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Islam was founded around the 7th century, however historians believe further back however. It the youngest of the major world religions. Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad’s life. Today, the faith is spreading rapidly throughout the world.

Sources:
https://www.history.com/topics/religion/islam#:~:text=Although%20its%20roots%20go%20back,spreading%20rapidly%20throughout%20the%20world.

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Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide. Although its roots go back further, scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century, making it the youngest of the major world religions. Islam started in Mecca, in modern-day Saudi Arabia, during the time of the prophet Muhammad's life. Today, the faith is spreading rapidly throughout the world.

Islam Facts

The word "Islam" means "submission to the will of God."

Followers of Islam are called Muslims.

Muslims are monotheistic and worship one, all-knowing God, who in Arabic is known as Allah.

Followers of Islam aim to live a life of complete submission to Allah. They believe that nothing can happen without Allah's permission, but humans have free will.

Islam teaches that Allah's word was revealed to the prophet Muhammad through the angel Gabriel.

Muslims believe several prophets were sent to teach Allah's law. They respect some of the same prophets as Jews and Christians, including Abraham, Moses, Noah and Jesus. Muslims contend that Muhammad was the final prophet.

Mosques are places where Muslims worship.

Some important Islamic holy places include the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, and the Prophet Muhammad's mosque in Medina.

The Quran (or Koran) is the major holy text of Islam. The Hadith is another important book. Muslims also revere some material found in the Judeo-Christian Bible.

Followers worship Allah by praying and reciting the Quran. They believe there will be a day of judgment, and life after death.

A central idea in Islam is "jihad," which means "struggle." While the term has been used negatively in mainstream culture, Muslims believe it refers to internal and external efforts to defend their faith. Although rare, this can include military jihad if a "just war" is needed.

Muhammad

The prophet Muhammad, sometimes spelled Mohammed or Mohammad, was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 570 A.D. Muslims believe he was the final prophet sent by God to reveal their faith to mankind.

According to Islamic texts and tradition, an angel named Gabriel visited Muhammad in 610 A.D. while he was meditating in a cave. The angel ordered Muhammad to recite the words of Allah.

Muslims believe that Muhammad continued to receive revelations from Allah throughout the rest of his life.

Starting in about 613, Muhammad began preaching throughout Mecca the messages he received. He taught that there was no other God but Allah and that Muslims should devote their lives to this God.

Hijra

In 622, Muhammad traveled from Mecca to Medina with his supporters. This journey became known as the Hijra (also spelled Hegira or Hijrah), and marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar.

Some seven years later, Muhammad and his many followers returned to Mecca and conquered the region. He continued to preach until his death in 632.

Abu Bakr

After Muhammad's passing, Islam began to spread rapidly. A series of leaders, known as caliphs, became successors to Muhammad. This system of leadership, which was run by a Muslim ruler, became known as a caliphate.

The first caliph was Abu Bakr, Muhammad's father-in-law and close friend.

Abu Bakr died about two years after he was elected and was succeeded in 634 by Caliph Umar, another father-in-law of Muhammad.

Caliphate System

When Umar was assassinated six years after being named caliph, Uthman, Muhammad's son-in-law, took the role.

Uthman was also killed, and Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was selected as the next caliph.

During the reign of the first four caliphs, Arab Muslims conquered large regions in the Middle East, including Syria, Palestine, Iran and Iraq. Islam also spread throughout areas in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

The caliphate system lasted for centuries and eventually evolved into the Ottoman Empire, which controlled large regions in the Middle East from about 1517 until 1917, when World War I ended the Ottoman reign.

Sunnis and Shiites

When Muhammad died, there was debate over who should replace him as leader. This led to a schism in Islam, and two major sects emerged: the Sunnis and the Shiites.

Sunnis make up nearly 90 percent of Muslims worldwide. They accept that the first four caliphs were the true successors to Muhammad.

Shiite Muslims believe that only the caliph Ali and his descendants are the real successors to Muhammad. They deny the legitimacy of the first three caliphs. Today, Shiite Muslims have a considerable presence in Iran, Iraq and Syria.

Other Types of Islam

Other, smaller Muslim denominations within the Sunni and Shiite groups exist. Some of these include:

Wahhabi: This Sunni sect, made up of members of the Tameem tribe in Saudi Arabia, was founded in the 18th century. Followers observe an extremely strict interpretation of Islam that was taught by Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab.

Alawite: This Shiite form of Islam is prevalent in Syria. Followers hold similar beliefs about the caliph Ali but also observe some Christian and Zoroastrian holidays.

Nation of Islam: This mostly African-American, Sunni sect was founded in the 1930s in Detroit, Michigan.

Kharijites: This sect broke from the Shiites after disagreeing over how to select a new leader. They are known for radical fundamentalism, and today are called Ibadis.

Quran

Nazaruddin Abdul Hamed/EyeEm/Getty Images

The Quran (sometimes spelled Qur'an or Koran) is considered the most important holy book among Muslims.

It contains some basic information that is found in the Hebrew Bible as well as revelations that were given to Muhammad. The text is considered the sacred word of God and supercedes any previous writings.

Most Muslims believe that Muhammad's scribes wrote down his words, which became the Quran. (Muhammad himself was never taught to read or write.)

The book is written with Allah as the first person, speaking through Gabriel to Muhammad. It contains 114 chapters, which are called surahs.

Scholars believe the Quran was compiled shortly after Muhammad's death, under the guidance of Caliph Abu Bakr.
READ MORE: Why the Quran Was a Bestseller Among Christians in 18th Century America
Islamic Calendar

The Islamic calendar, also called the Hijra calendar, is a lunar calendar used in Islamic religious worship. The calendar began in the year 622 A.D., celebrating the journey of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.

The Islamic calendar indicates the proper days of Islamic holidays and celebrations, including the period of fasting and prayer known as Ramadan, which occurs during the ninth month of the calendar.

Islam Symbols

As in many religions, there is no single image or symbol of Islam that is universally accepted by all Muslims worldwide.

The crescent moon and star has been adopted in some predominantly Muslim countries as a symbol of Islam, though the crescent moon and star image is believed to pre-date Islam and was originally a symbol of the Ottoman Empire.

In some other applications, such as the International Red Cross and Red Crescent humanitarian aid movement, a red crescent indicates that followers of Islam are respected and treated accordingly.

The color green is also sometimes associated with Islam, as it was reportedly a favorite color of Muhammad's and is often featured prominently in the flags of predominantly Muslim countries.

Five Pillars of Islam

Muslims follow five basic pillars that are essential to their faith. These include:

Shahada: to declare one's faith in God and belief in Muhammad

Salat: to pray five times a day (at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening)

Zakat: to give to those in need

Sawm: to fast during Ramadan

Hajj: to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during a person's lifetime if the person is able

Sharia Law

Islam's legal system is known as Sharia Law. This faith-based code of conduct directs Muslims on how they should live in nearly every aspect of their lives.

