[This piece was originally to be the prologue of my book 'Faith and Sword: A Short History of Christian-Muslim Conflict' (London, 2006), but was deleted before publication.]
This short book was originally intended to be an overview of the influence of sea power on Christian-Muslim conflict over the centuries. However, while still seeking to demonstrate the often forgotten importance of maritime activities and strategy in Christian-Muslim warfare, the story has been widened to include land warfare and, in more recent times, the impact of air power.
Traditionally the great Muslim empires of the last millenium have been seen primarily as land powers, yet in many areas Christian-Muslim conflict resolved itself into a battle for the control of seas. Throughout all the centuries since the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 one area of constant Christian-Muslim confrontation has been the Mediterranean Sea. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese brought the oceanic naval power of Christian Europe to the Indian Ocean for the first time, and Christian-Muslim warfare was extended to that ocean and its offshoots, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Between the 1760s and the 1870s control of the Black Sea was the prize at stake in the wars between the growing Orthodox Christian empire of Russia and the declining Muslim empire of the Ottoman Turks.
Nevertheless one cannot deny that for centuries it was the military power of the Muslims on land which seemed to pose the greatest threat to the survival of Christian Europe. Between the eighth and the fifteenth centuries the Christians fought to expel the Muslim invaders from Spain and Portugal. Yet even before this threat had been finally removed from south-west Europe, a new Muslim military threat, the Ottoman Turks, was advancing across south-east Europe. That Muslim presence in Europe would not be removed until the first decades of the twentieth century.
Yet during the middle ages the Christians of Europe had delivered a counter-attack which struck at the heartlands of Islam. It was growing Christian maritime power in the Mediterranean that was one of the factors which allowed the crusaders to reach the Holy Land at the end of the eleventh century and take Jerusalem from the Muslims. The success of the First Crusade led to the creation of Christian states in Palestine and Syria which survived for almost two centuries before finally being destroyed by the Muslims. Although this Christian success was comparatively short-lived, memories of it lived on in European consciousness.
Indeed the struggle against Islam was one of the fundamental factors that shaped the Europe which emerged from the middle ages into the modern world. It was an influence that spread widely across Christendom, touching places far removed from the main areas of direct Christian-Muslim warfare. The final draft of this book was completed during a stay in Herefordshire, a largely agricultural county of England on the border with Wales. Such an area might seem remote from the battlefields where cross and crescent clashed, but even here links with that struggle can still be found.
North of the small town of Leominster is Croft Castle, which was for generations the home of the Crofts, a family who came originally from Normandy in France. According to family tradition an ancestor, Jasper de Croft, went on the First Crusade and was knighted by one of its leaders, Godfrey of Bouillon, after the crusaders took the city of Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099.
South of Leominster, tucked away in a wooded valley, is Dinmore Manor. This estate was once a possession, known as a Commandery, of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John in Jerusalem. This religious military order, led by warrior monks, was tasked with the defence of the lands in Palestine and Syria which had been won for the Christians by the First Crusade. Landed estates in western Europe, such as Dinmore Manor, provided the money and men to support this distant struggle against the Muslims. Eventually the knights were driven out of the Holy Land, but they continued their war against Islam at sea, basing their galley fleet at the island of Rhodes. One of the last Commanders of Dinmore, Sir John Buck, was killed fighting the Ottoman Turks when they besieged Rhodes in 1522.
In Leominster itself, the town's war memorial includes the names of men of the Herefordshire Regiment who died in Palestine during the First World War while driving the Turks out of the Holy Land. Before Christmas 1917 the British had captured Jerusalem, becoming the first Christian conquerors of that holy city since the soldiers of the First Crusade in 1099. That the Christian-Muslim struggle for Jerusalem should leave such strong traces in a part of England so distant from the Holy Land is a measure of the long and intense nature of that conflict. Jerusalem was the greatest prize, and at Jerusalem this story can begin.
