Origins of Crusading and the First Crusade: From Clermont to Jerusalem

The First Crusade grew from several developments in the late eleventh century: Byzantine military need, the western Church’s efforts to direct Christian warfare, the religious importance of pilgrimage, and the appeal of a penitential journey to Jerusalem. Pope Urban II’s call at Clermont in 1095 set these aims in motion, but the response was not a single, centrally controlled army. Poorer groups left before the planned expedition, while nobles and their followers travelled in separate contingents. Between 1096 and 1099, they crossed the Balkans and Anatolia, fought local rulers and captured Jerusalem. Their route also brought violence against Jewish communities in Europe and against Muslim and Christian inhabitants of eastern cities.

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Political and religious conditions before the call

By the late eleventh century, the Byzantine Empire faced military pressure in Anatolia, the peninsula forming most of present-day Turkey. After the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071, Seljuk forces and other Turkish rulers gained ground there. Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who came to power in 1081, sought military assistance from western rulers and the papacy. His request was for help against the Turks, not necessarily for the mass pilgrimage and expedition that followed.

The political situation farther east was divided. Seljuk rulers and local emirs competed for power in Anatolia and Syria, while the Fatimid caliphate, based in Egypt, competed with Turkish rulers for Palestine. At the time of Urban’s appeal, Jerusalem was held by Artuqid rulers associated with the Seljuks; the Fatimids recovered it in 1098. The Fatimids followed Shi‘i Islam, while the Seljuks supported Sunni Islam. Political and religious rivalries complicated cooperation against the western expedition.

Relations between the western Latin Church and the Greek-speaking Byzantine Church were strained by disputes over authority and religious practice. Disputes about the pope’s authority and church customs complicated cooperation between them. At the same time, reforming popes were seeking greater authority over church affairs and trying to restrain violence among western Christian nobles. Movements known as the Peace of God and the Truce of God aimed to protect certain people and places from attack and to limit fighting at particular times. These efforts did not end warfare, but they formed part of the setting in which Urban presented an eastern campaign as a religiously directed use of arms.

Pilgrimage to Jerusalem long predated the crusade, and Muslim rule had not stopped it altogether. Conditions varied, however, and travellers faced changing political circumstances, local tolls and the risk of attack. Christian accounts also circulated stories of mistreatment. The destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the church associated with Jesus’s burial, on the orders of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in 1009 became a powerful memory in western Christian accounts. Its reconstruction was later permitted and supported by the Byzantine emperor. The church’s destruction remained a potent subject in western appeals concerning Jerusalem, even though pilgrims could again visit the restored shrine.

Clermont and the meaning of the appeal

In March 1095, Byzantine envoys asked for help at a church council in Piacenza. Later that year, Urban convened a council at Clermont in central France. The council dealt with church reform and discipline as well as the eastern crisis. On 27 November, Urban made a public appeal that connected assistance to eastern Christians with the wider religious significance of Jerusalem and pilgrimage.

The speech’s exact wording is not known. Urban’s letters from 1095 are close to the events, but detailed accounts of the sermon were written later, including by chroniclers who had taken part in the campaign. Their versions differ in emphasis. Some foreground aid to Byzantine Christians; others give greater prominence to Jerusalem. Together, these accounts connect assistance to eastern Christians with the recovery of Jerusalem’s holy places.

The appeal offered a new kind of religious undertaking: an armed journey treated as pilgrimage and penance. Participants who took the cross made a vow to complete the journey, and many wore a cloth cross sewn onto their clothing. The council’s terms connected the journey with the remission of penance, the acts prescribed by church authorities to address sin. The expedition itself could count as a penitential act for a participant who confessed and repented. The promise gave the journey a religious purpose that could make hardship, danger and the possibility of death seem meaningful to participants.

Urban also urged western warriors to redirect their fighting away from fellow Christians and toward the eastern expedition. This was both a call to aid Byzantium and an attempt to place armed violence under church leadership. The response associated with the phrase Deus vult, meaning God wills it, is famous in later accounts, though the precise scene and words cannot be recovered with certainty. Urban’s appeal spread through preaching and messages beyond the council, and its response exceeded what he and Alexios appear to have anticipated.

Recruitment and the first departures

People joined for different reasons. Religious devotion, the desire to undertake penance, concern for eastern Christians and reverence for Jerusalem could all matter. Family ties and noble obligations helped bring groups of relatives and retainers into the campaign. Some leaders may also have hoped for political advantage. Joining required substantial expenditure and exposed participants to a dangerous journey; land and wealth were uncertain prospects.

The expedition required each participant or household to find food, equipment and transport for a long overland route. Noble leaders raised resources from their estates, sometimes selling or mortgaging property. The armies included knights and foot soldiers, as well as clergy and other non-combatants. Their leaders commanded separate contingents rather than a unified force under one western king. Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, served as Urban’s representative and the expedition’s senior religious leader; the princes retained command of their own followers.

In spring 1096, before the main forces’ planned departure, groups of poorer pilgrims and minor nobles set out under leaders including Peter the Hermit and Walter Sans Avoir. The label People’s Crusade is often used for these early movements, though they were not one orderly army. Their members had little common military training, and many travelled with families. Peter’s preaching helped draw followers, but it is uncertain whether Urban had formally authorized him to preach the campaign. These groups struggled to obtain supplies and discipline as they crossed central Europe.

Some of the early crusaders turned their religious hostility against Jewish communities along the Rhine in present-day Germany. During 1096, armed groups attacked Jews in places including Speyer, Worms and Mainz, as well as other towns. Many Jews were murdered; others took their own lives, were forced into baptism or fled. The violence was not an instruction of the Church’s crusade appeal. Some bishops and local authorities tried to shelter Jewish residents, but those efforts often failed to stop the attackers. The pogroms showed how the language of fighting enemies of Christ could be turned against people who had no part in the eastern conflict.

