11. Chapter 9: The Church Loses Territory, 632-732

CHAPTER 9 The Church Loses Territory, 632-732

1. The Curtain Opens on a Scene of Disaster The eastern part of the Empire escaped the barbarian deluge and for a time enjoyed comparative peace. But for fifty years after the destruction of the Empire in the West, the eastern part had to fight for its life. At first it was kept busy beating off the attacks of the German tribes who tried to cross its borders from the north. After this had been done, the emperor Justinian was even able to recon­quer Italy from the Ostrogoths and North Africa from the Vandais, and regain those provinces for the Empire in the East.

Another fifty years passed. Then the emperor Heraclius had to wage a desperate war with the Persians. In the terrible battle of Nineveh in the year 627 the Persian army was annihilated, and the Empire in the East was saved. However, this security lasted only a short time. Then calamity befell also the east­ern part of the Empire. It was not completely destroyed as had been the western part, but some of its provinces were taken from it. They were never regained. This chapter is the story of that calamity. The German tribes that con­quered the western part of the Empire had come from the North. They were of the same Aryan or Indo-European race as the inhabi­tants of the Empire, and for the most part confessed the same Christian religion. The Arabs who conquered some of the provinces of the eastern part of the Empire came from the South. They were of a race and religion different from that of the inhabitants of the Empire. The Arab conquerors were Semitic by race and Mohammedan in religion. In the foregoing chapter we saw that the Church in the West not only survived the invasion by the German tribes, but thereafter en­joyed a wonderful growth and ex­tension. In this chapter we shall see that the invasion of the east­ern part of the Empire by the Arabs was for the Church in that part of the world nothing short of disaster.

2. Mohammed Founds a New Re­ligion The inhabitants of Arabia are de­scendants of Ishmael, son of Abra­ham and half-brother of Isaac. They were heathen, worshiping idols and believing in many gods. In this heathen country of Arabia there was born in the city of Mecca in the year 570 a boy to whom was given the name Moham­med. In his youth he was a shep­herd. Later he became a merchant, and with his caravan of camels he traveled to various countries. In his travels he came in contact with Jews and Christians, and learned something of their religion. He liked to retire to a solitary place for meditation. There he claimed to have received revelations from the angel Gabriel. The result of his observations and meditations was a new and false religion named after him, Mohammedanism. The teachings of Mohammed were later collected and written in a book called the Koran which is the sacred book of the Mohammedans to this day. His fundamental teach­ing is: There is but one God, and Mohammed is his prophet. The Arabian name for God is Allah. The Mohammedans sum up their religion in the saying: Allah is great, and Mohammed is his prophet.

MOHAMMED’S FLIGHT FROM MECCA
Schoenfeld Collection from Three Lions

Mohammed gained a few con­verts, but most of the people of Mecca, who believed in many gods, did not like his teachings. The opposition became so strong that in the year 622 he and his followers had to flee to the city of Medina. There his teachings were warmly received, and with the help of his converts in ten years time he made himself master of Arabia.

3. The Mohammedans Conquer Many Imperial Provinces

Mohammed died in 632, but his influence did not die with him. In the next one hundred years his fol­lowers, large hosts of fierce horse­men, swept out of the hot deserts of Arabia, conquered Persia, pene­trated into India, overran the im­perial province of Asia Minor, twice laid siege, although in vain, to Constantinople itself, and took away from the Eastern Empire the provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa. The Arabs did not stop in North Africa. They went on, crossed the straits of Gibraltar, and in the years 711 to 718 conquered Spain.

Neither did the Arabs stop in Spain. They crossed the Pyrenees, and penetrated into the center of what for four hundred years had been the Roman province of Gaul, but had now for some two hun­dred years belonged to the Franks. The emblem of Mohammedanism is the crescent (the shape of the moon as it appears at first quar­ter). This crescent now lay across northern Africa with one point resting on Asia Minor and the other on France. It seemed as if the moon might become full, and that all Europe might become Mo­hammedan. The moment was one of the great crises in the history of the Church and the world.

4. The Cross Faces the Crescent in the Battle of Tours

Once before in 451 Europe had been threatened with a terrible danger. This was even before the fall of Rome. Then Attila and his barbaric Huns were defeated in the battle of Chalons, which is also located in France. Now once more, almost three hundred years later, the whole future of Europe, of the Church, and therefore of the world was at stake. Mohammedanism seemed ready to engulf Christian­ity. At this point you must recall something told you in the previous chapter, section 8. You were told that the conversion of Clovis, king of the Franks, back in 496, and the adoption of Christianity by the heathen Franks was an event of the utmost importance. Now after more than two hundred years the importance of that event was going to become partially evident. The Franks now came forward as the champions of Christianity. The leader of the Franks was one Charles. He sent out a call for every man able to bear arms in all the Frankish lands to come to his aid. There was a general sense of the greatness of the danger threat­ening all that men held dear. Even Frisians and tribes across the Rhine responded to the call. A great Christian army under the command of Charles met the countless Mohammedan hosts on the plain of Tours in the year 732. Both sides felt that tremendous issues would be decided by the one single battle that was impending. For seven days the two armies faced each other. Neither side dared to begin the attack. At last on a Saturday in October the bat­tle lines were formed. The Arab army was composed mainly of cavalry; the Frankish army of foot soldiers. The hosts of Islam (as Mohammedanism is also called) had behind them one long and un­broken series of victories extend­ing over a hundred years. They had conquered country after coun­try in that time. Why should they not likewise win this battle! The Franks drew up their army in close order. Nowhere was there a gap in their ranks. All day long, in charge after charge, the wild and expert Arab horsemen swept down headlong and furiously upon the Frankish army. Over their heads fluttered the crescent ban­ners of Islam. It was becoming evident that the crescent was destined not to become full. Help­lessly the charges of the Arab horsemen broke against the Frank­ish army as against a wall. The banners of the cross continued to wave defiantly. When night fell both sides retired exhausted to their camps. Heaps of dead cov­ered the bloody field of Tours. But the most furious attacks of the Arabs had been baffled. As the Franks left the battlefield they still brandished their swords.

