations: (a) The south-western portion of the city wall, which was “presumably” of the ninth century; (b) A small bath-complex, of the 9th/10th century; and (c) A “part” of the Umayyad (8-9th century) mosque (The Oxford Archaeological Guide, Collins, 1998). This is all that can be discovered from two-and-a-half centuries of the history of a city of supposedly half-a-million people. And the rest of Spain, which has been investigated with equal vigor, can deliver little else. The foundations of a small house here and a few fragments of pottery there, usually of doubtful date and often described as “presumably” of ninth century or such like.

The sheer poverty of these remains makes it clear that the fabulously wealthy Cordoba of the eighth, ninth and early tenth centuries is a myth; and the elusive nature of all materials from these three centuries, in every part of the Islamic world, makes us wonder whether the rise of Islam has been somehow misdated: For the first real mark left (in archaeological terms) by Islam in Spain is dated to the mid-tenth century, to the time of Abd er-Rahman III, whose life bears many striking comparisons with his namesake and supposed ancestor Abd er-Rahman I, of the eighth century.

Again, there are strange and striking parallels between the major events of Islamic history of the seventh and eighth centuries on the one hand and of the tenth and eleventh centuries on the other. Thus, for example, the Christian Reconquista in Spain is supposed to have commenced around 720, with the victory of Don Pelayo at Covadonga; but the real Reconquista began three hundred years later with the victories of Sancho of Navarre around 1020. Similarly, the Islamic invasion of northern India supposedly commenced around 710-720 with the victories of Muhammed bin Qasim, though the “real” Islamic conquest of the region began with the victories of Mahmud of Ghazni, roughly between 1010 and 1020. Yet again, the impact of Islam on Europe seems not have been felt until the late tenth and eleventh centuries, though commonsense would suggest that it should have been felt three hundred years earlier. Henri Pirenne, for example, was criticized by Alfons Dopsch for suggesting that Islam terminated Classical Civilization in Europe in the seventh century by its blockade of the Mediterranean. Thus, said Dopsch, Europe should have become “Medieval” by the late seventh century. Yet many of the characteristics of medieval society, such as the rise of feudalism and castle-building, said Dopsch, only appear in the late tenth century. And obviously Islamic ideas, such as Holy War, were only copied by the Europeans in the eleventh century.

What then does all this mean?

The lack of Muslim archaeology from before the tenth and eleventh centuries (with the exception of two or three monuments such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Amr ibn al-As mosque in Cairo, usually of the mid-seventh century), would indicate that the rise of Islam has been misdated, and that some form of error has crept into the chronology. But error or not, the fact that, virtually nothing from before the mid-tenth century has been found, means that Islam was not a flourishing, opulent and cultured civilization whilst Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. By the late tenth century, Europe was experiencing her own “renaissance”, with a flowering of “Romanesque” art and architecture, much of it strongly reminiscent of the Late Classical work of the Merovingian and Visigothic period.

The meaning of this archaeological “dark age”, of central importance to our understanding of European and Islamic history, will be discussed more fully in a subsequent article.

The above article summarizes arguments found in John O’Neill’s Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization (Felibri Publications).

Cultural Christianity, not necessarily the idiots who ruled, gradually and imperfectly, ended worldwide slavery

Worldwide slavery,

before the coming of Christianity,

despite many instances of small minded Christian men who participated in slavery,

in a 200 to 300 year timeline from the time a culture starts to convert to Christianity, slavery has disappeared

The Pilgrims landed in North America, (a continent mired in slavery, tribal warfare and utter brutality) in 1620 -

In 1865, only 245 years later, Cultural Christians and the Republican Party fought and died to abolish world wide slavery.........

Stunning treatise on how Islam and the Viking slave raiders from the North destroyed Classical Civilization (Rome and Greece were brutal 100% slave societies!!!)

Did Islam Destroy the Classical Civilization?
Sunday, 12 July 2009 05:53 John J. O’Neill While Islam is viewed as the savior and nurturer of the Classical Greek Civilization, there is an alternative story to this near-universal widsom of our time. Islam may well have had initiated the death of the Classical Civilization. Find out why???


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the most enduring problems of history is the decline of Classical Civilization. How is it, scholars have long asked, that the civilization of Greece and Rome, which had endured over a thousand years, gave way to the world of the Medieval; an age which saw, for a while, the decline and apparent disappearance of the rationalist spirit of Greece and Rome? In academic and journalistic literature and in the popular imagination there is no mystery at all: After the Barbarian Invasions of the fifth century, we are told, the peoples of Western Europe reverted to living in thatched, wattle-and-daub huts. Cities were destroyed and abandoned, the art of writing virtually lost, and the mass of the population kept in a state of ignorance by an obscurantist and fanatical Church, which effectively completed the destructive work of the Barbarians. Into this darkened stage, the Arabs arrived in the seventh and eighth centuries like a ray of light. Tolerant and learned, they brought knowledge of the science of antiquity back into Europe and, under their influence, the Westerners began the long journey back to civilization.

