Muhammad died in Medina on June 8, 632 AD.
Damascus fell in 635, and Jerusalem capitulated five years after Muhammad died, in February 638
The fall of Alexandria in 643 sounded the death knell of more than thousand years of Hellenic civilization that once enriched the whole of the Near East with its scholarship and culture.
Cyprus fell in 648-9
Rhodes in 653
Constantinople had been attacked in 673, and then for the next five years Arab armies and fleets attempted unsuccessfully to break through the Byzantine defences. ‘Greek Fire,’ that mysterious substance that burned on water, destroyed the Muslim fleets and won the day for the defenders.
The whole of North Africa was lost by 698
Spain invaded - Less than eighty years after Muhammad’s death, in 711, Muslims from Tangiers poured across the 13 km wide strait of Gibraltar into Spain.
Then, in 717, the Muslims returned to the attack, emboldened by their successes in Spain.
By 721 this Arab-Berber horde had overthrown the ruling Catholic Visigoths and, with the fall of Saragossa, set their sights on southern France.
By 720 Narbonne had fallen.
Bordeaux was stormed and its churches burnt down by 'Abd al-Rahman ibn Abdullah al-Ghafiqi in early spring 732 - A basilica outside the walls of Poitiers was razed, and 'Abd al-Rahman headed for Tours which held the body of St Martin [who died in 397] apostle and patron saint of the Franks.
He was to be defeated and killed by Charles Martel and his Frankish army on a Saturday in October, 732, one hundred years after Muhammad’s death, on the road from Poitiers to Tours a defeat that was hailed by Gibbon and others as decisive in turning back the Muslim tide from Europe.
Attacks on France, however, continued, and in 734 Avignon was captured by an Arab force.
Lyons was sacked in 743.
It wasn’t until 759 that the Arabs were driven out of Narbonne.
Marseilles was plundered by them in 838.
Muslim incursions into Italy had been a feature of life from the early 800s
The islands of Ponza [off Gaeta] and Ischia [off Naples] had been plundered, and then, in 813 Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, whose harbour had been constructed by Trajan, was sacked by the Arabs.
In 826 the island of Crete fell to Muslim forces which retained it as their base until 961.
From around 827 they then began nibbling at Sicily
They captured Messina and controlled the Strait of Messina by 842, and finally took the whole island in 859, after Enna fell to them.
In 836 the Neapolitans self-interestedly invited the Muslim forces to help them against the Lombards and set the stage for more than a century of Muslims raids along the Adriatic, involving the destruction of Ancona, and Muslim progress as far as the mouth of the Po. ‘Saracen Towers’[5] south of Naples, built in the ninth century to warn locals of the approach of Arab fleets from Sicily and Africa still charm visitors to the Neapolitan coast.
Bari, now home to the relics of St Nicholas of Myra, the original ‘Father Christmas,’ fell to Khalfun, a Berber chieftan, by another act of treachery in 840.
From 853-871 the notorious Muslim brigand al- Mufarraj bin Sallam, and his successor, another Berber named Sawdan, controlled all the coast from Bari down to Reggio Calabria, and terrorized Southern Italy. They even plundered the Abbey of St Michael on Mt Gargano. They claimed the title of Emir, and independence of the Emir in Palermo.
Sacking of St Peter’s - Naples herself had to beat off a Muslim attack in 837. But in 846 Rome was not to be so fortunate. On August 23rd 846, Arab squadrons from Africa arrived at Ostia, at the Tiber’s mouth. There were 73 ships. The Saracen force numbered 11,000 warriors, with 500 horses.
The most revered Christian shrines outside the Holy Land, the tombs of Sts Peter and Paul, were desecrated and their respective Basilicas were sacked, as was the Lateran Basilica along with numerous other churches and public buildings.
The very altar over the body of St Peter was smashed to pieces, and the great door of St Peter’s Basilica was stripped of its silver plates. Romans were desolated and Christendom was shocked at the barbarism of the Muslim forces.
Three years later Pope Leo IV [847-855] formed an alliance with Naples, Amalfi and Gaeta, and when a Saracen fleet again appeared at the mouth of the Tiber in 849, the Papal fleet joined forces with its allies and they repelled the Muslim fleet which turned, and ran into a violent wind-storm that destroyed it, like Pharaoh’s army long before.
Taranto in Apulia was conquered by Arab forces in 846. They held it until 880.
In 870 Malta was captured by the Muslims.
In 871 Bari, the Saracens’ capital on mainland Italy, was recaptured from the Muslims by Emperor Louis II, who in 872 was to defeat a Saracen fleet off Capua.
In 873 the Muslim forces devastated Calabria in southern Italy to the point that it was reduced to the state ‘in which it had been left by the Great Flood’ and the Saracens expressed their intention of destroying Rome, the city of the ‘Petrulus senex,’ 'the ineffective old man, Peter.
In 874 Pope John VIII did all he could to dissuade Amalfi, Naples, Benevento, Capua, Salerno, and Spoleto from forming a pragmatic alliance with the Saracens. Amalfi, Capua and Salerno alone heeded his pleas for Christian solidarity.
From the close of 876 Pope John VIII had been sending letters in all directions to obtain help against the Arab forces which were devastating southern Italy and even threatening Rome itself.
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Best advise yet. Least at the end of the day no matter ones conclusion the research was done.