The Seventh Century Battle that Changed the World Forever
The Seventh Century Battle that Changed the World Forever
You've Probably Never Heard of It
NOTE: While I planned on writing on the farming system in an article that dove more into the details on Mr. Griggs’ article on Tyson,1 the reaction in Europe to mass migration, as shown by the nationalist victories across Europe this week,2 made this subject more relevant. That is because it answers the question of how we got to a situation where Europe is under threat of being swamped by Islamic invasion, and what happened the first time such a situation came to pass. Further, it will address how the consequences of a single battle over a thousand years ago led to this disastrous situation.
The Battle that Changed Everything
The Clash of Civilizations in the Seventh Century
Opposing armies glare at each other across a sun-scorched, hilly border of what is now Israel and Jordan. Opposite each other are two large and growing armies that pray to their gods while sharpening spears and swords on whetstones and ensuring the strings of bows are taut. One side, gathered from the far reaches of empire, is splendidly equipped but exhausted after generations of grinding warfare in this region. The other is, though equipped with scavenged equipment, is devoted to its newfound religion and dedicated to waging jihad to spread Mohammad’s banners across the world.
After much waiting and maneuvering, the clash begins. For five long days, the battle rages back and forth. The Christian cavalry crashes again and again into exposed Muslim flanks as the Bedouins bash Byzantines back time and time again. The heavy Christian infantry proves hard to kill but also struggles to come to grips with its nomadic antagonists, the ancient world never did have an answer to horse archers…and in the end, both sides struggle to advance their lines despite inflicting and incurring much bloodshed.
Then comes the sixth day of the bloody battle. Massed Muslim cavalry forces the Byzantine heavy cavalry from the field, leaving the flanks of the sturdy Roman infantry exposed and its back against a ravine. This results in disaster for the now outnumbered, surrounded, and increasingly demoralized Byzantine forces, who have been out of their element, fighting in a raging sandstorm all day. As the Muslim forces advance and push the Christians closer and closer together, the Christians are gradually unable to wield their weapons or maintain their formations. Crushed against the inexorable advance and their densely-packed brothers, they are gradually forced backward and over the edge of the ravine and die en masse from the fall.
The Consequences of Defeat
From there, the Caliphate advanced across the region inexorably, its success coming thanks to its own fanaticism and Byzantine weakness. Though Emperor Heraclius escaped from Byzantine Syria in time, the once-warlike emperor was a broken man and his army was even more shattered. The 30,000-man army he brought to the banks of the Yarmouk was all he had, the collected forces of the whole empire. When it was destroyed, so was Byzantium’s ability to fight back.
The ensuing spread of the black flag across the once-Christian world was a terror to behold. First, the Caliphate’s forces advanced through the Holy Land and Roman Syria, conquering the lands where Jesus walked and killing or oppressing the Christians within them. Advancing northward, the Caliphate reaches all the way to the mountains on the edge of Anatolia, where it is finally stopped by the remnants of Byzantium’s army. In the south, the cancerous spread was even more severe. After Gaza fell to the black flag of the Caliphate (the same flag ISIS later mimicked), Caliphate forces sacked Alexandria, seized the grain basket of the Mediterranean world - Egypt and the fertile banks of the Nile - and advanced all the way across North Africa.
From there, Caliphate forces crossed the Pillars of Hercules and conquered almost all of Spain, leaving only a tiny spit of land in the north, Galicia, in Christian hands. From there the Reconquista will later come, but for then, it was just a few knights holding fast in the mountains and valleys of Asturias. The Caliphate’s armies continued over the Pyrenees, crashing into France until they were finally stopped for good at Tours by Charles Martel. He spent the rest of his life retaking conquered French lands and pushing them back over the mountains.
