A History Lesson , You wonder why we have a problem now.... POLITICS... only if Europe and Byzantine was united then... and still to date countries are divided... nothing has changed and the problem grows even more... history will repeat Between about 565 and 700 we can speak of a transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Very severe plagues ravaged the Byzantine empire. By 600 population was tumbling everywhere, and trade shrinking. In 610 a then-obscure Arab named Mohammed had a vision of the archangel Gabriel, and started preaching Islam (SUBMISSION to the way of God). In 634 his successor Omar led armies into the Byzantine Empire in the first jihad. They took Damascus in 635 and Jeruslaem in 638; in 642 they took Alexandria and overthrew the Persian Empire. The first Arab raid hit Sicily in 652. At this point the Arab fleet was tiny, but the Byzantines felt that the threat was real enough for emperor Constans II to come to the west in person in 662. He worried that if the Arabs overran Sicily and southern Italy, Byzantine Greece would be surrounded by Islam. Things didn’t go well for Constans. Despite his presence, Mu‘awiya ben Khudayj, caliph of Egypt, sent a much bigger raid in 667, which carried off tremendous plunder and slaves; and in the same year Mu‘awiya ben Abi-Sufyan launched the first of many Arab assaults on Constantinople (modern Istanbul), the Byzantine capital. Beset by crises on all sides, Constans was murdered by his own troops in Siracusa in 668. Things just got worse and worse. In 698 Arabs took Carthage, the last Byzantine stronghold in North Africa. A great Byzantine counterattack from Sicily failed in 702, and from that point on the initiative was firmly in Arab hands. The Byzantine Empire had been reduced to a rump around Constantinople, plus Sicily and southern Italy. All three areas were under constant attack. In 711 the Arabs invaded Spain and India; in the west, they were only turned back in 732, on the outskirts of Paris. Many Christians thought that the apocalypse was near, and things got very weird. Byzantine Christianity had long attached importance to beautiful religious icons, whereas Islam (following Judaism) banned artistic representations of religious subjects. In the 720s a movement called Iconoclasm (“image-smashing”) caught on in Byzantium in an effort to recapture God’s favor, on the assumption that God preferred the Muslim rejection of representational art. Traditional religious authorities resisted this, and by the 740s Byzantine Christians were killing each other over iconoclasm almost as quickly as the Muslims were killing them. The Byzantines were too busy fighting each other, the Arabs in the east, and the Slavs in the Balkans to do much for Sicily and Italy. Major Arab raids plundered the island most years between 727 and 753. The 8th century was a real Dark Age in Sicily, as it was in much of the Mediterranean. We know of so little activity on the island that some archaeologists suspect that there must be a technical problem that has prevented us from identifying 8thcentury pottery correctly. But that is at most only part of the problem. 250 years of plagues and a century of Arab raids caused population and trade to collapse. Habib ben Ubayda probably would have occupied Sicily in 740 had he not been recalled to fight a Berber revolt in what is now Algeria. Western Christians felt that they were on their own. The Bishop of Rome made a separate alliance with Pepin, king of the Franks, in 754, and from then on distanced himself from the Eastern Church. This finally drove the Byzantine emperor Constantine V to do something about the west. He sent a large fleet in 754, which defeated Arab plans to invade both Sicily and Sardinia. He also confiscated vast papal lands in Sicily. The political/religious situation was even messier in the second half of the 8th century than before, with Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Greeks scheming against each other. web.stanford.edu/group/mountpolizzo/handbookPDF/MPHandbook5.pdf
Posted on: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 23:36:07 +0000
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