Apart from the fictional Robin Hood, it is quite likely that no medieval Western figure is better known than King Richard I of England, Richard the Lion Hearted, who co lead the Third Crusade, an unsuccessful attempt to re conquer Jerusalem and the Holy Land following its recovery by Muslim forces. Likewise, it is very likely that no Muslim who lived prior to recent years, apart from the Prophet Muhammad himself, is better known among Westerners than "Saladin" or, to give him his proper name, Salahaddin al Aiyubi the Muslim general who recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusading kingdom and who bested Richard in the subsequent contest of the Third Crusade.
Not only are these two antagonists among the most familiar of medieval personages, they are also among the most significant and interesting. The reasons for their significance and enduring interesting are so closely interwoven that they cannot be disentangled. To put it briefly, they can be taken as symbolizing, in their persons, the whole encounter between Western Christendom and Islam that characterized the Crusades, and which left a lasting mark on both cultures. At a time when the West and Islam are again encountering one another in new ways fundamentally as equals, after centuries of Christian dominance, which in turn followed centuries of Muslim dominance the linked figures of Richard Plantagenet and Salahaddin al Aiyhubi are freighted with contemporary significance.
To take a couple of examples: The Arab view of the Palestinian/Israeli dilemma is shaped not only by events since 1948, or the prior growth of Zionism in Palestine since the late nineteenth century, but also by the underlying stratum of historical memory of the Crusading era. Many Arabs and Muslims see in Israel a modern attempt to re establish something like the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem ... and they remember how, for many generations after the failure of the Third Crusade,...