This story starts out slow, but gets better, so stay with me here.

Muhammed was born in Mecca around the year 570 AD. As a young man he worked with his uncle in the trading business. At age 25, he married a rich widow, Khadijah, and her wealth allowed him to expand in the trading business on his own. At age 40, while meditating, he fell into a trance and saw the Angel Gabriel. The words spoken to Muhammed were written down and later formed into the Qur'an or Koran. He started preaching to small groups just as Jesus did 600 years before him.

Until now, Muhammed was under the protection of his uncle's clan from enemies who felt he was preaching falsehoods. But when his wife and uncle died in the year 619, he was "persuaded" to leave Mecca, and so he moved to Medina in the year 622...year 0 of the Muslim era.

It took time, but Muhammed finally established his authority in Medina, and this is how he did it. He organized raids on caravans of the merchants of Mecca. In the year 623, a group of sixty Muslims, during a raid on a caravan, shot arrows at the escort, the first act of aggression on behalf of Islam. Two poets, captured at Badr, were executed because they had written poems contrary to the writings of Muhammed. The Jewish clan of Qurayzah were attacked, the men were executed and the women and children were sold into slavery. After each of these raids or conquests, the booty was split among the warriors.

After the prophet's death, there was an immediate separation in the nation of Islam, the Sunni, led by Abu Bakr, and the Shia, led by Ali (and we all know how well that's working).Bakr was the accepted choice.Two years after his death, one of Muhammed's fathers-in-law (he had nine of these) Umar, succeeded and, in the year 636, led a campaign against Syria and Iraq, and then five years later invaded Egypt. Umar was now the master of Persia. In the year 646, Umar sacked the metropolis of Alexandria. By 715, Muslims had reached Central Asia and Northern India in the east, and had crossed over the Straits of Gibralter in the west, and overran most of Spain.

In the year 732, under Abd ar-Rahman, they crossed the Pyrenees into France, sacking the city of Bordeaux and burning Christian churches as they went, but were routed by an army of Franks outside the cuty of Poitiers, and the Mulims were chased back into Spain.

In the year 846, a Muslim force of fifteen thousand landed in the Italian port of Ostia, which served Rome, and the defending forces, mainly composed of pilgrim Anglo-Saxons, were massacred at the hands of these "Saracens." The basilicas of Saint Peter and of Saint Paul were both looted while the pope, Sergius II and theRoman people looked on helplessly.

A Saracen base was established at Fraxentum (LaGarde-Freinet) on the coast of Province from which Muslim marauders raided Christian cities on the Mediterranean coast. Bari, on the Adriatic coast, also fell. In the middle of the ninth century, they took Sicily, and in the year 878, the city of Syracuse was sacked.

Islamic law did not ensure equal treatment. The Caliph al-Mutawakkil expressed his dislike of Christians by making them bind small bands of wool around their heads, exactly like the Nazis, who forced the Jews to sew a star of David on their clothing. In Salerno, a Mussulman chief would, on the church altar each night, sacirfice the virginity of a Christian nun. In Cordova Spain, fifty men and women who were publicly preaching Christian faith, were stoned to death.

And yet people today are confused about why there was a crusade from Christendom