That, in a nutshell, is the story told in an enormous number of scholarly treatises and academic textbooks. It is a story implicitly accepted by a large majority of professional historians, both in Europe and North America – among them Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies in the English-speaking world; and yet it is a version of the past that is completely and utterly false. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a narrative further removed from what actually happened. And, shocking as it may seem, historians have known this for several generations. Why this knowledge has never been fully disseminated or integrated into academic thought is a moot point, but the fact that textbooks designed for schoolchildren and students of higher education can still be printed promoting the above version of events should be a cause of deep concern. For the truth is that when the Arabs reached southern Italy and Spain they found not a bunch of primitive savages, but a highly sophisticated Latin civilization, a civilization rich in cities, agriculture, art and literature, and presided over by completely Romanized Gothic kings. How do we know this? Well, the Arabs themselves said so. On their arrival in Spain, Gothic Spain, the Muslim conquerors of 711 were astonished at the size and opulence of its cities. Their annalists recall the appearance at the time of Seville, Cordova, Merida and Toledo; “the four capitals of Spain, founded,” they tell us naively, “by Okteban [Octavian] the Caesar.” Seville, above all, seems to have struck them by its wealth and its illustriousness in various ways. “It was,” writes Ibn Adhari,

among all the capitals of Spain the greatest, the most important, the best built and the richest in ancient monuments. Before its conquest by the Goths it had been the residence of the Roman governor. The Gothic kings chose Toledo for their residence; but Seville remained the seat of the Roman adepts of sacred and profane science, and it was there that lived the nobility of the same origin. (Cited from Lious Bertrand and Sir Charles Petrie, The History of Spain, London, 1945, p. 7)

Not much sign of decline here! Another Arab writer, Merida, mentions Seville’s great bridge as well as “magnificent palaces and churches,” (Bertrand and Petrie, pp.17-18) and we should note that archaeological confirmation of this picture is forthcoming. Several of the magnificent Visigothic churches and palaces still stand, and the discovery near Toledo in 1857 of a collection of richly wrought Visigothic votive crowns encrusted with precious stones brought the descriptions of the Arab conquerors to mind in the most vivid way possible. (See Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain, London, 1992, p. 18)

Documentary and archaeological evidence from throughout the territories of the former Roman Empire has demonstrated, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the Barbarian rulers who occupied Italy and the Western Empire during the fifth century, far from destroying Roman culture and civilization, rapidly became Romanized themselves, and presided over a veritable renaissance of Classical civilization. The arts and the sciences flourished under them, and their enormous wealth was employed in the construction of brilliantly decorated residences and churches. By 500 AD, virtually all of the damage that had been done during the Invasions of the fifth century had been repaired, and cities flourished as they had under the old Imperial administration. Indeed, the “Barbarian” kings of Italy, from the very beginning, actively imitated the Court in Constantinople, and all of them regarded themselves as not only allies, but functionaries and officers of the Empire. The gold coins they issued were stamped with the image of the Byzantine Emperor, and they dwelt in the palatial villas erected by earlier Roman procurators and princes. Some of these were extended, and all were regularly renovated. Yet, having said all that, it is true that by the end of the seventh century, or at the very latest by the start of the eighth, this flowering Classical civilization came, rather suddenly, to an end; and the medieval world we are all familiar with took shape: cities and towns declined and were sometimes abandoned, trade diminished, life became more rural, the arts declined, illiteracy prevailed, and the feudal system, which fragmented the kingdoms of Western Europe, took shape. In the years which followed, the Church became the sole vehicle of learning and administration, and a barter economy largely replaced the monetary system in place shortly before. What coins were issued, were minted in silver, rather than the gold used till the start of the seventh century. The Middle Ages had begun.

Who or what had produced this situation?

As early as the 1920s Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne located the proverbial smoking gun. But it was not in the hands of the Goths or Vandals, or the Christian Church: it was in the hands of those people whom it had, even then, become fashionable to credit with saving Western Civilization: the Arabs. The evidence, as Pirenne was at pains to show in his posthumously published Mohammed and Charlemagne (1938) was incontrovertible. From the mid-seventh century the Mediterranean had been blockaded by the Arabs. Trade with the great centers of population and culture in the Levant, a trade which had been the mainstay of Western Europe’s prosperity, was terminated. The flow of all the luxury items which Pirenne found in the records of the Spanish Visigoths and the Merovingians of Gaul, came to an abrupt end, as Arab pirates scoured the seas. The flow of gold to the West dried up. Gold coinage disappeared, and the great cities of Italy, Gaul and Spain, especially the ports, which owed their wealth to the Mediterranean trade, became mere ghost towns. Worst of all, perhaps, from the perspective of culture and learning, the importation of papyrus from Egypt ceased. This material, which had been shipped into Western Europe in vast quantities since the time of the Roman Republic, was absolutely essential for a thousand purposes in a literate and mercantile civilization; and the ending of the supply had an immediate and catastrophic effect on levels of literacy. These dropped, almost overnight, to levels perhaps equivalent to those in pre-Roman times.

Pirenne stressed that the arrival of Islam effectively isolated Europe both intellectually and economically. And with this economic paralysis came war: the Muslim conquests were to unleash a torrent of violence against Europe. As a direct result of the Arab advance, by the seventh and eighth centuries, Christendom, the area within which Christianity was the dominant religion, diminished almost to vanishing-point. This catastrophic loss of territory – everything from northern Syria to the Pyrenees – took place in a space of two or three generations. In Western Europe there remained only a nucleus of Christian territory, comprising France, Western Germany, the Upper Danube and Italy (as well as Ireland and parts of Britain); and these regions felt themselves threatened also with imminent extinction: For the surviving Christian territories were besieged and under sustained attack from the north and east, as well as the south. As the Arabs sent army after army to plunder, destroy and occupy, they encouraged and, in some ways directed, further attacks on the core areas of Europe from other directions. Thus even the Viking onslaught, which devastated huge areas of the British Isles, France and northern Germany, was elicited by the Muslim demand for slaves. The latter is a fact not yet widely known, though well-accepted by professional historians: the Vikings, essentially, were piratical slave-traders, and their notorious expeditions across the seas to the west and along the great rivers of Russia to the east were elicited first and foremost by the Muslim demand for white-skinned concubines and eunuchs. Without Islam, there would almost certainly have been no Vikings. As it was, this trading-alliance between the barbarians of the North and the Muslims of Spain and North Africa was to bring Christian Europe to the brink of collapse.

