The First Crusade, one of the most famous campaigns in all of history.

That vast and unprecedented European expedition undertaken by tens of thousands of soldiers

in order to lay claim to the Holy Land.

Yet, like all wars, this one didn't happen in a vacuum.

As far as the Islamic world was concerned, and indeed most educated Europeans at the time,

this was far from the beginning of hostilities.

In the eyes of regular Muslims from the Atlantic to the Black

Sea, and in the words of contemporary Arabic scholars, several earlier expeditions and incursions

into their lands had been just as important as this one.

For many Arabic scholars, the beginning of the crusading period had been in the 1060s and 1070s, with the Norman invasion and gradual conquest of the island of Sicily.

Indeed, the leader of that campaign, the great Count Roger Hoteville,

was the uncle of Boamund of Taranto, one of the integral commanders in the First Crusade.

The knowledge and expertise gained in the Sicily campaign was especially important to the Norman success in the East.

Many of Bowman's men already being fluent in Arabic by the time the expedition began.

Yet other wars sometimes described as Crusades took place too, long before the First

Crusade. In 1064, during the Reconquista in Spain, a vast multi-ethnic army officially

sanctioned by Pope Alexander II rode south to war, to seize the strategically important city of Barbastro

from its Muslim rulers.

19th century Spanish scholar Ramon Pidal famously called this war a crusade before the

Crusades.

Finally in 1087 we have another example of a papely sanctioned campaign, conducted by a multinational

Christian army against a Muslim ruler.

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