Welcome to the Crusades: The First Crusade - Ep 1: Rome

to the Crusades The First Crusade. When the American Prestige Boys approached us about doing a collaboration, we jumped at the chance. After a bit of discussion, looking for a medieval topic with contemporary significance, we settled on the First Crusade. Despite being one of the most important events in recorded history, it is poorly understood by many today, especially those who seek to use its ahistorical legacy to perpetuate similar atrocities.

But more than that, it's also an extremely interesting story, filled with a bunch of weird characters and fascinating battles and sieges. So we decided to do a ten part podcast series chronicling the events of the First Crusade from the perspectives of all four of its major players, Catholic Europe, the Byzantine Empire, the Celgic Turks, and the Fatimid Caliphate. We go into the background, separate fact from fiction, and follow as the crusader armies of Europe travel from west

to east in their attempt to reconquer Jerusalem. We also discussed how the first is the origin point for so many colonial and post colonial problems we face in our postmodern world. What you're about to hear today is the first episode of the series in title Rome. The second episode, Taranto,

will also appear in your podcast feed alongside this one. However, if you want to hear the rest of the series, you'll need to go to American Prestige Dot supporting cast FM Slash Welcome, Dash to Dash, The Dash, The Crusades, Dash the Dash First Dash Crusade. That's a lot of mumbo jumbo hyperlink, but yeah, you know it'll be in the show notes, so just check it out. Go there. Pay just eight dollars to unlock the final eight episodes plus a bonus episode with the reading list for the show.

That's eleven total episodes for just eight dollars, But that price will only last for a couple of weeks, at which point the whole series will go up to ten dollars, which still seems pretty reasonable if you ask me. Oh, and pay should stick around for a special discount code. We're very proud of the series and we hope you

will support us by purchasing it. If you're a fan of medieval history and have always wanted a really extensive deep dive into the First Crusade, or even if you're new to the Middle Ages and just looking for more familiarity, then look no further. We'll be back with your regularly scheduled We're Not So Different next week, but for now, sit back and welcome to the First Crusade.

leader to another. One of those world leaders, Alexios Comnenos, Emperor of the Byzantine Empire, was in desperate need of help to reverse a decades long series of territorial losses in Anatolia to the Muslim Celgic Turks. Though Constantinople was in no danger of falling, the loss of the richest tax, food, and martial recruitment base of its empire was in existential

threats to the empire's long term survival. What's more, they couldn't reverse this loss on their own, as the the empire's once formidable military had become utterly anemic, incapable of pushing the Turks out of Anatolia. So Alexios looked around for allies he could trust, but found his options lacking. He had no money, for mercenaries and no faith in the musliminemies of the Seljuks to be found. The truth was,

Alexios had only one real choice. He would reach out to Pope Urban the Second, the leader of the Catholics of Western Europe, just forty one years after the East West Schism had torn them apart. So it was that Alexios the First came to his fateful decision, sending an envoy to the spiritual leader of Western Christendom to ask for military aid, a request that Urban, who was looking to make his own mark on the Church and history, was all too happy to oblige for his own worldly

and spiritual reasons. Though neither Alexios the First nor Urban the Second knew it, disagreement would spawn a mass popular movement, now known as the First Crusade, that would grow far beyond their ability to control or even properly oversee, such that it would reshape all of Europe, much of the Levant and swathes of North Africa Beyond that, however, this new type of Christian Holy war, this Crusade, and the Crusader ideology that it developed in its wake, still haunt

us to this day. In a very literal sense, the First Crusade is the genesis for every colonial and post colonial horror that Europe and so called Western civilization have committed since that time, an enduring testament to our collective sin. But in order to understand how Alexios's request for aid an Urban's ready assent spawned all of this, we're going to take an in depth look at the First Crusade.

Over the next ten episodes. We will discuss the conflict from the perspectives of all its major players, separate fact from fiction, find out why this wasn't some preordained civilizational conflict between Christianity and Islam, and hopefully move beyond the sanitized Crusader narrative we so often receive. So please join us as we begin our journey east from Western Europe to the Holy Land, starting in the eternal city that is Rome.

So one of the things that begins to happen for all Christians in this period is this idea that the Holy Land somehow belongs to them and it's something that they should always be able to visit and also always control. And I think this has massive knock on effects for the way we now think about the levant the Near Middle East, which for us is almost like something that people in the West think that they can dictate or

should have some say over. And I just do think that it all kind of goes back to a thousand years ago when some people in Western Europe sought that they had a better way of organizing a region that they were nowhere near. You know, we still not given up that ghost. We still feel that we're the ones that you should come to if anything is happening over there.

all of this just stuff. And it started because the Pope just didn't understand like how personally the Christians of Europe were going to take this and how much they they set this thing up as a beacon of hope in their lives, and it would be a turning take. Retaking Jerusalem and then losing it again would be a turning point for Christianity.

