Pope Urban II Calls for Crusade: Jerusalem to Be Recaptured

A French pope stood before a crowd in an open field in Clermont, southern France, and delivered one of the most consequential speeches in human history. Pope Urban II, addressing the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095, called upon the knights of Christendom to march east, liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control, and reclaim the Holy Sepulchre. The crowd's response, according to chroniclers, was a thunderous shout: "Deus vult!" — God wills it. Urban's motives were layered and strategic. The Byzantine emperor Alexios I had appealed to Western Christendom for military assistance against the Seljuk Turks, who had conquered much of Anatolia after their victory at Manzikert in 1071. Urban saw an opportunity to reunite the Western and Eastern churches, which had split in 1054, while channeling Europe's violent warrior class toward an external enemy. He also offered an unprecedented spiritual incentive: remission of all sins for those who took the cross. The response exceeded anything Urban anticipated. He had appealed to nobles and trained knights, but the message spread uncontrollably through popular preaching. Peter the Hermit raised a chaotic "People's Crusade" of peasants that massacred Jewish communities along the Rhine before being annihilated by the Turks. The organized crusader armies, numbering perhaps 60,000, departed in August 1096 under leaders including Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of Toulouse, and Bohemond of Taranto. The First Crusade succeeded where subsequent crusades would fail. Jerusalem fell on July 15, 1099, accompanied by a massacre of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. The crusader states established in the Levant survived for nearly two centuries. Urban's speech launched an era of religious warfare that scarred relations between Christianity and Islam for a millennium.