Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

The First Crusade and Byzantium 

Page 9

In these letters the question was not only of a crusade for the liberation of the Holy Land. Gregory VII was planning an expedition to Constantinople in order to save Byzantium, the chief defender of Christianity in the East. The aid procured by the pope was to be followed by the reunion of the churches and by the return of the schismatic eastern church to the bosom of the true Catholic church. One is given the impression that in these letters it is a question rather of the protection of Constantinople than of the conquest of the Holy Land. Moreover, all these letters were written before the eighth decade of the eleventh century, when Jerusalem passed into the hands of the Turks and when the position of the Palestinian Christians grew worse. Thus, in Gregory's plans the Holy War against Islam seems to have taken second place; it seems that, in arming the western Christians for the struggle with the Muslim east, the pope had in view the schismatic east. The latter seemed to Gregory more horrid than Islam. In one of his briefs concerning the regions occupied by the Spanish Moors, the pope openly declared that he would prefer to leave these regions in the hands of the infidel, that is to say, of the Muhammedans, rather than see them fall into the hands of the disobedient sons of the church. If the messages of Gregory VII embody the first plan of the crusades, they show the connection between this plan and the separation of the churches in 1054.

Like Michael VII, Alexius Comnenus, especially under the pressure of the horrors of 1091, made appeals to the West, asking that mercenary auxiliaries be sent. But the interference of the Cumans and the violent death of the Turkish pirate Tzachas ended the danger, so that from the point of view of Alexius, western auxiliaries seemed useless to the Empire in the following year, 1092. Meanwhile, the movement, created by Gregory VII in the West, spread widely, thanks especially to the confident and active Pope Urban II. The modest auxiliaries asked for by Alexius Comnenus were forgotten. Now it was a question of a mass movement.

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