Citing history—or rather, a highly selective and often fabricated version of it—is one of the chief ways Islam’s modern apologists attempt to elevate Muhammad’s creed and its civilization.

The formula is familiar: to portray Muslims as uniquely tolerant and magnanimous, medieval Christians must be depicted as uniquely barbaric, fanatical, hypocritical, and bloodthirsty. Thus the same names are endlessly paraded before modern audiences as proof of Christian savagery: Vlad the Impaler, Ivan ‘the Terrible’, Tomas Torquemada, the Crusaders, the Conquistadors.

Entire books have been devoted to this caricature. One 2002 volume, The Most Evil Men and Women in History, neatly packages Vlad, Ivan, and Torquemada together as exemplars of Christian cruelty.

What is almost never acknowledged, however, is that these men—and the cultures that produced them—were profoundly shaped by centuries of conflict with Islam. All three spent their lives either surrounded by Muslims, ruled by Muslims, fighting Muslims, or reacting to political and military pressures generated by Islamic conquest and jihad.

Take Vlad III Dracula (1431–1476), the historical figure behind the fictional vampire Dracula. In popular Western imagination, Vlad is remembered as a sadistic madman who impaled victims for pleasure and drank blood while monks sang hymns nearby. CNN has even said that the Islamic State learned some of its execution methods from Vlad.

Reality is considerably less cinematic—and far more revealing.

Vlad’s notorious penchant for impalement was learned from the Ottoman Turks and directed overwhelmingly against them and their collaborators. As a youth, Vlad was held hostage by Sultan Muhammad (or Mehmed) II, one of history’s most ruthless conquerors—the same sultan who captured Constantinople in 1453 and transformed Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Muhammad regularly employed impalement as an instrument of terror and statecraft.

‘While Western popular culture remembers Vlad as a monster, Romanians largely remember him as a national hero’

Vlad absorbed the lesson well.

Later, as ruler of Wallachia, he used impalement as a deliberate strategy of psychological warfare against the Ottomans: a grim message to the sultan that Christians could answer terror with terror. His brutality was not born in a vacuum; it emerged from a frontier world shaped by relentless warfare against a vastly larger Islamic empire.

Hence one of history’s great ironies: while Western popular culture remembers Vlad as a monster, Romanians largely remember him as a national hero who resisted Ottoman domination against impossible odds.

But Vlad was only the beginning.

The same pattern appears again and again across Christian Europe—from the Spanish Inquisition to Ivan the Terrible—where figures remembered today as uniquely ‘Christian monsters’ were, in reality, shaped by centuries of conflict with Islamic powers.

Take Tomas Torquemada (1420–1498), the infamous grand inquisitor of Spain and enduring symbol of the Spanish Inquisition, regularly invoked as one of history’s supreme examples of Christian savagery and intolerance.

Modern portrayals of the Inquisition usually present it as a bizarre eruption of irrational Catholic sadism. Missing almost entirely is the historical context that produced it.

As historian Thomas Madden notes, the Inquisition ‘was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions.’ Indeed, by the standards of its age, inquisitorial courts were often more restrained and methodical than their secular counterparts.

The popular image of endless torture chambers and sadistic dungeons is largely a product of centuries of anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda. Torture was used, as it was throughout Europe, but modern researchers have found that the Spanish Inquisition employed it in only a tiny percentage of cases and under stricter limitations than many contemporary courts.

‘Inquisitorial courts were often more restrained and methodical than their secular counterparts’

More important still is the question almost never asked: why did the Spanish crown, of all European states, establish the Inquisition in the first place?

The answer lies in Spain’s unique, centuries-long struggle against Islamic conquest.

By the late 15th century, the Reconquista—the long Christian effort to reclaim Iberia from Muslim rule—had finally culminated in victory with the fall of Granada in 1492. Spain’s large Muslim population was initially granted remarkably generous terms, including freedom of religion and the right to emigrate.

Some accepted these terms peacefully. Many more did not.

Rebellions repeatedly erupted, some involving the torture, mutilation, beheading, impalement, and burning alive of Christians. Muslim populations also frequently collaborated with foreign Islamic powers in North Africa and the Ottoman world in hopes of reversing the Reconquista and restoring Muslim rule in Spain.

As pressure mounted, many Muslims outwardly converted to Christianity while secretly continuing to practice Islam and maintain political loyalties hostile to the Spanish crown. They attended church, baptized their children, learned Christian customs, and publicly professed Catholicism while privately remaining committed to Islam.

