Myths About the Middle Ages Debunked

1. The Medieval Cult That Sacked the Kaaba

Ninth-century Arabia saw the emergence of the Qarmatians, who started off as bandits preying upon caravans. Then they got religion, after they came upon and fell under the sway of a mystic who preached that the End Times were nigh. The Qarmatians morphed into a heretical millenarian cult, and captured eastern Arabia and Bahrain, where they founded a utopian religious republic in 899. Believing that pilgrimage to Mecca, a pillar of Islam, was a superstition, the Qarmatians attacked pilgrim caravans, and in 906, massacred over 20,000 Muslim pilgrims. In 930, as part of their millenarian quest to speed up the End Days, they seized Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities, and sacked both.

The Qarmatians killed over 30,000 pilgrims in Mecca, desecrated religious sites, and polluted the holy wells of Zamzam by filling it with corpses. They also seized the Black Stone, a meteorite rock affixed to the Kaaba and deemed holy by Muslims, took it back to their republic, and smashed it to pieces. They held the shards for a huge ransom, that was paid by the Abbasid Caliph, who then reassembled the bits and restored them to the Kaaba. Pilgrimage ceased for nearly a decade, and only resumed after the Qarmatians were paid protection money by the region’s states to stay away from the holy cities. The payments continued until the Abbasid defeated the Qarmatians in 976.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Annotated Prince – Francesco Sforza: Warlord Prince of Milan

Badass of the Week – Khawlah bint Al-Azwar

BBC – Trial by Ordeal: When Fire and Water Determined Guilt

British Battles – Battle of Agincourt

Buzzfeed – 16 Strange and Surprising Facts About Medieval England

Encyclopedia Britannica – Bela I

Encyclopedia Britannica – Timur

English Monarchs – Edmund II Ironside

Geni – Wreck of the White Ship

Health and Fitness History – Medieval Mob Football