Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

The First Crusade and Byzantium 

Page 15

In November 1095, at Clermont (in Auvergne, middle France) the famous council was held. At this meeting so many people had assembled that not enough room was found in town for the visitors, and the multitude was quartered in the open air. After the close of the council, at which some most important current matters, strictly ecclesiastical, were discussed, Urban II delivered a very effective oration, the original text of which has been lost. Some witnesses of the council who wrote down the oration later from memory, give texts which differ very much from one another. Fervently relating the persecutions of the Christians in the Holy Land, the pope urged the multitude to take arms for the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre and of the eastern Christians. With cries of Deus lo volt (God wills it or It is the will of God) the throngs rushed to the pope. At his proposal, a red cross worn on the right shoulder was adopted as the emblem of the future crusaders (hence the name crusaders). They were promised remission of sins, relief from debts, and protection for their property during their absence. There was no compulsion; but there must be no turning back, and the renegade was to be excommunicated and regarded as an outlaw. From France enthusiasm spread all over Italy, Germany, and England. A vast movement to the east was forming, and the real scale and importance of it could not be anticipated or realized at the Council of Clermont.

Therefore, the movement aroused at the Council of Clermont, which in the ensuing year shaped itself into the form of a crusade, was the personal work of Urban II; and for carrying this enterprise into effect he found favorable conditions in the life of the second half of the eleventh century, not only from a religious, but also from a political and economic point of view. While the danger that loomed in Asia Minor became steadily more imminent, the First Crusade had practically been decided upon at Clermont.

The news of this decision came to Alexius as a sudden and disconcerting surprise; disconcerting because he neither expected nor desired assistance in the form of a crusade. When Alexius called mercenaries from the west, he called them for the protection of Constantinople, that is to say, his own state; and the idea of the liberation of the Holy Land, which had not belonged to the Empire for more than four centuries, had for him a secondary significance.

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