As if all that were not enough, the attempt to control the inroads of Muslims and Vikings opened Europe to the depredations of other predatory peoples, most especially from the steppe lands of central Asia, and one of these in particular, the Magyars, or Hungarians, were to prove a real threat, for a time, to the continued existence of a Christian Germany.

Pirenne’s research was first class and was never effectively refuted by his critics. Nonetheless, his findings have been ignored. Year after year popular and scholarly works on the history of the Mediterranean and of Islam’s interaction with Christianity continue to be published – especially in the English-speaking world – without mentioning Pirenne’s name, far less taking on board his findings. This was the case, for example, with John Julius Norwich’s history of the Mediterranean (The Middle Sea), published in 2006. The same is true of the latest offering of Bernard Lewis, the grand old man of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton, whose 2008 book God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 – 1215, not only ignores Pirenne and his ideas, but comes to conclusions reminiscent of those taught before the appearance of Mohammed and Charlemagne. So for example in the above volume Lewis contrasted the cultural sophistication of the eighth century Islamic invaders of Spain with what he describes as the almost Neolithic culture and economy of the Visigoths and Franks whom they encountered. For Lewis, the “Dark Age” was still brought about by the Germanic Invaders of the fifth century, and the Arab blockade of the Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries had no effect upon Europe. For him, the Arabs were still, evidently, the saviors of Europe from barbarism.

How to explain this? Without doubt, political correctness has played a part. The spirit of the age dictates that non-European civilizations (such as the Islamic) should never be criticized, or even critically examined. Such an attitude, which essentially places ideology above evidence, is most disturbing, and needs to be combated at every opportunity.

There is however another factor: Pirenne, along with almost all historians of his age, assumed that Byzantium, which had not been overrun by the Barbarians, never experienced a Dark Age or a Medieval period. This view was prompted, in part at least, by Byzantine propaganda, which always advertised the Empire as the Second Rome and the inheritor of Rome’s mantle. As recently as 1953, for example, Sidney Painter could write that, “from 716 to 1057 came [for Byzantium] slightly more than three centuries of glory. The Byzantine Empire was the richest state of Europe, the strongest military power, and by far the most cultivated. During these three centuries while Western Europe was a land of partly tamed barbarians, the Byzantine Empire was a highly civilized state where a most felicitous merger of Christianity and Hellenism produced a fascinating culture.” (A History of the Middle Ages, 284-1500). To this day, popular literature tells us how, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, Greek scholars and philosophers, fleeing to the West, helped “kick-start” the Renaissance in Italy. But if Byzantine civilization was not destroyed by the Arabs, why should anyone believe they destroyed classical civilization in the West? This was a point Pirenne did not address: He was perhaps unaware of its importance. Yet developments in Byzantine archaeology since the Second World War have now come dramatically to the support of Pirenne: For it has been shown, much to the surprise of everyone, that from the mid-seventh century onwards, the Eastern Empire suffered its own Dark Age: Byzantium experienced three centuries during which – in complete contrast to the opinion expressed above – almost all her cities were abandoned, populations plummeted and high culture came to an end. So great was the destruction that even bronze coinage, the everyday lubricant of commercial life, disappeared. And when archaeology again appears, in the middle of the tenth century, the civilization it reveals has been radically altered: The old Byzantium of Late Antiquity is gone, and we find an impoverished and semi-literate rump; a Medieval Byzantium strikingly like the Medieval France, Germany and Italy with which it was contemporary. Here we find too a barter or semi-barter economy; a decline in population and literacy; and an intolerant and theocratic state. And the break-off point in Byzantium, as in the West, is the first half of the seventh century – precisely corresponding to the arrival on the scene of the Arabs and of Islam.

The evidence from the East, which has, regrettably, not yet become “common knowledge” even in the world of academia, weighs decisively in favor of Pirenne. The debate is essentially over – though the knowledge of that fact has yet to percolate through to the history faculties of our universities. Classical civilization, just as Pirenne said all those years ago, did not end in the fifth century; it ended in the seventh; and it was terminated by the Arabs.

In my forthcoming book, Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization (Felibri, August, 2009) I reiterate Pirenne’s arguments and demonstrate that, in many ways, he did not go far enough. For the impact of Islam upon Europe was far from being merely economic. Whilst Islam’s doctrine of perpetual war against the infidel did turn the Mediterranean into a violent frontier, and did impoverish Europe, Islam now also began to impose its mindset upon the West. Until the closing of the Mediterranean the predominant cultural influence upon Europe was from the East: from Byzantium and from the ancient Hellenistic centers in the Near East, especially Egypt and Syria. With the closing of the Mediterranean, the West was isolated, and the centre of gravity moved, as Pirenne stressed, to the North; to northern Gaul, Germany and Britain. Yet the influence of the East did not come to an end. There was continuity. But now the East meant Islam. And in the centuries after the first Arab conquests, the influence of Islam became profound: It was this influence that would definitively terminate Classical civilization and give birth to the theocracy we now call "Medieval Europe".

