Introduction

At one time the crusades were regarded as a sidelight of the Middle Ages – peripheral campaigns fought thousands of miles from Europe for a variety of religious, economic, and political reasons. Historians have come to know better. e crusades stood not at the periphery of the medieval world, but at its core. ey were the product of events separated by thousands of miles and across complex frontiers of culture and religion. ey owed their existence as much to Muslim expansionism and Byzantine instability as they did to the articulation of ecclesiastical reform to a Western feudal nobility. It is within the context of the crusading movement that each of the major medieval cultures – Latin West, Byzantine, and Muslim – came into contact. at contact, of course, resulted in conict, cooperation, collaboration, and individual assimilation, accommodation, or rejection of the newly encountered other. Crusade studies is not simply the study of campaigns and battles (although those are by no means excluded), but the examination of a context in which the medieval Mediterranean and its disparate cultures both acted and interacted.