“God Wills It” | Urban II and the First Crusade

Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time, have been robbers, now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward. Let those who have been wearing themselves out in both body and soul now work for a double honor.

— Urban II, speech at the Council of Clermont in 1095 AD, as recorded by Fulcher of Chartres —

The townspeople gathered in the small church after being summoned by the lord of the manor. They entered the stone building, crossed themselves, bowed to the altar, and then took their place on the wooden benches. The priest spoke briefly about the necessity of obedience to God and His Church and then motioned to two strangers who sat at the front. In the light of candles and the setting sun, they walked to the raised platform before the altar and began to speak. Their message was one of destruction and death in lands far away, of faithful servants of God murdered by brutal infidels, of women and children sold into slavery at the hands of barbarians, and of the duty of every Christian to set them free and to liberate the Holy Land in the name of Almighty God. If they joined brave knights and men-at-arms from across Europe in the quest, they would receive wealth beyond measure and, more importantly, salvation from their sins from a God who would look on their sacrifice and suffering with pleasure and gratitude. While one monk gave the message of the beloved Urban II, the other produced one relic after another —the cloak of one saint, the bones of another, a vial of holy water blessed by the Virgin Mary herself. The people were awed by the majesty of these relics and stirred by the words of their spiritual leader. As the oration reached its zenith, a wave of passion swept through the audience, and as one the men rose and pledged themselves to “take the Cross” and join this holy crusade to free the Holy Land from Muslim rule. A cry arose from the people of this small French town: “Deus vult!” God wills it.

The imagery of monks crisscrossing Europe and recruiting thousands of peasants and knights to join the Crusades with the promise of lands, glory, riches and salvation is common knowledge to most students of history. And yet, like most events of the Dark Ages, they are shrouded in mystery. Records from that period shortly after the turn of the first millennium are sparse, and what has survived gives few details about the responses from those who heard the message of Urban II’s emissaries sent out across Western Europe. Most accounts, including those of the pope’s message to the Council of Clermont in 1095, were written years after the fact and were often penned by those who did not witness the events. It is sadly impossible, therefore, for historians to accurately record the motivations of the men—and women—who took the Cross and marched into the Holy Land in the First Crusade. They might have been seeking land or wealth, perhaps even glory and power and salvation from their sins, or they might simply have seen it as their duty as Christians to follow the orders of those whom God had placed in authority over them as a matter of personal piety. What is certain, however, is that the events of 1095-1099 AD would forever alter the fates of European and Middle Eastern history, Christian and Muslim alike.

The Council of Clermont

To understand the Crusades, one must first understand the political and religious situation in Europe in the preceding century. Following the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire into disunion and disarray, Europe reeled from invasions by Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens. Kings and emperors were powerless to keep their lands secure because of constant warfare between their vassal nobles and armies of knights. Small insults to honor or raids on neighboring manors led to years of bloodshed. The Church could not reign in the violence even after passing edicts known as the Peace and Truce of God, which set limits on how and when Christians could murder each other on the battlefield. Violence was endemic during the Dark Ages as knights— who were not nearly as chivalrous as modern legends depict—raided peasant cottages and murdered or raped at will. An outlet for these murderous urges was needed, preferably somewhere far away from the homesteads and castles of Europe.

At the same time, the Christian Church had experienced a major schism four decades before the calling of the First Crusade. In 1054, the political and religious tension between the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity had reached a breaking point. The Greek and Latin communions had clashed for centuries over the power of the Bishop of Rome versus that of the Byzantine emperor, as well as theological issues like iconoclasm, monastic disciplines, the text of the Nicene Creed, and celibacy among priests. Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael I Cerularius excommunicated each other and all those who followed their leadership in July 1054, dissolving the union within the Church that had existed since the Council of Nicaea seven centuries earlier. From this point forward, the Roman Catholic Church in the West and the Greek Orthodox Church in the East would go their separate ways.

