In the Near East Europeans were until very recently called ‘Franks’, a word first used in Byzantium to mean western Christians. It caught on elsewhere and was still being used in various distortions and mispronunciations from the Persian Gulf to China a thousand years later. This is more than just a historical curiosity; it is a helpful reminder that non-Europeans were struck from the start by the unity, not the diversity, of the western peoples and long thought of them as one.