What were the landmark sieges of the First Crusade? Who went on this long and arduous journey? And what caused Pope Urban II to spark the idea of crusading in the minds of western Europe? We answer your top questions surrounding the armed pilgrimage that kickstarted years of military campaigns to the Holy Land and beyond…
The Crusades were a series of eight military campaigns, organised by Christian kings and religious leaders, in order to retake Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim control, and took place over almost 200 hundred years.
Published:
January 27, 2021 at 11:36 am
“When Pope Urban had said these and very many similar things in his urbane discourse, he so influenced to one purpose the desires of all who were present that they cried out, ‘It is the will of God! It is the will of God!’’’
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So wrote the monk Robert of Rheims in his
Historia Hierosolymitana (‘History of Jerusalem’) during the early 1100s. Some years earlier, on 27 November 1095, Urban II preached a public sermon outside the town of Clermont in central France, summoning Christians to take part in the First Crusade, a new form of holy war. It was a carefully stage-managed event, in which the pope’s representative, the papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy, supposedly moved by the pope’s eloquence, tore up strips of cloth to make crosses for the crowds. Urban had been travelling through France accompanied by a large entourage from Italy, dedicating cathedrals and churches and presiding over reforming c