The move in Medieval Studies away from nationalising and Eurocentric paradigms toward the ‘Global Middle Ages’ raises pressing and fascinating intellectual questions about scales of knowledge. How do we negotiate these scales as we move between the micro and the macro? What spatial and temporal scales do we use to study the period defined for ‘Europe’ as ‘The Middle Ages’? These same questions of scale were also challenging a millennium ago, especially in the years around 1100, in the wake of the 1st Crusade, which transformed Latin Europe’s relationship with the Afro-Eurasian space.