encroach upon the other.
The only serious debatable ground was Spain, where Moslem and Christian
were continually at hand-grips; but, after all, Spain was mutually
regarded as a frontier episode. Between Islam and Christendom, as a
whole, intercourse was becoming steadily more friendly and more
frequent. This friendly intercourse, if continued, might ultimately have
produced momentous results for human progress. The Moslem world was at
that time still well ahead of western Europe in knowledge and culture,
but Saracenic civilization was ossifying, whereas the Christian West,
despite its ignorance, rudeness, and barbarism, was bursting with lusty
life and patently aspiring to better things. Had the nascent amity of
East and West in the eleventh century continued to develop, both would
have greatly profited. In the West the influence of Saracenic culture,
containing, as it did, the ancient learning of Greece and Rome, might
have awakened our Renaissance much earlier, while in the East the
influence of the mediaeval West, with its abounding vigour, might have
saved Moslem civilization from the creeping paralysis which was
overtaking it.

But it was not to be. In Islam the refined, easygoing Saracen gave place
to the bigoted, brutal Turk. Islam became once more aggressive--not, as
in its early days, for an ideal, but for sheer blood-lust, plunder, and
destruction. Henceforth it was war to the knife between the only
possible civilization and the most brutal and hopeless barbarism.
Furthermore, this war was destined to last for centuries. The Crusades
were merely Western counter-attacks against a Turkish assault on
Christendom which continued for six hundred years and was definitely
broken only under the walls of Vienna in 1683. Naturally, from these
centuries of unrelenting strife furious hatreds and fanaticisms were
engendered which still envenom the relations of Islam and Christendom.
The atrocities of Mustapha Kemal's Turkish "Nationalists" and the
atrocities of the Greek troops in Asia Minor, of which we read in our
morning papers, are in no small degree a "carrying on" of the mutual
atrocities of Turks and Crusaders in Palestine eight hundred years ago.

With the details of those old wars between Turks and Christians this
book has no direct concern. The wars themselves should simply be noted
as a chronic barrier between East and West. As for the Moslem East, with
its declining Saracenic civilization bowed beneath the br