First Crusade

In 1095 the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked the Council of Piacenza for military support against the Seljuk-led Turks, and later that year Pope Urban II gave a speech at the Council of Clermont supporting the request and urging faithful Christians to undertake an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. All the versions of the speech were written after Jerusalem had been captured, so it is difficult to know what was actually said. The call met an enthusiastic popular response across all social classes in western Europe. The Crusader armies stormed and captured Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 and a large fraction of its residents were massacred, though some historians propose that the scale of the massacre has been exaggerated in later medieval sources. Four Crusader states were established in the Holy Land, and the First Crusade was the first of a series of religious wars, the Crusades, that the Latin Church initiated, supported and at times directed.