History can be written from many different viewpoints. A 19th-century European writing shortly after the French Revolution is likely to have very different interests from a Chinese bureaucrat living in the 2nd century BCE, or a 10th-century Muslim traveller. Moreover, the interpretation of facts is always open to dispute, and historians often disagree about how one fact is linked with another. ---- The perspective of chroniclers such as the French scholar Geoffrey Villehardouin on the Fourth Crusade, is very different from that of his contemporary on the opposing side, the Arab historian Ibn al-Athir.