ABSTRACT
Holy wars against non-Christians and especially Muslims in Spain and the Mediterranean had begun in the eleventh century, and what has been called the First Crusade was launched against the Near East in 1092. Themes justifying these grand aggressions were the superiority of the Catholic faith and the recuperation of lands usurped by Saracens from the Christian Roman Empire in earlier times; hence a French lawyer, Peter Dubois, called his Crusade tract The Recovery of the Holy Land. Roger Bacon coolly wrote off the Ruthenians as 'schismatics' who practised the Greek rite, argued that crusades involved the Church in secular wars, proving his point by the French Crusade against Catalonia-Aragon. The Preachers created a Society of Missions in 1312 which, together with the United Brethren, a group of sympathetic Greek Basilians, ran missions in Persia and Armenia in the early fourteenth century. Hopes for voluntary conversion were vibrant.