The first and most obvious Islamic idea to be adopted by Europeans was that of Holy War. Before the seventh century, Christianity had been largely true to its pacifist roots. Even after becoming the official religion of the Empire, Christians tended to eschew the army as a career and the taking of any human life, even in war, continued to be frowned upon. In the words of Gibbon – no friend of Christianity – by the fifth century; “The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged, and the last remains of the military spirit [of Rome] were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and charity.” (Decline and Fall, Chapter 38). This may go part of the way to explain the recruitment into the army of great numbers of Barbarians from the fourth century onwards. Actually, by the late fourth and certainly by the fifth century the words "barbarian" and "soldier" became virtually synonymous.

The Gothic and Vandal kings who supplanted the Roman Emperors in the West were, to begin with, not exactly pacifists. Whilst readily accepting Christianity, the new faith had to find a place alongside the ancient warlike cults of Woden and Thor. Nonetheless, by the end of the sixth century, even the warlike nature of the Teutonic rulers began to dissipate. Gibbon notes that, under the spell of Christianity, the Goths and Vandals soon lost their martial traditions: so much so that by the seventh and eighth centuries the Germanic populations of North Africa and Spain were utterly unable to stem the Islamic advance in those regions.

What a contrast this Christianity appears when we compare it with the muscular and militant faith of the Middle Ages, the faith of the Crusaders, Inquisitors and Conquistadors.

This new Christianity was a direct consequence of the clash with Islam, for it did not appear until after the arrival of Islam. In one respect, the change came quite simply because it had to: Surrounded by aggressors bent on its destruction, aggressors with whom it was impossible to make peace, Christians had to take up arms. This was as true among the Christians of the North, threatened by the Vikings and Hungarians, as it was among the Christians of the South, threatened by the Muslims. But the change was elicited by ideology as well as simple necessity. Europeans began to be profoundly influenced by Muslim ideas – ideas on war, interpretation of Scriptures, heresy, the Jews, etc. This was a purely “Medieval” outlook: indeed, it was the very epitome of what we now mean by “Medieval.”

Historians are familiar with the influence of Islamic philosophy upon the West at this time, and they quote, generally with approval, the study by Europeans of the Persian Muslim Avicenna and the Spanish Muslim Averroes. But not everything that came from Islam was so benevolent. It is widely known, for example, that the Byzantine doctrine of iconoclasm, the destruction of sacred religious images, was directly attributable to the influence of Islam. But many Islamic ideas, some of them the polar opposite of those found in early Christianity, now began to find resonance in the thinking of Europeans at almost every level. How could it have been otherwise, when impoverished Christians viewed with astonishment the wealth, luxury and sophistication of Muslim cities in Spain, Sicily, and further east? That this wealth and luxury was debarred to them by the very Muslim Emirs and Caliphs whose opulence they so much admired, was beside the point. Europeans could only be impressed, and influenced. And influenced they were. From the Muslims they learned "Holy War"; from them they learned too that the Jews were an accursed race and the enemies of God. The consequences of these Islamic notions about the Jews were to be as long-lasting as they were tragic.

Islamic fatalism, founded on the conviction that Allah could not be bound by any kind of natural or scientific laws, was lethal to the rationalism of Greece and Rome, which now began to die. Parallel with this development, there appeared, first in Islamic Spain and then throughout Europe, that obsession with sorcery and witchcraft which was to be one of the hallmarks of the Middle Ages. From Islam too the Europeans breathed the essence of fanaticism. Islamic law decreed death to be the only fit punishment for a heretic or an apostate. No such idea had ever existed among Christians. True there had always been fierce doctrinal and theological disputes among Christians which even, at times, turned violent. But such violence as occurred was mainly verbal and rarely involved physical attack. By the end of the eleventh century, Christian Europe, under the influence of Islam both in Europe and in the Middle East, was beginning to think in a very different way; and within a hundred years the Popes had defined and published their new doctrine of capital punishment for dissenters. Torture too, absolutely normal in Islamic lands, began, for the first time, to be applied judicially in Europe.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John J. O’Neill’s is the author of upcoming book, Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization (Felibri, August 2009).

The Great Christian effort to abolish slavery was slow, imperfect, and fraught with danger

The problem posed by slavery, according to many Northern politicians, was not so much the mistreatment of slaves (a theme that abolitionists emphasized), but rather the political threat to American republicanism, especially as embraced in Northern free states.

The Free Soil Party first raised this warning in 1848, arguing that the annexation of Texas as a slave state was a terrible mistake.


The Free Soilers rhetoric was taken up by the Republican party as it emerged in 1854.

The Republicans also argued that slavery was economically inefficient, compared to free labor, and was a deterrent to the long-term modernization of America.

Worse, said the Republicans, the Slave Power, deeply entrenched in the "Solid South" (i.e.,democrat), was systematically seizing control of the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. Senator and governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio was an articulate enemy of the Slave Power, as was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts.

In his celebrated "House Divided" speech of June 1858, Abraham Lincoln charged that Senator Stephen A. Douglas, President James Buchanan, his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, and Chief Justice Roger Taney were (i.e.,democrat party plot) to nationalize slavery, as proven by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857.

Other Republicans pointed to the violence in Kansas, the brutal (democrat) assault on Senator Sumner, attacks upon the abolitionist press, and efforts to take over Cuba (Ostend Manifesto) as evidence that the Slave Power was violent, aggressive, and expansive.

The only solution, Republicans insisted, was a new commitment to free labor, and a deliberate effort to stop any more territorial expansion of slavery.

Northern Democrats answered that it was all an exaggeration and that the Republicans were paranoid.

Their Southern (democrat) colleagues spoke of secession, arguing that the John Brown raid of 1859 proved that the Republicans were ready to attack their region and destroy their way of life.

