In his Letter to a Muslim Friend, Paul claims to have travelled to "the homelands of the Romans [i.e., the Byzantines], Constantinople, the country of Amalfi, some Frankish provinces, and Rome." There he met and discussed the Qurʾān with "eminent and learned men". Doubt has been cast on the accuracy of these claims. Many commentators view them as a literary device, a fiction that allows Paul to distance himself from the objections to Islam expressed by his European interlocutors. On the basis that these were actual journeys, argues for placing Paul's activity in the period 1140–1180, because it was a period of relative calm after the establishment of the Crusader states and before the rise of Saladin. Herman Teule, on the other hand, places Paul's activity earlier, around 1100. David Thomas and Sidney Griffith suggest a late date, around 1200, as more likely, on the grounds that his polemical writings are unlikely to have gone unnoticed for long.
