‘Thus Are Moors Defeated!’

When the Cid annihilated the Jihadists. 

Raymond Ibrahim October 26, 2022 1 Comment

This week in history, in the year 1094, a small force of Christian knights destroyed a massive Muslim horde in Spain, where the Jihad and Reconquista had been raging for years.  Earlier, the Almoravids, a North African group committed to jihadist teaching and led by the emir Yusuf bin Tashfin, began pouring into Spain to aid their Islamic counterparts, the Moors, who had suffered several significant defeats to the Christians in recent years.

In 1086, the Muslims and Christians clashed at Sagrajas. The Christians were annihilated; their king barely managed to escape with a dagger stuck in his thigh.  Afterwards, in a typical gesture of Islamic supremacy, Yusuf had some 2,400 Christian heads decapitated and assembled into a pyramid, atop which the muezzin called the faithful to prayers.  Following the disaster at Sagrajas, one by one, Muslim kingdoms that had been liberated during the Reconquista—even a few Christian strongholds—fell back under Islamic control...............

A showdown was inevitable: “Islam and the Occident were now each represented by an outstanding personality,” writes historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal: “Yusuf the Saharan and the Castilian Cid stood face-to-face in the struggle between the two civilizations."............The final showdown between the Cid and his African adversaries had come and is recorded in both song and chronicle.  Cid remained in a defensive posture, the Muslims became more emboldened and encroached closer to his city’s walls.  Before long they had surrounded Valencia’s gates in very tight formations—precisely what the Cid was waiting for.........

Thus, at the height of Muslim confidence, heavily armored knights astride even heavier steeds of war burst out of one of the gates.........a “multitude” of Almoravids “fell to the sword,” the panicked Africans “turned their backs in flight,” the Historia concludes, many of them falling and drowning in the Jucar river.

The battle of Cuarte was a shattering blow to the hitherto undefeated Almoravids: though outnumbered by twelve-to-one, the Spanish knights had defeated and driven off 50,000 jihadists. Christians all throughout Western Europe wildly celebrated..........To Read More...