Edward Lewis, W W Norton & Co Inc., 1985
In the year 1068, a cultivated Muslim historian wrote of the European peoples to the north: “They are more like beasts than like men…. Their temperaments are frigid, their humors raw, their bellies gross,… they lack keenness of understanding…and are overcome by ignorance and apathy.”
In truth, the Muslim world of this time was a great civilization, a center of art and science stretching from Spain to the Middle East, while Europe lay slumbering in the Dark Ages. The two worlds knew little of one another. Slowly, inevitably, however, Europe and Islam came together through trade and war, crusade and diplomacy. The Muslims began to take note of the Europeans and to write about them, to acquire information on languages, science, government, religion, economics.
The story of this ebb and flow of these two worlds over seven hundred years is one of the great sagas of world history, told here by a great historian using journals, letters, diaries, dispatches, and books, many of them never before translated.