First Crusade Called
In November 1095, at the close of a church council held at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II called on the knights and common people of Latin Christendom to march east. The expedition that followed, later known as the First Crusade, ended with the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 and the creation of Latin Christian states in the Levant. It set a template for a series of religious wars that shaped relations among Christians, Muslims, and Jews for centuries.
The background was a mix of religious, political, and social change. In 1071 the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert and went on to take much of Anatolia. In 1095 the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos sent envoys to the West asking for military help. The Muslim world was also divided: the Seljuk realm had fragmented into rival emirates, and Egypt was ruled by the separate Fatimid caliphate. Meanwhile, the reform-minded papacy was asserting its authority over European rulers, and pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a well-established devotion.
No verbatim record of Urban's speech at Clermont survives. Accounts written years later differ in their wording, so historians are cautious about what he actually said. He seems to have urged armed pilgrimage to aid eastern Christians and to liberate Jerusalem, and he offered spiritual rewards, which later developed into the idea of the crusade indulgence. The response far exceeded his expectations. Several waves set out in 1096. The first, often called the People's Crusade, was poorly organized and was largely destroyed in Anatolia. Some of its members and other bands also attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland, a series of massacres that left a lasting scar.
The main armies, led by nobles such as Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto, and Robert of Normandy, gathered at Constantinople in 1096 and 1097. They took Nicaea, defeated a Turkish force at Dorylaeum, and endured a long siege of Antioch, which fell in 1098. Disease, hunger, and quarrels over leadership took a heavy toll. In July 1099 the crusaders stormed Jerusalem and killed many of its inhabitants, Muslim and Jewish. Accounts of the scale vary, but the slaughter was remembered bitterly in the region.
The victors established the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, and the counties of Edessa and, later, Tripoli. These crusader states survived in various forms until the late thirteenth century. In the short term, the Byzantines recovered some territory, but relations between Constantinople and the crusaders soured. In the longer term, the idea of crusading as holy war endorsed by the papacy spread to other theaters and shaped the memory of the Middle Ages in both Europe and the Islamic world.