Franks and Saracens is the first and only book to examine the Crusades from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, studying the hidden emotions and fantasies that drove the Crusaders and the Muslims to undertake their terrible wars. Using original documents as well as secondary sources, Avner Falk demonstrates that the deepest and most powerful motives for the Crusades were not only religious or territorial – or the quest for lands, wealth, or titles – but also unconscious emotions and fantasies about one's country, one's religion, one's enemies, God and the Devil, Us and Them. The book demonstrates the collective inability to mourn large-group losses, and the collective needs of large groups such as nations and religions to develop a clear identity, to have boundaries, and to have enemies and allies. Falk investigates the unconscious dynamics of the Crusades, both on the individual and on the collective level, to understand why the Crusading fantasies persisted for nearly two centuries, and why the “northern Crusades” went on until the early fifteenth century. This updated edition adds a new chapter on collective trauma both as cause and as consequence of the Crusades and has been fully revised to include literature on trauma and other psychological aspects of the Crusades. Franks and Saracens will be of great interest to historians, political scientists, medievalists, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and sociologists interested in questions of conflict, fantasy, and identity, collective psychological processes, and to academics of the Crusades and military history.

This is the first and only book to examine the Crusades from the added viewpoint of psychoanalysis, studying the hidden emotions and fantasies that drove the Crusaders and the Muslims to undertake their terrible wars. The reader will learn that the deepest and most powerful motives for the Crusades were not only religious or territorial - or the quest for lands, wealth or titles - but also unconscious emotions and fantasies about one's country, one's religion, one's enemies, God and the Devil, Us and Them. The book also demonstrates the collective inability to mourn large-group losses and the collective needs of large groups such as nations and religions to develop a clear identity, to have boundaries, and to have enemies and allies. Motives which the Crusaders and the Muslims were not aware of were among the most powerful in driving several centuries of terrible and seemingly endless warfare.

Saracens and Franks in 12th - 15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature examines the tension between two competing discourses in the medieval Muslim Mediterranean and medieval Christian Europe: one rooted in the desire to understand the world and one's place in it, and another promoting an ethnocentric narrative. To this end, it examines the construction of an image of the Other for Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean and for Christians in Western Europe in works of literature, particularly in the works produced in the centuries preceding the Crusades; and it explores the ways in which both Muslim and Christian writers depicted the Enemy in historical accounts of the Crusades. The author focuses on medieval works of ethnography and geography, travel literature, Muslim and Christian accounts of the Crusades, and the romances of Western Europe to trace the evolution of the image of the Eastern Mediterranean Muslim in medieval Western Europe and the Western European Christian in the medieval Muslim world, first to understand the construct in the respective scholarly communities, and then to analyze the ways in which this conception informs subsequent works of non-fiction and fiction (in the Western European context) in which this Muslim or Christian Other plays a prominent role. In its analysis of the medieval Mediterranean Muslim and European Christian approaches to difference, this book interrogates the premises underlying the concept of the Other, challenging formulations of binary opposition such as the West versus Islam/Muslims.

Saracens and Franks in 12th - 15th Century European and Near Eastern Literature examines the tension between two competing discourses in the medieval Muslim Mediterranean and medieval Christian Europe: one rooted in the desire to understand the world and one's place in it, and another promoting an ethnocentric narrative. To this end, it examines the construction of an image of the Other for Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean and for Christians in Western Europe in works of literature, particularly in the works produced in the centuries preceding the Crusades; and it explores the ways in which both Muslim and Christian writers depicted the Enemy in historical accounts of the Crusades. The author focuses on medieval works of ethnography and geography, travel literature, Muslim and Christian accounts of the Crusades, and the romances of Western Europe to trace the evolution of the image of the Eastern Mediterranean Muslim in medieval Western Europe and the Western European Christian in the medieval Muslim world, first to understand the construct in the respective scholarly communities, and then to analyze the ways in which this conception informs subsequent works of non-fiction and fiction (in the Western European context) in which this Muslim or Christian Other plays a prominent role. In its analysis of the medieval Mediterranean Muslim and European Christian approaches to difference, this book interrogates the premises underlying the concept of the Other, challenging formulations of binary opposition such as the West versus Islam/Muslims.

The Song of Roland is a book of poems by an anonymous author. It depicts a gory French tale of war, where General Charlemagne was ambushed in a remote Pyrenean pass, showcasing a symbolic struggle between Christianity and Islam.

This volume offers a literary and cultural history of the idea of crusading over the last millennium.