Andreas wrote:
>You might have hit on something here. I don't think the Turks had
>any much aversion to killing fellow Muslims - one of the reasons
>medieval Islamic rulers liked Turkish slave-soldiers was supposedly
>that they were less prone to such inhibitions than Arabs and
>Persians - but while it will have been very easy to be assimilated
>by culturally superior Muslim Persians in Iran and Arabs in
>Iraq/Syria/Egypt, the religious devide will have made it hard to be
>assimilated by Christian Greeks and Armenians in Anatolia.
This reminds me of the practice of the Hauteville and Hohenstaufen
kings of Sicily (1072-1282) of using Saracens in their armies because
they were not inhibited by papal excommunications!
P.S. Will someone please tell me what IIRC means? I have not been
able to figure it out!
Charlie