The relationships to Islam of the many Christians who lived in Muslim lands, for example, were very different from those of Christians living in orthodox Christian Byzantium or Catholic Latin Europe. This chapter focusses on those lands that came to think of themselves as 'Christendom': that is, Catholic Western Europe, from the Iberian to the Hungarian kingdoms. The actual content of the Saracens' faith was irrelevant to Sophronios, who was interested in elucidating the Muslims' role in Christian sacred history. Engagement with Islamic texts did not alter Christian understandings of Islam because this engagement was largely structured by polemic. Iberian Muslims living under Christian rule are called 'Mudejars', and they represent a novel and important phenomenon in Islamic history. Certainly most Mudejar scholars felt that theirs was a culture in decline. The importance of polemics to Muslims living within Christendom reminds us of my earlier conclusions about Christian encounters with Islam.

Supporters of the conciliar way wanted the council to undertake a reform of the Church, especially of papal taxation and papal appointments to senior benefices. On 26 June Peter Philarge, cardinal-archbishop of Milan, was elected pope and took the name Alexander V. The ensuing military and political events had a decisive impact on church history. The project of reunion through a council had been attracting strong support among the universities, especially Paris, and the numerous clerics, including senior prelates, who had been educated there. The defeat of the Council of Basle proved decisive for the western Church, for western Christendom and for European civilisation. Public opinion, amongst intellectuals and in court circles, seems to have favoured the more moderate view that a council was the emergency superior of the pope in cases of heresy, schism and the urgent need for reform. A look at popes and councils shows that the politics and ideology had an effect in shaping European culture.

In 1415 Henry V, king of England, invaded northern France. In the east, two new powers, Muscovy and, above all, the Ottoman Empire, were putting eastern Europe to the sword. The 'modern states' of western Christendom were characterised by the provision of substantial revenues derived from national taxation raised by consent. Dialogue, political intercourse between prince and subjects, was essential to the modern state. Both theory and practice needed adapting to the particular political society of each state on at least two levels. Epitomising power, witnessed by an attentive audience, they became complex rituals, given tangible expression as dramatic presentations overlaid with symbolism. Speeches, in particular sermons, could convey unequivocal declarations of political thought. Clerics and ecclesiastics who had completed their university studies in the faculty of arts had become acquainted with the political works of Antiquity. History, like politics, was being transformed by literature; the success of Jean Froissart's work in aristocratic and bourgeois circles is testimony of this.