Obviously losing Jerusalem, the third holiest city of the faith, very important place, the displacement and death that ensues as the result of the campaigns, all of these things matter. But in the the immediate aftermath of this, well, I mean maybe not quite immediate aftermath, but very close to the end of the Crusading period, when the final Crusader state is done away with, the Mongols come through the region,

and that's a much bigger deal. So any effect that the Crusades might have get sort of washed out by the Mongols. But later on, when the Europeans come back because their appetite's been wetted for the luxuries of the East and all the wonderful things that they found, that's really when you start to see this become a bigger deal, and it takes on a valance of you know, resistance

to the Crusaders. The Europeans that show up later are regarded as you know, Franks as they called all the Crusaders, and you know, it takes on a more emotional basis, like we'll talk about you know, if we do more of these, we will eventually get to talking about Saladin, who's sort of the great Islamic hero of the story, at least as far as the Europeans are concerned. His reputation really is made centuries later when he becomes a

symbol of resistance to the Europeans. It's, you know, he's known at the time, but it's it's not nearly what he becomes.

who were having it pop off. And that's not necessarily how the medieval world itself works, which is what makes the Crusades so interesting.

They never actually met in person, but that's the you know, that's the sense you get from the European sources is like they you know, they were intimately involved with one another. And in the Islamic world, like he founds a dynasty, he rules Egypt for a while. His dynasty is kind of a nothing burger. They're pretty quickly overrun by their

own slave soldiers. But really he doesn't become a big figure until the Europeans come back and make him a major figure, both in terms of like, you know, them coming with this conception that Saladin is like the great figure of Islamic history, and then him taking on the resonance of somebody who resisted the European conquest.

focus on? And we could talk about a lot of different things, from the Gregorian reforms to the investigure of controversy over Henry the Fourth, But where's Rome and where's the church at this moment in history in the middle of the eleventh century.

imperial centers for what had been the Roman Empire. And now we make this really clear cut distinction about what the antique world is and what the medieval world is. But medieval people didn't have that compunction. You know, they don't think they live in the Middle Ages. And people in Rome still think they live in Rome, and people in Constantinople will still tell you that they live in the Eastern Roman Empire. So these are the two very

obvious anchors for Europe at the time. But then, of course also we have to understand that in the medieval period there's a really different way of thinking about who's controlling these situations. Because when I say that Rome considers itself to be the inheritor of Rome, the papacy has been fighting for hundreds upon hundreds of years to have themselves seem as the natural leaders of this romanness. And the thing about the eleventh century is these guys have

finally pulled it off. You know, they spent absolutely centuries up to this point being you know, made fun of, like, oh yeah, buddy, you're the Bishop of Rome. Why don't you calm down, Like we're gonna beat your ass in the street if the local nobility don't like you. Nobody cares about the papacy. But they were grinding it out.

They were writing at texts all about how important they were that they passed down and passed down and passed down, and hundreds of years later they've finally done it and they celebrate by immediately attempting to start a holy war.

But so we have this real center of religious and temporal power, and now that it's got it, it wants to flex itself by doing something violent, which you know, hey, who amongst us hasn't been tempted with a little bit of light conquest here and there once they gained full power.

at this moment? Because my understanding is that this becomes the major question of the late medieval period is one of the major questions is the relationship between the state and the church and who's going to have power? And this is obviously a theme that we're going to be exploring. So what's actually happening in terms of that type of organization at this moment.

In the super it is you know this, it is laid on top of and it becomes part of the superstructure that keeps the medieval European societies that we know in line. They become an integral part of that mechanism. So this is a huge thing. But the church itself is very i mean structurally very similar to like what you might see today. You have the pope, yes as cardinals, you have the bishops the on down to the parish priests, the nuns, the things like that, and so it's kind

of like that. But it's power and the way that it works in these various European states and principalities is vastly, vastly, vastly different than it is today or even one hundred

years ago. Like it is, they have been fighting the investiture controversy with the Holy Roman emperors, and by the beginning of our story in ten ninety five, Pope Urban the Second and the Pope the Papacy has gotten a an upper hand in that regard, at least for the time being because of the you know, walk to Canosa Castle. He's Henry the forest begging for you know, uh, begging in the snow to be forgiven, et cetera, et cetera.

And so they now have in the in the in the big scheme of things, in the power ranking of European medieval European political entities, the Catholic Church is now on top. They're they're on top of everything for right now.

