Shows how the interactive, confrontational practice of courtly arts shaped imperial thought in the Middle Ages A probing inquiry into medieval court struggles, this book shows the relationship between intellectual conflict and the geopolitics of empire. It examines the Persian Buyids' takeover of the great Arab caliphate in Iraq, the counter-Crusade under Saladin, and the literature of sovereignty in Spain and Italy at the cusp of the Renaissance. The question of high culture-who best qualified as a poet, the function of race and religion in forming a courtier, what languages to use in which official ceremonies-drove much of medieval writing, and even policy itself. From the last moments of the Abbasid Empire, to the military campaign for Jerusalem, to the rise of Crusades literature in spoken Romance languages, authors and patrons took a competitive stance as a way to assert their place in a shifting imperial landscape. Key Features Covers Classical Arabic poetry and official prose, Spanish court documents, Galician Portuguese lyric and Italian narrative works from 950-1350 CE Provides new critical context for historians' work to reconcile the political violence of the late Middle Ages with the cosmopolitanism of that era's Islamic and Christian empires Argues that medieval thinkers' most pressing cultural challenge was to make the court appear as robust as possible in the face of major demographic change and regional war Shows how the ritual of artistic contest allowed elites to come to terms with religious and ethnic groups' rival claims to legitimacy, and to subsume those claims into an overarching courtly ideal Samuel England is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.