In congratulating President-elect Lincoln in 1860, Salmon P. Chase exclaimed, "The object of my wishes and labors for nineteen years is accomplished in the overthrow of the Slave Power", adding that the way was now clear "for the establishment of the policy of Freedom" — something that would come only after four destructive years of Civil War.

IF THE NORTHERN DEMOCRAT PARTY HAD PROVIDED LEADERSHIP INSTEAD OF EXPLOITATION OF THE VULNERABLE, THE CIVIL WAR WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED, AND THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES WOULD HAVE BEEN SAVED

Abolishing slavery - an enormous accomplishment (undercut by democrats both north and south at every step)

the Republicans (and cultural Christianity) abolished slavery

On this day in 1864, the Chairman of the Republican National Convention, Senator Edwin Morgan, opened the national convention. At the suggestion of President Abraham Lincoln (R-IL), he did so with a brief statement:

"The party of which you, gentlemen, are the delegated and honored representatives, will fall far short of accomplishing its great mission, unless among its other resolves it shall declare for such an amendment of the Constitution as will positively prohibit African slavery in the United States."

Inspired by Chairman Morgan's leadership, delegates made abolishing slavery part of the platform. And so, Republicans entered the 1864 presidential campaign determined to defeat the Democrats' pro-slavery policies once and for all. The 13th Amendment was passed by congressional Republicans seven months later and ratified within the year.

Islam and slavery in Medieval Europe

Muslim slave traders


The Islamic World was also a main factor in Medieval European slavery. From the early 700s until the early Modern time period (rough the 18th or 19th centuries) Muslims consistently took European slaves.
This slavery began during the Muslim Conquest of Visigothic Spain and Portugal in the 8th century.
The Muslim powers of Iberia both raided for slaves and purchased slaves from European merchants, often the Jewish Radhanites, one of the few groups that could easily move between the Christian and Islamic worlds.
As the Muslims failed to conquer Europe in the 8th century they took to pirate raids against the shores of Spain, southern Portugal and France, and Italy, that would last roughly from the 9th century until the 12th century, when the Italian city-states of Genoa, Venice, and Pisa, along with the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, as well as the Sicilian Normans, began to dominate the Mediterranean.
The Middle Ages from 1100 to 1500 saw a continuation of the European slave trade, though with a shift from the Western Mediterranean Islamic nations to the Eastern, as Venice and Genoa, in firm control of the Eastern Mediterranean from the 12th century and the Black Sea from the 13th century sold both Slavic and Baltic slaves, as well as Georgians, Turks, and other ethnic groups of the Black Sea and Caucasus, to the Muslim nations of the Middle East.

The sale of European slaves by Europeans slowly ended as the Slavic and Baltic ethnic groups Christianized by the Late Middle Ages.

European slaves in the Islamic World would, however, continue into the Modern time period as Muslim pirates, primarily Algerians, with the support of the Ottoman Empire, raided European coasts and shipping from the 16th to the 19th centuries, ending their attacks with the naval decline of the Ottoman Empire in the late 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the European conquest of North Africa throughout the 19th century.

Many of the great Christian accomplishments have been plagarized by others

The idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment is a commonly held myth. In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate -- not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.

Slavery in prechristian Rome - until the miraculous advance of Christianity

Romans inherited the institution of slavery from the Greeks and the Phoenicians [11].

As the Roman Republic expanded outward, entire populations were enslaved, thus creating an ample supply.

The people subjected to Roman slavery came from all over Europe and the Mediterranean.

Such oppression by an elite minority eventually led to slave revolts (see Roman Servile Wars); the Third Servile War led by Spartacus was the most famous and severe.

Greeks, Berbers, Germans, Britons, Thracians, Gauls (or Celts), Jews, Arabs, and many more were slaves used not only for labor, but also for amusement (e.g. gladiators and sex slaves).

If a slave ran away, he was liable to be crucified. ...............

11,000,000 Black Africans were seized in slavery by the West. Most survived and have a much better life than those in Africa.

14,000,000 Black Africans were seized in slavery by Muslims and the males were castrated, while black babies were murdered upon birth.

Ancestors of today's black Africans sold their neighbors into slavery, and many still do so today - Niger slave flees castration in the 21st century in Africa!!!

Black muslim Africa is still involved in slavery today.

Wake up, Black America!

Christianity and the horrific failed states of Africa - wherever Christianity has gone in Africa, the best of societies have followed

The crocodile must not be fed with do-nothingism and denial
Failed states index

Christianity has led in the struggle up and out of the abyss of failed states

The great Christian abolitionists of the 18th and 19th centuries led a world of darkness up out of the abyss

Abolitionists repeatedly invoked the Golden Rule: ‘All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them' (Matthew 7:12).

Obeying this ‘Royal Law of Christ' involved looking at the world from the Other's point of view.

Abolitionist preachers urged their listeners to imagine themselves being enslaved.

The Baptist preacher, Abraham Booth, visualised himself, his family and thousands of his fellow countrymen ‘kidnapped, bought, and sold into a state of cruel slavery'. He was left with a sense of outrage. [33]

The maverick Quaker, Benjamin Lay, even kidnapped a child (temporarily) from its slaving-owning parents to help them see the distress their practice caused!

Thinking about the Golden Rule required people to consider how their actions impacted others, including African slaves on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Methodist, Samuel Bradburn, observed to his horror that though he had ‘always abhorred slavery in every shape', he had been ‘in some degree accessory to the Bondage, Torture and Death of myriads of human beings by assisting to consume the produce of their labour, their tears, and their blood!'