The journey from 1054 to 1095 was fraught with conflict as the Muslim Seljuk Turks assaulted the Byzantine Empire and the petty nobles of Western Europe fought each other. The Seljuks pushed the Byzantines to the very fringes of Asia Minor, capturing the historic city of Nicaea in 1081, and the leaders in Constantinople realized that they needed help from the Latin Christians if they were to preserve their empire. Emperor Alexios I Komnenos reached out to Pope Urban II and asked him to call on the warriors of God in his lands to save their brethren from the rampaging Muslims. Urban agreed to aid the Byzantines, and he traveled to Clermont Ferrand in France for a meeting with other church leaders to organize a crusade. The Council met for ten days in November 1095, and Urban laid out his goals of reclaiming Asia Minor for the Byzantines and ending the attacks on Christians in the Holy Land by a massive armed campaign against the Seljuk Turks and other Muslim tribes in modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. He stated that “Christ commands it” and promised the absolution of sins for anyone who died during the crusade. The council agreed, and emissaries were sent to all corners of Christendom to recruit soldiers for this new holy war.

From Nicaea to Antioch

The First Crusade is really two different campaigns: the People’s Crusade and the Prince’s Crusade. The People’s Crusade began within weeks of the Council of Clermont as a monk named Peter the Hermit began to organize mobs of untrained peasants to march on the Holy Land in the name of God. His “army” assembled in Cologne, Germany, in the spring of 1096 and, before departing for the East, they slaughtered thousands of Jews in the Rhineland. Many of Urban II’s messengers had whipped up anti-Semitic feelings in their calls for taking the Cross, blaming the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus and insisting they were enemies of God just like the Muslims. The peasants also needed money, and the Jews of the Rhineland were the wealthiest non-Christian minority in the region. Urban and other Catholic leaders condemned this anti-Semitic pogrom and excommunicated all those who carried it out, and they issued new decrees to protect Jews living in Christian lands in Western Europe. And yet, the damage was done, and Jews were expelled from that part of Germany, returning only after the Crusades had ended.

Peter’s “People’s Crusade” ended badly for those involved. The peasants were undisciplined and ill-provisioned, and they resorted to raiding towns as they marched across the Balkans toward Constantinople. They murdered four hundred Hungarians over a dispute involving shoes in the town of Zemun, burned the city of Belgrade, and were attacked by brigands on the road to Sofia. Once they had reached Constantinople (many months before the properly-trained armies of Europe’s princes had arrived), they raided and captured Turkish castles along the coast of the Bosphorus Straits until they were ambushed near the village of Dracon. Most of the peasants were massacred, and the survivors—led by Peter—retreated to Constantinople to await the arrival of the princes.

The Prince’s Crusade was led by five European nobles from different parts of the Latin Christian world: Godfrey, duke of Bouillon; Hugh, Count of Vermandois and son of King Henry I of France; Raymond IV, count of Toulouse; Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy and eldest son of William the Conqueror; and Bohemond I, prince of Taranto. Altogether their armies numbered about thirty thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry. They came to Constantinople by land or sea over the course of 1095 and 1096 and were provisioned by Emperor Alexios in exchange for an oath of loyalty and promise to return all conquered Seljuk lands to the Byzantine Empire. After hearing a message from Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, the spiritual leader of the First Crusade, the armies crossed the Bosphorus from Constantinople and landed in Seljuk-controlled Asia Minor. Accompanied by the survivors of the People’s Crusade, they marched on Nicaea and laid siege to it for five weeks in May to June of 1097. Raymond IV defeated a Turkish sally out of the city two days into the siege and then repelled a larger attack by an enemy force responding to the invasion. Losses were heavy on both sides, but the Crusaders’ morale was strengthened by Adhemar’s insistence that God was with them. After four weeks of siege, Emperor Alexios sent a general to negotiate Nicaea’s surrender to him (rather than to the Crusaders), and on June 19th the city capitulated to the Byzantines. Some Crusaders, especially Bohemond, were furious at what they saw as Alexios’ treachery, but historians assess the victory at Nicaea as an example of cooperation between the Crusaders and the Byzantines. With one victory under their belts, the Crusaders departed for Jerusalem in two columns under the Norman Duke Robert Curthose and the French Duke Godfrey of Bouillon. Count Stephen of Blois, a leading knight in Godfrey’s army, wrote to his wife that he expected to be in Jerusalem within five weeks.

