If I'm in, yeah, Valeman, yeah.

If I'm in, yeah.

Hey, my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour podcast, and I have a book recommendation for you. No, I don't. No, I don't. I'm not actually going to recommend that you read this book, but we are going to talk about this book for just a minute, because this is pretty cool. The book is called the Chronicle of Fredegar, with its continuations. It was written by a handful of people. It took several generations to write the Chronicle of Fredegar.

It was written in the 500s, 600s, and 700s, A.D.

We don't normally talk about stuff that forward into history, but I got a reason.

Just a minute.

We're going to get to the reason.

But first, there's an exciting, juicy history story, and I just can't pass it up.

So the Chronicle of Fredegar tells the story of the central European, the Christian kingdoms that came after the Roman Empire kind of petered out and moved east.

Europe at this time is looking for new leadership.

The kings are weak.

Rome is weak.

The Pope, I mean, it's not nothing, but politically, fairly weak during this time as well.

But I'll tell you who wasn't weak during that time, the Muslims.

Islam is a brand new thing.

They just thought of a new religion and immediately it turned violent.

And I don't care if that historical analysis is somehow offensive to people.

I don't like the way we kind of try to sprinkle sugar over the top of really ugly things and really ugly movements

in history. Here's the reality. Islam was a bulldozer and wildly aggressive, like to the level

of Alexander the Great, except it wasn't spreading Greek culture. It was spreading Islam. And Islam quickly

covers North Africa, and then a Muslim leader, the Caliph, jumps the Mediterranean from

North Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar into southern Spain, the Iberian Peninsula.

...