The Crusades

Reference

Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia

The Crusades brought, "the Latin world face-to-face with the scientific and technological prowess of the Arab East." [Lyons: House of Wisdom, p. 12] "Urban appears to have made extensive use of this form of graphic and incendiary imagery . . . Either way, his explicit dehumanisation of the Muslim world served as a vital catalyst to the ‘crusading’ cause," [Asbridge: The Crusades, p. 37] "The crusades and the presence of the crusader states reconfigured Mediterranean trade routes . . . and played a critical role in solidifying the power of the Italian mercantile cities of Venice, Pisa and Genoa. Europe’s adoption of Arabic numerals can also be dated to around 1200 and likely resulted from trade with Islam . . . Historians have long recognised that interaction between western Christendom and the Muslim and wider Mediterranean worlds during the Middle Ages played an important, perhaps even critical, role in advancing European civilisation." Europeans absorbed artistic, scientific, medical, and philosophical learning that contributed to the Renaissance. [Asbridge: The Crusades, p. 665-7] Many histories of the crusades written by ‘western’ scholars are biased by the Christian viewpoint. [Asbridge: The Crusades, p. 768]