Sharia law requires men and women to dress modestly. It also outlines marriage guidelines and other moral principles for Muslims.

If crimes are committed, Sharia law is known for its harsh punishments. For example, the punishment for theft is amputating a person's hand. Adultery can carry the penalty of death by stoning. However, many Muslims do not support such extreme measures.

Muslim Prayer

The prophet Muhammad is credited with building the first mosque in the courtyard of his house in Medina. Mosques today follow some of the same principles he established in 622 A.D.

Muslim prayer is often conducted in a mosque's large open space or outdoor courtyard. A mihrab is a decorative feature or niche in the mosque that indicates the direction to Mecca, and therefore the direction to face during prayer.

Men and women pray separately, and Muslims may visit a mosque five times a day for each of the prayer sessions. In addition to hosting prayers, mosques often function as public gathering places and social centers.

Muslim Holidays

The two major Muslim holidays are:

Eid al-Adha: celebrates the Prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for Allah.

Eid al-Fitr: marks the end of Ramadan-the Islamic holy month of fasting.

Muslims also celebrate other holidays, such as the Islamic New Year and the birth of Muhammad.

Islam Today

In recent years, Islam's supposed association with terrorism and mass murder has sparked a political debate in many countries. The controversial term "radical Islam" has become a well-known label to describe the religion's connection to acts of violence.

While some Muslims use their faith to justify terrorism, the vast majority do not. In fact, Muslims are frequently victims of violence themselves.

Recent surveys have found that in countries with high Muslim populations, the majority of Muslims have overwhelmingly negative views of terrorist groups like ISIS.

While Muslims aim to clear up misconceptions about their faith, the religion continues to spread rapidly. Today, Islam is the world's fastest growing religion. Experts predict Islam will surpass Christianity as the largest religion by the end of the century.

Sources

Islam, BBC.
Islam: The Second Largest World Religion...And Growing, Religious Tolerance.
Islam Fast Facts, CNN.
Basic Facts About Islam, PBS.
What is Sharia Law and How is it Applied? BBC.
In nations with significant Muslim populations, much disdain for ISIS. Pew Research Center.
Islam Rituals and Worship: Symbolism, The Religion Library.
The Islamic Calendar: TimeandDate.com.

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Islam is the second largest religion in the world after Christianity, with about 1.8 billion Muslims worldwide. Although its roots go back further, scholars typically date the creation of Islam to the 7th century, making it the youngest of the major world religions.

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The Spanish Reconquista was in Iberian Peninsula from 801-1492 A.D. The reason the reconquista became such a major deal was because of the desire for land and profit.

Sources:
https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/spain-and-america-reconquest
https://www.britannica.com/event/Reconquista#:~:text=The%20Reconquista%20began%20with%20the,the%20Catholic%20Monarchs)%20conquered%20Granada.

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The First Crusade was from 1095-1102, it was a military campaign by western European forces. There goal was to get the Holy Land from Muslim control, to success they had to recapture the city of Jerusalem.

Sources:
https://www.worldhistory.org/First_Crusade/

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The First Crusade (1095-1102) was a military campaign by western European forces to recapture the city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control. Conceived by Pope Urban II following an appeal from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, the Crusade was a success with Christian forces taking control of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099.

Around 60,000 soldiers and at least half again of non-combatants were involved in the First Crusade which set off on their quest in 1095. After campaigns in Asia Minor and the Middle East, great cities such as Nicaea and Antioch were recaptured, and then the real objective, Jerusalem itself. Many more crusades would follow, the objectives would widen, as would the field of conflict, so that even Constantinople would come under attack in subsequent campaigns.

Causes of the First Crusade

The first and most important action to spark off the fuse which would eventually burn down to the explosion of the First Crusade was the rise of the Muslim Seljuks, a Turkish tribe of the steppe. The Seljuks won significant victories in Asia Minor against Byzantine armies, notably at the Battle of Manzikert in ancient Armenia in August 1071. As a consequence, they gained control of such great cities as Edessa and Antioch and, c. 1078, the Seljuks created the Sultanate of Rum with their capital at Nicaea in Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor. By 1087 they had taken control of Jerusalem.

The Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081-1118) realised the Seljuk expansion into the Holy Land was a chance to gain the help of western armies in his battle to control Asia Minor. Consequently, Alexios appealed to the west for soldiers in March 1095. The appeal was sent to the Pope Urban II (r. 1088-1099) who proved remarkably responsive, as did thousands of European knights.

A crusade would increase the prestige of the papacy as it led a combined western army & consolidate its position in Italy.

Pope Urban II had already sent troops to help the Byzantines in 1091 against the Pecheneg steppe nomads who were invading the northern Danube area of the empire. He was again disposed to assistance for various reasons. A crusade to bring the Holy Land back under Christian control was an end in itself - what better way to protect such important sites as the tomb of Jesus Christ, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Christians living there or visiting on pilgrimage also required protection. In addition, there were very useful additional benefits.

A crusade would increase the prestige of the papacy, as it led a combined western army, and consolidate its position in Italy itself, having experienced serious threats from the Holy Roman Emperors in the previous century which had even forced the popes to relocate away from Rome. Urban II also hoped to make himself head of a united Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christian church, above the Patriarch of Constantinople. The two churches had been split since 1054 over disagreements about doctrine and liturgical practices. In case anyone was concerned, a campaign of violence could be justified by references to particular passages of the Bible and emphasising this was a fight for liberation, not attack, and that the objectives were just and righteous ones.

On 27 November 1095, Urban II called for a crusade in a speech during the Council of Clermont, France. The message, known as the Indulgence and aimed specifically at knights, was loud and clear: those who defended Christendom would be embarking on a pilgrimage, all their sins would be washed away, and their souls would reap untold rewards in the next life. Urban II then embarked on a preaching tour in France during 1095-6 to recruit crusaders, where his message was spiced up with exaggerated tales of how, at that very moment, Christian monuments were being defiled and Christian believers persecuted and tortured with impunity. Embassies and letters were dispatched to all parts of Christendom. Major churches such as those at Limoges, Angers, and Tours acted as recruitment centres, as did many rural churches and especially the monasteries. The call to "take the cross" - where people swore an oath to become a crusader and then wore a cross on their shoulder to proclaim their obligation - was an amazing success. Across Europe warriors, stirred by notions of religious fervour, personal salvation, pilgrimage, adventure and a desire for material wealth, gathered throughout 1096, ready to embark for Jerusalem. The departure date was set for 15 August of that year. Around 60,000 crusaders including some 6,000 knights would be involved in the first waves.

The noble knights from the west were not interested in harassing an enemy & carrying off portable riches, they were in the Levant for permanent conquest.

