148 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Historians traditionally count eight Crusades over the course of two
hundred years, but really there was at least a trickle of crusaders arriving
and leaving at any given time during those years. So it's probably more
accurate to say that the Crusades lasted about two hundred years, with
eight periods during which the traffic swelled, usually because some
monarch or coalition of monarchs organized a campaign. Over these two
centuries, "crusading" simply became an ongoing activity for Europeans,
with some families sending one or two sons off to the wars in every gen-
eration, these sons departing when they came of age, not when "the next
crusade" was leaving.
The first wave of European knights took a handful of cities and estab-
lished four quasi-permanent "Crusader kingdoms," after which would-be
crusaders from England or France or Germany always had a place to land
and an army to join if they headed east. Some Christians of western Euro-
pean stock were of course born in these kingdoms and lived and died
there, but many came east for a few years, did some fighting for the cause,
acquired some booty if they were lucky, and went home. The Crusaders
built impressive stone fortresses, but their sojourn in the east always had a
temporary feel to it.
Some modern-day Islamist radicals (and a smattering of Western pun-
dits) describe the Crusades as a great clash of civilizations foreshadowing
the troubles of today. They trace the roots of modern Muslim rage to that
era and those events. But reports from the Arab side don't show Muslims
of the time thinking this way, at least at the start. No one seemed to cast
the wars as an epic struggle between Islam and Christendom-that was the
story line the Crusaders saw. Instead of a clash between two civilizations,
Muslims saw simply a calamity falling upon ... civilization. For one thing,
when they looked at the Franj, they saw no evidence of civilization. An
Arab prince named Usamah ibn Munqidh described the Franks as being
like "beasts, superior in courage and in fighting ardor, but in nothing else,
just as animals are superior in strength and aggression."^6 The Crusaders so
disgusted the Muslims that they came to appreciate the Byzantines by con-
trast. Once they understood the political and religious motives of the Cru-
saders, they made a distinction between "al Rum" (Rome-i.e., the
Byzantines) and "al-Ifranj." Instead of"the Crusades," Muslims called this
period of violence the Franj Wars.