He asked God's pardon, and hoped that by boycotting sugar he could ‘make some restitution for my former want of attention to my duty in this respect'. [34]

Abolition of the vicious Scandanivian slave trade

Abolition of the vicious Scandanivian Slave Trade
In 1788, the English Committee for the Abolition of Slavery sent a Swedish opponent of the slave trade, Anders Sparrman, to Gustav III. The committee feared that other nations would expand their trade if England stopped its own. They sent books about the issue and a letter, in which the king was encouraged to hinder his subjects to participate in this disgraceful trade. In the response letter, delivered through Sparrman, he wrote that no one in the Country had participated in the slave trade and that he would do all that he could to keep them from doing so.

During the early 19th century, movements against slavery became stronger, especially in England. Slave trade was outlawed in England in 1807, and in the United States in 1808, after which other countries started to follow suit. Sweden made slave trade illegal in 1813, but allowed slavery until October 9, 1847.

During the 19th century, the British Admiralty patrolled the African coast to catch illegal slave traders.[10] The Swedish vessel Diana was intercepted by the British authorities close to the coast of Africa while engaged in carrying slaves from Africa to Saint Bartholomew during this period. The case was taken to court in order to test if slave trade could be considered contrary to the general law of nations. However, the vessel was returned to the Swedish owners on the ground that Sweden had not prohibited the trade and tolerated it in practice.[11]

Once the slave trade became a hot issue, the Swedish government abandoned the slave trade in the Caribbean, but did not initially outlaw slavery. The West Indian colonies became financial burdens. The island of Guadeloupe was returned to France in 1814, against a compensation in the sum of 24 million francs. A Guadeloupe Fund was established in Sweden for the benefit of the Swedish Crown Prince and Regent Charles XIV John of Sweden, born Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a French national and former Marshal of France under Napoleon I. He and his heirs were paid 300,000 riksdaler per year up until 1983 in compensation for their loss of prestige in France when Sweden joined England against France in the Napoleonic War. In Saint Bartholomew, the Swedish government bought the remaining slaves to give them freedom. According to Herman Lindqvist in Aftonbladet (8 October 2006), 523 slaves were bought free for 80 riksdaler per slave.

Exactly how many slaves were brought to the New World on Swedish ships is yet impossible to know, since most of the archives documents have not been investigated seriously in that respect, and many of them are by now not accessible because of their bad preservation and non microfilming.[12] Nevertheless, a few datas, mostly concerning the former Swedish island Saint-Barthélemy, are now available online[13].

NON MONAGOMOUS CULTURES ARE INHERENTLY DYSFUNCTIONAL, TRIBALISTIC, HATE BASED, AND FREQUENTLY VIOLENT

Non monagomous cultures lead to brutalization and excessive control over females, genetic problems due to inbreeding, dysfunctional fathering, child marriage, old bulls needing to rid themselves of unwanted young bulls, often resulting in mindless sexual violence.

THE GOLDEN RULE: THE SINGLE MOST TRANSFORMATIVE TEACHING THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN

THE GOLDEN RULE ENDED WORLDWIDE SLAVERY, ALBEIT SLOWLY AND IMPERFECTLY

Ethic of reciprocity

The Parable of the Good SamaritanThe ethic of reciprocity, also known as the Golden Rule, is an ethical code that states one has a right to just treatment, and a responsibility to ensure justice for others. Reciprocity is arguably the most essential basis for the modern concept of human rights, though it has its critics.[1]

.............

Today the most common English phrasing of the Golden Rule is "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." (Luke 6:31, NIV) The "Do unto others" part first appeared in English in a Catholic Catechism probably in 1567, but certainly in the reprint of 1583.[3]

Elie Whitney, the cotton gin, and his mass production methods that ultimately enabled the slaveless north to easily defeat the slave crippled south

patent drawing of the cotton gin that just may have started the dominos of slavery falling over the entire civilized world

Eli Whitney's Patent for the Cotton Gin

Eli Whitney and the Need for an Invention
As Eli Whitney left New England and headed South in 1792, he had no idea that within the next seven months he would invent a machine that would profoundly alter the course of American history. A recent graduate of Yale, Whitney had given some thought to becoming a lawyer. But, like many college graduates of today, he had debts to repay first and needed a job. Reluctantly, he left his native Massachusetts to assume the position of private tutor on a plantation in Georgia.

There Whitney quickly learned that Southern planters were in desperate need of a way to make the growing of cotton profitable. Long-staple cotton, which was easy to separate from its seeds, could be grown only along the coast. The one variety that grew inland had sticky green seeds that were time-consuming to pick out of the fluffy white cotton bolls. Whitney was encouraged to find a solution to this problem by his employer, Catherine Greene, whose support, both moral and financial were critical to this effort. At stake was the success of cotton planting throughout the South, especially important at a time when tobacco was declining in profit due to over-supply and soil exhaustion.

Whitney knew that if he could invent such a machine, he could apply to the federal government for a patent. If granted, he would have exclusive rights to his invention for 14 years (today it is 20 years), and he could hope to reap a handsome profit from it.

...........snip.................

Eli Whitney Patents His Cotton Gin
In hopes of making a patentable machine, Whitney put aside his plans to study law and instead tinkered throughout the winter and spring in a secret workshop provided by Catherine Greene. Within months he created the cotton gin. A small gin could be hand-cranked; larger versions could be harnessed to a horse or driven by water power. "One man and a horse will do more than fifty men with the old machines," wrote Whitney to his father. . . . "Tis generally said by those who know anything about it, that I shall make a Fortune by it."

