ABSTRACT
The crusades were basically a Latin Christian monologue. Their ideology, and even the political realities and practical motives which played a part in their realization are only to be understood to a very small degree as reactions to Muslim initiative ; not until the establishment of the Franks in the Holy Land did there arise a situation like that of the cold war today, in which the mutually hostile momenta of the two sides increasingly affected and evoked each other. But until the end the destiny of the Latin states in the Levant was guided by developments which can be explained solely in terms of the changes of mental climate in the West, though naturally they were influenced by the practical experiences of the crusaders and the counter thrusts of the Muslim princes. Even when demographic or simply general economic considerations seem to us to predominate, it was almost exclusively internal western stimuli that fanned or withdrew interest in the crusades, and not those resulting from the situation in Islam, except in a remote and indirect manner.
