The Crusades examines how the Crusades affected peoples and terrains; agriculture, art, and archeology; military and urban architecture; literature and music; and the attitudes of the Christian West towards the Muslim East and vice versa. In researching it, a work in progress even today, it is imperative to keep in mind the fact that one is dealing with an event in history where the right exists side by side with the wrong; the good with the bad; the beautiful with the ugly; charity, generosity, and nobility with cruelty, selfishness, and treachery—a task which is, for the historian, as difficult as working on the Holocaust while listening to Wagner.