Who were the victims? It depends on how many years, decades, and centuries you take into account. By the middle of the tenth century, more than a hundred years before the Crusades began, half the Christian world had been conquered by Muslim Arab armies: the city of Jerusalem and countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, including Egypt, Sicily, Spain, and Turkey. In 1095, Pope Urban II called on the French aristocracy to wage holy war against all Muslims.
