In 1095 Pope Urban II gave a speech at the Council of Clermont, and this speech talked about all atrocities being committed by the heretic Muslims, about how they tortured and murdered any Christians that went to the holy land, and how these Muslims were constantly expanding their borders and threatening all of Christendom, and this speech was so rousing that it moved huge numbers of Europeans to march out to the holy land and take it back. The speech was so rousing it ended in a long chant of “Deus lo Vult!” or “God wills it!” Most of what was in the speech was false, The Muslims had conquered the Holy Lands, but they weren’t stopping the Christians from making pilgrimages there, and certainly weren’t torturing them, after all, they shared many principals with the Christens. The reason most historians have come up with for this speech was that the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos was feeling threatened by the Muslim armies, and rightly so because after they conquered the Holy Lands the next obvious target was the Byzantine Empire, so it’s suspected that he bribed Urban to raise an army to fight the Muslims for him. Urban’s idea of stirring the population into sending knights did work, but what he didn’t expect was the peasants getting riled up, and under Peter the Hermit, a preacher, over 40,000 peasants started out to Jerusalem, though not before mishaps. Peter’s group consisted wholly upon impoverished knights and poor peasants, all willing to go out a kill people in the middle east, so maybe it isn’t surprising that they decided to pillage and plunder many christian towns on their way. Peter didn’t approve of this, but he didn’t really control them either, so this continued all the way to Constantinople. Alexios, confronted with an army of 40,000 peasants, didn’t know what to do, since he didn’t expect an army until 1196, a year later, decided to let them into the Middle East, and once there the Germans and Italians had an argument and split from the French and English. Peter had lost all control at this point and went to Constantinople to wait for the real crusaders. The two splits, Germans and French, both pillaged and plundered different towns, controlled both by the Muslims, and by their allies. Eventually the Muslim army went to deal with this army in the north, and when they got there they easily slaughtered everybody in the Peoples Crusade. This left only Peter and his 3,000 alive in Constantinople. Five armies left Europe and traveled different paths until uniting at Constantinople, where Alexios got oaths from them all to restore to him all previous Byzantine lands. After that they went out and conquered the City of Nicaea after an attack by the Muslims. After Nicaea they captured Antioch after an eight month siege. After defending against the Sultans army they went down to Jerusalem and after a month long siege the commander of the city let them in in exchange for passage to another city. This was the First Crusade, and the only entirely successful Crusade, since the Third resulted in a treaty and the Sixth was only temporary. All the others were failures, leaving 1 crusade successful, 2 crusades partly successful, and 5 total failures.
School Essays 