They inched above the Holy Roman Empire. And so they can call upon these states and they they don't have an army themselves, they can call upon these states and say we we need you, you know, to do X, y or z to move the Muslims out of this place, to you know, do kid people out of Sicily, things of that nature.

telling the other party about. And Alexios does this because it's his only option and he had no way of knowing the hell he called down himself and his empires. There's really no way to put it other than that, Yeah, eleanor what aout? What about Urban?

the unpleasantness of Avignon in the fourteenth century. Although I'm team Avignon, but that's a whole different story, you know. And this is a guy who is coming out of a milieu that is very much interested in kind of taming wild boys, right because they got a boys up in France at the time. We have the barely domesticated Normans at this point in time, who have just stopped being vikings about two seconds ago, who are running around

speaking French. You have got a lot of chaos in the Italian lands, which is just that's basically the rule of thumb for the medieval period. But you he comes out fighting, he is eventually made the Bishop of Ostia, and so he kind of moves over into the more Italian mel u and he's able to use this as a ladder all the way to the top of the papacy.

And what does he do with that, Well, he is very much of the opinion that the papacy should be the organizing principle for Christendom in general, right, you know, going back to we mentioned it very briefly, the idea of the Donation of Constantine, which is a forged document that says that the the papacy was given control of Western Europe by the Emperor Constantine when he established Constantinople. Big old forgery never happened, but Pope Urban the Second

would probably go to the mat on that one. Right. He's like, the Pope is more or less the emperor of the Western Empire, and he kind of stands in opposition to Alexios because what he's attempting to do with things like the walk to Canosa with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry, is he's trying to say, emplers are made by the papacy, and they are made by the papacy specifically so that the papacy will have an army to

do whatever it wants. And along comes Alexios saying, oh, hey, we need an army, and Pope Urban the Second is essentially rubbing his hands together because, like Great, I have been delivered an excuse to say, yes, the papacy should be able to raise arms and do what it wants with violence. But when you are the You can't do it yourself. It has to be a reflected thing, right. God has given them temporal authority through religion, but anything violent needs to be done by the secular arm of

the world. So essentially, what Urban is trying to say is that he is able to marshal armies in the name of God. And I always kind of feel bad for Alexius in this because I don't think this was a stupid move on his part. I don't know what other option he really had. It's just he had no way of knowing that he was dealing with Odo over here, who was a very clever guy and had completely different designs on Constantinople.

go on this crusade. But Peter's the one who has to go out or one of many, but but he's the one who really gets uh gets famous from it, has to go out and preach the crusade to the people out there, you know, across Europe.

Like this is not what I asked for and leads them across, you know, very encouraged by Alexios to get them out of Constantinople, leads them across into Asia Minor and then pieces out and goes back to Constantinople. While they get slaughtered by the Turks, which is just an amazing story, and then continues on with the Crusaders to Jerusalem.

I don't think we know very much about what happens to him after Jerusalem's He's not terribly I don't He's not like who's never beatified even by the Catholic Church, so he's not necessarily well regarded in the Church, but just a fascinating figure in all of this for being the guy who is kind of moving and shaking on the ground to make this all happen.

Holy War. I can't believe that I've organized an entire society around this point and that normal people are now taking part in it and doing bad things fundamentally, And this is why, Yeah, the Catholic Church does not claim him because he sort of pops up out of nowhere. And one of the cool things about the medieval period is you've got dudes with names who just scam and manage to get followings, doing vaguely religious things at all times,

and they rise to the top. Baby once in a while you get to learn a name, because no one expected them to scam so successfully, but they do it, and God bless them. They make historiography a much more fun place.

it's that the popes in Rome. One of the things that popes in Rome feel that they are very, very important, and now they are to us, and in the later Middle Ages they were, but in the late Antiquity, in the Early Middle Ages they were not. They were just one of the five patriarchs of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople,

and Jerusalem. So that was a big thing. Then them getting help with the formation of the Holy Roman Empire was another big issue that the people in the East hated, and in the East did Iconoclasm, which was a one hundred and twenty year long internal Orthodox fight about stuff that people in the West hated. They hated, and the first inklings of like the enmity, the long enmity between Venice and Constantinople are begin because of Iconiclasm in the

Holy Roman Empire. So yeah, it's just those things bubbling up. But eleanor you know what broke it, what kind of you know broke it? What was the big cause there?

disinterested in that particular gambit. And indeed, initially the way that Constantinople was set up was under what we call Sassaro papism, So the idea that the emperor was also the head of the church. And yes, you've got the five patriarchs underneath him, but really the emperor is the one who is doing things very Roman right. So when we have Pope Leo the Ninth crop up and send delegations over to Constantinople to say, hey, hey, guys, love what you're doing over here.

