The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

the battleground in the war for the Holy Land–cannot be spoken of as a Muslim world. The relatively tolerant approach to subjugation adopted during the early Arab-Islamic conquests meant that, even centuries later, the Levant still contained a very high proportion of indigenous Christians–from Greeks and Armenians to Syrians and Copts–as well as pockets of Jewish population. Nomadic communities of Bedouins also continued to range widely across the East–migrant Arabic-speaking Muslims, who had few fixed allegiances. This long-established pattern of settlement was overlaid by a numerically inferior Muslim ruling elite, itself made up of Arabs, some Persians and the newly arrived Turks. The Near East, therefore, was little more than a fractured patchwork of disparate social and devotional groupings, and not a purebred Islamic stronghold.