1. What were the crusades about?
- The Crusades were a series of Holy Wars by the Christian states of Europe against the Saracens. The term "Saracen" was the word used to describe a Moslem during the time of the Crusades. The Crusades started in 1095 when Pope Claremont preached the First Crusade at the Council of Claremont. The Crusades were great military expeditions undertaken by the Christian nations of Europe for the purpose of rescuing the holy places of Palestine from the hands of the Mohammedans. They were eight in number, the first four being sometimes called the Principal Crusades, and the remaining four the Minor Crusades. In addition there was a Children's Crusade.

SPAIN-Islam had been in Spain hundreds of years before the first crusade. The Muslims that lived in Spain were called Moors. Christians were fighting against them the whole time, but this fighting was not necessarily a crusade. The mere fact that the war against the Moors in Spain was believed to be meritorious and thus attracted a certain number of French knights does not make it a crusade. The fighting in Spain was simply a Holy War at this time. It did play an important part in the origins of the crusade.

CATALONIA- Before the northward advance of the Moslem forces had run its full cruse at least one center of Christian resistance had made in appearance at the nothern edge of the Hispanic peninsula. By the middle of the ninth century the princes of Asturias-Leon had extended their holdings southward across the Cantabrian mountains for a distance of some sixty miles from the as of the Bay of Biscay. On the eastern coast of the peninsula, to the immediate south of the eastern Pyrinees, lay the Catalan countries of the Spanyish March, Barcelona Chief among them.