When Pope Urban II called for a crusade in 1095, the vast majority of Europeans knew little or nothing about the Middle East. Italian merchants had well-established trading connections in the eastern Mediterranean, but their firsthand knowledge of the region and its peoples had not made its way into the popular consciousness. Thus, for most European participants in the First Crusade, the Muslim Turks were simply the “other,” defined almost entirely by the fact that they were not Christian Europeans. While many Muslims held a similar view of Christians, the Islamic world was far more diverse and cosmopolitan than Christian Europe, and on the whole, Muslim views of Europeans tended to be more nuanced. As you read the documents included here, one written by a European knight and the other by a Muslim scholar, think about the connections between the Crusades and cross-cultural perceptions. How might the Crusades have reinforced Christian and Muslim stereotypes of one another? How might they have contradicted such stereotypes?