The loss of Jerusalem caused an outporing of anger from many commoners in Muslim countries which were not affected by the Crusades, and protests began to break out in areas such as Baghdad to convince leaders to send aid and drive the invaders out. But no help was forthcoming from the equally shaken Turkish leaders until one man, a recently appointed sultan named Saladin who ruled in Egypt, began to gather forces and prepare to retake Jerusalem. When his invasion began, he was very successful, and took Jerusalem on October 2, 1187. His army tore down crosses and burned them, but, on the whole, Saladin�s triumph was peaceful and the transfer of power from Frankish to Turkish was smooth. However, upon word of his victory, another Crusade was called in 1189 and a new group of warriors were sent back into the East to attempt the recapture of the Holy Land. This invasion was unsuccessful and all subsenquent Frankish invasions were likewise failures, culminating in the Muslim capture of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire. From that point, zeal for the Crusades dwindled in Europe, but hatred of the Christians among Muslims remained long after. Immediately after the Frankish withdrawl, the Ottoman Turks swept through and replaced the Seljuks as rulers of Islam, further diluting the culture and society.
At this point, a period of �Isolation and intellectual decline set in�� (Lamb 61) throughout the Muslim world while Europe was soaring to new heights of power and intellectual discovery. Rather than sparking the same amount of growth in the Arab world, �the post-Renaissance era when Europe forged ahead�passed the Arabs by,� (Lamb 61) holding them back for many years after the Holy Wars which had ravaged their lands. A great amount of suspicion of anything new or innovative set in and the whole East became for the most part completely isolated from the West. Innovations such as the bagpipes, the zero, irrigation, geography, arches, and cubical supports (Lamb 11) were incorporated and improved upon in European society, but these improvements and similar advances were shunned in the Eastern lands. The Arabs feared for the ultimate destruction of their native culture and �came to understand that�isolation was the surest means of enduring,� (Lamb 61). According to Amin Maalouf, �it seems clear that the Arab East�sees the West as a natural enemy,� (266) and therefore have �withdrawn deeper into what does not threaten: family and religion,� (Lamb xvii). The Crusades created a definite suspicion and separation between the West and East so when the West began to grow toward the world power that it is today, the Arabs shifted from being the advancing powerhouse of culture and sophistication to a stagnant cultural and intellectual nation.
Before the Crusades occurred, Europe was made up of many small fiefdoms, and a middle class was almost nonexistent. In the East, the people were under a very similar government system, emirs ruled by caliphs ruled by sultans, but there was a slightly larger middle class, even though it was dwarfed by the number of citizens who lived in poverty. The East was still a highly advanced society despite this and �many of the world�s great scholars � among them Plato, Pythagoras, and Archimedes � traveled to Egypt to study the advancement of a culture,� (Lamb 11) which they could not find in Europe, even Greece at the time. On the other hand, most of the wealth in both West and East was largely distributed to ruling powers of each areas. Trade, a very important ingredient to building any society, usually only occurred between fiefdoms or kingdoms at this time and each culture rarely made an impression upon the other. As early as the First Crusade, trade routes began to develop between East and West. Eastern innovations and knowledge inundated Western culture, improving their methods and creating a stronger middle class in the form of merchants and artisans who began by imitating the Arab style and then improving upon it. The improvements made by mixing these two cultures could be seen on a smaller scale during the European occupation of the Near East; �[the Frankish] society had the advantage of being a distributor of rights,� (Maalouf 263). The Europeans had begun to create a stronger middle class in the areas they occupied during the Crusades, but afterwards there is evidence that the middle class dwindled again as the Crusades continued. Ironically, many of these Crusades were sparked over control of the newly made trade routes. Perhaps because of this small middle class, while Europe was staging revolutions and rejecting the Divine Right philosophy, Arabs were still under the sultans that they had been ruled by for years. In the same vein, the brief unification felt during the Crusades began to dwindle as early as Saladin�s death when unified Islam was �broken with the division of his territories among his brothers and sons,� (Hallam 156). Meanwhile, Europe was growing more unified which translated into a large increase in power and ability to advance in many areas. Middle classes were also gaining power in Europe. According to one account �Non-noble Franks�formed a burgess class whose members included craftsmen, administrative officials, and soldiers,� (Hallam 116). On the other hand, Islam during the later 1200�s �was dead�To Muhamadans everywhere it was as though the sun had gone out and there was no moon,� (Payne 246).
The East after the Crusades became intellectually stagnant, as well. This effect was probably the most drastic when the advances previous to the Crusades are compared with the lack of advances after. Before the Crusades, the East was the obvious powerhouse as far as intellectual innovations especially since �Arab doctors and scientists found answers to the questions that Europe had hardly begun to ask,� (Lamb 11). The first novel was written in the East, the first school of astronomy, the first arch, the arcitectural design that we know today as a hallmark of Spain was also begun by the Arabic people (Lamb 11). After the Crusades, however, the forward momentum created by these innovations seemed to dwindle. The Arabs had become increasingly suspicious of the West and as they improved and surpassed the East�s pervious advances, the new concepts were not assimilated into the Eastern culture despite exposure to some of them. They began to become even more strongly religious and interpret the Koran very literally, which is reflected in many areas of Arab life where �the very word �innovation� is heresy, because nothing can be new; all knowledge is already in the Koran,� (Lamb 16). Therefore, advances in science or medicine ground to a slow crawl and scientists and doctors were an unfruitful occupation. Farming, not manufacturing, was a fixed aspect in Islamic society and it was rare to find even advances in that beyond what had already been made.