Early the next morning the Franks again drew up in battle ar­ray, but no Arab horsemen ap­peared. Fearing an ambush, the Franks sent out searching parties. For miles around no enemy was to be seen. In the deserted Arab camp they found piles of plunder from many lands. The Arabs had retreated behind the Pyrenees into Spain.

5. The Conversion of Clovis Has Far-reaching Consequences

Never before in all the one hun­dred years since the hosts of Mo­hammedan Arabs had swept out of their desert wastes upon their fiery Arabian steeds had they met with a major defeat. Tours was the high water mark of the Mo­hammedan tide. The once heathen and barbarian tribe of the Ger­man Franks had saved western Europe for Christianity. The con­version of the Frankish king Clovis in 496 had proved itself to be one of the greatest events in the his­tory of the Church and of the world.

CHARLES MARTEL HALTS THE MOSLEM INVASION AT TOURS
Schoenfeld Collection from Three Lions To Charles, the Frankish com­mander in the battle of Tours, was given the title of Martel, which means "hammer." He is known to history as Charles Martel, or Charles the Hammer.

6. The Losses Sustained by the Church Are Many and Serious The hosts of Islam had been stopped dead at Tours, but in the wake of their conquests they left behind them the wreckage of many churches in many lands. By the conquests of Islam the Christian Church was deprived of possible mission fields among many heathen nations. In India today there are many millions of Moham­medans. Persia became entirely Mohammedan. In addition to that, the Arabs had cast up a Moham­medan barrier across the road from Christian Europe to the heathen nations of the Orient ­walls which for many centuries remained insurmountable.

THE CONQUESTS OF MOHAMMEDANISM (A.D. 632-732)
Adapted from The Church Through the Ages,
Courtesy Concordia Publishing House The Church itself had been sadly torn. (It would be well to use your map, p. 112, in studying this para­graph.) The provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, which were wrested by the Arabs from the Eastern Empire, had been the seat of numerous and flourishing Christian churches. Spain, too, had been a Christian land. Consider, for a moment, the long list of casualties: Jerusalem in Palestine had been the cradle of the Church. In Bethlehem Jerome, the greatest scholar of the Church in the West, had given to the Church his translation of the Bible into Latin. Antioch in Syria had been the gateway through which Christianity, in the person of Paul, had come into the Roman Empire. It had also been the scene of the marvelous eloquence of Chrysos­tom, the greatest preacher of the ancient Church. Alexandria in Egypt had been the home of Clement; of Origen, the greatest scholar of the Church in the East; and of Athanasius — the father and fearless champion of ortho­doxy, and the inspirer of the Creed of Nicaea. In Carthage and in Hippo in North Africa, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, the great­est of the fathers of the ancient Church, had taught. In Seville in Spain, Isidore, the head of the Spanish Church, had labored mightily and with vast learning to pass on the knowledge of the highly cultured Greeks and Ro­mans of the ancient world to the barbarous German tribes of the Middle Ages. This he accomplished by means of his Book of Sentences and his Origins or Etymologies.

Syria, Palestine, and Egypt to this day remain overwhelmingly Mohammedan. The few weak Chris­tian churches remaining in those countries lead but a feeble exist­ence. Cairo in Egypt is today the seat of a great Mohammedan uni­versity, the intellectual citadel of Islam. Christian missions in those lands seem to be plowing upon rock. In North Africa the Church was for hundreds of years completely wiped out. No trace of it remained. It is only within the past century that the Church has been re-intro­duced into North Africa through the colonizing activities of the Spaniards, French, and Italians; but it is a very small, weak, and deformed church. Mohammedan­ism at the same time remains the religion of the natives. The de­scendants of the Arabs in North Africa and Spain became known as Moors. In the continent of Africa Chris­tian missions among the heathen Negro tribes are meeting with strong competition from Moham­medan missions, and Islam is still spreading. The Spanish peninsula has again been a Christian land, in the broad sense of the word, for more than four hundred years. But it took eight hundred years to recover that territory. The last Moorish stronghold in Spain was Granada. It was not until the year 1492 that the crescent upon its ramparts was replaced by the cross.

7. The Causes for Defeat The story of the violence done to the Church by the Mohamme­dans is a black chapter in its his­tory. Christ’s army in the seventh century suffered its first great de­feat, and that defeat was stagger­ing.

What were the causes of this inglorious defeat of the Church?

Civilization had softened the Christian inhabitants of the Em­pire, while wild desert life had hardened the Mohammedan Arabs. Monasticism had robbed the Em­pire of thousands who might have been its defenders. Mohammedan­ism promised to men who fell in battle while fighting for the faith, special privileges and pleasures in the next world. This inspired the fierce Arab horsemen. They fought with reckless courage and without fear of death. But most important, the salt of the Christianity of that day in the eastern part of the Empire had largely lost its savor. (See Matthew 5:13.) It was roughly trodden under the hoofs of the Moham­medan steeds. With reference to this, read the warnings of Christ to the seven churches recorded in chapters two and three of the book of Revela­tion.