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The Crusades in History
It must be noted that source materials, in any language, on the history of the
Crusades are almost exclusively Western. The Crusades were entirely a Western
project fought for Western reasons in a European political, social, and economic
context. Europe was, in effect, ripe for a grand mission to the East that could
absorb and safely redirect all the diverse drives of the swirling European
political and social environment. Catholic Europe was ready to begin its restless
eastward expansion—against pagan Slavs, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, or
Muslims—regardless of what religion happened to be dominant in the Middle
East at that point.
Most Muslims who did not live near the crossroads of the crusader movement
or who were not engaged in military struggle were largely ignorant of the events.
At the time they occurred, the Crusades were not perceived by Muslims as a
“civilizational event” in the way that Europeans then perceived, or contemporary
thinking has now come to perceive, it. Indeed, even for those Muslims affected
by the ongoing battles for control of the Levant coast, the crusaders, or “Franks”
as they were known, were often viewed by Muslims as just one more variant of
the many Byzantine mercenaries or ethnic militias regularly pressed into service
from around the Byzantine Empire.
This was the period as well when the word “Frank” was widely absorbed into
the Muslim world to denote all Europeans. The word “firengi” or “faranji” is
still a near-universal slang word all across Muslim Asia to refer to foreigners
from the West of any sort.
Finally, the Crusades created sets of attitudes of each side toward the other,
particularly in the West. As the Crusades scholar Carole Hillenbrand puts it:
Contact with the Muslim world gave the Europeans a taste for all kinds
of commodities, including ivory, inlaid metalwork and other luxury goods
that came from the Arab world. Of these the most important were textiles:
damask, fustian, muslin, organdie, atlas, satin and taffeta…
Crusaders returning home from the Holy Land would speak of the
exotic countries they had left behind. The phenomenon of Orientalism
from the 18th century onward and its manifestations in Western art and
literature, so powerfully described in recent times by Edward Said, fed on
the heritage of the Crusades. The Muslim world was the place of deserts,
walled cities, veiled women, harems, eunuchs, bathhouses, intrigues,

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outlandish animals, clothing, languages, luxuries and an alien religion; in
short, a land of romantic mystery and danger.
When asked his opinion of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-
Lai in the 1950s famously remarked, “It’s too early to tell.” So, too, time never
ceases to refract the past in shifting patterns that tell us as much about the
contemporary observer as it does about specific past events. Over time, the
Crusades have undergone various interpretations, both favorable and
unfavorable. In the West today, there is a tendency among most secular-minded
people to see the events as indeed a force of Western expansionism—a not-