On July 1, 1097, Robert army of Normans and Englishmen was attacked by the Turks at Dorylaeum. Robert was surrounded, and the enemy assaulted the Normans on all sides, confident that they could defeat this smaller column of Crusaders. However, Godfrey’s force arrived as the afternoon drew to a close and attacked the Turks from the rear. Knowing they could not defeat the combined might of the entire Crusader army, the Turks instead retreated. As they moved south toward Antioch, the Crusaders found that the Turks had burned or carried off everything that could be used to provision the army. The Europeans finally reached Antioch, the halfway point between Constantinople and Jerusalem, in October 1097. Stephen of Blois, now disabused of his five-week campaign idea, wrote that the city was “great beyond belief, strong and impregnable,” and the Crusaders lacked enough men to fully surround and lay siege 3 “God Wills It”: Urban II and the First Crusade By Jon Streeter to it. The siege lasted until May 1098, when Bohemond bribed a guard to open the gates before a Muslim army under Kerbogha of Mosul arrived. The Crusaders sacked the city and slaughtered most of its citizens, but they could not complete the conquest before Kerbogha arrived and laid siege to them. The situation was now reversed—the Crusaders were inside Antioch and the Muslims were outside.

Adhemar did his best to keep the soldiers’ sprits up with ceremonies and fasting, but Kerbogha’s siege of Antioch sapped the Crusaders’ cause of much of its strength. And yet, the Crusaders eventually triumphed. Kerbogha could not hold his army of warring tribes together, and during the Europeans’ sally out of Antioch on June 28, 1098, thousands of Muslim soldiers deserted Kerbogha to ensure his defeat and the downfall of his tribe. Antioch had been saved— some Crusaders attested it was due to an army of saints who had fought alongside them—and the cause could continue.

From Antioch to Jerusalem

With the fall of Antioch, the way to Jerusalem was now open. The Crusaders met little resistance as they moved down the eastern coast of the Mediterranean toward the Holy Land, as local rulers preferred to negotiate surrender rather than put up a fight. However, the journey was not without difficulty. A plague broke out in August 1098, claiming the lives of hundreds of Crusaders, including Bishop Adhemar. The Crusaders mourned the loss of their spiritual leader, but the campaign continued. The march to Jerusalem took nearly a year, and the Crusaders arrived outside Jerusalem in June 1099 with little supplies or water, as the Jerusalem garrison had poisoned all local wells. The Crusaders also had to care for thousands of Christian refugees whom the Muslims had expelled from Jerusalem for fear of treachery. The armies of Godfrey and Tancred (nephew of Bohemond who now ruled in Antioch) encamped north of the city while Raymond marched around it to the south. Of the original army of nearly forty thousand, now fewer than fourteen thousand had to attack the great city that was the object of their desires. They had neither the time nor the numbers to lay siege to Jerusalem, and they chose instead to attack and take it by force.

The first assault on June 7th succeeded in taking Jerusalem’s outer wall, but the Crusaders could not get over the inner defenses and had to fall back. Ten days later, Italian sailors arrived with lumber and skilled engineers to construct siege engines, and a priest by the name of Embriaco spread word throughout the Crusader camps that he had seen a vision of Bishop Adhemar seated at God’s right hand promising them victory. These two events raised the Crusaders’ spirits greatly, and they gathered their strength over the next month for the final assault. Embriaco and Peter the Hermit preached sermons to them on the Mount of Olives outside the walls, urging them to go forward as warriors for the Lord.

