Henri Pirenne’s Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937) is one of the seminal works of history written in the twentieth century. His argument that it was the Arab conquests of the seventh century, not the earlier Germanic invasions, that broke the unity of the Mediterranean world remains valid. The conquering Islamic umma saw the new world in terms of the Dar al-Islam and the Dar al-Harb, the latter being a space filled with fantastic and exotic barbarities that reinforced the Muslim sense of superiority. The old Roman empire, faced with the hard task of adjusting to reduced circumstances, reinvented itself as a New Israel, a Chosen People, whose embattled circumstances were a paradoxical proof of God’s favour. Only in the west did past perspectives survive. In 1096, an expedition now called the First Crusade marched to the east. Where they were going was not a strange and new world, but the most familiar landscape imaginable; a Biblical world whose names were better known than anywhere other than their most immediate local surroundings. The creation of the Crusader states did not pre- figure nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism; still less did Crusader attitudes exemplify what Edward Said dubbed ‘Orientalism’. But the Crusading experience did in due course fundamentally alter the Latin vision of the Near East and lead to the creation of a new sense of Europe. ‬