The year is 1095 CE.
We stand at the Council of Clermont.
In the audience are all the great names of Europe,
both secular and ecclesiastical.
For a moment there's a hush.
The last words of Pope Urban II's fiery speech, extolling nations of
Christendom to retake the holy land from Muslim invaders,
hangs in the air.
Then someone in the crowd shouts
"Deus vult",
"God wills it".
The chant is picked up by man after man until the council rings with
deafening shouts of "Deus vult".
Then, out of the crowd, a bishop named Adhemar
rushes up and falls to his knees before the Pope,
claiming that he will lead
any willing Christian to reclaim the holy land for Christ.
And thus, the First Crusade began.
There's just a few problems.
You see, by this point Muslims had actually occupied
the Holy Land for nearly 400 years
and there was little evidence of the various
atrocities Urban invoked in his speech to incite Europe to crusade.
In fact, the church had never seemed very concerned about the occupation before now and
pilgrimages to the holy land had continued practically uninterrupted
since Jerusalem fell into Muslim hands in 637.
So what was really going on ?
Well, earlier that year,
Alexius Comnenus,
the Emperor of the Byzantine Empire,
an empire that had
fallen a long way since the days of Justinian,
had sent envoys to the Pope
asking for help from the West against the Seljuq Turks.
These Turkish Muslims coming out of the East had practically pushed the Empire to its limits,
forcing them out of nearly all of Anatolia,
the traditional heartland of his empire.
Alexius Comnenus had hoped for supplies, arms, and a few thousand
well-trained men so that Byzantium could continue to serve as the bulwark of
Christian Europe against the Muslim east
or really so he could just win this war
retake his territory and strengthen the Empire he was the head of.
But you know, it's all in how you sell it.
Well, Pope Urban had a slightly different idea.
You see, the Pope wasn't in the most secure position.
The church was basically at war with the Holy Roman Emperor.
Another pope named Clement III had been installed in Ravenna and claimed to be the rightful Pope.
In fact Urban couldn't even enter Rome.
Hence why he was kicking around in France : because the Holy Roman Emperor
and the antipope held it against him.
So Urban thought:
"Maybe let's unite all of Christendom to fight somebody else"
Of course he never really asked for Alexius Comnenus' opinion on the
this plan but we'll deal with that more later.
And thus the First Crusade began.
But Urban was a smart guy,
he knew how to motivate people.
He knew how to gather a
force larger and more cohesive than any nation in Europe could muster.
He would offer to those who have spent their life fighting, those who had spent
their lives committing mortal sins,
one chance,
one opportunity for absolution.
And he would offer that opportunity for doing the thing they did best:
going to war.
This is the first time a pope had ever done this.
Never before had a plenary indulgence been offered for Marshall action, and
this innovation drew a lot of people.
And truth is: though I may have my suspicions
about some of the motivations of the leaders of this movement,
In a world as motivated by faith as medieval Europe
I think that faith and a hope for absolution was the reason that so many
people bankrupt themselves just so they could join the crusade.
But unfortunately, this offer was so good that a lot of people who signed up weren't quite the
people the Pope meant to get.
You see, the Pope had set a date of August 1096
for the Crusaders to leave from Europe so that nights and barons could get their
affairs in order and so that they could prepare what in the Middle Ages counted
as supply and logistics.
But that wasn't fast enough for some people.
In France, there was a fellow by the name of Peter the Hermit
who began whipping up the
peasantry he talked of the atrocities he'd witnessed in the Holy Land.
(Although there's a fair amount of evidence to say that he never actually went there)
And he told tales of his divine appointment by Christ to lead the spiritually pure who
would be protected by heaven to Jerusalem.
Tens of thousands of people left their farms to join Peter,
although they had no money for the journey and didn't even know how far it
was from their homes in Western Europe to the levant.
Few of them where soldiers,
and fewer still even owned weapons.
But as Peter preached, word of this peasants crusade began.
