PREFACE Toward the middle of the tenth century, an Arab geographer and cosmographer from the great city of Baghdad wrote an account of the known world in which he included a few words about some of the strange, wild people beyond the northwest frontier of civilization-that is to say, the Islamic empire of the caliphs. Of the northernmost of these peoples, he observed, "Their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull and their tongues heavy. Their color is so excessively white that it passes from white to blue.... Those of them who are farthest to the north are the most subject to stupidity, grossness and brutishness." In 1798 an Ottoman secretary of state wrote a memorandum to inform the Imperial Council about the recent troubles in Paris. He began his description of the events which, in the West, came to be known as the French Revolution: "The conflagration of sedition and wickedness that broke out a few years ago in France, scattering sparks and shooting flames of mischief and tumult in all directions, had been conceived many years previously in the minds of certain accursed heretics.... The known and famous atheists Voltaire and Rousseau, and other materialists like them, had printed and published various works, consisting ... of the removal and abolition of all religion, and of allusions to the sweetness of equality and republicanism, all expressed in easily intelligible words and phrases, in the form of mockery, in the language of the common people." During the nine and a half centuries that intervened between these two reports, the level of information about Europe among Middle Eastern visitors and observers had improved considerably. The basic attitudes of contempt and certitude, however, remained substantially unchanged. Much the same may be said about Western attitudes toward the Middle East. Though in general rather better informed, medieval and early modem Western observers of the Middle East, including travelers, show a similar self-satisfied ignorance in their discussions of the places they visited and the peoples they met. From the end of the nineteenth century a much closer contact between the two cultures brought a radical change, on both sides, in their perceptions of each other and ultimately of themselves. The rise and spread of Islam brought the Middle East into contact-and sometimes into collision-with other regions and cultures: in the east with India and China, in the south with Africa, in the west and north with Christendom. The last of these, seen by Islam as its only serious rival both as world faith and world power, gave rise to the most sustained and most traumatic of these encounters. It began with the advent of Islam in the seventh century and the irruption of the Muslim Arabs into Palestine, Syria, Egypt and North Africa, all until then part of the Christian world. Three major areas of European Christendom were for a while lost to Islam: the two peninsulas at the southwestern and southeastern comers of Europe, Iberia and Anatolia, and the vast plains of Russia. The first was conquered and ruled by Arabs and Moors, the second by Turks, the third by Islarnized Tatars. The loss of Anatolia proved permanent. The attempt by the Crusaders to reconquer the Holy Land failed. But in both Russia and the Iberian Peninsula, the Christian inhabitants were in time able to defeat and expel their Muslim rulers, and, in the flush of victory, even pursued them whence they had come-from Russia to Asia, from Spain and Portugal to Africa and beyond. The reconquest grew into conquest and began the great expansion of Europe, from both east and west, which in time brought most of Asia and Africa into the European orbit. The relationship between the Middle East and the West has not been limited to war and its consequences-fear and mistrust, resentment and hatred, and a readiness to invent and believe the most absurd o

"A magnificent collection that lays out the history of the Middle East like no other book before it. The sheer wonder of this book cannot be overstated." --Denver Rocky Mountain News "History in the hands of a master historian is an exquisite thing." --The Charlotte Observer

Providing a rich overview of two millennia of commerce, diplomacy, war and exploration, this treasury of stories has been drawn from letters, diaries and histories.