Given how many times Europe launched crusades against Muslims, was there ever any plans among Middle-Eastern rulers to invade Europe?

by _Ishmael

Were there ever any plans for Muslim forces to invade Europe given how Europeans invaded them.

sunagainstgold

Were there ever any plans for Muslim forces to invade Europe given how Europeans invaded them.

Muslim and Christian armies faced off in Europe on many occasions, both before and after the major Crusades of the late 11th through 13th centuries. During the early and into the high Middle Ages, most of the Iberian peninsula and all of Sicily were under Islamic rule; into the early modern era, the Ottoman Empire ruled swathes of eastern Europe. Into the early 19th century, corsairs captained by Muslims based out of North Africa (including a substantial--40-60--percentage of European converts) harrassed European coastlines and kidnapped crews of European military and merchant vessels, frequently holding them as slaves until Europeans (and a handful of Americans!) back home could raise the money for ransom.

What these situations have in common is that they were not a response to the Crusades. And with the very possible exception of the initial expansion under the Umayyads in the first decades of Islam, the conquests were not the work of "Islam" or the Islamic world united against "Christendom." They were specific territorial or financial acquisition strategies by specific, localized Muslim states acting on their own behalf. (In comparision, while specific numbered crusades tended to draw from a more limited geographic body of crusaders than "western Europe," they proceeded under the guise and ideology of Latin Christendom united). A small, rural, poor, climatologically-different sliver of Iberia in the north remained in Christian hands, but most of the peninsula became known as al-Andalus.

Although the initial conquest of al-Andalus proceeded under a dynasty ruled out of Damascus in Syria, east and west quickly diverged--to the extent that when the Umayyads fell out of power in the east, in the west they only grew stronger as their new, independent Cordoba caliphate.

Both Muslims and Greeks recognized that Sicily (which was under Byzantine rule until the 9th century) was a key staging point for trade and military activity in the Mediterranean. Although the initial raids into Sicily came in the course of that initial Umayyad-run exppansion of Islam, the final conquest came with the small North African Aghlabid dynasty in the early 9th century. With, by the way, apparently substantial Christian help thanks to infighting among Greek Sicilian leaders-by-repeated-coups.

While Latin armies invaded the Near East repeatedly during the height of the Crusades era, they were also busy invading al-Andalus. I guess you could consider some of this era in Iberia to be "Islamic states expanding territorially within Europe," although in this case it was more like a bunch of Muslim and Christian rulers fighting each other in various permutations, with substantial numbers of Christian mercenaries fighting even for the hard-line Muslim Almohad dynasty. (And, remember, they are fighting to re-gain their territory.)

In the very very late Middle Ages and into the early modern era, the armies of the Ottoman Empire were massively successful in conquering large amounts of eastern Europe, including the Byzantine capital at Constantinople. The prize, however, was always the Holy Roman Imperial capital at Vienna, and Ottoman armies came so, so close to their goal...but they never quite got there. Eventually, the early modern world settled into kind of a stalemate, although throughout the Reformation era western European countries made inroads at alliances with the Ottomans against rival European nations.

And finally, although this doesn't constitute an invasion, Muslim galley ships based out of the Barbary states in North Africa were a pesky nuisance to European shippers and coastal residents into the brink of the modern age. Although for a short period of time they kidnapped (primarily) men for slave labor in Algiers and Tunis, for most of the period they basically wanted prisoners to be ransomed back to Europe for money.

So while we can find many cases in the Middle Ages and early modern era when Christians and Muslims fought in and around Europe, the specific situations are very different from, and not a reaction to, the Crusades.