But patenting an invention and making a profit from it are two different things. After considering possible options, Whitney and his business partner, Phineas Miller, opted to produce as many gins as possible, install them throughout Georgia and the South, and charge farmers a fee for doing the ginning for them. Their charge was two-fifths of the profit -- paid to them in cotton itself.

And here, all their troubles began. Farmers throughout Georgia resented having to go to Whitney's gins where they had to pay what they regarded as an exorbitant tax. Instead planters began making their own versions of Whitney's gin and claiming they were "new" inventions. Miller brought costly suits against the owners of these pirated versions but because of a loophole in the wording of the 1793 patent act, they were unable to win any suits until 1800, when the law was changed.

Struggling to make a profit and mired in legal battles, the partners finally agreed to license gins at a reasonable price. In 1802 South Carolina agreed to purchase Whitney's patent right for $50,000 but delayed in paying it. The partners also arranged to sell the patent rights to North Carolina and Tennessee. By the time even the Georgia courts recognized the wrongs done to Whitney, only one year of his patent remained. In 1808 and again in 1812 he humbly petitioned Congress for a renewal of his patent.

The Effects of the Cotton Gin
After the invention of the cotton gin, the yield of raw cotton doubled each decade after 1800. Demand was fueled by other inventions of the Industrial Revolution, such as the machines to spin and weave it and the steamboat to transport it. By midcentury America was growing three-quarters of the world's supply of cotton, most of it shipped to England or New England where it was manufactured into cloth. During this time tobacco fell in value, rice exports at best stayed steady, and sugar began to thrive, but only in Louisiana. At midcentury the South provided three-fifths of America's exports -- most of it in cotton.

However, like many inventors, Whitney (who died in 1825) could not have foreseen the ways in which his invention would change society for the worse. The most significant of these was the growth of slavery. While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor. In 1790 there were six slave states; in 1860 there were 15. From 1790 until Congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, Southerners imported 80,000 Africans. By 1860 approximately one in three Southerners was a slave.

Because of the cotton gin, slaves now labored on ever-larger plantations where work was more regimented and relentless. As large plantations spread into the Southwest, the price of slaves and land inhibited the growth of cities and industries. In the 1850s seven-eighths of all immigrants settled in the North, where they found 72% of the nation's manufacturing capacity. The growth of the "peculiar institution" was affecting many aspects of Southern life.

Epilogue
While Eli Whitney is best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin, it is often forgotten that he was also the father of the mass production method. In 1798 he figured out how to manufacture muskets by machine so that the parts were interchangeable. It was as a manufacturer of muskets that Whitney finally became rich. If his genius led King Cotton to triumph in the South, it also created the technology with which the North won the Civil War.

For Further Reading
Caney, Steven. Steven Caney's Invention Book. New York: Workman Publishers, 1985.

Green, Constance M. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Educational Publishers, 1965.

Mirsky, Jeannette and Allan Nevins. The World of Eli Whitney. New York: Macmillan Co., 1952.

Murphy, Jim. Weird and Wacky Inventions. New York: Crown Publishers, 1978.

THE REFORMED CHRISTIANITY (PROTESTANT) WORK ETHIC, MORALS (THE GOLDEN RULE) AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Protestant work ethic


Another theory (REGARDING THE RISE OF TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE) is that the British advance was due to the presence of an entrepreneurial class which believed in progress, technology and hard work.

The existence of this class is often linked to the Protestant work ethic (see Max Weber) and the particular status of the Baptists and the dissenting Protestant sects, such as the Quakers and Presbyterians that had flourished with the English Civil War.

Reinforcement of confidence in the rule of law, which followed establishment of the prototype of constitutional monarchy in Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the emergence of a stable financial market there based on the management of the national debt by the Bank of England, contributed to the capacity for, and interest in, private financial investment in industrial ventures.

Dissenters found themselves barred or discouraged from almost all public offices, as well as education at England's only two universities at the time (although dissenters were still free to study at Scotland's four universities).

When the restoration of the monarchy took place and membership in the official Anglican Church became mandatory due to the Test Act, they thereupon became active in banking, manufacturing and education.

The Unitarians, in particular, were very involved in education, by running Dissenting Academies, where, in contrast to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and schools such as Eton and Harrow, much attention was given to mathematics and the sciences—areas of scholarship vital to the development of manufacturing technologies.

Historians sometimes consider this social factor to be extremely important, along with the nature of the national economies involved.

While members of these sects were excluded from certain circles of the government, they were considered fellow Protestants, to a limited extent, by many in the middle class, such as traditional financiers or other businessmen.

Given this relative tolerance and the supply of capital, the natural outlet for the more enterprising members of these sects would be to seek new opportunities in the technologies created in the wake of the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

WHY WERE AMERICA'S NORTHERN STATES TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY TO THE SOUTHERN STATES?

BECAUSE THE NORTHERN STATES ABOLISHED SLAVERY!

WITH THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY, TECHNOLOGY REARED IT'S POLLUTING HEAD.

Why did the industrial revolution start in the UK, then Europe and North America? The industrial revolution followed the abolishment of slavery!

A SLAVE CULTURE DEMANDED CONSTANT BRUTALITY TO ACQUIRE, MANIPULATE AND CONTROL THEIR SLAVES.

