The First Crusade

The story

The appeal at Clermont

In November 1095, at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II held a council, an assembly of bishops and nobles. At the end, before a great crowd in the open air, he spoke of the need to help the Christians of the East. A few years earlier the Seljuk Turks, a Muslim people who had come from Central Asia, had defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert (1071) and conquered much of Anatolia, the peninsula of present-day Turkey. The Byzantine Emperor Alexios I had asked the West for help.

We do not have the exact text of the pope's speech, but we know that he asked knights to stop fighting one another and to turn their weapons against the enemies of Christians, to free Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, the place where, according to tradition, Jesus was buried. To those who set out, the pope promised forgiveness of their sins. The crowd answered: “God wills it!” Those who decided to go sewed a cloth cross onto their clothes: hence the name “crusade”.

The crusade of the poor and that of the knights

In the spring of 1096 a first wave of ordinary people set off, led by the preacher Peter the Hermit. There were thousands of them, peasants, women and young people, poorly armed and without organisation. Along the way, in some towns of the Rhine valley in Germany, a persecution of the Jewish communities broke out: many Jews were killed or forced to be baptised. The bishops of some towns tried to protect them, often without success. When it reached Anatolia, this crusade was almost completely destroyed by the Turks in the autumn of 1096.

In August 1096 the armies of the nobles set out, in separate groups: that of Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, that of Raymond of Toulouse, that of Bohemond, a Norman from southern Italy, and others. They marched for months across Europe, and at Constantinople they swore to the emperor that the lands they reconquered would be returned to the empire. In June 1097 they took Nicaea.

An exceptional witness was Anna Komnene, daughter of the Byzantine emperor, who wrote the “Alexiad”, the history of her father's reign. She described with amazement and with worry the arrival at Constantinople of those armies of Western knights, whom the empire did not entirely trust: it seemed that half of Europe was arriving.

Antioch and Jerusalem

The journey was very hard. Food and water ran short, and many horses fell ill and died. At Antioch, a great city in Syria, the siege lasted from October 1097 to June 1098: the crusaders, reduced to starvation, took the city and immediately afterwards were themselves besieged by a Muslim army. They held out and won. In the meantime Bohemond made himself lord of Antioch, against the promise he had made to the emperor.

In June 1099 the crusaders, by now few in number, arrived before Jerusalem, which had recently come under the control of the Egyptian dynasty of the Fatimids. They built siege towers and on 15 July 1099 they entered the city. A terrible massacre followed: very many Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were killed, according to the chronicles even children. Historians do not agree on the number of victims, but they all agree on the ferocity of those days.

The crusader states

The crusaders did not return the lands to the empire, but founded four small states: the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Edessa (as early as 1098) and, a few years later, the County of Tripoli (1109). Godfrey of Bouillon, chosen as leader, refused the title of king and called himself “Defender of the Holy Sepulchre”; after his death, in 1100, his brother Baldwin was crowned king. Only some of those who set out reached the Holy Land; most died along the way or went back home.