Abstract

There is no shortage of problems in trying to speak consistently of terrorism per se in the Middle Ages. This historical period has the burden of covering three continents across a period of at least one thousand years of changes. To this historiographical headache, this chapter poses another disjunction: namely, how to find aspects of terrorism, as understood today, in these periods and places that generally lacked the organizing principle and legitimacy of the nation-state, that struggled to define the warrior against the innocent bystander, and whose ideological police (the Church) preached both pacifism and physically enforceable dogma.