World history · High Medieval
Pope Urban II Calls the First Crusade
AD 1095-1099
Responding to a Byzantine appeal for military aid and calling for the liberation of Jerusalem, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont, beginning nearly two centuries of Crusading warfare between Western Christendom and the Islamic Middle East.
The event
In November 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a dramatic sermon at the Council of Clermont in France, responding to an appeal from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos for military assistance against Turkish advances in Anatolia, and calling on Western Christian knights to take up arms to liberate Jerusalem and the eastern Christian holy sites from Muslim rule, promising participants remission of sins (an indulgence) for their efforts.
Urban's call met with an extraordinary popular response, drawing not only trained knights and nobility but also, in an unplanned and disastrous preliminary episode known as the People's Crusade, poorly organized bands of commoners led by preachers such as Peter the Hermit, most of whom were destroyed en route or upon arrival in Anatolia.
The main crusading armies, composed of forces led by various European nobles, fought their way through Anatolia and the Levant over several years, capturing Antioch after a grueling siege in 1098 and finally Jerusalem in July 1099, following a brutal siege and massacre of the city's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants that shocked contemporaries even by the standards of medieval warfare and left a lasting legacy of bitterness in the historical memory of the Islamic and Jewish worlds.
The crusaders established a set of Latin Christian states in the region, known as the Crusader States (including the Kingdom of Jerusalem), which persisted with varying territorial extent for roughly two centuries until the fall of Acre in 1291, and the First Crusade's initial success inspired a further series of Crusades over the following two centuries, several of which — most notoriously the Fourth Crusade's sack of Christian Constantinople in 1204 — proved deeply damaging to relations both between Christians and Muslims and between Western and Eastern Christianity itself.
Other witnesses
- Fulcher of Chartres, Chronicle of the First Crusade
- Robert the Monk, Historia Iherosolimitana (records of Urban II's Clermont speech)
Further reading
More timeline entries
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