As the year 1000A.D. was approaching the strength of Christianity in
Western Europe was growing along with its population. The newly reformed and
organized Church began to gain great power. A new Europe was being born with
the Catholic Church as a force in every area of life.
In Christian beliefs, the savior, Jesus Christ was to return to earth
and bring judgment on its people. Many clergy members along with lay people
believed this would take place in the year 1000A.D. . Knowing this, the people
of Europe awaited the return of Christ and feared the Wrath of God. Religious
people wanted to make up for their sins and avoid the horrors of eternal
damnation. Clergy members were often consulted to figure out what would be a
suitable penance. " The Church itself still frequently imposed pilgrimages as a
penance" (Campbell p.14). A pilgrimage to the Holy Land was not an easy task to
say the least. The road to Jerusalem was jagged. On the way to Jerusalem,
pilgrims were often murdered by thieves. They were defenseless and often did
not return. Some pilgrims did return from the Holy Land. They came back with
tales that planted the seeds for a Crusade.
"The pilgrims that returned from the Holy City of Jerusalem recounted
tales, often grossly exaggerated, of the horrible pollution of the sacred places
at the hands of the Turks" (Campbell p23). Other stories of the destruction of
the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the burial place of Jesus, by the Turks
surfaced in the early eleventh century. The news of the destruction of the
Sepulcher was mourned in every Christian country. The nations looked to Rome
for a solution to this most serious of Problems.
The Byzantine emperor asked for the aid of the Pope to help him with his
Turk problem. To the Pope, it would be a strategic move to aid the Byzantine
emperor. The Pope realized that this offered the opportunity to re-establish
the universal Church and establish the supremacy of Rome. In 1095, at the
Council of Clermont in southern France, "Urban II challenged Christians to take
up their weapons against the infidels and participate in a holy war and
recapture the Holy Land" (Spielvogel,p344). Pope Urban II addressed the French
telling them of the horrors imposed on the Holy Land. He told them all of the
destruction and desecration of churches, and the torturous treatment of the
Christian inhabitants of the Holy Land. The large crowd listening to the Pope's
speech was saddened and outraged. The Pope called on Christian knights to set
out to the Holy Land and free it from the claws of the pagan Seljuk Turks. He
promised any knight who set out to the Holy Land " the remission of sins and be
sure of the incorruptible glory of the kingdom of heaven" (Spielvogel,p345).
The crowd immediately supported it by crying out " It is the will of
God"(Spielvogel,p345). This can be seen as the starting point of the period of
the Crusades.
A Crusade immediately followed known as the Peasant's Crusade. This
Crusade was not organized by the papacy. They were mostly poor or peasants and
were inadequately prepared. On their way to the East they terrorized the
Balkans by looting and persecuting the Jews. Eventually, they reached
Constantinople and were sent by the Emperor Alexius I to Asia Minor where they
were slaughtered by the Seljuk Turks.
A papal supported Crusade was soon to follow. The soldiers for the
first true Crusade were recruited from the warrior class of knights. By 1096, "
an international military force, with a large nucleus of knights from central
and southern ...