Those lovable Saracens

Eric Idle's Spamalot lets the audience in on the fact that it is messing wildly with medieval history. Not so Ridley Scott's much heralded Kingdom of Heaven. I've been reading a lot about the movie, with those on the left incredibly excited about how it "proves" that, at least in the past, Muslims were good and Christians were bad (with the further implication that this is still true). On the right, of course, I hear what I, as a historian, already know: Ridley Scott's view is complete bunkum. I also learn that Scott kept changing his movie to keep CAIR happy. My favorite of the debunking articles, and the one I link to here, is Crusading Against History by Robert Spencer. UPDATE: The Paragraph Farmer has a marvelous post about how Western views about the Crusades have changed over time with the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. It's good reading and entirely new information to me.