One frustrated Spaniard described the dilemma:

‘With the permission and license that their accursed sect accorded them, they could feign any religion outwardly and without sinning, as long as they kept their hearts nevertheless devoted to their false impostor of a prophet.’

This was a reference to taqiyya—the Islamic doctrine permitting religious dissimulation under certain circumstances.

The Inquisition thus became, above all, a mechanism for determining whether converts were secretly collaborating with hostile Islamic powers or working to undermine Spain from within. Far more Muslims than Jews passed through its tribunals, a fact often obscured in modern retellings.

Nor did these methods emerge in isolation. For centuries, Muslim dynasties in Spain and North Africa—including the Almoravids and Almohads—had themselves investigated, tortured, deported, enslaved, or executed converts suspected of secretly aiding Christians. Christian Spain, in many ways, absorbed and mirrored the harsh frontier habits of the Islamic powers it had battled for centuries.

The same dynamic appears again in Russia.

Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’, 1530–1584) is commonly remembered as the quintessential Christian tyrant: paranoid, violent, and cruel beyond measure. Yet modern portrayals almost always detach him from the brutal historical environment that shaped both Russia and his reign.

For roughly two centuries, Russia had existed under the domination of Islamic Tatars and Mongol successor states. The so-called ‘Tatar Yoke’ subjected the Russian principalities to repeated devastation, tribute extraction, slave raids, and political humiliation.

‘Hundreds of thousands of Slavs were captured and sold into Islamic slavery’

Even after Moscow formally broke free in 1480, the threat did not disappear. During Ivan’s reign, the Crimean Khanate and other Muslim powers continued launching devastating raids deep into Russian territory. Hundreds of thousands of Slavs were captured and sold into Islamic slavery.

Historian Emmet Scott summarizes the long-term effect:

‘Centuries of tyranny and brutality at the hands of the Islamicized Mongols and their Turkish agents rendered Russia a land where despotism came to be seen as normal and where human life was cheap.’

It is difficult to understand Ivan’s ruthlessness apart from this environment. Russia was not developing in peaceful isolation; it was hardening under centuries of existential struggle against powerful Islamic overlords and neighbors.

Even Ivan’s famous title is misunderstood. The Russian word grozny, translated as ‘terrible’, more accurately means ‘fearsome’ or ‘formidable’—and was given to him by his Muslim enemies.

Nor was the phenomenon confined to rulers alone.

During the Crusades, for example, Christian chroniclers acknowledged that some Frankish forces adopted brutal methods directly from their Muslim adversaries. Guibert of Nogent wrote that Crusaders learned the tactic of decapitating enemies and hurling their heads into fortified cities from the Muslims themselves—a grim tit-for-tat born from prolonged warfare.

The same principle helps explain the notorious militancy of the Spanish Conquistadors. After nearly eight centuries of struggle against jihad in Iberia, Spain had developed a deeply martial religious culture forged in continual frontier warfare. Once Muslim rule was finally expelled from Spain, that crusading mentality did not simply vanish overnight; it found new outlets across the Atlantic.

None of this absolves Christians of their own atrocities or moral failings. Men and women remain responsible for the choices they make.

But history ceases to be history when actions are severed from the world that produced them.

For decades, Western academia and media have insisted that Islamic violence can only be understood ‘in context’—from the crusades to colonialism—while Christian violence must be treated as proof of inherent civilizational guilt. The result is a grotesquely distorted narrative: Muslims appear as perpetual victims of Western aggression, while Christians become history’s uniquely intolerant villains.

Yet the historical record tells a far more uncomfortable story.

For centuries, Christian Europe existed under immense military, demographic, and psychological pressure from expanding Islamic powers. Frontier societies brutalized by jihad, slave raids, conquest, piracy, forced conversion, and civilizational struggle inevitably developed harsh habits of their own. Some became ruthless; some became paranoid; some became savage.

‘The point is not that Christians were innocent and Muslims guilty. The point is that history is reciprocal’

But they did not emerge in a vacuum.

The point is not that Christians were innocent and Muslims guilty. The point is that history is reciprocal. Civilizations shape one another—especially in war. And many of the men modern audiences are taught to regard as uniquely ‘Christian monsters’ were, in large measure, products of centuries of conflict with Islam itself.

Honest history requires acknowledging that reality—even when it disrupts modern ideological myths.

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