All that, a blitzkrieg on camels from the river Jordan to the Straights of Gibraltar, from Galilee to Armenia and Aquitaine, came as a result of the devastating battle of Yarmouk, the Byzantine defeat described above. With it came a complete reversal of Byzantine fortunes. Under Heraclius, the Eastern Romans had defeated their hereditary Persian rivals for good shortly before Yarmouk occurred. After it, the Christian empire in the East took centuries to recover and never regained its territory in Africa and the Levant. Meanwhile, the Caliphate’s forces spread across the Mediterranean and changed it forever. In seizing 2/3 of Christian territory, they converted many areas permanently, namely Egypt, the Levant, and North Africa. They also set up centuries of grinding conflict in Spain, the Holy Land, and the borders of Anatolia.
That defeat led to everything from the Crusades to recover the Holy Land to the Barbary pirates preying on American ships in the 1800s, Portugal’s attempts to outflank the Muslim East by sailing around Africa to Spanish conquistadors sailing West and conquering pagans in the Americas after finally defeating the last remnants of the Caliphate’s blitzkrieg, Grenada, in 1492. Because of that defeat, much of the once strongly Christian lands of the Roman Empire - North Africa, the Holy Land, Syria, and Egypt - became Muslim for good; first, the Christians were oppressed and exploited, later they or their descendants converted.
Raymond Ibrahim, a Christian historian who had focused on the conflicts between the Christian West and Muslim East, explained the consequences of the devastating defeat on the banks of the Yarmouk in detail in his “Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.” He wrote:
[I]mportant centers of Christianity - Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria - were permanently swallowed up by Islam and thoroughly Arabized. For unlike the Germanic barbarians who invaded and conquered Europe in the preceding centuries— only to assimilate into Christian culture, civilization, and language (Latin and Greek) —the Arabs further imposed their creed and language onto the conquered peoples so that, whereas the "Arabs" once only thrived in the Arabian Peninsula, today the "Arab world" consists of some twenty-two nations spread over the Middle East and North Africa.
This would not be the case, and the world would have developed in a radically different way-there would likely be no more chapters to this book-had the original floodgates on the banks of the Yarmuk not been inundated by Muslim invaders. Even without the power of hindsight afforded to historians living more than a millennium after the fact, Anastasius of Si-nai, who was a youth when Muslim forces overran his Egyptian homeland, testified to the decisiveness of the battle by referring to it as "the first terrible and incurable fall of the Roman army. I am speaking of the bloodshed at Yarmuk..., after which occurred the capture and burning of the cities of Palestine, even Caesarea and Jerusalem. After the destruction of Egypt there followed the enslavement and incurable devastation of the Mediterranean lands and islands. But those ruling and dominating the Roman Empire did not understand these things.")
Put differently, because the Eastern Roman Empire failed to deal a decisive blow to the invaders and send them back to Arabia, the unity of the ancient Mediterranean was shattered and the course of world history forever altered. Little wonder some historians hold that "the battle of the Yarmuk had, without doubt, more important consequences than almost any other in all world history."
Interestingly, Christians at the time blamed their woe son the prevalence of degeneracy, particularly of the homosexual cross-dressing variety, in the Byzantine Empire. As Ibrahim notes
Both agreed that God was on the side of Muslims- but for radically different reasons. Christians agreed with Patriarch Sophronius: just as God had often punished the ancient Hebrews whenever they fell astray by raising ruthless pagan conquerors against them, so these new invaders were God's rod to chastise Christians for falling astray, particularly, if the seventh-century Apocalypse is to be believed, for engaging in widespread acts of sexual immorality, including cross-dressing:
Thus not because He loved them [Muslims] did the Lord God give them power to seize the land of the Christians, but because of the lawlessness of the Christians. The likes of it never had occurred nor may it occur in the entire generations of the earth. For why did men put on the clothes of adulterous women and prostitutes, adorn themselves as women and openly stand in the squares and markets of towns and change their natural practice for an unnatural one ...?
