Christian European states armed Muslim armies against fellow Christians

Evidence

From quite an early date, Muslim armies realized the value of European weapons, and there were always Christian Euro­ pean merchants willing to bring and sell them. In Ottoman times the English Levant company maintained a gunshop in Istanbul selling choice weapons of war to the Turks to help them in their invasion of Christian Europe. All the Christian countries participated in this trade. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 755

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the clean civilizational-conflict frame often imposed on Islam-West relations in Said-adjacent scholarship.
• CANDY: The English Levant Company gunshop in Istanbul selling weapons to the Ottomans is a striking, conversation-ready irony.