of the Italian cities are elaborated in his work. In this he influenced his student Walter Scott. 19th-century Western literature Much of the popular understanding of the Crusades derives from the 19thcentury novels of Scott and the histories of Michaud. Scott published four Crusades-based novels between 1819 and 1831 viewing the Crusades as incursions of glamorous but uneducated western Europeans into a superior civilisation. Michaud published his influential Histoire des croisades between 1812 and 1822 depicting the Crusades as glorious instruments of French nationalism and proto-imperialism. These incompatible views agreed only on the idea that a crusade was defined by its opposition to Islam. Scott's description of an inferior culture attacking a more sophisticated one mixed with Michaud's proto-colonialist conviction. By the 1950s this established a neo-imperialistic and materialistic orthodoxy that remains the popular perceptions. The Romantics and conservative adherents of the European anciens régimes appropriated crusading imagery for their own political goals, downplaying religion to fit within a modern, secular context and presenting crusades as a counterpoint to liberal ideas of nationalism. Future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Benjamin Disraeli showed a deep interest in crusading, touring the Near East in 1831 and writing a crusade novel in 1847, called both Tancred or The New Crusade. Western historians have traditionally argued that the Muslim world showed little interest in the Crusades until the mid-19th century. Carole Hillenbrand suggests they were a marginal issue compared to the collapse of the Caliphate, while Arab writers often took a Western viewpoint in opposition to the Ottoman Empire, which suppressed Arab nationalism. In 1841, the first of 15 volumes of Recueil des historiens des croisades was published, based on original sources collected by the Maurists prior to the Revolution. Louis-Philippe opened the Salle des Croisades at Versailles in 1843, with over 120 specially commissioned paintings related to the Crusades. Modern Western historiography French historians such as Emmanuel Guillaume-Rey, Louis Madelin and René Grousset expanded on the thinking of Michaud, espoused propaganda of the country's Mediterranean colonies, and provided a source of popular models that were criticised and dismantled when empires ceased to hold academic approval. Early modern period and Francisco Franco-era Spain presented a special case where nationalism and national identity could be projected onto the Crusades. The Spanish Catholic Church baptised declared crusade against Marxism and atheism and in the following thirty-six years of National Catholicism idea of Reconquista as a