The departing bands also attacked communities along their route. In the Balkans, shortages and disputes over provisions contributed to clashes with local populations and Byzantine officials. Some groups pillaged settlements, and violence affected Christians as well as others. The Hungarian ruler Coloman resisted bands that threatened his lands. These early expeditions demonstrated the practical problem of moving large groups without dependable supplies or effective command.

From Constantinople to Antioch

Alexios had reason to distrust the arriving western forces: earlier Norman campaigns had threatened Byzantine territory, and the poorly controlled bands of the People’s Crusade had already caused trouble. He nevertheless arranged for the survivors to cross the Bosporus into Asia Minor, where many were killed or captured by forces of the Seljuk ruler Kilij Arslan I near Civetot in October 1096. Peter was not present at the defeat. The survivors who returned to Constantinople were only a small remnant of the early movement.

The main noble-led contingents left western Europe in 1096 and reached Constantinople at different times between late 1096 and spring 1097. Alexios provided supplies and transport, while seeking assurances that lands recovered from the Turks and formerly held by Byzantium would be returned to imperial control. Several leaders agreed to such terms, though their understandings of the promises differed. The relationship was an alliance of practical necessity, not a transfer of command: Alexios wanted to recover imperial territory, while the western leaders pursued a religious expedition that increasingly took on its own political aims.

The campaign’s first major objective was Nicaea, a Seljuk-held city and regional capital. The crusaders and Byzantine forces besieged it in 1097. Byzantine ships were brought into the lake beside the city, cutting off an important supply route, and the garrison surrendered to the emperor’s representatives. The crusaders were frustrated that the city was not left open to their customary plunder, but the capture helped restore western Anatolian territory to Byzantine rule.

In July 1097, the crusaders fought Kilij Arslan’s forces at Dorylaeum. Mounted archers attacked the contingent moving ahead of the main army; the arrival of the other crusaders helped turn the battle in their favour. The march that followed was still punishing. Seljuk forces withdrew and damaged or removed supplies, leaving the western army short of food and water in the summer heat. Men and animals died, and the army depended on foraging, local supplies and occasional plunder.

Some leaders also broke away from the main force. Baldwin of Boulogne went east into Armenian-populated territory and, in 1098, became ruler of Edessa, now Şanlıurfa in southeastern Turkey, after local political conflict left him in control of the city. This gave the expedition a foothold and a source of supplies along the Euphrates, but it also marked a widening of the leaders’ aims beyond the original journey through Anatolia.

The main army began besieging Antioch, near modern Antakya in southern Turkey, in October 1097. The city’s size made it difficult to surround, and food shortages, disease and desertion weakened the besiegers during the long siege. In June 1098, Bohemond of Taranto arranged to enter with the help of Firuz, a commander responsible for part of the city’s defences. The ensuing sack killed many Muslim inhabitants and also many local Greek, Armenian and Syriac Christians. The capture did not end the crisis: a large army led by Kerbogha of Mosul arrived and besieged the crusaders inside Antioch. On 28 June, the crusaders left the city to fight and defeated Kerbogha’s forces.

Arguments among the leaders and exhaustion delayed the onward march. They also disagreed over who should control Antioch, and Bohemond remained there to assert his claim. The crusade was not directed by one commander with authority over all the princes. Adhemar’s death in 1098 further weakened the expedition’s central religious leadership. At the beginning of 1099, the remaining leaders resumed the journey south.

The siege and capture of Jerusalem

Jerusalem had changed hands shortly before the crusaders arrived. The Fatimids had retaken it from the Seljuks in 1098. In June 1099, the western army reached the city and found a dry landscape with limited food and water. The Fatimid governor, Iftikhar al-Dawla, had expelled Jerusalem’s Christian population before the siege. The defenders prepared for an assault, while the crusaders had too few men and too little time to rely on a long blockade.

An initial attack on 13 June failed. On 17 June, Genoese sailors arrived at Jaffa with skilled help and timber taken from their ships. The wood allowed the besiegers to build siege equipment, including towers used to bring attackers to the walls. Religious observances, including a fast and a barefoot procession around the city, helped sustain the army’s morale, while news of a Fatimid relief force made delay more dangerous.

The final assault began on 13 July, and on 15 July the crusaders broke through the city’s defences. A large-scale killing followed. Muslim defenders and residents were slaughtered, and Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue died when it was burned. Some inhabitants survived, and some captives were ransomed. Tancred’s offer of protection to people sheltering in the precinct of the al-Aqsa Mosque did not prevent later killings there. The accounts differ over the scale of the slaughter, but the violence was extensive. The Christian population expelled before the siege was spared the massacre because it was no longer in the city.

The crusaders’ victory established western Christian rule in Jerusalem. A council chose Godfrey of Bouillon to govern the city. He governed without a royal coronation. Accounts call him prince or advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, linking his authority to the church associated with Jesus’s burial. In August, a Fatimid army approaching from Egypt was defeated at Ascalon. Many crusaders then returned home, while those who remained faced the continuing task of maintaining control of the territories won by the expedition.

The events of 1095–1099 established a model that the Church and western rulers would invoke in later campaigns. It was a difficult armed pilgrimage, assembled through preaching, vows and separate aristocratic networks. Its military success depended on cooperation and negotiation as well as force; its consequences included new political rule in the east and devastating violence against Jewish, Muslim and local Christian communities along its path.