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produced, including the cartoons of Leonardo, Durer and Michaelangelo, and on which Leonardo, amongst others, committed to posterity those ideas which we still treasure to this day.
But the process of change was usually slow and fitful.
Rather than assuming that the myriad riches of the East were brought to Europe solely in the saddlebags of returning Crusaders, it seems more likely that they reached the Christian homeland through a number of avenues - Spain, the Aquitaine, Russia, Italy - at about the same time.
The cross cultural contacts were inevitable: the effect of the Crusades was perhaps mainly to hasten the process.
1. Robert of Rheims account of the speech of Urban in Riley Smith, The Crusades: Idea d Reality, p.45.
2. Billings, The Cross and the Crescent, pp.70-1.
3. D. Seward, Early Islam Time Life, Netherlands, 1969, p. 145
4. Ibid., pp.146-7.
5. Barry, Readings in Church History, pp.331-2.
6. Seward, pp.144-5.
7. A. S. Atiya, Crusade, Commerce and Culture Peter Smith, Massachussetts, 1969, pp.213-4.
Chapter 8:
"Now We Are Easterners"
"We used to be Westerners; now we are Easterners. You may once have been a Roman or a Frenchman: here, and now, you are a Galilean or a Palestinian. For we have forgotten the lands of our birth: to most of us they are now strange, foreign countries. Some people are now in possession of their own houses and servants as if they had inherited them by right; others are married not only to girls from back home, but also to Syrians, Armenians and even Saracens - but of course only the baptised ones."
Fulcher of Chartres.1
Soon after the first invasion, further waves of settlers arrived in Outremer from Europe. Fulcher, writing in around 1125, says that friends and relatives of the original invaders came in time to acquire great riches. Those who had little money in Europe found themselves possessed of countless bezants, those who did not have a house now possessed a city.
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