AS WORLDWIDE SLAVERY SLOWLY AND IMPERFECTLY WAS ABOLISHED, THE SLAVELESS CULTURES TURNED TO TECHNOLOGY TO MEET THE NEEDS THAT FORMERLY WERE MET BY SLAVES

Causes for occurrence in Europe

Some historians such as David Landes[23] and Max Weber credit the different belief systems in China and Europe with dictating where the (industrial) revolution occurred. The religion and beliefs of Europe were largely products of Judaeo-Christianity, and Greek thought. Conversely, Chinese society was founded on men like Confucius, Mencius, Han Feizi (Legalism), Lao Tzu (Taoism), and Buddha (Buddhism). Whereas the Europeans believed that that the universe was governed by rational and eternal laws, the East, believed that the universe was in constant flux and, for Buddhists and Taoists, not capable of being rationally understood.

Torture, slavery, rigidly stratified caste system were worldwide before Christianity made it's way slowly around the world

Torture Practices of the Ancient World

Was the cradle of civilization also the birthplace of atrocity? Historians have been researching the most extreme forms of torture in the ancient world. Among other things, they have found that, back then, "sitting in the tub" was actually a pretty nasty way to kick the bucket.

In total, Julius Caesar reckoned that he had 1,192,000 enemies killed during his reign. Meanwhile the Emperor Tiberius would have young men's urethras laced shut before force-feeding them wine. And, under Caligula, it became customary to saw noblemen in half.

It sounds bad -- but were these the cruellest of them all? Would they qualify for the barbarity top 10?


PHOTO GALLERY: TORTURE AND EXECUTION IN ANTIQUITY
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (6 Photos)

A new book, "Extreme Formen von Gewalt in Bild und Text des Altertums" (Extreme Violence in the Visuals and Texts of Antiquity) by Martin Zimmerman, a professor of ancient history in Munich, looks at current research into the kinds of violence that inspired "loathing, dread, horror and disgust."

Its conclusion? In the ancient Far East, where there were large states peopled by many different ethnicities, leaders demonstrated their might by inventing ingenious new tortures and agonizing methods of execution -- as a way to keep the population obedient.

Grisly Ends

The judges of ancient Babylon were particularly enthusiastic. The cutting off of feet, lips and noses, blinding, gutting and the tearing out of the heart were all standard punishments in this corner of the ancient world.

But the Assyrians seem to have been the masters of brutality. They were also extremely verbose about the grisly ends they wreaked upon their enemies. "I will hack up the flesh and then carry it with me, to show off in other countries," exulted Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king who reigned from 668 to 627 BC. And his heir liked to cut open the bellies of his opponents "as though they were young rams."


FROM THE MAGAZINE
Find out how you can reprint this DER SPIEGEL article in your publication. "The king was the deadliest," explains Andreas Fuchs, a specialist in the study of the Assyrians. "It was he alone who decided what would happen to the victims. The ability to make those decisions was the very essence of personal, royal power."

Shock and awe at such punishments permeated every dealing one had with the ruler. For example: "A message from the king to the Governor of Kaleh: "700 bales of straw. On the first of the month, at the very latest. One day late and you're dead."

Provincial governors who did not co-operate could reckon with the most horrible of deaths.

Flaying involved the delinquent official being staked to a peg and having the skin on his back torn off. Staking involved the executioner hammering a stake through the victim's lubricated anus. The goal was to place the rounded, wooden stake so carefully that it only just pushed the internal organs aside. Many victims lived for days skewered like this.

A Hefty Kick

Most of the time these bloody and brutal pieces of theater were played out on the home turf of the conquered enemy. Artists immortalized the gruesome sights, the terrifying pictures serving as educational material.

The city-states of ancient Greece, meanwhile, tended to keep their torture local, in the frequent battles they fought among themselves. They rarely conquered outside peoples, perhaps a reason that violent visual propaganda isn't often found on ancient Greek monuments.

In ancient Greece the blood flowed elsewhere. In Homer's Iliad alone, 318 bloody duels are described with anatomical precision: teeth fly around, eyes leak and brain matter sprays. And the reality was hardly more appetizing. The tyrant Periander of Corinth gave his pregnant wife such a hefty kick that she died. His colleague Phalaris had a hollow bronze oven made in the shape of a bull -- in which he could roast his enemies alive.

In ancient Rome, rulers not only relied on crucifixions. Those on death row were likewise often sentenced to execution ad bestias. That is, they would be ripped apart by wild animals in the Colosseum. These were displays of political power -- but with added entertainment value.

Researchers have also exposed the generally mild-mannered Persian Empire. Two Persian practices are often mentioned that had always puzzled researchers. Now, together with experts in forensic medicine from Cologne, the Basel-based historian Bruno Jacobs has managed to solve that mystery.


NEWSLETTER
Sign up for Spiegel Online's daily newsletter and get the best of Der Spiegel's and Spiegel Online's international coverage in your In- Box everyday.

The sentence, "throw them into the ashes" meant that the candidate would have to stand for days in a room filled with ash. At some stage the person would collapse from fatigue, at which point they would breathe the ash in. Even if they managed to pick themselves up, their lungs would fill up with grey flakes sooner or later, resulting in slow suffocation.

The Tub

And the punishment of "sitting in the tub" saw the convicted person placed in a wooden tub with only their head sticking out. The executioner would then paint the victim's face with milk and honey. Flies would begin to swarm around the victim's nose and eyelids. The victim was also fed regularly and fairly soon, they would virtually be swimming in their own excrement.

At which stage maggots and worms would devour their body. One victim apparently survived for 17 days -- he decayed alive.

As distant and heinous as these punishments may seem to us today, the issue of state-sanctioned torture to achieve political goals is still a current one. "Physical violence is a universal in all cultures," the new history book concludes. "Whether we will ever see any improvement is hard to say, considering mankind's history to date."