Likewise, women did the same things as the men had done. Father, son and brother had intercourse with one woman who touched every kinsman... For this reason God delivered them into the hands of the barbarians, that is, because of their sin and stench. The women will pollute themselves through the men who already are polluted and the sons of Ishmael will cast lots [for them].
The Present Consequences
The Europe that withstood the consequences of Yarmouk now faces the consequences of its own post-Cold War degeneracy. As the Byzantines frittered away their pre-Islam victory over the Persians and then were crushed by the advancing tide of Islam, Europe has seen itself weakened by internal subversion, degeneracy, and pacifism and now lies open to Camp of the Saints-style invasion that is only different from the Saracen invasions of days past in that now the Europeans don’t even bother fighting back.3
Entire swathes of French cities are no-go zones for even the highly militarized and well-armed police,4 much less French citizens who have no right to arms and no ability to walk through their own cities in their own land thanks to the invaders. England is in an even worse spot, with the police aiding and abetting Islamist rapists that prey on young English girls.5 Similarly, in Germany Islamists prey upon women en masse and have turned once-beautiful Christmas markets into militarized zones that can either transform into unaesthetic fortresses or face the Islamist consequences. The gates of Toledo are open,6 and the invaders are flowing in, erasing Christendom.7
The situation might not be lost, particularly if the nationalist parties win in the coming elections and then, like Charles Martel, devote themselves to scouring Europa of her invaders. But, given the deracinated and demoralized state of much of Europe, not to mention how America’s far-left government would react to such nationalist policies, that seems unlikely.8
Rather, it seems that the Old World is in for what happened to the Holy Land, Armenia, Egypt, and North Africa after Yarmouk: a swamping of the once-Christian lands by invaders as no one fights back, with the Christian population turning into dhimmis under the brutal, conquering path of the scimitar and its crescent banner.9 Such is what Raspaill predicted in the Camp of the Saints, and it’s hard to see such a path not happening now unless Europe gets its spirit back in an immediate and radical way.
But that doesn’t mean the situation is irretrievable. “Oft hope is born, when all is forlorn,” as Tolkien said. The situation probably seemed lost to the Spanish knights in Asturias,10 the Frankish knights before a stunning victory at Antioch,11 or the knights of St. John on Malta.12 Similarly, nationalist victories were just won that would have been a mere dream even a decade ago; the tide is turning as Europe wakes up from her slumber. Though Europe is heading toward the cliff, she has been in dire straights before and recovered before it was too late. Hopefully, the same will happen once again.
Yarmouk Brought Us Here
Whether the situation is irretrievable or not, Europe is now in its present straights in no small part because of Yarmouk. Admittedly, the failure of the Crusades, Britain under Disraeli protecting the Ottomans from a Russian coup de grâce,13 America and the USSR partnering to end colonization and imperialism after World War II,14 and the general societal rot induced by the Globalist American Empire and its EU satrapies embracing Critical Race Theory and Cultural Marxism has helped create the situation as well. Like the Trump and Tiberius Gracchus connection,15 it’s not exact, only close enough to have some explanatory power.
But the fact remains that, had the conquering tide of Islam been stopped at Yarmouk, whether the cause of the Byzantine defeat was her army’s bad tactics and generalship or her societal degeneracy, we wouldn’t be in this situation. Islam would have been stopped and driven back, becoming a contained cult in the desert. The countries now flooding Europe with Muslim immigrants - Turkey, Lybia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, etc. - would never have become Muslim, instead remaining Orthodox Christian.
Had the battle’s outcome been different, had the Christians better pressed their advantage and crushed the black flag and crescent in the Seventh Century, the world today would be a radically different beast, for better and worse. That’s worth considering, and is a fact to remember whenever you hear that a certain clash doesn’t matter. Perhaps not, but then again, it could be the next Yarmouk.
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If you think Europe could get away with this, remember that America didn’t even let Rhodesia defend itself from communist terrorists:
For a very cursory read on the subject: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Western-colonialism/The-United-States-and-the-Soviet-Union
