The Christian Crusades of the High and Late Middle Ages waged against Islamic kingdoms in the eastern Mediterranean, western Asia, and northern Africa, also helped form a division between Christians and Muslims. The expansion of Islam in the fifteenth century through the Ottoman Empire (which encompassed parts of southeastern Europe, North Africa, Western Asia, and the Middle East by the sixteenth century) further fueled religious conflicts before the trans-Atlantic trade. In addition, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, Barbary corsairs (or pirates) raided European coastal towns and enslaved European Christians for Islamic slave trade markets. Ultimately, even with the protection of church law, European Christians were familiar with the threat of enslavement.
