re: What if the European peoples had banded together to destroy the early Islamic caliphates?

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Also, there wouldn’t have been so much conflict with neighboring peoples

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Can you point to a time in European history where this is accurate?

This literally happened for centuries. England and France were in all out war during the Crusades. Killing Muslims was a distraction time to time. But they went right back at it once they went home.

It’s not hard to understand why Constantinople fell. Gunpowder. Plain and simple.

It stood for 1,000 years.

Is this the part where you sniff your own fart while explaining how cultured the goat frickers used to be?

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it's never to late

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“too”

Christians were too busy trying to destroy each other

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All that you had to say was that you're dumb and uneducated. (Reading your post history, you are dumber than a door nail.) Your dumb arse telling me I'm wrong is ironclad proof I have the right idea lmao.

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What I said is 100% true and factual.

The fact that you have no rebuttal and instead just hurled insults and called me names proves that I’m right and you’re wrong. You behave like an unhinged leftist.

Go read a damn book, educate yourself, and quit talking down to me.

That is why Charlemagne unified France and created an empire

The Byzantines in 636 were THE European power when Jerusalem fell. Charlemagne doesn't even show up for another 150 years. There were no other halfway credible European (Christian)powers at the time.

If you want to get down to it. If the emperor Maurice had allowed his legions into Winter Quarters instead of pressing an attack across the Danube in 602, you might never have heard of Islam as other than a footnote.

Maurice's overthrow at the hands of Phocas leads to the Persians running crazy throughout the Levant and Egypt that leads to Heraclius overthrowing Phocas and taking the fight to the Persians ultimately taking out the Persian king, but leaving two great empires utterly exhausted both physically, politically and militarily. Nature absorb a vacuum and the Arab Muslims stepped in.

Maurice did not have to pursue the Sclaveni (Slavs) when he did. He already had the upper hand.

In the Middle Ages, Islamic societies were much more advanced scientifically and technologically than Christian European civilizations (see, e.g., Toledo in Spain). Others have noted this point earlier in the thread, and the OP has subsequently dismissed it or written it off.

But this example poses a big problem for the OP's argument nonetheless, because it disproves one of the core assumptions of the post: That Islam is inherently limiting to technological and societal advancement. With such an obvious counterpoint in the centuries after the emergence and spread of Islam, it should be clear that this assumption is wrong.

With that reasoning in mind, the more interesting counterfactual question is not about the early spread of Islam, but rather : Why did subsequent Islamic civilizations turn their backs on European advancements, specifically during the Age of Exploration and the Enlightenment?


Many have mentioned the Turks -- they actually did adopt European technology, but failed to keep innovating after the Second Siege of Vienna.

Perhaps more recently, we could consider efforts by Islamic societies to modernize, and ask questions like : Why did the post-War Arab modernization programs of Nasser and the Ba'athists ultimately fail?

Clearly, this failure has a lot to do with the Luddite/anti-modern tendency in Islamic extremism, which emerged as a backlash to the Ba'athist approach.

Or, if you really want to get philosophical about it, you could consider the current popularity of modern Islam among the poorest segments of Asian societies, then ask : Does Islam make people poor? Or are poor people attracted to Islam for some reason?


There are all sorts of questions that are much better and more historically informed than the one you posed, which is laced with flawed assumptions about the nature of the religion itself (or perhaps its adherents, that part isn't clear, either).

Byzantines were in disarray by 1096 during the first crusade. They were having their asses handed to them by the Seljuk Turks who had destroyed Byzantine forces on 1071 at Manzikert. Plus the Byzantines had their hands full in the Balkans as well. The Byzantines could not send a credible force to the Levant.