The Muslim Enemy

The Seljuk Muslims who had taken control of most of Asia Minor and northern Syria in the latter decades of the 11th century were suffering their own particular problems even before the crusaders arrived. In conflict with their bitter rivals, the Shiite Fatimids, based in Egypt, the Sunni Seljuk Muslims had wrestled Jerusalem from them. However, a serious blow to Seljuk ambitions came with the death of the powerful Seljuk Sultan Malikshah in 1092 which produced a scramble for power by various local lords with none gaining supremacy. Further, the Seljuk base was in Baghdad, a long way from the battles which would occur throughout the First Crusade, and so there was little centralised support or management of the war. Added to this, the Shiite Muslims managed to recapture control of Jerusalem from the Seljuks just a few months before the Crusaders arrived on the scene. Both groups of Muslims were most likely completely unaware of the religious nature of the Crusader's quest and that they were any different from usual Byzantine raiding parties. The noble knights from the west, though, were not interested in harassing an enemy and carrying off portable riches, they were in the Levant for permanent conquest.

Peter the Hermit & the 'People's Crusade'

Ironically, and despite the Pope's deliberate intentions to appeal specifically to knights (which is what Alexios had asked for), a whole lot of other people were bitten by the crusading bug. The first major group was the people's army, a mixed group of poor and petty knights. They were led by the preacher Peter the Hermit and the knight Walter the Penniless (Sansavoir). Ill-equipped and by necessity driven to foraging as they crossed Europe, they made few friends along the way. Peter had earlier been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land where he had been captured by Muslims and tortured, now was his chance for revenge.

Meanwhile, a second group of crusaders, equally humble and ill-disciplined, made its way down the Rhine. Led by Count Emicho of Leningen, the group infamously turned their religious hatred to Jews in Speyer, Mainz, Trier, and Cologne. Both groups of crusaders, sometimes referred to as the 'People's Crusade' (despite actually containing some knights), arrived in Constantinople in the early summer of 1096 with the aim of then moving on to Jerusalem to remove the Seljuks. These first-comers are described by Anna Komnena (1083-1153), historian and daughter of the Byzantine emperor, in her Alexiad:

And those Frankish soldiers were accompanied by an unarmed host more numerous than the sand or the stars, carrying palms and crosses on their shoulders; women and children, too, come away from their countries. (Gregory, 296)

They were promptly shipped by Alexios to Asia Minor, where, ignoring the Byzantine's advice, they were ambushed and wiped out near Nicaea by a Seljuk army led by Kilij Arslan I on 21 October 1096. This was not what Alexios or Pope Urban II had had in mind when they started off the crusade movement.

The Fall of Antioch

The second wave of crusaders, this time composed of more gentlemanly and knights and professional warriors, arrived in Constantinople in the autumn and winter of 1096. The second batch was not much of an improvement as far as the Byzantine emperor was concerned as it included amongst its leaders an old enemy, the Norman Bohemund of Taranto. He and his father, Robert Guiscard (the "Crafty"), the Duke of Apulia, had attacked Byzantine Greece between 1081 and 1084. In 1097 Bohemund and his knights arrived in Constantinople and initially, things went well with the Norman swearing allegiance to the emperor along with other Crusader leaders such as Godfrey of Bouillon, the Duke of Lower Lorraine, and Raymond IV (aka Raymond de Saint-Gilles), Count of Toulouse. There were many more nobles besides, and with each commanding their own contingent of knights, not to mention the practical problems of language barriers, it was a minor miracle the force achieved anything at all. Their success would surprise everyone.

Alexios used the crusaders well, despite the rape and pillage perpetrated by the less pious members of the western armies which were causing chaos as they crossed Europe and the Empire's territory. The Normans were keen to defeat the Seljuks and establish some new kingdoms of their own. Alexios may well have gone along with this plan as such kingdoms might prove a useful buffer on the Empire's border. With a mixed force of crusaders, Alexios' army, commanded by the Byzantine general Tatikios, thus managed to recapture Nicaea in June 1097, although the Seljuks had, in reality, preferred to abandon it and fight another day. Next, they swept on over the Anatolian plain and won a great victory at Dorylaion on 1 July 1097.

The crusader-Byzantine army then split up in September 1097, with one army moving on to Edessa further to the east and another into Cilicia to the south-east. The main body headed for Antioch in Syria, the key to the Euphrates frontier. The great city was one of the five patriarchal seats of the Christian church, once home to Saint Paul and Peter, and probable birthplace of Saint Luke. It would be a fine propaganda coup to get it back again.

Although well-fortified and too big to fully encircle, Antioch was indeed the next big crusader capture on 3 June 1098 after an arduous 8-month siege where the attackers themselves came under siege from a Muslim force from Mosul. The Crusaders also suffered from plague, famine, and desertions. Unfortunately for Alexios, on his way to support the siege of the city he had met refugees from the area who wrongly informed him that the Crusaders were on the brink of defeat to a huge Muslim army and so the emperor returned home. Bohemund was not best pleased to find out his army had been abandoned by the Byzantines, even if he did capture the city anyway and defeat a relief force. The Norman decided to renege on his vow to return all captured territory to the Emperor and kept the city for himself. The relations were thus irrevocably soured between the two leaders.

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The Capture of Jerusalem

In December 1098 the crusader army marched onwards to Jerusalem, capturing several Syrian port cities on their way. They arrived, finally, at their ultimate destination on 7 June 1099. Of the vast army that had left Europe there were now only around 1,300 knights and some 12,500 infantry to achieve what was supposed to be the primary goal of the Crusade.

Protected by massive walls and a combination of moat and precipices, Jerusalem was going to be a tough military nut to crack. Fortunately, a number of Genoese ships arrived at just the right moment with timber, which was used to make two siege towers, catapults, and a battering ram. Despite these weapons, the defenders resisted the siege, although the Muslim garrison was remarkably reluctant to break out and make raids on the besiegers, perhaps being content to sit and await the promised relief from Egypt. Then, in mid-July, Godfrey of Bouillon decided to attack what he thought looked like a weaker section of the wall. Setting up their siege tower under the cover of darkness and filling a portion of the moat, the Crusaders managed to get in touching distance of the walls. With Godfrey leading from the front, the attackers scaled the defences and found themselves inside the city on 15 July 1099.

A mass slaughter of Muslims and Jews followed, although figures of 10,000 or even 75,000 killed are very likely an exaggeration. A contemporary Muslim source (Ibn al-Arabi) puts the figure at 3,000 of the city's probable 30,000 residents. Within a month, a large Egyptian army arrived to take back the city, but they were defeated at Ascalon. Jerusalem, for the time being at least, was back in Christian hands; Godfrey of Bouillon, the hero of the siege, was made the king of Jerusalem. Back in Italy, Pope Urban II had died on 29 July 1099 without knowing the success of his crusade. For some historians, Ascalon marks the end of the First Crusade.