The final assault on Jerusalem was both a triumph and a tragedy, what the historian Christopher Tyerman called “a juxtaposition of extreme violence and anguished faith.” The northern and southern walls were surmounted easily, as the Muslim strength had waned by repeated bombardment over the preceding month. The defenders retreated to the Temple Mount, where Tancred’s army of Italians and Germans murdered hundreds of women and children alongside the defenders until they reached the Al-Aqsa Mosque. There, the slaughter ended, and the survivors were allowed to surrender. The garrison commander at the citadel negotiated a truce with Raymond and was similarly permitted to leave in peace. With the city now in their hands and the defending soldiers defeated, the Crusaders now unleashed two years’ 4 “God Wills It”: Urban II and the First Crusade By Jon Streeter worth of pent-up fury upon the defenseless population of Jerusalem. Muslim civilians were hacked to death by Christian soldiers for protecting their families. Synagogues were burned down with Jews still inside and Christian archers shooting anyone who tried to escape the flames. Only the city’s Orthodox Christian residents survived, as they were now outside the walls with the Crusader armies. Estimates are that between fifty and seventy percent of Jerusalem’s civilian population perished after the siege in some of the darkest days in all of Christian history.

Urban II was horrified at the violence in Jerusalem but proclaimed the First Crusade a success in a message to Christendom in November 1099. The Crusaders established Latin Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land, the largest of which was the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey of Bouillon was proclaimed “Protector of the Holy Sepulcher” (referencing the tomb of Jesus Christ), and his successors reigned as Kings of Jerusalem. For ninety years, Christian lords ruled Muslim and Jewish peoples in the Near East, but a majority of the fighting men returned to Europe laden down with treasures looted from the City of God and with their sins forgiven for their service.

Turning Points: New Directions, East and West

The First Crusade probably produced more turning points than any other event we have covered this season, far too many for me to cover in our remaining minutes (but I hope Joe will ask me about some in our discussion). In matters of faith, it militarized Christianity and divided the Christian world even more than the Great Schism of 1054 had done. Europe’s military strategy, tactics, and equipment were modernized rapidly, as was medical treatment for soldiers wounded on the battlefield. It changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of men and women who traveled to the Holy Land over the next century. And there are many more turning points beyond that. However, as I close out this episode, I want to briefly discuss what I believe are the two most important turning points which came from the First Crusade—one in the East and one in the West.

As I mentioned earlier, during the Siege of Antioch, the Muslim leader Kerbogha was betrayed by some of his soldiers at a critical moment during the final assault. Like Christendom in Western Europe, the Muslim world of the Near East was fractured into hundreds of warring tribes who often preferred to see their religious foes triumph rather than a rival leader succeed in battle. The loss of Jerusalem showed the Muslim world that they needed to lay aside their tribal disputes and unite against a common foe. It took many decades, but eventually there arose among the followers of the Prophet Muhammad a man who would unite the Islamic world and triumph over the Christian invaders: An Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, more commonly known as Saladin. In 1187, Saladin united the tribes of Syria and Egypt into a mighty army that defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin and then recaptured Jerusalem. (Unlike the Crusaders, he allowed his opponents to leave the city in peace after its fall.) From then onward, Muslims have always looked to Saladin as a role model for leadership in times of trial for their faith, and many leaders in the Islamic world have sought to claim the mantle of Saladin for themselves. In the West, the wars that began with the First Crusade of 1095-1099 sparked a renewal of culture that contributed to the eventual end of the Dark Ages. While I do not wish to minimize the death of innocents and the destruction of so many historic sites, it is important to recognize that the Crusades brought knowledge of the ancient world back to the depressed and darkened minds and spirits of European intellectuals. For nearly a thousand years, the mighty power of 5 “God Wills It”: Urban II and the First Crusade By Jon Streeter the Church had suppressed creativity and independence of thought in pursuit of unity among believers, but as Crusaders—noble and common alike—returned to Europe with tales of the wonders of the East, they began to look at their own world and consider how they could make their lives better. The rise of humanism, a desire to improve one’s own life rather than endure suffering for the promise of heaven, is inextricably tied to the Crusades. It is tragic that it took such destruction and death to bring about this revival in European thought and culture, but this is common among the history of our world. The rise and fall of civilizations are always interspersed with periods of crushing darkness, and the Middle Ages was no exception. In the end, it was the men and women who witnessed the horrors of the Crusades, who endured the tragedies and triumphs of those years, and who returned with new knowledge and strength of purpose, who lifted their communities—and their countries—into the new light of the Renaissance.