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Thomas Asbridge argues that the First Crusade was Pope Urban II's attempt to expand the power of the church, and reunite the churches of Rome and Constantinople, which had been in schism since 1054.
Asbridge, however, provides little evidence from Urban's own writings to bolster this claim, and Urban's four extant letters on crusading do not seem to express such a motive.
According to Asbridge, the spread of Islam was unimportant because " Islam and Christendom had coexisted for centuries in relative equanimity ".
Asbridge, however, fails to note that the recent Turkish conquests of Anatolia and southern Syria had shattered the tense but relatively stable balance of power that a somewhat revived Byzantine Empire had gradually developed with earlier Islamic powers over the course of the 10th and early 11th century.
Following the defeat at Manzikert in 1071, Muslims had taken half of the Byzantine Empire's territory, and such strategically and religiously important cities as Antioch and Nicaea had only fallen to Muslims in the decade before the Council of Piacenza.
Moreover, the harrowing accounts of the Turkish invasion and conquest of Anatolia recorded by such Eastern Christian chroniclers as John Skylitzes, Michael Attaleiates, Matthew of Edessa, Michael the Syrian and others, which are summarized by Vryonis, seem to contradict Asbridge's broad picture of equanimious " coexistence " between the Christian and Muslim worlds in the second half of the 11th century.

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