This collection of essays emerged from a conference entitled “The Eastern Mediterranean between Christian Europe and the Muslim Near East (11th to 13th centuries)”, which was held in Istanbul in 2007. The broad theme that the volume seeks to address is the nature and impact of cross-cultural contact – political, intellectual and economic – during the Crusades period, beyond the most obvious military contexts. Notably, the focus is not simply on contact between Latin Christians and Arab and Turkic Muslims; there is considerable effort to offer snapshots of the medieval Near East in all its complexity and diversity. The Mongols and the Byzantines are especially well represented, but there are also contributions on the Teutonic Knights' relations with Cilician Armenia (by Hubert Houben), and the attempts of the Latins and the Syrian Orthodox churches to overcome doctrinal differences and contrasting institutional approaches in order to make common cause, i.e. Peter Bruns' “Franken und Syrer in der Kirchenchronik des Gregor Barhebräus († 1286)”. David Abulafia, meanwhile, uses the contrasting descriptions of Sicily given by al-Idrīsī (d. 1165–66), in the geography he composed for Roger II (r. 1105–54), and the travel writer Ibn Jubayr (d. 1217), some thirty years later, in order to demonstrate how Arabic influence – or Norman borrowings – declined in the kingdom as the century wore on. There is perhaps a little too much time spent on narrating the history of Norman Sicily and summarizing texts that are readily accessible in translation, but the cumulative picture is a rich and convincing one. Ralph-Johannes Lilie discusses how Byzantium's struggles with unruly Franks began long before 1204, through the lens of elite Byzantines' fears that Greek high culture was threatened by the increasing Latin presence – and their hopes that judicious application of said Greek culture might civilize the barbarians – during the reign of Manual I Komnenos. One of the strongest pieces in the book, that of Sara Nur Yıldız, looks at the intersection of Byzantine provincial elites and the Seljuk court in Anatolia, through contrasting accounts – one by the Byzantine chronicle Niketas Choniates (d. 1215), one from the Persian pen of Ibn Bībī (wr. c. 1282) – of the career of Manuel Komnenos Mavrozomes. Manuel was one of a number of Byzantine aristocrats who crossed cultural lines to serve the Seljuk state and form marriage ties with the dynasty, while retaining their Christian and Byzantine identities – allowing the Seljuks, in turn, to draw upon aspects of the Komnenoi legacy. In the challenge it poses to understood categories of religious, ethnic and cultural belonging, this is a valuable article indeed.

The alteration to the date range of the collection's title (from the “11th–13th centuries” of the conference to the 12th–14th of the collection) seems to reflect the fact that most of the contributions – like those to the original conference – are primarily concerned with aspects of the period between the Second Crusade and the fall of Acre, the last Crusader outpost in the Near East, in 1291. This is not exclusively the case. The two articles on the Mamluks, particularly Yehoshua Frenkel's “Jihād in the medieval Mediterranean Sea: naval war and religious endowment under the Mamluks” – which gives multiple examples of the expansion of awqāf to fund Mamluk defence and campaigns against both the Crusaders and the Mongols – extend their discussions into the fourteenth century. Reuven Amitai's “Dealing with reality: early Mamluk military policy and the allocation of resources” takes a similar tack to Frenkel's paper, but concentrates to a greater degree on the Mongol campaigns, as discussed more fully in the same author's Mongols and Mamluks (Cambridge, 1995). At the other end of the chronological scale, meanwhile, Marie-Luise Favreau-Lilie's very useful overview of European trading links with the Near East, “Die italienische Seestädte und die islamische Levante (Syrien, Ägypten) in Zeitalter der Kreuzzüge (11.–13. Jh.)”, does look back to the period before the First Crusade, but only briefly; the bulk of the article is concerned with how non-Muslim merchants, and in particular Italian funduqs, negotiated a legal space for themselves and their activities within Muslim jurisdictions in the Near East between the 1150s and the 1220s, and how this process was both helped and hindered by Frankish and papal ambitions in the region.

For the most part, the essays concentrate on literary evidence. In addition to the articles mentioned above, Georg Gressner treads some familiar territory on Christian perceptions of Islam in “Hagarenes, Sarazenen, Mauren, Türken, Moabiter – Wahrnehmung und Wertung der Araber und Muslime in päpstlichen Dokumenten bis zum 12. Jahrhundert”, but the sheer breadth of the material covered in a short article is impressive, as is the close and nuanced reading; Dietrich Lohrmann usefully and lucidly highlights a less-discussed corner of Christian reception of Arabic science in “Die Rolle Antiochiens bei der Einführung der scientia Arabum in Westeuropa (11.–12. Jh.)”, putting the Greeks back into the Crusades-era picture; and Stefan Leder offers a provocative and largely convincing re-reading of several twelfth-century Arabic chronicles, jihad tracts and monumental inscriptions, although the final section of his piece – which points to the rise of al-Islāmī as a signifier in texts of the period (thus “Islamic territories”, “Islamic fortifications”, and similar) – is crying out for a comparison between this terminology and that of the umma in earlier centuries. Documentary material is represented by Favreau-Lilie's mining of Italian archives and Houben's of the Teutonic Knights' charters, together with Peter Herde's look at letters exchanged between Mongol rulers and various western potentates from the reign of Güyük (1246–48) to that of Muslim convert Ghāzān (1295–1305). An entry on material evidence is the most obvious omission, particularly for the purposes of gaining a sense of how cross-cultural interaction took place outside the sphere of the literate elites; Amitai's and Frenkel's pieces both discuss military construction and infrastructure to a degree, but their focus is more on the processes that enabled building works rather than the works themselves. The programme for the original conference lists a paper on Christian architecture that, unfortunately, does not appear here.