ABSTRACT
On 27 November 1095, at the end of a great church council at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade – a call to free the holy city of Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims. The response to his appeal was quite remarkable: spectators at Clermont interrupted his speech with cries of ‘God wills it!’ and hundreds begged to join the expedition. News of the crusade spread rapidly through Christian Europe; Fulcher of Chartres, a participant in the expedition, wrote that people ‘of any and every occupation’ took the cross. Once the crusaders had assembled he commented: ‘whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges [Savoyards], Lotharingians, Allemani [South Germans and Swiss], Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Dacians [Romanians], Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians’ (Fulcher of Chartres, tr. Ryan, 1969: 88). Representatives of the last two groups probably joined the expedition en route, but the remainder had been attracted by Urban’s initial call to arms. The crusade therefore appealed to people from almost every level of society right across Christian Europe.
Why had Urban’s message provoked such a reaction? The pope had managed to draw together a number of key concerns and trends in late eleventh-century society and synthesised them into a single, highly popular idea. As we noted in the introduction, spiritual issues were a prominent factor governing peoples’ lives at the time of the First Crusade. It was an intensely religious age: the number of saints’ cults was increasing, along with interest in relics and the observation of feast days.
