Crusades - Medieval Worlds in Conflict

At one time the crusades were regarded as a sidelight of the Middle Ages - peripheral campaigns fought thousands of miles from Europe for a variety of religious, economic, and political reasons. Yet the crusades were not at the periphery of the medieval world, but at its core. They were the product of events separated by thousands of miles and across complex frontiers of culture and religion. They owed their existence as much to Muslim ideas of expansionism and Byzantine instability as they did to the articulation of ecclesiastical reform to a western feudal nobility. It is within the context of the crusading movement that each of the major medieval cultures - Latin West, Byzantine, and Muslim - came into contact. That contact, of course, resulted in conflict, cooperation, collaboration, and individual assimilation, accommodation, or rejection of the newly encountered other. The purpose of this volume is to bring together recent research into the ways in which these medieval worlds were affected by the crusading movement. The first group of essays explore worlds of conflicting sanctity within the framework of the crusades. Across the battlefields two religious cultures constructed narratives of the sacred while simultaneously describing the other as polluted and worthy of destruction. Other essays focus on the crusades and contested worlds of ideas, on definitions of a crusade, and the contested relations of the crusaders with Byzatnium. The last set of essays are the product of the symposium's special session on the crusade and Louis IX. Together these essays reveal more of the seemingly endless facets of medieval life that touched and were touched by the crusading movement. With each new investigation into the crusades we learn more about the conflicting medieval worlds that they themselves mirrored.