How had Christianity become by 1500 a largely European faith, with its earlier and promising Asian and African communities diminished, defeated, or dissolved? The answer, in large measure, was Islam. The wholly unforeseen birth of yet another monotheistic faith in the Middle East, its rapid spread across much of the Afro-Eurasian world, the simultaneous creation of a large and powerful Arab Empire, the emergence of a cosmopolitan and transcontinental Islamic civilization—these were the conditions, described more fully in Chapter 9, that led to the contraction of Christendom in Asia and Africa, leaving Europe as the principal center of the Christian faith.2