Christians and the First Crusade
Douglas James explains why so many in the Christian West answered Urban II’s call to arms following the Council of Clermont in 1095.
Though Latin Christendom’s response to Pope Urban II’s cry for crusade was nothing akin to Anna Comnena’s hyperbolic assertion that the ‘whole of the West and all of the barbarian races’ converged on her father’s city of Constantinople, it was nothing short of remarkable and certainly unprecedented. Lest we forget the act of ‘crusade’ was a voluntary exercise, that people (sometimes entire peoples) gathered from the geographical fringes of Christendom would suggest that Urban manufactured at Clermont an ideological ‘synthesis’ that culminated in the largest exodus hitherto known to mankind.
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