HAVOC 149In areas under attack, Muslims did, of course, feel threatened by the
Franj, even horrified by them, but they didn't see in these attacks any in-
tellectual challenge to their ideas and beliefs. And although the Crusades
were certainly a serious matter for Muslims living along the eastern
Mediterranean coast, the Crusaders never penetrated deeply into the Mus-
lim world. For example, no real army ever reached Mecca and Medina,
only a small raiding party led by a renegade whom even other Franj re-
garded as a despicable rogue. The Crusaders never laid siege to Baghdad
nor did they penetrate historic Persia. People in Khorasan and Bactria and
the Indus Valley remained completely unaffected by the incursion and
largely unaware of it.
What's more, the Crusades stimulated no particular curiosity in the
Muslim world about Western Europe. No one expended much energy
wondering where these Franj had come from, or what their life was like
back home, or what they believed. In the early 1300s, Rashid al-Din Fa-
zlullah, a Jewish convert to Islam, wrote an epic Collection of All Histories,
which included the history of China, India, the Turks, the Jews, the pre-
Islamic Persians, Mohammed, the khalifas, and the Franj, but even at this
late date, the part about the Franks was perfunctory and undocumented.?
In short, the Crusades brought virtually no European cultural viruses into
the Islamic world. The influence ran almost entirely the other way.
And what flowed the other way? Well, the Crusaders opened up op-
portunities for European merchants in the Levant and Egypt. During the
Franj wars, trade between western Europe and the Middle World in-
creased. As a result, people in places like England, France, and Germany
obtained exotic goods available in the East, products such as nutmeg,
cloves, black pepper, and other spices, as well as silk, satin, and a fabric
made from a wonderful plant called cotton.
European merchants, pilgrims, and Crusaders (the categories were not
always distinct) returning to Europe reported on the riches of the Muslim
world and told tales about even more distant lands, places such as India,
and the near-mythic islands of"the Indies." These stories aroused appetites
in Europe that kept growing over the years and were to have tremendous
consequences later on.
In the Middle World, however, just as the calamity of the Crusades was
subsiding, a second and far more catastrophic assault broke out.