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In Palestine as in Spain, Islam and Christianity were in contest for the same terrain. Yet there was a subtle difference. Al-Andalus lay on the outer perimeter of Islam, and did not have the special significance for Muslims of the “far distant place of worship” in Jerusalem, whither the Prophet Mohammed came miraculously by night and was thence taken up into heaven.11 Christian Spaniards claimed Spain as their own holy land by prior right, in which the Moors were temporary intruders. By contrast in Palestine, Muslims, Jews, and Christians all claimed full rights to a territory revered by all three communities. Moreover, in each case, the process of losing and later redeeming this land became a dominant religious and literary motif. The loss of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem—Al Quds—from 1099 to 1187 generated an intense preoccupation with the infidel Christian enemy.

The encounter between Western Christendom and Islam after 1099 created a malign heritage for both communities. Each battle, siege, despoliation, or defilement fueled opposing narratives. Thus the conquest of the Christian County of Edessa in 1144 by Imd al-Din Zengi, the Turkish ruler of Mosul, seemed a divine intervention to the chronicler Ibn al-Athir:

When Almighty God saw the princes of the Islamic lands and … how unable they were to support the [true] religion and their inability to defend those who believe in the One God and He saw their subjugation by their enemy and the severity of their despotism … He then wished to set over the Franks someone who could requite the evil of their deeds and send to the devils of the crosses [Western Christians] stones from Him to destroy and annihilate them.12

For the Christian bishop William of Tyre, the city was lost through Christian failures—the petty squabbles among Christian princes and a negligence in Christendom for the sacred patrimony in the East:

Thus while the Prince of Antioch, overcome by foolish hatred, delayed rendering the help he owed to his brothers and while the count awaited help from abroad, the ancient city of Edessa, devoted to Christianity since the time of the Apostles and delivered from the superstitions of the infidels through the words and preaching of the Apostle Thaddeus, passed into an undeserved servitude.13

The loss of Edessa roused the West to launch the Second Crusade, led by the emperor Conrad III and King Louis VII of France. Steven Runciman charted the rise and ignominious fall of the enterprise:

No medieval enterprise started with more splendid hopes. Planned by the Pope, preached and inspired by the golden eloquence of St Bernard, and led by the two chief potentates of Western Europe it had promised so much for the glory and salvation of Christendom … in fact the Crusade was brought to nothing by its leaders, with their truculence, their ignorance, and their ineffectual folly.14

No subsequent Crusade met the high expectations created by the first “pilgrimage.” During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a succession of failed ventures caused a number of writers to ask whether these journeys were indeed God’s will. Would he have allowed them to fail so ignominiously if they were? Many ingenious solutions were found to this conundrum. Failure stemmed from the moral imperfections of the Crusaders themselves and of the wicked society that had produced them. They were unworthy to recover the holy city. Others explained the Muslim infidels’ victories as the instrument by which Christ chastened his sinful people and called them to reform. But gradually a more comprehensive explanation emerged, which seemed to fit all the circumstances and also corralled Islam within Christian doctrine.

For many scholars the success of Islam could only be rationally explained if the Prophet Mohammed and his followers represented the Antichrist, whose appearance foreshadowed the final triumph of Christ in his second coming. Saint Paul had given this ancient idea a succinct Christian definition: “That day [the second coming] shall not