More Victories

Having accomplished their mission, many crusaders now returned to Europe, some with riches, a few with holy relics, but most rather worse for wear after years of hard battles and scant reward. A fresh wave of crusaders, though, arrived in Constantinople in 1100, and they were organised by Raymond of Toulouse. On 17 May 1101 Caesarea was captured; on 26 May Acre fell too. Ominously, though, for future crusades, the Muslims were becoming more familiar with western battle tactics and weapons. In September 1101 a crusader army of Lombard, French, and German knights was defeated by the Seljuks. Things were only going to get more difficult for western armies over the next two centuries of warfare.

To ensure Jerusalem stayed in Christian hands, it was necessary that various western settlements were established: the Latin East.

Meanwhile, Alexios had not given up on Antioch, and he sent a force to attack the city or at the very least isolate it from the surrounding Crusader-held territories. Bohemund had left, though, and returning to Italy, he convinced Pope Paschall II (r. 1060-1118) and the French king Philip I (r. 1060-1108) that the real threat to the Christian world was the Byzantines. Their treacherous emperor and wayward church had to be eliminated, and so an invasion of Byzantium, the precise location being Albania, was launched in 1107. It failed, largely because Alexios mobilised his best forces to meet them, and the Pope abandoned his support of the campaign. As a result, Bohemund was forced to accept subservience to the Byzantine emperor, who let him rule Antioch in Alexios' name. Thus, the pattern was set for a carving up of captured territories.

Assessment: Achievements & Failures

The First Crusade was successful in that Jerusalem was recaptured, but to ensure the Holy City stayed in Christian hands, it was necessary that various western settlements were established in the Levant (collectively known as the Crusader States, the Latin East or Outremer). Orders of knights were created, too, for their better defence. Clearly, a steady supply of new crusaders would be needed in the coming decades and a wave of taxes to fund them. Initially, there were massacres of local populations, but the westerners soon realised that to hold on to their gains they needed the support of the extraordinarily diverse local populations. Consequently, there grew a toleration of non-Christian religions, albeit with some restrictions.

Despite the continued recruitment drive in Europe and attempts to create permanent 'colonies' and kingdoms, it proved impossible to hold on to the gains of the First Crusade, and more campaigns were required to recapture such cities as Edessa and Jerusalem itself after its fall again in 1187. There would be eight official crusades and several other unofficial ones throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, which all met with more failure than success.

There were unforeseen or negative consequences to the First Crusade, notably the rupture in western-Byzantine relations and the Byzantines horror at unruly groups of warriors causing havoc in their territory. Outbreaks of fighting between crusaders and Byzantine forces were common, and the mistrust and suspicion of their intentions grew. It was a troublesome relationship that only got worse, and the ill-feeling and mutual distrust between east and west would rumble on and culminate in the sacking of Constantinople in 1204.

Crusader groups, usually not knights but the urban poor, took the opportunity of Christian fervour to attack minority groups, especially Jews in northern France and the Rhineland. The crusading movement also spread to Spain where, in the second and third decades of the 12th century, attacks were made against the Moors there. Prussia, the Baltic, North Africa, and Poland, amongst many other places, would also witness crusading armies up to the 16th century as the crusading ideal, despite the dubious military successes, continued to appeal to leaders, soldiers, and ordinary people in the west, and its target widened to include not only Muslims but also pagans, schismatics, and heretics.

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The First Crusade (1095-1102) was a military campaign by western European forces to recapture the city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control. Conceived by Pope Urban II following an appeal...

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The Spanish Inquisition was from 1478-183 A.D., it was essentially served to consolidate power in the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom, but it achieved that end through infamously brutal methods.

Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Spanish-Inquisition

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How many people died during the Spanish Inquisition?

How did the Spanish Inquisition work?

When did the Spanish Inquisition end?

Did anyone expect the Spanish Inquisition?

Spanish Inquisition, (1478-1834), judicial institution ostensibly established to combat heresy in Spain. In practice, the Spanish Inquisition served to consolidate power in the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom, but it achieved that end through infamously brutal methods.

The rise of the Spanish Inquisition

The medieval inquisition had played a considerable role in Christian Spain during the 13th century, but the struggle against the Moors had kept the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula busy and served to strengthen their faith. When toward the end of the 15th century the Reconquista was all but complete, the desire for religious unity became more and more pronounced. Spain's Jewish population, which was among the largest in Europe, soon became a target.

Spain: The Spanish Inquisition

Over centuries, the Jewish community in Spain had flourished and grown in numbers and influence, though anti-Semitism had surfaced from time to time. During the reign of Henry III of Castile and Leon (1390-1406), Jews faced increased persecution and were pressured to convert to Christianity. The pogroms of 1391 were especially brutal, and the threat of violence hung over the Jewish community in Spain. Faced with the choice between baptism and death, the number of nominal converts to the Christian faith soon became very great. Many Jews were killed, and those who adopted Christian beliefs-the so-called conversos (Spanish: "converted")-faced continued suspicion and prejudice. In addition, there remained a significant population of Jews who had professed conversion but continued to practice their faith in secret. Known as Marranos, those nominal converts from Judaism were perceived to be an even greater threat to the social order than those who had rejected forced conversion. After Aragon and Castile were united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella (1469), the Marranos were denounced as a danger to the existence of Christian Spain. In 1478 Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull authorizing the Catholic Monarchs to name inquisitors who would address the issue. That did not mean that the Spanish sovereigns were turning over to the church the struggle for unity; on the contrary, they sought to use the Inquisition to support their absolute and centralizing regime and most especially to increase royal power in Aragon. The first Spanish inquisitors, operating in Seville, proved so severe that Sixtus IV attempted to intervene. The Spanish crown now had in its possession a weapon too precious to give up, however, and the efforts of the pope to limit the powers of the Inquisition were without avail. In 1483 he was induced to authorize the naming by the Spanish government of a grand inquisitor (inquisitor general) for Castile, and during that same year Aragon, Valencia, and Catalonia were placed under the power of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition at its peak

The grand inquisitor acted as the head of the Inquisition in Spain. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction that he had received from the Vatican empowered him to name deputies and hear appeals. In deciding appeals, the grand inquisitor was assisted by a council of five members and by consultors. All those offices were filled by agreement between the government and the grand inquisitor. The council, especially after its reorganization during the reign of Philip II (1556-98), put the effective control of the institution more and more into the hands of the civil power. After the papacy of Clement VII (1523-34), priests and bishops were at times judged by the Inquisition. In procedure the Spanish Inquisition was much like the medieval inquisition. The first grand inquisitor in Spain was the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada; his name became synonymous with the brutality and fanaticism associated with the Inquisition. Torquemada used torture and confiscation to terrorize his victims, and his methods were the product of a time when judicial procedure was cruel by design. The sentencing of the accused took place at the auto-da-fé (Portuguese: "act of faith"), an elaborate public expression of the Inquisition's power. The condemned were presented before a large crowd that often included royalty, and the proceedings had a ritualized, almost festive, quality. The number of burnings at the stake during Torquemada's tenure was exaggerated by Protestant critics of the Inquisition, but it is generally estimated to have been about 2,000.

