Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Peter the Venerable, the powerful abbot who had ordered the translation of the Koran the better to attack the 'heresy' of Islam, had conceded publicly that the Arabs were particularly clever at science and philosophy." [Lyons: House of Wisdom, p. 167-8] "Bernard, in so many ways Peter’s opposite, perhaps most tellingly in the matter of Abelard, not only preached a Second Crusade but became the patron of the Knights Templar, those monks-in-arms vowed to the Christian “liberation” of Palestine and especially of Jerusalem. These behaviors were despised by Peter the Venerable, who saw the Cistercians’ faith in the power of arms and violence as all of a piece with their shunning of secular learning, and especially their disdain for the classics, and thus all manner of rational and scientific thought . . . Peter, in effect, understood Muslims and Jews to be 'Peoples of the Book' . . . " [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 185]