“Christian pigs and filth”
accomplishments, and ignoring their friendly interactions with certain groups among the crusaders.
In more recent decades, the Eurocentric reading has been nuanced but never completely challenged, while the Islamocentric reading has not changed at all, thanks to the political situation in the Muslim world.
The crusades was not a clash of civilisations. Only a fool would say that the Muslims and crusaders loved each other, but this does not justify going to the other extreme – for the contemporary sources (especially the Islamic ones) draw a mosaic picture of the period, featuring wars and alliances, boycott and exchange, hatred and amicability and myriad shades in between. In other words, there were never two camps. There were, however, many actors, with different agendas and varying schemes to achieve them.
A window into this complex reality is provided in The Travels of Ibn Jubayr.A Muslim secretary from medieval Iberia (Spain), Ibn Jubayr, who died in 1217, sojourned in the eastern Mediterranean and saw things not always palatable to his taste. One observation he made was that, despite occasional wars between the Muslims and crusaders, merchants and commerce continued to move freely between the two realms as if everything was normal. For him, this was a sign of the corruption of rulers on both sides. In one instance, in 1184 he crossed the plain from the Sea of Galilee to
Acre, where he discovered countless farming villages inhabited by Muslims who seemed to him to live in complete harmony with the crusaders.
What shocked Ibn Jubayr the most was not only that the crusaders were not harming the Muslims. He bemoaned the fact that these Muslims did not seem bothered by their mingling with – to use his words – “Christian pigs and filth”. As such, in Ibn Jubayr’s eyes, these Muslims could not have been good Muslims.
The complexity of the crusader period is apparent in the contemporary Muslim sources. For instance, the physician and chronicler Ibn Abi Usaibia (died 1270) recounts the story of an envoy from Emperor Frederick II arriving sometime in the 1220s