As western Europeans began to look beyond their early medieval horizons, the forces of commerce and conquest brought them into closer contact with the wider world, and with the great civilisations of the Mediterranean: the ancient ‘eastern Roman’ Byzantine Empire and the sprawling Arab-Islamic world. These long-established ‘superpowers’ were historic centres of wealth, culture and military might. As such, they tended to regard the West as little more than a barbarian backwater–the dismal homeland of savage tribesmen who might be fierce fighters, but were essentially just an uncontrollable
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