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“[...] With the success of the First Crusade and the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, an era began of continuous guerrilla warfare, of clashes but also of truces, negotiations, and trade, as is inevitable. The Crusader kingdom could not have lasted two centuries—even though constantly destabilized by conflict with the Muslim world—without countless moments of encounter, moments in which dialogue was unavoidable, when a single emir no longer wished to wage jihad and preferred to reach an agreement with a single Christian prince, his neighbor. There are many such moments, and we are fortunate that one of these Turkish princes, the Emir of Caesarea in Syria, wrote a book recounting a large number of anecdotes from his personal experience as a Muslim leader who both fought extensively against the Crusaders and also negotiated and dealt with them.
This gentleman’s name is Usama; the usual spelling is with a U, but naturally it is the same Islamic name made far more famous today thanks to another Osama. His full name is Usama Ibn Munqidh, and we will now look at some excerpts from his book, which a great Italian Arabist, Francesco Gabrieli, translated into Italian some time ago in his Storici arabi delle Crociate. These excerpts trace a path through the observation of this strange people, the Franks. There is no doubt they are strange: they are coarse and ignorant, a view shared by the Turks as well as the Byzantines. Usama also provides testimonies of their coarseness and ignorance, for example in the practice of medicine.
Usama recounts that a certain Crusader leader had asked him to send a doctor because there were sick people that the Frankish physicians could not cure. It was a period of truce, and the emir sent a doctor, an Arab Christian named Tabit. The doctor, however, “returned after not even ten days. We asked him: ‘You were quick to treat those patients!’ And he recounted: ‘They presented a knight who had an abscess on his leg and a woman suffering from consumption. I applied a poultice to the knight and the abscess opened and improved. I prescribed a diet for the woman, tempering her condition. Then a Frankish doctor arrived and said: “This man does not know how to treat them at all,” and, turning to the knight, asked: “What do you prefer, to live with one leg or die with two legs?” And when the knight said he preferred to live with one leg, he ordered: “Bring me a strong knight and a sharp axe.” The knight and the axe were brought, and I’—the Arab doctor continues—‘was present. He laid the leg on a block of wood and said to the knight: strike it with a great blow of the axe so it is severed cleanly.’ And the knight struck with the axe before my eyes; the first blow did not sever it, so a second blow followed. The leg’s marrow splattered, and the patient died instantly.
Then he examined the woman and said: “She has a demon in her head, who has fallen in love with her; cut her hair.” They cut her hair, and she returned to eating their foods, garlic and mustard, which worsened her illness. The devil has entered her head, he decreed; and taking a razor, he opened her head in a cross, removing the brain until the skull was exposed, which he then rubbed with salt; and the woman died instantly. At this point, I asked: ‘Do you still need me?’ They replied no, and I left, having learned from their medicine what I had previously not known.’
Very instructive—but there is also a downside. It is clear that our Tabit, the Arab Christian, had a highly refined cultural background, namely the Greek one: the Arabs knew the Greek authors, read them, and used them. Their medicine was based on the theory of humors, on the balance of humors—the same medicine of Hippocrates and Galen that would later be rediscovered in the West, and which during the Renaissance and modern age was practiced in Europe. A medicine founded on an extraordinary cultural tradition, but in reality completely ineffective, because Galenic theory has no scientific basis, and thus no doctor, ancient or Renaissance, ever truly cured anyone except by chance, following those precepts. Certainly, Tabit’s medicine sounds much more refined compared to Western surgery; yet when I speak of surgery, I do not exaggerate, because the trepanation operation described by Usama is indeed shocking. However, we know that in those centuries in the West, people were truly beginning to study the possibility of trepanning the skull and healing cranial traumas in that way. Stretching things a bit—but not too much—we might almost say that those rough Franks who could only heal by cutting and sawing are still us: after all, which diseases can we really cure? Primarily those where surgical intervention is possible. This fundamental inclination toward practice is a hallmark of Western civilization, already evident in the Crusader Middle Ages.”
Benedette Guerre. Crociate e jihad, Alessandro Barbero,  Editori Laterza, 2019