These innumerable accounts are of course instructive after their fashion; nevertheless, they tend to confuse our imaginations – rather than to assist them – about the most characteristic circumstances of the East. The one-sidedness of the hostile Christian viewpoint limits us through its own limitations; only in more recent times has that view broadened a bit as we’ve gradually gotten to know the events of those wars through Oriental writers. At the same time we remain gratefully indebted to all those agitated pilgrims and crusaders since we owe the protection and preservation of our cultivated European situation to their religious enthusiasm and to their fierce and tireless battle against aggression from the East.