At Torquemada's urging, Ferdinand and Isabella issued an edict on March 31, 1492, giving Spanish Jews the choice of exile or baptism; as a result, more than 160,000 Jews were expelled from Spain. Francisco, Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, promoted the suppression of Muslims with the same zeal that Torquemada had directed at Jews. In 1502 he ordered the proscription of Islam in Granada, the last of the Muslim kingdoms in Spain to fall to the Reconquista. The persecution of Muslims accelerated in 1507 when Jiménez was named grand inquisitor. Muslims in Valencia and Aragon were subjected to forced conversion in 1526, and Islam was subsequently banned in Spain. The Inquisition then devoted its attention to the Moriscos, Spanish Muslims who had previously accepted baptism. Expressions of Morisco culture were forbidden by Philip II in 1566, and within three years, persecution by the Inquisition gave way to open warfare between the Moriscos and the Spanish crown. The Moriscos were driven from Granada in 1571, and by 1614 some 300,000 had been expelled from Spain entirely.

When the Reformation began to penetrate into Spain, the relatively few Spanish Protestants were eliminated by the Inquisition. Foreigners suspected of promoting Protestant faiths within Spain met similarly violent ends. Having largely purged the country of Jews and Muslims-as well as many former members of those faiths who had converted to Christianity-the Spanish Inquisition turned its attention to prominent Roman Catholics. Saint Ignatius of Loyola was twice arrested on suspicion of heresy, and the archbishop of Toledo, the Dominican Bartolomé de Carranza, was imprisoned for almost 17 years. Nominally Christian groups that diverged from the Inquisition's orthodoxy, such as the followers of the mystical Alumbrado movement and adherents of Erasmianism (a spiritualized Christian belief system influenced by the teachings of humanist Desiderius Erasmus), were subjected to intense persecution throughout the 16th and into the 17th century.

Resistance and the decline of the Inquisition

Under the supreme council of the Spanish Inquisition were 14 local tribunals in Spain and several in the colonies; the tribunals in Mexico and Peru were particularly harsh. The Spanish Inquisition spread into Sicily in 1517, but efforts to set it up in Naples and Milan failed. In 1522 Holy Roman Emperor Charles V introduced it into the Low Countries, but its efforts to wipe out Protestantism were unsuccessful. John III of Portugal, with the permission of Pope Paul III, introduced a tribunal like the Spanish Inquisition against Portuguese Jews in 1536. Though John III's methods led the pope to revoke the grant, the Inquisition was definitely established in Portugal in 1547, at which time its scope was also widened.

The Inquisition remained a force in Spain and its colonies for hundreds of years-indeed, autos-da-fé were a common occurrence into the mid-18th century-but the excesses seen under Torquemada were checked to some degree. Ironically, the well-established bureaucratic structure of the Inquisition would help insulate Spain from the effects of ad hoc witchcraft trials that swept Europe and claimed tens of thousands of lives in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The Spanish Inquisition was suppressed by Joseph Bonaparte in 1808, restored by Ferdinand VII in 1814, suppressed in 1820, restored in 1823, and finally suppressed permanently in 1834. The Portuguese Inquisition was suppressed in 1821.
Edward A. Ryan The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Spanish Inquisition | Definition, History, & Facts

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Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834), judicial institution ostensibly established to combat heresy in Spain. In practice, the Spanish Inquisition served to consolidate power in the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom, but it achieved that end through infamously brutal methods.

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The Sykes-Picot Treaty was signed in november 1915. It was signed in agreement agreement by negotiators from Britain and France, Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sergey Dmitrievich Sazonov was also present to represent Russia, the third member of the Triple Entente. They agreed on Constantinople Agreement to give Russia Constantinople (Istanbul) and areas around it, which would provide access to the Mediterranean Sea.France, meanwhile, had a number of economic investments and strategic relationships in Syria, especially in the area of Aleppo, while Britain wanted secure access to India through the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. It was out of a need to coordinate British and French interests in these regions that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was born.

Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement

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This article was most recently revised and updated by

Sykes-Picot Agreement, (May 1916), secret convention made during World War I between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. Negotiations were begun in November 1915, and the final agreement took its name from the chief negotiators from Britain and France, Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot. Sergey Dimitriyevich Sazonov was also present to represent Russia, the third member of the Triple Entente.

Background and provisions

In the midst of World War I the question arose of what would happen to the Ottoman territories if the war led to the disintegration of "the sick man of Europe." The Triple Entente moved to secure their respective interests in the region. They had agreed in the March 1915 Constantinople Agreement to give Russia Constantinople ( Istanbul) and areas around it, which would provide access to the Mediterranean Sea. France, meanwhile, had a number of economic investments and strategic relationships in Syria, especially in the area of Aleppo, while Britain wanted secure access to India through the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf. It was out of a need to coordinate British and French interests in these regions that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was born.

Its provisions were as follows: (1) Russia should acquire the Armenian provinces of Erzurum, Trebizond ( Trabzon), Van, and Bitlis, with some Kurdish territory to the southeast; (2) France should acquire Lebanon and the Syrian littoral, Adana, Cilicia, and the hinterland adjacent to Russia's share, that hinterland including Aintab, Urfa, Mardin, Diyarbakır, and Mosul; (3) Great Britain should acquire southern Mesopotamia, including Baghdad, and also the Mediterranean ports of Haifa and ʿAkko (Acre); (4) between the French and the British acquisitions there should be a confederation of Arab states or a single independent Arab state, divided into French and British spheres of influence; (5) Alexandretta ( İskenderun) should be a free port; and (6) Palestine, because of the holy places, should be under an international regime.

Impact and legacy

The pact excited the ambitions of Italy, to whom it was communicated in August 1916, after the Italian declaration of war against Germany, with the result that it had to be supplemented, in April 1917, by the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, whereby Great Britain and France promised southern and southwestern Anatolia to Italy. The defection of Russia from the war canceled the Russian aspect of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Turkish Nationalists' victories after the military collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the gradual abandonment of any Italian projects for Anatolia.

The Arabs, however, who had learned of the Sykes-Picot Agreement through the publication of it, together with other secret treaties of imperial Russia, by the Soviet Russian government late in 1917, were scandalized by it. This secret arrangement conflicted in the first place with pledges already given by the British to the Hashemite dynast Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, sharif of Mecca, during the Ḥusayn-McMahon Correspondence (1915-16). Based on the understanding that the Arabs would eventually receive independence, Ḥusayn had brought the Arabs of the Hejaz into revolt against the Turks in June 1916.

