On Tuesday the 27th of November 1095, in an open field outside the cathedral city of Clermont in the Auvergne, the French-born Pope Urban II preached a sermon to an audience of bishops, abbots, and lay nobles whose surviving accounts — there are at least five, written by participants or near-contemporaries — record different versions of what he said. The substantive call was for a military pilgrimage to recover the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem from Seljuk Turkish control and to assist the Eastern Roman emperor Alexios I, whose ambassadors had appealed to Urban earlier that year for military help against the Turks of Anatolia. The crowd is reported to have responded with the cry Deus vult — "God wills it." Volunteers were invited to take a cloth cross to be sewn onto their clothing, marking their pledge. Urban set a departure date of the Feast of the Assumption (the 15th of August) the following year. In the event the response was much larger than anyone had anticipated.
The First Crusade was the first of the eight (or nine, depending on numbering) major Christian armed pilgrimages to the eastern Mediterranean between 1095 and 1291. It was also the only one that fully succeeded in its original objective. The campaign that followed Urban's sermon was, by any military measure, an extraordinary feat: an army of perhaps 70,000 people (the figures are disputed; some estimates are as high as 100,000, including non-combatants) marched approximately 4,500 kilometres from western Europe to Jerusalem, in three to four major divisions led by various princes, without a centralised command structure or a fixed supply system, fighting at least three pitched battles and four major sieges, and arrived at the Holy City with about a quarter of the original force still present. The original objective was achieved. The political result was the establishment of four crusader states in the Levant that would last, at various sizes, for the next two centuries.
The People's Crusade
The first wave to depart was not the one Urban had asked for. The People's Crusade — an unauthorised expedition led by the popular preacher Peter the Hermit — left in early 1096, before the official August departure date, with perhaps 20,000 to 40,000 people, most of them peasants and small townsmen with little military training. The expedition marched east through the Rhineland (where it conducted pogroms against the Jewish communities of Mainz, Worms, Cologne, and Trier in May and June 1096 — the first organised anti-Jewish massacres in medieval Christian Europe and the templates for many to follow), through Hungary, and into Byzantine territory, where the emperor Alexios I — alarmed at the disorganised and ill-disciplined force — ferried them across the Bosphorus into Anatolia and effectively abandoned them to the Seljuk Turks. They were ambushed and largely massacred at Civetot on the 21st of October 1096, with perhaps a few thousand survivors making it back to Constantinople, where they joined the main armies the following spring. Peter the Hermit survived and would be at the siege of Jerusalem two years later.
The princes
The main expedition — the so-called Princes' Crusade — left in four contingents from August 1096 onwards. The leaders were a remarkable group of senior nobility, none of them kings (Philip I of France was excommunicate; the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was in conflict with the papacy; William II of England was uninterested): Godfrey of Bouillon (the Duke of Lower Lorraine, who would become the first Frankish ruler of Jerusalem) and his brothers Eustace III of Boulogne and Baldwin (later Baldwin I); Raymond IV of Toulouse (the senior commander, count of one of the largest French principalities); Robert II of Normandy (William the Conqueror's eldest son); Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred (the Norman princes of southern Italy); Stephen of Blois (Robert of Normandy's brother-in-law); Hugh of Vermandois (the French king's brother); and the papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy. The leaders did not get on. Adhémar's role as legate, until his death of plague at Antioch in 1098, was largely to prevent them from openly fighting each other.
The four contingents converged on Constantinople in late 1096 and early 1097. Alexios I extracted oaths of fealty from each leader (with varying success — Raymond IV refused outright and gave only a more limited promise; Bohemond, characteristically, took the oath and then ignored it) before ferrying them across the Bosphorus. The first major Crusader operation, the siege of Nicaea, captured the Seljuk capital of Anatolia in June 1097 — but the city surrendered to Byzantine envoys rather than to the Crusaders, and Alexios kept it. The crusaders defeated a major Turkish counter-attack at Dorylaeum on the 1st of July 1097 and then began the long, gruelling march across the central Anatolian plateau in the summer of 1097, losing perhaps a third of their force to heat, thirst, and lack of supplies.
Antioch
The single most important operation of the Crusade was the siege of Antioch, the largest fortified city in northern Syria, which the Crusaders besieged from October 1097 to June 1098. The siege almost destroyed the crusading army: the defenders were well supplied, the surrounding countryside was hostile, and large Turkish relief forces were converging from Mosul. The city was finally taken on the 3rd of June 1098 by treachery rather than assault — Bohemond of Taranto had bribed a tower commander to admit the Crusaders by night — and the citadel held out for another month under the Seljuk emir Yaghi-Siyan. Three days later the Crusader army was itself besieged inside the city by the relief force of Kerbogha of Mosul, which had arrived too late to save the defenders but in time to trap their successors.
The siege-within-a-siege at Antioch was the lowest moment of the Crusade. Food was almost exhausted; morale was at the breaking point; some Crusaders escaped over the walls (the "rope-walkers," who were publicly humiliated when they reappeared). The episode that turned the situation was the discovery, by a previously unimportant Provençal soldier named Peter Bartholomew, of what he claimed to be the Holy Lance — the spear that had pierced Christ's side at the Crucifixion — buried in the cathedral of Antioch. The discovery (which has been variously interpreted, from genuine religious experience to deliberate fraud) electrified the army. Three days later, on the 28th of June 1098, the Crusaders sallied out under Bohemond, with the Lance carried as their battle standard, and defeated Kerbogha's army in a battle the Muslim sources describe as inexplicable. (The Crusader sources describe it as miraculous. Both accounts agree that the Crusader army should have lost.) Bohemond claimed Antioch for himself and stayed there as the founder of the Principality of Antioch, the second crusader state. The bulk of the Crusader army moved on toward Jerusalem.
The siege of Jerusalem
The crusader army that arrived before Jerusalem on the 7th of June 1099 was reduced to about 1,500 knights and 12,000 infantry. The city was held by an Egyptian Fatimid garrison (the Fatimids had taken Jerusalem from the Seljuks in 1098). The defences were formidable. The Crusaders had no siege engines and the local timber was insufficient to build them; the trees they needed came in by sea, on a small Genoese fleet that reached Jaffa in mid-June.
The siege began with an unsuccessful direct assault on the 13th of June. Over the next five weeks the Crusaders built siege towers (one for each major commander's contingent) and prepared a second assault. On the 8th of July they conducted a barefoot religious procession around the walls of the city — emulating Joshua at Jericho — and on the 13th of July they launched the renewed attack. Godfrey of Bouillon's siege tower reached the wall on the morning of the 15th of July; the Crusaders forced their way over and fought through the streets of the city. The massacre that followed was complete: the entire Muslim and Jewish population of the city was killed, men, women, and children. The contemporary sources — Christian, Muslim, and Jewish — agree on the scale, though they disagree on the numbers (Crusader sources speak of fighting in blood up to the knees; Muslim sources, of 70,000 killed at al-Aqsa alone; modern estimates place the death toll between 20,000 and 30,000). The Eastern Christian population of the city, which had been expelled by the Egyptian garrison before the siege, was permitted to return. The Crusade had achieved its original objective. The new state would now have to be invented.
End of Chapter I