SM: Actually, Islam’s “golden age” goes much longer, from the 9th to the 14th centuries-and it moves around, from Baghdad to Damascus to Cairo. Wasn’t there a flowering in the 9th and 10th centuries? Tell me about medieval Islamic civilization.
He would go on to ultimately recapture Jerusalem from the crusaders and push them back to a thin strip along the Mediterranean. He took over Egypt, then set about reconquering Syria and parts of Iraq. PC: Saladin, Islam’s most famous counter-crusading hero, was a very astute politician who knew he had to get his own house in order before he could deal with the Franks. But there was eventually a movement toward unification, right? (Credit: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)Īt that time, the core of the Islamic world was divided between a Shi’ite dynasty in Egypt and a Sunni dynasty in Syria and Iraq. While Saladin led Muslim opposition to the western Crusaders, he also befriended some, like King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. Portrait of Saladin, the first sultan of Egypt and Syria and the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty. It’s not just Franks invading Jerusalem, holding it 87 years and leaving, but a long-term and consistent assault on the most exposed areas of the Mediterranean edge of Muslim world-Spain, Sicily, North Africa, and what is now Turkey-over hundreds of years. PC: Muslims saw the Frankish threat as Mediterranean-wide. What came before and after reflected a lot of continuity and not abrupt change. SM: To say the Crusades started in Clermont in 1095 and ended at Acre in 1291, we are fooling ourselves. And whereas most Western historians recognize the 1291 fall of Acre as the end of the main Crusades, Muslim historians don’t see the end of the Frankish threat until, I would say, the mid-15th century, when Ottoman armies conquer Constantinople. By 1060 Christians were not only nibbling at the edges of the Islamic world, but were actually gaining territory in Sicily and Spain.
(I use “Franks” or “Frankish” to refer to western Christians.) For them, the Crusades didn’t begin in Clermont with Pope Urban’s 1095 speech, as most historians say, but rather decades earlier. They recognize the events we call the Crusades today simply as another wave of Frankish aggression on the Muslim world. Paul Cobb: Chronologically, Muslim sources differ from the Christians because they don’t recognize the Crusades. How the US Civil War Inspired Women to Enter Nursingĭo Muslim perspectives match Western ones in terms of chronology and geography?