Despite the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the British still appeared to support Arab self-determination at first, helping Ḥusayn's son Fayṣal and his forces press into Syria in 1918 and establish a government in Damascus. In April 1920, however, the Allied powers agreed to divide governance of the region into separate Class "A" mandates at the Conference of San Remo, along lines similar to those agreed upon under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The borders of these mandates split up Arab lands and ultimately led to the modern borders of Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

Even though the borders of the mandates were not determined until several years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the fact that the deal set the framework for these borders stoked lingering resentment well into the 21st century. Pan-Arabists opposed splitting up the mostly Arab-populated territories into separate countries, which they considered to be little more than imperialist impositions. Moreover, the borders split up other contiguous populations, like the Kurds and the Druze, and left them as minority populations in several countries, depriving their communities of self-determination altogether. Moments of political turmoil were often met with declarations of "the end of Sykes-Picot," such as the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq in 1992 or the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in 2014. Meanwhile, the Sykes-Picot Agreement is often criticized together with the Ḥusayn-McMahon Correspondence and the Balfour Declaration as contradictory promises made by Britain to France, the Arabs, and the Zionist movement.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Pat Bauer.

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Sykes-Picot Agreement | Map, History, & Facts

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Sykes-Picot Agreement, secret deal between the Triple Entente in 1916 for the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Though it did not itself determine the modern borders of the Middle East, it laid the groundwork for later agreements which did and has thus left a disreputable legacy among the population of the Middle East.

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The Treaty of Versailles ending WW1 was signed Jun 28, 1919. The treaty was put insight because WW1 had gone on for 5 years! conditions were harsh and decided peace between the war.
Sources:
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/jun28/treaty-versailles-ends-wwi/#:~:text=Background%20Info%20Vocabulary-,On%20June%2028%2C%201919%2C%20the%20Treaty%20of%20Versailles%20was%20signed,Great%20War%E2%80%94World%20War%20I.

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Hilter was Appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933. They choose him because he had lead several victorious victories to the Nazi Party.
Sources:
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/how-did-hitler-happen#:~:text=Adolf%20Hitler%20was%20appointed%20chancellor,by%20suicide%20in%20April%201945.

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Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945) was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945. Upon achieving power, Hitler smashed the nation's democratic institutions and transformed Germany into a war state intent on conquering Europe for the benefit of the so-called Aryan race. His invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, triggered the European phase of World War II. During the course of the war, Nazi military forces rounded up and executed 11 million victims they deemed inferior or undesirable-"life unworthy of life"-among them Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

Hitler had supreme authority as führer (leader or guide), but could not have risen to power or committed such atrocities on his own. He had the active support of the powerful German officer class and of millions of everyday citizens who voted for the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party and hailed him as a national savior in gigantic stadium rallies.

How were Hitler and the Nazis possible? How did such odious characters take and hold power in a country that was a world pacesetter in literature, art, architecture, and science, a nation that had a democratic government and a free press in the 1920s?

Hitler rose to power through the Nazi Party, an organization he forged after returning as a wounded veteran from the annihilating trench warfare of World War I. He and other patriotic Germans were outraged and humiliated by the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which the Allies compelled the new German government, the Weimar Republic, to accept along with an obligation to pay $33 billion in war reparations. Germany also had to give up its prized overseas colonies and surrender valued parcels of home territory to France and Poland. The German army was radically downsized and the nation forbidden to have submarines or an air force. "We shall squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak!" explained one British official.

Paying the crushing reparations destabilized the economy, producing ruinous, runaway inflation. By September 1923, four billion German marks had the equal value of one American dollar. Consumers needed a wheelbarrow to carry enough paper money to buy a loaf of bread.

Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This New Order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme national leader.

In the new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state, or Volk; democracy would be abolished; and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the führer state. The ultimate aim of the Nazi Party was to seize power through Germany's parliamentary system, install Hitler as dictator, and create a community of racially pure Germans loyal to their führer, who would lead them in a campaign of racial cleansing and world conquest.

Hitler blamed the Weimar Republic's weakness on the influence of Germany's Jewish and communist minorities, who he claimed were trying to take over the country. "There are only two possibilities," he told a Munich audience in 1922. "Either victory of the Aryan, or annihilation of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew." The young Hitler saw history as a process of racial struggle, with the strongest race-the Aryan race-ultimately prevailing by force of arms. "Mankind has grown great in eternal war," Hitler wrote. "It would decay in eternal peace."

Jews represented everything the Nazis found repugnant: finance capitalism (controlled, the Nazis believed, by powerful Jewish financiers), international communism (Karl Marx was a German Jew, and the leadership of the German Communist Party was heavily Jewish), and modernist cultural movements like psychoanalysis and swing music.

Nazi Party foreign policy aimed to rid Europe of Jews and other "inferior" peoples, absorb pure-blooded Aryans into a greatly expanded Germany-a "Third Reich"-and wage unrelenting war on the Slavic "hordes" of Russia, considered by Hitler to be Untermenschen (subhuman).

Once conquered, the Soviet Union would be ruled by the German master race, which would exterminate or subdue millions of Slavs to create lebensraum (living space) for their own farms and communities. In a conquered and racially cleansed Russia, they would work on model farms and factories connected to the homeland by new highways, called autobahns.

Hitler was the ideologue as well as the chief organizer of the Nazi Party. By 1921, the party had a newspaper, an official flag, and a private army-the Sturmabteilung SA (storm troopers)-made up largely of unemployed and disenchanted WWI veterans. By 1923, the SA had grown to 15,000 men and had access to hidden stores of weapons. That year, Hitler and WWI hero General Erich Ludendorff attempted to overthrow the elected regional government of Bavaria in a coup known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

The regular army crushed the rebellion and Hitler spent a year in prison-in loose confinement. In Landsberg Prison, Hitler dictated most of the first volume of his political autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The book brought together, in inflamed language, the racialist and expansionist ideas he had been propagating in his popular beer-hall harangues.

By 1932, the Nazis were the largest political party in the Reichstag. In January of the following year, with no other leader able to command sufficient support to govern, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Shortly thereafter, a fire broke out in the Reichstag building in Berlin, and authorities arrested a young Dutch communist who confessed to starting it.

Hitler used this episode to convince President Hindenburg to declare an emergency decree suspending many civil liberties throughout Germany, including freedom of the press, freedom of expression, and the right to hold public assemblies. The police were authorized to detain citizens without cause, and the authority usually exercised by regional governments became subject to control by Hitler's national regime.

