Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam by Ibrahim Raymond

Author:Ibrahim, Raymond [Ibrahim, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Religion, Biography
ISBN: 9781642938210
Goodreads: 61034081
Publisher: Bombardier Books
Published: 2022-07-26T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

John Hunyadi: The White Knight of Wallachia

“We have had enough of our men enslaved, our women raped, wagons loaded with the severed heads of our people, the sale of chained captives, the mockery of our religion…. [W]e shall not stop until we succeed in expelling the enemy from Europe.”

—John Hunyadi1

“Tis John, called Hunyadi, who is to be the salvation of Christendom.”

—John Capistrano2

The final expulsion of the Crusaders from the Holy Land in 1291 coincided with the rise of a new Islamic power—one that would require every ounce of Crusading zeal to be redirected from offensive warfare (trying to reconquer Jerusalem) to defensive warfare (trying to protect Europe).

In the late thirteenth century, a Turkish chieftain by the name of Osman (1258–1326) began laying the foundations of and eventually imparted his name to what would become the Ottoman (from Osman) Empire. After purging northwest Anatolia of its ancient Christian character—sources speak of churches aflame and Christians massacred, enslaved, or fleeing—Osman’s successors entered the easternmost strip of Europe and took the old fortress town of Gallipoli in 1354.3 There, “where there were bells,” an Ottoman chronicler wrote, Suleiman, a grandson of Osman “broke them up and cast them into fires. Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them to mosques. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins.”4 Cleansed of all Christian “filth,” Gallipoli became the first jihadist base whence the terrorization of the Balkans began; or, as Mustafa, an Ottoman emir later boasted, Gallipoli became “the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation, that chokes and destroys the Christians.”5

Despite European resistance, by 1371 Thrace and large swathes of Bulgaria and Macedonia were overrun and devastated. Traveling through them later that same year, Issaye, a Mount Athos monk, recorded his impression: “The Ishmaelites,” he wrote, conflating Turks with Arabs—both Muslims—“massacred one part of the Christians with the sword, and led off others into slavery; the rest were carried off by a premature death.” He described how nature—in the guise of a terrible famine and ravenous wolves—“decimated” the rest: “Alas, what a sorrowful picture to behold! The land is left devoid of all goods, men, livestock, and other produce.” The devastation and desolation was so horrific that those who remained alive “truly envied the dead,” concluded Issaye.6 (Such accounts underscore the fact that, as historian Dimitar Angelov writes, “the conquest by the Turks had disastrous consequences for the Balkan peoples and for centuries trammeled their normal economic and social development.”7)

In an effort to drive their Islamic tormentors out, on June 15, 1389, a large coalition of Christians—Serbians, Albanians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Hungarians, and Wallachians—fought but lost to the Turks at Kosovo. On September 25, 1396, an even larger coalition of Balkan Christians—this time augmented by Western, primarily French, forces—tried again and lost again to the Turks at the battle of Nicopolis. A new wave of terror and slave raids ensued, as Ottoman suzerainty extended deeper into the Balkans.

The victor at Nicopolis, Bayezid I, one of Ottoman history’s many depraved sultans, especially relished the human booty.

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