When the Saracens invaded Switzerland, plundering and murdering

It sounds like a horror story from the pen of a right-wing extremist author: Muslims invade the Alpine region, occupy roads, devastate monasteries and villages, abduct young women, murder, and extort money.

But this scenario has actually happened before: In the 10th century, the so-called Saracens came from southern France to the area of ​​present-day Switzerland and for several decades controlled important mountain passes, murdered pilgrims and carried out brutal raids throughout the Central Plateau.

The period of the Saracens is a little-studied episode in Swiss history. It's not even entirely clear who exactly these foreigners were, who made not only Switzerland, but also parts of France and northern Italy unsafe. For a long time, it was assumed that they were emissaries of the Emir of Córdoba, meaning they came from the predominantly Muslim Iberian Peninsula.

Recent research tends to suggest that they were pirates from North Africa, i.e., Muslims of Arab or Berber descent, who came to France via the Mediterranean. What is certain is that they held a fortress in Fraxinetum (now La Garde-Freinet) near St. Tropez, which served as their headquarters for eighty years. The term "Saracen," however, is a foreign term; at that time, all Muslims were called that, and sometimes other foreigners as well.

Around the year 920, the Saracens advanced into Valais. The first written mention of them dates back to 921. According to a chronicle, several English pilgrims to Rome were stoned to death by Saracens while marching over the passes. This was just the beginning. The invaders occupied several Alpine passes, including the Great St. Bernard Pass. From their remote mountain refuges, they raided villages and towns in guerrilla style, carrying out massacres, looting churches and monasteries, including the famous St. Maurice Abbey, and burning settlements.

Ten years after invading Valais, the "Alpine pirates" appeared in the Churratian region, in present-day Graubünden. In the spring of 940, the Bishop of Chur complained that his diocese had been "severely devastated by the constant plundering of the Saracens." The monks of Disentis Abbey, warned, packed their valuable relics and manuscripts, their precious metals, and their liturgical textiles into 51 chests and brought them to Zurich for safekeeping in the Grossmünster. The monastery was then indeed raided by the Saracens and partially destroyed. The Muslim invaders spread fear and terror as far as the Rhine Valley and St. Gallen, leaving entire regions in ruins.

The chronicler of the monastery of St. Gallen, Ekkehard IV, recorded that the Saracens had invaded the monastic territory from the south and "occupied our alpine pastures and mountains." According to his accounts, which he wrote down decades later based on stories, the Saracens attacked monks with arrows during a procession. The dean of St. Gallen, Walto, launched a counterattack. At night, he and "the bolder members of the servants" attacked the sleeping and naked Saracens, whose hiding place had been revealed to him. Some of the bandits were murdered with lances, sickles, and axes; others managed to escape, and a few were captured. Those arrested, however, refused food and drink and died—an early form of hunger strike.

Especially in Valais, many legends surround the Saracens to this day. Arabic-sounding place and mountain names such as Almagell, Allalin, or Mischabel date back to the time of the Muslim invasion, some still claim today. Black-necked goats were also once introduced by the Saracens as live food. Research has since refuted all of this or deemed it unlikely. The claim that one can still tell the Saracen ancestry of certain people today based on their physiognomy, hair, or skin color is also unlikely to be tenable.

Even with the Graubünden village name Pontresina, which derives from the late Latin "Pons Sarisina" (1137) or "Pontzarisino" (1244, Saracen Bridge), it remains uncertain whether Saracens were actually involved in the construction of the bridge or merely people who were mistaken for Saracens because of their appearance. The same applies to the surnames Sarasin and Sarrazin, which are still widespread today; there are also doubts that they can be traced directly back to the Muslim invaders.

For medieval expert Hannes Steiner, however, there is no doubt that the Alpine Saracens interbred with the local population. Steiner is one of the few Swiss historians who has studied the topic intensively. "Some sources mention that the Saracens forcibly took wives from the local population in the territories they conquered," he says. "It is therefore reasonable to assume that they also had offspring."

He considers the widespread belief that the Saracens retreated to their headquarters in Fraxinetum on the Côte d'Azur between raids implausible. "The distances are too great. Even modern guerrilla troops, with their modern tools, do not have an operational radius of more than 500 kilometers." This means that the Saracens had permanent bases in Switzerland.

The longer the Saracens were present in the Alpine region, the more frequently they concluded agreements with local rulers, who saw this as a means of keeping rivals at bay. Particularly noteworthy is the alliance treaty of 942 with the Italian King Hugh I, who officially handed over the Swiss Alpine passes to the Saracens so that they could prevent the hostile Swabians from crossing into Italy. This legitimized the Saracens' right to collect tolls and engage in trade; reports of raids and massacres subsequently declined noticeably.

In 972, a highly publicized hostage-taking in the Valais Alps marked the end of the Saracens in Switzerland and Europe. Near Orsières, at the foot of the Great St. Bernard Pass, Muslim fighters captured Majolus, the fourth abbot of Cluny, who was later canonized. He was considered the most influential figure in the Church after the Pope. The kidnapping and the demand for a ransom caused a stir. For the Christian world, the action was so humiliating that many historians consider it the trigger for the storming of the fortress of Fraxinetum shortly afterwards. The Saracens were forcibly converted or killed; their time in Europe was over.

For Hannes Steiner, the hostage-taking is a milestone for another reason as well. According to the account of the chronicler of the time, Radulfus Glaber, the kidnapping was characterized by respect and curiosity toward the other religion. This had never happened before. Although the Saracens robbed Abbot Majolus and his companions and additionally demanded a ransom of 1,000 pounds of silver, the treatment is described as very dignified.

For example, when a Saracen once carelessly rested his foot on the abbot's Bible, his own men attacked him and cut off his foot—as a punishment from God. The Christian hostages, for their part, showed great interest in the religion of their captors. "The Saracens read the Hebrew, and even more so the Christian, prophets and say that everything the holy prophets had foretold about the Lord Christ has already been fulfilled in one of their own, whom they call Mohammed," writes the chronicler Glaber.

Hannes Steiner describes this account as "the earliest non-polemically distorted depiction of Muslims in Western literature." Previously, the Saracens had always been referred to disparagingly as "barbarians," "infidels," or "hordes of Ishmaelites," and they had sometimes been confused with other foreign invaders, such as the Huns.

It's actually surprising that this episode of Swiss history is rarely discussed outside of Valais. It doesn't even appear in most history books. According to Steiner, this is partly due to the limited availability of sources. "There are some written sources, but nowhere near as many as from other phases of the Middle Ages." However, no one in the scientific community doubts that the Saracens wreaked havoc here: "The destruction in Churrätien mentioned in 10th-century documents can now also be archaeologically verified, including that in Disentis, Chur, and Tomils."

Perhaps the lack of interest also has something to do with the explosive nature of the topic of Islam: the fact that the first contact with Muslims in our latitudes was marked by murder, rape and destruction is not something that is necessarily broadcast from a loud bell in universities or schools today.