Byzantium and the Abbasids: Best of Enemies
Christian Byzantium and the Muslim Abbasid caliphate were bitter rivals. Yet the necessities of trade and a mutual admiration of ancient Greece meant that there was far more to their relationship than war, as Jonathan Harris explains.
Osama bin Laden once declared that the world was divided into those who were with Islam and those who were with the ‘crusade’, the western imperialist oppression of Muslims. The stark division between them and us is what one would expect of a militant jihadist, yet bin Laden’s polarised language finds a curious reflection in the plethora of English-language books, films and television programmes that continue to be produced about the medieval crusades.
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