Your review was posted before I started reading Eurotrib regularly, so, no. But it sounds like an interesting book.

There were several smaller Crusades, such as the one against the Cathars (who are an interesting, interesting group, and one of my reasons for reading up on all this history), but they amounted to (from what I've learned so far) some really nasty religious persecution. Don't ask me about the "Children's Crusade." Not to belittle what happened to the Cathars, but that Crusade looks like it was called a Crusade just because they could call it that.

I don't doubt there was animosity before the Crusades. If there wasn't, why would anyone care that Muslims ruled all these lands? My point was that the Crusades may have created a much more massive gulf between the two.