The conclusion revisits the book’s key claims and maps new avenues for research on medieval European representations of, and self-definition in relation to, Muslims and Islam. It closes with a brief discussion of the qualified anti-crusade argument, grounded in imperfect ideas of equality, voiced by the French lawyer Honorat Bovet in his widely disseminated Arbre des batailles (1387).

Romances’ formal innovations and authorial self-consciousness are studied from another angle by Sylvie Lefèvre, who examines the variety of authorial framing techniques and narratorial interventions in French romance. Although we possess little information about historical authors before the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, many stories call attention to their creators, sometimes billed as an “acteur,” who can assert himself (or, more rarely, herself) in numerous guises: as an omniscient narrator who animates the dialogue of characters; as a parallel persona who compares his amorous affair to that of his characters; as an intradiegetic narrator who plays a role inside the story beside the characters; as a full-blown amorous persona himself, who describes the progress of his affair; or as a pseudohistorical agent based on a historical author from the previous century. Whether in verse or prose, in intradiegetic or extradiegetic narration, romances proved fertile ground for artistry, experimentation, and innovation, first in French and later in other European traditions. While some authors remain firmly entrenched inside the fiction of their creations, others created bridges to “real” incidents beyond the tale, blurring the distinction between fiction and history in ways that anticipate the modern novel.

Christian liturgy and ritual underpinned the practice and ideals of holy war and especially the Crusades (11th–16th centuries) in the medieval Christian imagination. As the mechanism of connecting the salvific and eschatological to the secular events of war and warfare, the liturgy – in the form of knightly blessings, votive masses for war, and penitential processions – articulated and sacralized the ideology of holy war throughout the period.

The chapter highlights the place of spiritual purification in the Islamic ethos and its relation to physical jihād. Tracing such ideas from early Islam, the chapter considers the jihād in the era of the Crusades and the ways in which pietistic motifs were essential components of jihād preaching and practice.

In 1208 Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade of “extermination” and “expurgation” against the heretics supposedly infesting the lands of the count of Toulouse. What is now known as the “Albigensian Crusade” lasted twenty-one years and was the first holy war in which Christians were guaranteed salvation by killing other Christians. The massacres during the crusade, especially at Béziers in 1209, were “genocidal moments.” The victims, though, were neither an ethnic, national, or racial group. The victims were arguably a regional or possibly a cultural group, but such groups are not covered by the modern legal definition of genocide. Nevertheless, they were deliberately targeted for destruction. Despite accusations of heresy, the victims were not initially a self-consciously different religious group either. Crucially, they were not “Cathars,” which is what most medieval historians and genocide scholars assume the victims to have been. “Catharism” as a medieval heresy never existed; it was an invention of nineteenth-century scholars trying to understand the Albigensian crusade more “scientifically” and less confessionally. Finally, were the individual testimonies collected by the first inquisitions into heretical depravity, established in Toulouse in the aftermath of the Albigensian crusade, analogous to the memories of individuals who witnessed or survived genocides collected by modern tribunals?

The article discusses the most consequential episodes of genocidal violence against the Jews in medieval Western Europe: the slaughter of Jews in the Rhineland during the First Crusade (1096), the massacres in England (1189-90), the Rintfleisch and Armleder massacres in Germany (1298, 1336-38), the Shepherds’ Crusade violence in France and northern Iberia (1320-21), attacks on Jews during the Black Death epidemic (1348-1351), and the anti-Jewish urban riots in Castile and Aragon (1391-92). While the massacres did not aim to eradicate Jews from the Western Christendom, by the end of the medieval period the violence expanded in scope, affecting entire regions and even kingdoms. Christians from all walks of life – not just lower-class people – participated in the assaults. They had a variety of motivations: while some wanted to take revenge on the supposed killers of Christ, others resented Jews’ association with royal power, or felt victimized by Jewish moneylenders. The dissemination of conspiracy theories about Jews committing ritual murder, desecrating the Eucharistic host, or causing the plague also led to violence. Jews were accused of plotting to destroy Christianity, inflict physical harm on Christians, and undermine their livelihood. In this sense, medieval and modern anti-Jewish violence have far more in common than many scholars are willing to admit.

The only surviving Byzantine image of the horseman inhabits an ominous and foreboding landscape. The unique image appears in an illustrated version of the Book of Job. The horseman presides over a darkly emotional and philosophically rich scene (Vat. Gr. 751, fol. 26r). The artist who created this image transported the horseman back in time to have it preside over the darkest moment in the trials of virtuous Job caught up in a contest between forces far greater than himself. Given that the motif of fall permeates the Book of Job, our image metaphorically envisions a bitter estrangement from the Queen of Cities. In this unique image of Job, Justinian’s column is multivalent. It is both triumphal and tragic. If it were not juxtaposed with Job’s suffering it would seem celebratory. However, the juxtaposition is central. The horseman is poised to witness how the righteous suffer as a result of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Either the manuscript’s creator was very prescient in forecasting Job-like tribulations for Constantinople or he was operating with hindsight at some point after the Crusader capture of Constantinople in 1204.

Chapter 5 looks at the public memory of the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia as expressed in the memoirs of ex-servicemen. This chapter argues that ex-servicemen in the interwar period still believed that they had been forgotten by the general public, despite a number of popular culture and commemorative representations of their campaigns. Using Jay Winter and Antoine Prost’s argument about soldier memoir writers as ‘agents of memory’, this chapter argues that ex-servicemen used their memoirs as a tool to persuade the public that they, too, had suffered and sacrificed during the war. This chapter also investigates the proliferation of crusading rhetoric in the memoirs of ex-servicemen who fought in Palestine, arguing that most soldiers did not use the language of holy war but instead of liberal imperialism and a crusade on behalf of western civilisation. This chapter also returns to the soldiers’ ideas, shown in Chapter 3, that their campaigns had brought civilisation to Arabs and Greeks and that, once again, it was they who had actually won the war. Crucially, these themes arose again after the war but for different reasons, emphasising the need to consider as separate wartime writings from post-war memoirs.

Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Muslims experienced multiple crises. The Crusaders and the Mongols destroyed the urban infrastructure and the public order across a vast Muslim geography. On the one hand, the fall of most Muslim states, except the Ayyubids and then Mamluks in Egypt, and Berber dynasties in Morocco/Andalus, weakened the ulema–state alliance. On the other hand, the perils of the Crusades and the Mongol invasions led many Muslims to seek safety from the ulema–state alliance. In general, both the Crusader and the Mongol invasions led to a deterioration of mercantile and scholarly activities in many Muslim cities. Muslim countries still produced such remarkable scholars as Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun. Another scholar, Ibn Taymiyya, wrote on the theory of the ulema–state alliance. Meanwhile Western Europe was protected from destructive invasions after the halt of the Mongol invasion in Eastern Europe. In this context, Western Europe witnessed socioeconomic and political transformations. This chapter first analyzes the Muslim world and then explores these Western European transformations.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.