The history of Islam and the West has been one of unwavering antagonism and seismic clashes, often initiated by the followers of Muhammad. By the standards of history, nothing between the two forces is as well documented as this long war. Accordingly, for more than a millennium, both educated and not-so-educated Europeans knew—the latter perhaps instinctively—that Islam was a militant creed that for centuries attacked and committed atrocities in their homelands, all in the name of “holy war,” or jihad. In the words of Konstantin Mihailović, a fifteenth century Serb who was forced to convert to Islam in his youth and made to fight as a slave-soldier for the Turks until he escaped: “the Persians, the Turks, the Tatars, the Berbers, and the Arabs; and the diverse Moors… [all] conduct themselves according to the accursed Koran, that is, the scripture of Mohammed.”
