Can we learn from history? A timely problem in the light of the recent dramatic developments in the Middle East and the immanent threat of international terrorism.The from time to time uneasy relations between the Christian West and the Islam originate in the seventh and eighth centuries and took shape in the Renaissance when for the first time in history knowledge of the "Turks" – a synonym of "Muslims" – was growing fast on the basis of first-hand experience, whether as agents of a western power, or as captives of the Turks. Apart from the unhappy but apparently universal tendency to represent one's enemy as the personification of evil, the fifteenth and early sixteenth western characterizations of the Ottomans as the sworn foe of Christianity are still pervading our concepts and terms, and are still formative for our own views.
The Shadow of the Crescent is re-issued, because the book is concerned with the image of the "Turk" in the West after the fall of Constantinople till the beginnings of the Reformation and deals with the western attitude toward the Ottomans and the growing importance of the Islam. Certainly the problems were, and still are immense; not exactly the same, but undoubtedly comparable. At least we can learn from this book that there is nothing new under the sun.