�- Caliph Omar led the great Arab conquests between the years 634 - 644. He is on record as saying: "It behooves us to devour the Christians and our sons to devour their descendants, so long as any of them remain on the earth." When Omar conquered Jerusalem in 638, the city had been Christian for over 300 years. Later, it was the turn of Spain, Sicily, Greece and what is now Turkey, where the communities founded by St Paul himself were turned into ruins.

�- From 686 to 689 a series of edicts in Egypt ordered every publicly visible cross destroyed, and every Christian church to bear on its door an anti-Christian slogan.

�- The traditional Muslim demand upon every newly encountered sovereign throughout the years of Islamic expansion was: 'accept Islam, or prepare for war'.

�- In 838 Caliph al-Mu'tasim killed 30,000 men from the city of Amorion in Asia Minor; he sold the same number of men, women and children into slavery.

�- In 846 Muslim soldiers descended upon Rome and sacked St Peter's Basilica.

�- In the 850s in Spain a number of Cordoba's Christians were martyred for declaring that Mohammed was not a true prophet. They refused to submit to the prohibition of public Christian worship and an enforced second-class status in their own land.

�- In 1071 the Muslim Turks virtually annihilated the Byzantine Christian army at Manzikert. It was this defeat that led the Byzantine Emperor to appeal to the Pope for aid against the Islamic threat, thus sparking the Crusades.

�- No competent historian questions the fact that Christian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land were given a very difficult time by marauding Turks. In the years preceding the First Crusade, Christian pilgrims were robbed and sometimes killed.

The Crusades were a just war. They were a justifiable military reaction to more than 450 years of Islamic aggression. The Christian nations of Europe were definitely not the aggressors. As seen above, the Muslims had been aggressors against the Christians since the 7^th century. The Christians of Europe were clearly justified in defending themselves against Muslim attacks and also in going on the offensive in order to prevent future attacks.

The Crusades were morally justifiable wars fought in self-defence to recapture what was lost to an unjust aggressor whose actions over the previous 450 years had shown an intention to conquer all of Christendom. At no point during any Crusade did the Crusaders conquer the Muslim homeland, Arabia, but only those originally Christian territories that the Muslims had conquered.