What does this tell us about the Crusades?
This painting helps us to see the ways in which the crusades contributed to important changes in Italian art history. If it were not for the transportation of Byzantine icons into western Europe, a movement in which crusaders played a role, then Italian painters might not have been exposed to the Byzantine artistic tradition that eventually became taught in Italian art workshops. Though many people view the crusades as a bloodbath between Christians and Muslims, war over the Holy Land was not its only defining factor. Instead, the crusades also provoked the movement of art objects and visual traditions from the eastern Mediterranean to western Europe.