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Editor’s note: The following account is partially excerpted from the author’s new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (with a foreword by Victor Davis Hanson).
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Why
Eastern Europeans are much more reluctant to accept Muslim migrants
than their Western counterparts can be traced back to circumstances
surrounding a pivotal battle that took place today, June 15, in the year
1389. The Battle of Kosovo raged between Muslim invaders and Eastern
European defenders, or the ancestors of those many Eastern Europeans
today vociferously hostile to Islam.
Because
the jihad is as old as Islam, it has been championed by diverse peoples
(Arabs in the Middle East, Moors -- Berbers and Africans -- in Spain
and Western Europe, etc.). Islam’s successful entry into Eastern Europe
was spearheaded by the Turks, specifically that tribe centered in
westernmost Anatolia (or Asia Minor) and thus nearest to Europe -- the
Ottoman Turks, so-named after their founder Osman Bey. As he lay dying
in 1323, his parting words to his son and successor, Orhan, were for him
“to propagate Islam by yours arms.”
This
his son certainly did; the traveler Ibn Batutua, who once met Orhan in
Bursa, observed that, although the jihadi had captured some one hundred
Byzantine fortresses, “he had never stayed for a whole month in any one
town,” because he “fights with the infidels continually and keeps them
under siege.” Christian cities fell like dominos: Smyrna in 1329, Nicaea
in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337. By 1340, the whole of northwest
Anatolia was under Turkic control. By now, and to quote a European
contemporary:
[T]he foes of the cross, and the killers of the Christian people, that is, the Turks, [were] separated from Constantinople by a channel of three or four miles.
By 1354,
the Ottoman Turks, under Orhan’s son, Suleiman, managed to cross over
the Dardanelles and into the abandoned fortress town of Gallipoli,
thereby establishing their first foothold in Europe: “Where there were
churches he destroyed them or converted them to mosques,” writes an
Ottoman chronicler. “Where there were bells, Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins.”
Cleansed
of all Christian “filth,” Gallipoli became, as a later Ottoman bey
boasted, “the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation --
that chokes and destroys the Christians.” From this dilapidated but
strategically situated fortress town, the Ottomans launched a campaign
of terror throughout the countryside, always convinced they were doing
God’s work. “They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding
pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage,
spoil,” explained Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was
taken captive in Gallipoli, adding:
[A]nd not only do they commit these crimes, but even -- what an aberration -- they believe that God approves them!
After
Orhan’s death in 1360 and under his son Murad I -- the first of his line
to adopt the title “Sultan” -- the westward jihad into the Balkans
began in earnest and was unstoppable. By 1371 he had annexed portions of
Bulgaria and Macedonia to his sultanate, which now so engulfed
Constantinople that “a citizen could leave the empire simply by walking
outside the city gates.”
Unsurprisingly,
then, when Prince Lazar of Serbia (b. 1330) defeated Murad’s invading
forces in 1387, “there was wild rejoicing among the Slavs of the
Balkans. Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and
Hungarians from the frontier provinces all rallied around Lazar as never
before, in a determination to drive the Turks out of Europe.”
Murad responded to this effrontery on June 15, 1389, in Kosovo.
There,
a Serbian-majority coalition augmented by Hungarian, Polish, and
Romanian contingents -- twelve thousand men under the leadership of
Lazar -- fought thirty thousand Ottomans under the leadership of the
sultan himself. Despite the initial downpour of Turkic arrows, the
Serbian heavy cavalry plummeted through the Ottoman frontlines and broke
the left wing; the Ottoman right, under Murad’s elder son Bayezid,
reeled around and engulfed the Christians. The chaotic clash continued
for hours.
On the night
before battle, Murad had beseeched Allah “for the favour of dying for
the true faith, the martyr’s death.” Sometime near the end of battle,
his prayer was granted. According to tradition, Miloš Obilić, a Serbian
knight, offered to defect to the Ottomans on condition that, in view of
his own high rank, he be permitted to submit before the sultan himself.
They brought him before Murad and, after Milos knelt in false
submission, he lunged at and plunged a dagger deep into the Muslim
warlord’s stomach (other sources say “with two thrusts which came out at
his back”). The sultan’s otherwise slow guards responded by hacking the
Serb to pieces. Drenched in and spluttering out blood, Murad lived long
enough to see his archenemy, the by now captured Lazar, brought before
him, tortured, and beheaded. A small conciliation, it may have put a
smile on the dying martyr’s face.
Murad’s
son Bayezid instantly took charge: “His first act as Sultan, over his
father’s dead body, was to order the death, by strangulation with a
bowstring, of his brother. This was Yaqub, his fellow-commander in the
battle, who had won distinction in the field and popularity with his
troops.” Next Bayezid brought the battle to a decisive end; he threw
everything he had at the enemy, leading to the slaughter of every last
Christian -- but even more of his own men in the process.
So
many birds flocked to and feasted on the vast field of carrion that
posterity remembered Kosovo as the “Field of Blackbirds.” Though
essentially a draw -- or at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Ottomans --
the Serbs, with less men and resources to start with in comparison to
the ascendant Muslim empire, felt the sting more.
In
the years following the battle of Kosovo, the Ottoman war machine
became unstoppable: the nations of the Balkans were conquered by the
Muslims -- after withstanding a millennium of jihads, Constantinople
itself permanently fell to Islam in 1453 -- and they remained under
Ottoman rule for centuries (as documented in my new book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West).
The
collective memory of Eastern Europeans’ not too distant experiences
with and under Islam should never be underestimated when considering why
they are significantly more wary of -- if not downright hostile to --
Islam and its migrants than their Western counterparts.
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