"In the warrior societies of the Middle Ages, the killing of enemies in combat and genocidal campaigns are frequently very hard to separate. In the West, notions of chivalry on the battlefield mixed with the barbarous readiness to eliminate whole groups of enemies, often with religious (“Christian”) justification as the backdrop. In the east, Mongol warriors also slaughtered enemies, sometimes as whole groups, because of perceived slights or resistance to the inevitability of Mongol overlordship. The twenty-first-century observer has to be careful not to make the particularities of a distant world, in this case that of the Crusaders or the Mongol warriors, blend too easily with those of their modern counterparts. But the wholesale massacres of civilians that the warrior societies of the past engaged in also should not be separated from the genocides of the modern world in any hard- and- fast way."