Brian Catlos > Quotes

“God is most great! Allahu akbar! God is most great!” and sending the most faithful grimly shuffling through the dusky, unlit streets to salat al-‘isha, the evening prayer. The Sabbath”
― Brian Catlos, Infidel Kings and Unholy Warriors: Faith, Power, and Violence in the Age of Crusade and Jihad

“Yet, the invasion was not one prong of a grand campaign on the part of the caliphate to conquer “Europe,” which was at that time a poor and underdeveloped backwater and did not figure at all in the Arabo-Islamic imagination.”
― Brian Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain

“The emerging cash economy of al-Andalus contrasted with the subsistence economies of Frankish Europe and Christian Iberia, where rural servility remained the norm, social mobility was low, and there was little by way of urban culture, infrastructure, or currency. Christian rulers collected revenue through the direct consumption of food surpluses, forcing them to continuously circulate through their lands with their households in tow. This itinerant lifestyle prevented them from accumulating easily transferrable wealth, and from developing secular institutions and bureaucracies.”
― Brian Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain

“In his own time, the Cid was a warrior of legendary stature among both Christians and Muslims of the peninsula, who praised or cursed him not according to their religious affiliation but according to whether he had appeared to them as a liberator or a scourge. This was a culture that glorified brutality in the pursuit of wealth and glory. Ballads extolling his feats, the medieval equivalent of today’s narco-corridas, which rhapsodize the exploits of modern frontier outlaws, were sung around countless campfires.”
― Brian Catlos, Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain