Dr. Roy Casagranda starts by laying out the backgrounds for the primary actors: the Arabs, the Romans, the Seljuks, the Pope of Rome, and the Normans. He proposes that there were three proto-Crusades: The Norman invasion of Sicily in 1061, the Siege of Barbastro by the Norman commander Guillaume de Montreuil of French, Burgundian, Catalan, Aragonese, and Norman soldiers in 1064, and Roussel de Bailleul's Norman principality of Galatia (1073-77). Finally, he starts the Crusades and gets to 1108.