Islam. 179ing charnel house. For at least five months the valleys and
ditches around the city were filled with putrefying corpses,
which were too numerous for the small number of Crusaders
who remained behind after the expedition to clear away, and
a stench hung over Jerusalem, where the three religions of
Abraham had been able to coexist in relative harmony under
Islamic rule for nearly five hundred years. This was the Mus-
lims' first experience of the Christian West, as it pulled itself
out of the dark age that had descended after the collapse of
the Roman Empire in the fifth century, and fought its way
back on to the international scene. The Muslims suffered
from the Crusaders, but were not long incommoded by their
presence. In 1187 Saladin was able to recapture Jerusalem for
Islam and though the Crusaders hung on in the Near East for
another century, they seemed an unimportant passing episode
in the long Islamic history of the region. Most of the inhabi-
tants of Islamdon were entirely unaffected by the Crusades
and remained uninterested in western Europe, which, despite
its dramatic cultural advance during the crusading period,
still lagged behind the Muslim world.
Europeans did not forget the Crusades, however, nor could
they ignore the Dar al-Islam, which, as the years went by,
seemed to rule the entire globe. Ever since the Crusades, the
people of Western Christendom developed a stereotypical
and distorted image of Islam, which they regarded as the
enemy of decent civilization. The prejudice became en-
twined with European fantasies about Jews, the other victims
of the Crusaders, and often reflected buried worry about the
conduct of Christians. It was, for example, during the Cru-
sades, when it was Christians who had instigated a series of
brutal holy wars against the Muslim world, that Islam was de-
scribed by the learned scholar-monks of Europe as an inher-
ently violent and intolerant faith, which had only been able to
establish itself by the sword. The myth of the supposed fanat-