And while Peter was still gathering his tide of peasants at Cologne, Other groups
decided that they were just going to set out on their own.
And this is where the
people's crusade becomes one of the most unmitigated messes in the history of History.
First there's the group from France under a fellow named Walter Sans-Avoir.
They left ahead of Peter and made it through Hungary all right,
but when they showed up at Belgrade,
The doorstep of the Byzantine Empire, the local governor
was very confused.
He'd been told that the Crusaders weren't supposed to show up for another
half a year at least.
And weren't they supposed to be soldiers?
This was just a mob led by a few
impoverished knights.
So he didn't let them in.
He told them he was gonna send a
letter back to Constantinople and could they please just wait patiently until he
got his instructions in order ?
How do they respond?
By pillaging the countryside!
In all fairness to the Crusaders, they were probably starving.
They hadn't thought to bring many supplies with them, and you've got to
remember : this is spring in medieval Europe,
it's not like they had refrigeration and rapid transport. The bulk of the food for
the year comes in during the fall harvest which is exactly why
Urban scheduled his crusade to start in the middle of august,
so it could be easy to resupply as they went.
But by springtime there's just not very much food around
So it's unlikely the Crusaders had been able to really stock up on spare provisions on their trek through Hungary
So the Crusaders went on a pillaging spree. They destroyed homes and farms
they even came to blows with the local byzantine garrison.
Some of them even went back to Hungary,
which they've managed to cross through
before without doing any harm, and tried to loot a local market.
They tried... but the town's folk kick them out
and the local byzantine garrison beat them down too and soon
cowed, these first Crusaders were brought under escort to Constantinople
we'll catch up with them in a bit when Peter gets there. But first we should
talk about the second splinter group of the people's crusade :
a group from Germany led by count Emicho of Leiningen.
This count had heard of Peters preachings, and had gathered his own group to go crusade.
They were to head off to the Holy Land from Germany but -
well they only got a few miles before they seem to decide that :
"you know, the local Jews are a lot closer and less well-armed !"
And so they went from town to town through Germany
sacking their own cities slaughtering the jewish population and stealing any
money they might find.
Now this was opposed almost unilaterally by the Catholic Church
this wasn't at all what urban had called for.
Even if you argue he didn't care about Jews
there's no question he wanted the fighting out of Christendom at the very least
not only did priests and monks preach against this sort of violence but there
are actually heroic stories of Bishops opposing these marauding Crusaders and
trying to protect their local Jewish communities.
The Bishop of Speyer gave them his protection.
The Bishop of worms brought the local Jews to take refuge in his home
and even tried to fortify the place
but the Christian Crusaders attack and stormed the bishops house
slaughtering some 800 Jews hiding there. The Bishop of Menz did the same and
even ordered the town bar against the Crusaders.
In fact, there the local Jewish
population even raised a great deal of gold to give Emicho if you would just go away.
But Emicho took the bribe and then attach the city anyway.
When word of the attack reached him
the bishop raised his personal guard and rushed to join forces with the
governor's militia and the force of local purchases who had come out armed
to defend the local jewish population. After fierce fighting, the locals drove
the Crusaders off. But the Crusaders gathered more men recruited some
sympathetic or bribable town's folk, and attacked again.
This time the defenders broke and fled. In the aftermath thousands of Jews were slaughtered.
Emicho's band massacred their way through Germany until at last
they ended up at the Hungarian border.
By this time Peter and his crusade had already passed through Hungary
(we'll talk about how their trip went next time). But when the king of Hungary
saw Emicho's marauding band he decided that :
Nope, he was having none of this. And refuse to let them into his country.
The Crusaders decided to force their way in anyway and promptly laid siege to
the Hungarian, Christian, city of Moson, where they were promptly defeated by the
city garrison and slaughtered almost to a man.
And thus the First Crusade began.
Join us next time to find out what happens to Peter's band of itinerant peasants
find out what the Pope and the nobles were doing all this time and
watch the First Crusade begin in earnest