How accurate is this image about the Crusades and Islamic conquests?

shlin28

These maps are utterly disingenuous and worthless for actually learning about history. The first two images come from a YouTube video and show a time-lapse of battles over time; however, this is very misleading, since adding together all the battles fought by Muslims over a thousand years will of course look very different from a small collection of Crusader battles. More importantly, this is an unfair comparison. Even if a Muslim leader led a Muslim army against Christians, that does not say anything about their motivations. Why should we compare a small select number of Christian battles to literally all Muslim battles? Christians of all creeds did fight with Muslims before, during, and after the Crusades, so I see no reason to limit this comparison to a few centuries (and I'm reasonably sure that there were more Crusader battles than that, you will have to ask someone else for details though). What about the eastern Roman offensives of the 670s, which raided into Egypt and Syria? What of the back-and-forth in Spain between the northern Christian kingdoms and the Muslim polities in the south? Instead, we get this, a poisonous comparison that serves to stir up hatred, rather than to reach an understanding of the past.

This is of course assuming that all the battles were genuine. The original video says that 'I created a database of some 548 jihad battles against classical civilisation'. I'm gonna need some serious references for that. This is because evidence for the first few centuries of Islam is sparse, so I doubt that any of the earlier dots can be particularly accurate. The first attack on Sicily, c.652, is for instance only attested to from a very brief mention in the Book of Pontiffs written in Rome, so we have no idea where the Arabs actually attacked apart from there being a raid on the island. Moreover, there is doubt that it actually happened - a recent article for instance suggests that it was in fact a reference to Romano-Moorish soldiers fighting a civil war against a rebel governor, and that the papal scribe had simply written down the name of their tribe incorrectly. You don't have to agree with this interpretation, but this brief reference is definitely not a solid foundation to build a argument on. The same goes for many other battles. We can perhaps identify the famous Battle of Yarmouk/Gabitha in Palestine, but good luck trying to pin down the other locations (which brings up another question, how do we distinguish between raids, battles, and campaigns?). Without further documentation, I can only assume that the original author put a dot on the likely locations and hoped that the audience would buy it because it looks impressive and knowledgeable.

Sadly, the comments on the video and in the image here suggest that the author knows very little about history. The war 'against classical civilisation' is a good starting point, since recent research has instead argued that the Arab conquests were very much a late antique phenomenon; far from the end of an era, it was the product of contemporary trends, of emperors preaching holy war, of holy men writing of an impending apocalypse, and of periphery peoples taking advantage of sedentary empires when they were weak. As the historian Robert Hoyland has put it:

From this perspective the Arab conquests began as an Arab insurrection, that is, the early conquerors were not invaders coming from outside the empire but insiders trying to seize a share of the power and wealth of the Byzantine state. This helps explain why the Arab conquests were not particularly destructive: the leadership already had close acquaintance with the empires and they wanted to rule it themselves, not destroy it.

There are even some doubts that we can even call it the 'Islamic conquests', since it is likely that Christians and Jews took part in these wars too - I wonder how /r/TheDonald would react to that.

So it is worth questioning the terminologies here. From the last image, we would get the impression that the 'Muslim armies' were fierce foes of Christianity, marching relentless on to seize Christian strongholds and to destroy Christian power. But that is a false image. Wars were and are terrible things, but the Arab conquests of the Middle East were, as far as conquests go, relatively mild. The Christian (and Jewish) holy city of Jerusalem was for example surrendered peacefully, a handover that compares favourably to when the Crusaders finally seized the city, which supposedly led to rivers of blood flowing through Jerusalem.

Instead of a constant wave of jihadis threatening to ruin Christendom, we need to appreciate that people were (and are) complicated. We cannot just assume that because they were Muslims that they must be hellbent on attacking Christians. What if they were ambitious men? What if they hungered for gold? People in the past were not caricatures, but real breathing beings with their own desires, virtues, and flaws. Indeed, in some cases, (non-Arab) Christians were happy to help the Arabs. Armenian noblemen in the 650s were for example all too eager to throw off the Roman yoke by making a favourable treaty with the rising caliphate, while a late-seventh century Frankish pilgrim, Arculf, had travelled to the Christian Holy Land unmolested by the new rulers of the land. Even at the dawn of the Crusades, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had built an enduring alliance with some of the Turks on his doorsteps to secure his holdings, including against other Christians and Muslims, an alliance that only fell apart when his partner, Sulayman, died. Historians of the Crusades can probably point to other more relevant examples, so I'm gonna ping /u/Valkine here.

It is also worth noting that by the second Islamic century, the concept of jihad was already changing, so it is incredibly tenuous to argue that individuals from across the Islamic world followed the same motivation (/u/textandtrowel can explain this far better than I). Religion was of course important, but such an image, as presented here, hardly cares about that, as it instead prefers to spread an ahistorical interpretation of the past. Listing battles is all very well and good, but they mean nothing without their context.

There are many and more things to be talked about here, particularly about specific conflicts, but I'm not a military historian nor do I know much about events beyond the seventh century, so I'll stop here, but I hope I have explained in part how and why this image is fatally incorrect.