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By Root 1269 0

these experiences and beliefs were sustained and regularly reinforced, then the conditioned response would dwindle. This drip feed of new information and ideas, the reiteration of old themes, meant that the far-distant conflict in the Levant conditioned the subsequent relationship between Christendom and Islam. It became the symbolic reference point for future recollections. As Alphonse Dupront put it, “When we say the word ‘crusade,’ something thrills and disturbs us. This ‘something’ is the utmost power of myth that is alive and real.”20 The word “Crusade” in Western society has now largely lost its specific denotation—war in a good cause—but it still carries a powerful charge. By contrast “Crusade” carries a stronger meaning for many Muslims, while “holy war”—jihad—still evokes a frisson of fear among Christians. These words have become metonyms of the enemy, reinforcing memories of their essential cruelty and savagery.21

We can trace the means by which these fears and hatred were constructed. Emmanuel Sivan began his seminal work on the Muslim “counter-Crusade” by pointing to distinct but parallel elements in the creation of this ideology: existing attitudes, which were in place before the pressure of events and of propaganda, and created attitudes formed (or exploited) as a result of events or propaganda.22 These functioned as reinforcement for the existing attitudes. But these twin elements were just as powerful in creating first the ideology and, later, myths of “Crusade” in Western culture. The Crusaders who marched to the Holy Land had firm (if ill-founded) ideas about their enemy, while the Muslims they encountered had almost no specific notions about the Franks, except that they were grotesquely unappealing infidels. However, during their confrontation in the East, Muslims and Western Christians developed much more complex and roughly symmetrical views of each other. The degree to which each group produced reverse or mirror images is remarkable. Christians regarded Muslims as inherently cruel and violent; Muslims felt the same about the Westerners. Christians developed wild imaginings about the sexual proclivities of Muslims. Muslims regarded the Franks, as Usāmah made clear, as little better than animals in terms of sexual propriety.

Equally, each could initially appreciate heroic and noble qualities in the other. The sultan Saladin was portrayed in many Western accounts, despite the loss of Jerusalem to his armies in 1187, as more just and honorable than many Christian rulers. Likewise, Muslims had no difficulty in recognizing the military skill and bravery of their opponents at the same time that they described them as “accursed.” Nor did negative attitudes prevent many forms of political and economic connection between enemies even in times of war and rancorous propaganda.23 However, while the Muslims might produce the occasional Saladin and Baybars, and were formidable opponents on the battlefield, their visible power appeared inferior to Westerners’.24 No Saracen fortress, for example, could match the raw defensive power of the Crusader castles such as Krak des Chevaliers, Beaufort, or the sea castle at Sidon.25 It was the rise to dominance of the Ottoman Turks from the mid–fourteenth century, in both Anatolia and Balkan Europe, that altered that equation. Saladin had been a noble individual, but represented a contemptible people. The Grand Signior, the sultan of the Turks, the “Great Cham,” represented an infidel state and culture whose power was to be feared and could not be denied.

THE SULTAN OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS MADE HIMSELF THE STANDARD-bearer of Islam. The Ottoman Turks were nomads who, brought as mercenaries into Anatolia by the Seljuqs, survived their downfall. By 1280 they had established a small Ottoman center, named after their chief, Osman, in western Anatolia. His son, Sultan Orhan, established their capital at Bursa on the slopes of Mount Olympus in Mysia (Mount Uludağ) in 1326, where Osman’s title is inscribed as “The mujahid [he who fights for Islam], Sultan of the ghazis, ghazi son