Almost immediately, Hitler began dismantling Germany's democratic institutions and imprisoning or murdering his chief opponents. When Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler took the titles of führer, chancellor, and commander in chief of the army. He expanded the army tremendously, reintroduced conscription, and began developing a new air force-all violations of the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler's military spending and ambitious public-works programs, including building a German autobahn, helped restore prosperity. His regime also suppressed the Communist Party and purged his own paramilitary storm troopers, whose violent street demonstrations alienated the German middle class.

This bloodletting-called the "Night of the Long Knives"-was hugely popular and welcomed by the middle class as a blow struck for law and order. In fact, many Germans went along with the full range of Hitler's policies, convinced that they would ultimately be advantageous for the country.

In 1938, Hitler began his long-promised expansion of national boundaries to incorporate ethnic Germans. He colluded with Austrian Nazis to orchestrate the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria to Germany. And in Hitler's most brazenly aggressive act yet, Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region populated predominantly by ethnic Germans.

The Czechs looked to Great Britain and France for help, but hoping to avoid war-they had been bled white in World War I-these nations chose a policy of appeasement. At a conclave held at Munich in September 1938, representatives of Great Britain and France compelled Czech leaders to cede the Sudetenland in return for Hitler's pledge not to seek additional territory. The following year, the German army swallowed up the remainder of Czechoslovakia.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, one of the signers of the Munich pact, had taken Hitler at his word. Returning to Britain with this agreement in hand, he proudly announced that he had achieved "peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time."

A year later, German troops stormed into Poland.

Learn More

After being released from prison, Hitler vowed to work within the parliamentary system to avoid a repeat of the Beer Hall Putsch setback. In the 1920s, however, the Nazi Party was still a fringe group of ultraextremists with little political power. It received only 2.6 percent of the vote in the Reichstag elections of 1928.

But the worldwide economic depression and the rising power of labor unions and communists convinced increasing numbers of Germans to turn to the Nazi Party. The Nazis fed on bank failures and unemployment-proof, Hitler said, of the ineffectiveness of democratic government. Hitler pledged to restore prosperity, create civil order (by crushing industrial strikes and street demonstrations by communists and socialists), eliminate the influence of Jewish financiers, and make the fatherland once again a world power.

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How Did Adolf Hitler Happen? | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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Adolf Hitler (April 20, 1889 - April 30, 1945) was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933 following a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party. He ruled absolutely until his death by suicide in April 1945.

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The holocaust happened from 1933 to 1945. The event lead to the deaths of 6 million Jews killed by Nazis. The holocaust happened as a result of many reasons, one being Adolf Hitler. He is the reason of all these deaths.
Sources:
https://www.ushmm.org/teach/fundamentals/holocaust-questions
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/how-and-why/why/

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The Second World War resulted in an extensive radicalisation of the Nazis' antisemitic policy.

The first major radicalising action that resulted from the war was the creation of ghettos following the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. This resulted in three million Jews coming under German control. In order to contain the Jewish population, the Nazis forcibly segregated these Jews from the local population and placed them into ghettos. This was a large escalation of the Nazis' previous antisemitic policy.

As the war continued it became clear that both the Magagascar Plan and the Generalplan Ost were infeasible, and it would not be possible to forcibly deport and resettle the Jewish population of Europe.

The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 further escalated lethal actions towards Jews. In the lead up to the invasion, Joseph Goebbels ' propaganda against Jews and, specifically OstJuden (eastern Jews), became even more vicious. This propaganda not only gave justification for the invasion of the Soviet Union, but directly linked the invasion to Jews.

As the historian Donald Bloxham wrote, 'The very decision to go to war presupposed a racial mindset...everything that happened in war was liable to be interpreted in that light: frustrations were the cause for 'revenge'; successes provided opportunities to create facts on the ground' [Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution A Genocide, (United States: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.174].

Following behind the Germany Army throughout the invasion and subsequent partial occupation, the Einsatzgruppen conducted mass shootings of communists , Jews and any others thought to be enemies of the Nazi state. As the invasion of the Soviet Union slowed and the tide of war turned against the Nazis, actions against the Jews were further intensified. They were once again used as scapegoats for Germany's military failures.

These actions culminated in the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, which coordinated the Nazis genocidal policy towards the Jews and resulted in the establishment of six extermination camps.

The Second World War played a vital role in radicalising the Nazis' antisemitic policy into genocide. The Nazis reacted to some events in the war by escalating their actions against Jews. One example of this is the murder of Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent mass killings of civilians and the liquidation of the village of Lidice.

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The Second World War resulted in an extensive radicalisation of the Nazis' antisemitic policy. The first major radicalising action that resulted from the war was the creation of ghettos following the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. This resulted in three million Jews coming under German control.

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The day Invasion of Normandy happened June 6th, 1944. The US invaded Normandy in order to confuse the Germans. Allies tried to make it look like they were attacking Normandy at Pas de Calais.
Sources:
https://www.ducksters.com/history/world_war_ii/d-day_invasion_of_normandy.php

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World War II History: D-Day the Invasion of Normandy for Kids

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Kids learn about the history of D-Day the invasion of Normandy during World War II. American and British troops fight to free France.

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Israel was created on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. U.S. President Harry S. Truman.

Sources:
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel#:~:text=On%20May%2014%2C%201948%2C%20David,nation%20on%20the%20same%20day.

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The formal end of the apartheid government in South Africa was hard-won. It took decades of activism from both inside and outside the country, as well as international economic pressure, to end the regime that allowed the country’s white minority to subjugate its Black majority. This work culminated in the dismantling of apartheid between 1990 and 1994.
Sources:
https://www.history.com/news/end-apartheid-steps

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The formal end of the apartheid government in South Africa was hard-won. It took decades of activism from both inside and outside the country, as well as international economic pressure, to end the regime that allowed the country's white minority to subjugate its Black majority. This work culminated in the dismantling of apartheid between 1990 and 1994. On April 27, 1994, the country elected Nelson Mandela, an activist who had spent 27 years in prison for his opposition to apartheid, in its first free presidential election.

The white minority who controlled the apartheid government were Afrikaners-descendants of mostly Dutch colonists who had invaded South Africa starting in the 17th century. Although Afrikaner oppression of Black South Africans predates the formal establishment of apartheid in 1948, apartheid legalized and enforced a specific racial ideology that separated South Africans into legally distinct racial groups: white, African, "coloured" (i.e., multiracial) and Indian. The apartheid government used violence to enforce segregation between these groups, and forcibly separated many families containing people assigned to different racial categories.

South African Resistance

Black South Africans resisted apartheid from the very beginning. In the early 1950s, the African National Congress, or ANC, launched a Defiance Campaign. The purpose of this campaign was for Black South Africans to break apartheid laws by entering white areas, using white facilities and refusing to carry "passes"-domestic passports the government used to restrict the movements of Black South Africans in their own country. In response, the government banned the ANC in 1960, and arrested the prominent ANC activist Nelson Mandela in August 1962.

