Deus Vult: The Call to Crusade

In November 1095, at the Council of Clermont in France, Pope Urban II preached a sermon that would echo for two centuries. The Seljuk Turks had overrun Anatolia and threatened the Byzantine Empire, whose emperor had appealed to the West for mercenaries. Urban transformed that request into something far grander: a call for the warriors of Latin Christendom to stop slaughtering one another and march to liberate Jerusalem and the Eastern Christians, with the promise that those who died would have their sins remitted. The crowd, it was said, roared back 'Deus vult!' — God wills it.

The response was overwhelming and uncontrollable. Before the great lords were ready, a wave of common folk and minor knights set off in the disorganized 'People's Crusade' led by the preacher Peter the Hermit. Undisciplined and fervent, some of these bands began their holy war by massacring Jewish communities in the Rhineland — the first great pogroms of European history. The People's Crusade then marched into Anatolia and was almost annihilated by the Turks.

The real expedition — the 'Princes' Crusade' — set out in 1096: tens of thousands of fighters and pilgrims under leaders like Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto, and Raymond of Toulouse. They converged on Constantinople, where the wary Byzantine emperor extracted oaths from them and ferried them across into Asia, glad to see such a dangerous host moving on toward his enemies.

The march that followed was an ordeal almost beyond belief — across the burning plateau of Anatolia, through hunger, thirst, disease, and constant skirmishing. Armies that had set out tens of thousands strong were whittled down by attrition long before they reached their first great test. That the crusade survived at all, let alone succeeded, struck contemporaries as nothing short of a miracle — and convinced the crusaders that God was marching with them.