For two centuries (1095–1291), Christian armies from Western Europe periodically invaded the Middle East to recapture for Christendom the Holy Lands associated with the life of Jesus, which then lay under the control of Muslim powers. These efforts became the most widely known expression of the “Crusades,” holy wars authorized by the pope to extend or protect the interests of Christianity. From the viewpoint of the Islamic world, they represented naked and brutal aggression. Many Christians, however, saw them as defensive, a response to the earlier Arab Muslim invasion of Christian lands and to the recent threat of Turkic Muslim incursions against the Byzantine Empire. Either way, they were an episode in a much longer encounter of Christian and Islamic civilizations.

Historians have focused much of their study on the origins of the Crusades and on the military conflicts they generated. Initial Crusader victories resulted in the establishment of four small Christian states in the Holy Land, including one in Jerusalem. But by 1291, Muslim forces had recaptured all of them. Here, however, our attention shifts to the cultural side of this epic encounter — how various peoples perceived or understood one another. As a vast set of cultural encounters, the Crusades encompassed more than Christians and Muslims. European and Middle Eastern Jews were likewise caught up in the Crusades, while relationships between Latin Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christians figured prominently in them as well. In assessing the sources that follow, we are less interested in “what really happened” than in the impressions, images, perceptions, and stereotypes that the various participants in the Crusades held of one another.