The banning of the ANC and the incarceration of its leaders forced many ANC members into exile. But it did not stop resistance within South Africa, says Wessel Visser, a history lecturer at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

"What many dissidents started to do inside the country was to form a kind of an alternative...resistance movement called the United Democratic Front," he says. The UDF, formed in 1983, "was a [collaboration] of church leaders and political leaders who were not banned at that stage, community leaders, trade unionists, etc.," he says.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Reverend Allan Boesak, two of the UDF's main leaders, "started to organize marches to parliament, in Cape Town, in Pretoria, Johannesburg-crowds of 50 to 80,000 people, so there was definitely a groundswell of resistance against apartheid," he says. And around the world, this activism drew attention.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan's Opposition to Sanctions Are Overruled

One of the big moments for international awareness of apartheid was in 1976, when thousands of Black children in the Soweto township protested a government policy mandating that all classes be taught in Afrikaans. Police responded to the protests with violence, killing at least 176 people and injuring over 1,000 more. The massacre drew more attention to activists' calls to divest from South Africa, something the United Nations General Assembly had first called on member states to do back in 1962.

Campaigns for economic sanctions against South Africa gained steam in the 1980s, but faced considerable resistance from two important heads of state: United States President Ronald Reagan and United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Both Reagan and Thatcher condemned Mandela and the ANC as communists and terrorists at a time when the apartheid government promoted itself as a Cold War ally against communism.

Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, but the U.S. Congress overrode his decision with a two-thirds majority, passing the act to impose sanctions on South Africa. The U.K. also imposed limited sanctions despite Thatcher's objections. The combination of international sanctions placed significant economic pressure on South Africa, which was then at war with the present-day nations of Namibia, Zambia and Angola.

International Pressure Builds to Release Mandela

Anti-apartheid activism also drew international attention to Mandela. International advocates urged South Africa to release him and other imprisoned ANC members and allow exiled members back into the country.

"As early as 1984 there were attempts by national intelligence inside the government structures and also by some of the ministers to make contact with the ANC ... and sound out the waters of a possibility of a negotiated settlement," says Anton Ehlers, a history lecturer at Stellenbosch University.

Berlin Wall Falls, Nelson Mandela Is Freed

Visser speculates that the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 helped speed the process of ending apartheid along because it took away one of the government's main defenses of itself among Western allies: that it needed to remain in place to fight communism. "The argument that the ANC are only the puppets of the Reds couldn't be used anymore," Visser says, both because the Cold War was ending and because the ANC now had a lot more support in Europe and the U.S.

Mandela finally walked free on February 11, 1990, and negotiations to end apartheid formally began that year. These negotiations lasted for four years, ending with the election of Mandela as president. In 1996, the country initiated a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in an attempt to reckon with the gross human rights violations during apartheid.

Fact Check

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Key Steps That Led to End of Apartheid | HISTORY

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A combination of internal and international resistance to apartheid helped dismantle the white supremacist regime.

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The Bosnian Civil War happened from 1992 to 1995, leader Milosevic began the war. The reason was from Milosevic, he created conflict between the Serbians, Croatians, and the Muslim Bosnians.
Sources:
https://borgenproject.org/cause-of-the-bosnian-war/

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The war led to the deaths of The Bosnian War began in 1992 and lasted until 1995, though the cause of the Bosnian War has roots in World War II and its impact is still being felt in 2017. around 100,000 people. It also spurred the genocide of at least 80 percent Bosnian Muslims, also called Bosniaks.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Balkan states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia became a part of the People's Republic of Yugoslavia, a communist country held together by its leader Josip Broz Tito. Part-Croat and part-Slovene, Tito checked both separatism and ethnic nationalism with stiff jail sentences.

Tito rebuilt Yugoslavia as a Communist federation of six equal republics, but the ethnic conflict was never far from the surface. Serbians disliked Tito's recognition of the Macedonians and the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina as distinct nationalities. However, these bad relationships alone were not the cause of the Bosnian War. The collapse of Communism in the Balkan states was punctuated by Tito's death in 1980. Following this, the Balkan states clamored for independence.

Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in Milosevic, also called Yugoslavia in 1986 as a lightning rod for nationalism. Milosevic was a leader who "The Butcher of the Balkans" took advantage of the ethnic tensions that would be the cause of the Bosnian War. deliberately created conflict between Serbians, Croatians and Muslim Bosniaks (the three main ethnic groups in the region).

Croatia and Slovenia fought alongside Germany and Austria in World War I, while Serbia fought alongside the allies. Because of this, Serbs regarded themselves as the dominant partners when they joined the Croats and Slovenes in 1918 to found the state what would be called Yugoslavia.

By using old grudges, stirring up nationalistic emotions, and inciting dreams of a "Greater Serbia," a country made up of only Serbians, Milosevic succeeded in rallying support for himself. By 1971 in Bosnia, Muslims represented the largest single population group. In a 1991 census, Bosnia's population of some four million was nearly half Bosniak.

Bosnia's Serbs, led by a man named Radovan Karadzic and backed by Milosevic, resisted and threatened bloodshed when Bosnia proclaimed its independence in 1992. The Serbs wished to remain part of Yugoslavia and create a nation only for Serbians.

Two days after the European Community and the United States recognized Bosnia's independence, the Serbian Democratic party - whose members wanted to be part of the "Greater Serbia" - launched an offensive with the bombardment of Bosnia's capital, Sarajevo.

The Bosnian War was marked by ethnic cleansing, with thousands of civilians killed and millions displaced. On July 11, 1995, Serbian forces attacked and overwhelmed the city of Srebrenica, a city the U.N. had designated as a safe haven in 1993. The forces separated the Bosniak civilians at Srebrenica, putting the women and girls on buses and sending them away while killing the men and boys on the spot or bussing them off to mass killing sites. An estimated 8,000 people died in the massacre.

Following this, awareness and international outcry over the war reached its zenith. In November 1995, the United States sponsored peace talks between the Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, resulting in the creation of a federalized Bosnia divided between a Croat-Bosniak federation and a Serb republic.

Tribunals over the war crimes committed during the war were established 23 years ago. Serbia only acknowledged the massacre of Srebrenica in 2004. Milosevic was jailed in 2002 on 66 counts of genocide and war crimes and died in his cell in March of 2006.

Last month in 2017, a Croatian general charged with war crimes had his sentence of 20 years upheld, and instead of submitting himself he chose to drink poison in the middle of the courtroom.
- Sam Bramlett

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What Was the Cause of The Bosnian War? | The Borgen Project

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The war led to the deaths of The Bosnian War began in 1992 and lasted until 1995, though the cause of the Bosnian War has roots in World War II and its impact is still being felt in 2017. around 100,000 people. It also spurred the genocide of at least 80 percent Bosnian Muslims, also called Bosniaks.