Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 9-E, Healers, Hospitals, and Holy Wars.

In this episode, we're going to turn our attention away from England and even away from Europe.

We're going to shift our focus to the Near East and the growing influence of the Islamic world during the Middle Ages.

This was a period when the Christian and Islamic worlds were coming into contact with each other in many different ways,

through trade, through pilgrimage, and through the series of violent clashes known as the Crusades.

Through these interactions, Christians in Europe discovered a civilization that was more advanced than their own in many ways,

especially in fields like mathematics, astronomy, and medical care.

And as Europeans discovered those new ideas and technologies, they started to borrow words from that culture.

So this time, we'll explore those developments, and we'll see how that Eastern culture influenced the English language.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is History of EnglishPodcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast at patreon.com, just go to historyofenglishpodcast.com and link from there.

In one other quick note, I recently spoke with the Silly Linguistics Podcast about podcasting and putting this particular podcast together.

For those of you who are interested in listening to that discussion, check out the Silly Linguistics Podcast at iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

Also, in the next few episodes, I'm going to be discussing developments in the Islamic world during the Middle Ages.

That means I'll be using some Arabic words from time to time, and I'll be discussing a different part of the world.

So I thought it might be a good idea to invite someone on who could help me out.

So I've asked him to make a quick introduction.

Hello, this is Elias Bohradad, creator of the History of a Slipple Podcast.

Thanks, Elias.

Elias has been a great help with some of the Arabic words I'm going to be discussing, and he may also pop in from time to time to offer a few thoughts of his own.

And if you want to learn even more about the history of Islam, be sure to check out his podcast, appropriately called the History of Islam Podcast.

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