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the Metropolis of the World or The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul. It was published in 1682. Thomas Fuller’s The Historie of the Holy Warre was equally popular. First published in 1639, and reprinted four times between 1640 and 1651, it was rarely out of print. Fuller’s work was a historical account—the first full description of the medieval Crusades in English. Bunyan’s elaborate allegory also drew on images of the infidel. He used a perception of the alien common in his day: his villain was King Diabolus, whom he described as “king of the blacks, and a most raving prince.” He had “a Luciferian heart,” as “insatiable, and enlarged as hell itself.” These were descriptions frequently applied to the Turks.

Unlike Bunyan, who was the son of a tinker, Fuller had a more settled and comfortable position in society. He was a clergyman of the Church of England, a moderate Royalist, and chaplain to General Sir Ralph Hopton during the Civil War. Although his Holy Warre was first published before fighting broke out in 1642, his description of the Crusaders struggling with the armies of the infidel seemed to have a particular resonance for both sides in the increasingly bitter internecine war. Both the Royalist and Parliamentary causes saw the infidels, and enemies of the true faith, in their opponents. Allegory, history, and current events were thus inextricably bound together.

Popular histories of the Crusades also appeared in other European languages. But it was the turn of the twentieth century before Muslims came to write their own histories of the Crusades in the Levant. By then, Christian missionaries believed they had converted the concepts and vocabulary of “crusade” into a spiritual war on sin and evil. But now Muslims rediscovered the harsh consequences of the events of the eleventh century: the desecration and despoliation of their holy places. For them, the Crusades became a contemporary event, not something mellowed by the passage of 800 years. The Arabic word for Crusade and Crusaders—al-salibiyyun (“the people of the cross”)—was used in a translation of a French military history in 1865. The earliest full-scale text written in Arabic (and from Arabic sources), entitled The Splendid Story of the Crusading Wars, was published in Cairo by Sayyid Ali al-Hariri in 1899.50 The word for the Christian cross had existed in Arabic in earlier times, but it was not until the twentieth century that it acquired this new and hateful connotation.51 From that point onward, new meanings proliferated. The neologism al-salibiyyun came to mean protocolonialists, exploitative agents of Western imperialism, enemies of Arab nationhood and of Islam.52 New political meanings of the West merged with the older tropes of contamination and despoliation formed from the Muslim experience of the Crusades centuries before.

IT WAS NOT ONLY MUSLIMS WHO WERE REEVALUATING THE ERA OF the Crusades. France began a new “crusade of conquest” early in the nineteenth century. By the 1820s the French Bourbon monarchy had returned to power after the final defeat of the Napoleonic empire in 1815. Louis XVIII became preoccupied with North Africa, inheriting a tradition where his distant ancestors’ glory was associated with the East. An immensely popular Histoire des Croisades by Joseph-François Michaud had appeared in the latter years of the Napoleonic empire, and the author had been rewarded with the Légion d’Honneur for his efforts. But the restored Bourbons, especially Louis’s successor from 1824, Charles X, concurred with Michaud’s view that “what is the most positive of the results of the first crusade is the glory of our fathers, this glory which is a real achievement for a nation.”53 The Crusades rapidly became the first example of France’s national grandeur. Michaud’s work was constantly reprinted and led to an ambitious collection of original sources in five languages—Recueil des historiens des croisades—which began in 1824; further volumes appeared at regular intervals thereafter under the auspices of the Académie des Inscriptions et