in Constantinople. Whatever you're doing over there is some kind of a joke, and people don't take it very lightly when you show up and say, well, you need to regularize underneath us, right, And it just goes to show that the Church is not as powerful as it thinks

it is. So essentially, there is this delegation sent by Luio the ninth to Michael, the first serularious over in Constantinople to say, hey, guys, become Catholic, right, not that they use those words, but basically get underneath the Rome. They say no, thank you, and both parties excommunicate each other. So Constantinople says that's it. The pope is no longer

a Christian, and the Pope says that's it. Everyone in the East are no longer Christians, and this results in a lot of ill will, to put it mildly, So basically, it's just tough guys trying to arm wrestle each other ending up in a slap fight, and we end up in a place where everyone is saying that they're going to build their own treehouse. Right. Then that's about it, and it is basically that dignified as well.

anyway because I'm lazy. There's a couple of things going on. One, which we'll get to when we talk about the importance of Jerusalem is the destruction of the Church or the Holy Sepulcher by the Fatimid califl Hackam, which really sends shivers up and down the spines of good Christians in Europe. But the more immediate immediate event, I guess that sparks Alexios to reach out to the schismatics in the West of appeal for help is the Battle of Mansucret, which

takes place in ten seventy one in eastern Anatolia. The Seljuk Turks of the Seljuk ruling house kind of blows through what had until that point been a fairly stable geographic unit for the Byzantines. And you know, speaking of the Anatolian Peninsula, if you go all the way back to the seventh century, when Byzantium lost most of its territory to the Arabs, to the early Muslim conquest, lost the Levant, that lost Egypt, it lost North Africa, et cetera.

The conquests were stopped at Anatolia because it's surrounded by mountains. It's very defensible. It's very difficult to get over the mountains, or at least it was at a time, very difficult to get over the mountains in a sustainable way, like you could get over and do a raid, but it was difficult to maintain a supply line back to Muslim territory over the mountains. The Byzantines could cut you off. They could, you know, lay traps.

we'll talk about more next time. The upshot is that they lost the Battle of Mansacret, and then that kicked off a whole and you know, Eleanor and Luke, you guys can talk about this, probably more detail than I can, but it kicked off a whole series of internal conflicts within the Byzantine Empire, basically civil war, succession crisis, and as a result, the Byzantines were unable to respond to this battle, which had sort of opened up the gates basically for the Turks to come in, the Seljuks to

lead what was essentially a migration, I mean the Celjucks again, we'll talk more about them next time, but what they led was was as much a migration as a conquest into the Middle East, and so they had all of the baggage, trains, the families, the herds, you know, everything kind of came with them wherever they went. And it very quickly became clear that they were starting to settle on the Anatolian peninsula and there was not much that the buzest Teines could do because they were being racked

by basically a full breakdown of the political entity. But so I'm again, I don't want to talk too much about the battle, but that was what prompted the call. I'm sort of curious, you know, from your guys perspective, what did the Latins know about this? Like what was it just through whatever message they got relayed from Byzanty? Was there a sense that they were aware that the empire was in some danger at this point, like you know, what was going on on the Christian side of things.

not true. People are going constantly to the Holy Land, and it actually tells us rather a lot about the theoretical stability before at this point that you know, you could get up one day in tour or something like that and decide that's it, I've got to make pilgrimage off, I go to Jerusalem. And you could do it. It's something that people expected to be able to pull off. You would need probably to travel in a group, but that standard in the Middle Ages. It's kind of dangerous

to go alone. You know, a lot take this a group of several other Christians also going to Jerusalem, and there's Christians kind of everywhere. That's something that I think also gets lost oftentimes when we're talking about the Crusades. There's all kinds of Christians who live in the Middle East.

You know. Now we might call them Syriac or Coptic or any of these other forms of Christians, but at the time, you know, that's just a flavor of Christian And so what is actually cycling back is not oh gosh, wow, the you know, Manzi Kurt has happened, and these problems have broken out in Anatolia for the Eastern Roman Empire. What gets back to the Western thing is it's really hard to get to Jerusalem now and occasionally Christians are killed. The Christians are being bothered at the tomb of the

Holy Sepulcher. That is what it's getting through because it's kind of like your vacation plans are being interrupted, right, It's like trying to explain something to Americans, so you use a burger. That's the way of doing it. For Western christiansom it's like, you know, your Jerusalem is threatened and therefore your holiday.

over who's going to lead what and win what. And in Spain there is the Iberian Peninsula. Rather there's you know, constant attempts to take it back. The beginning parts of the reconquesta are are going on, and you have all this, you have all these things, and it is ruining the land.

It's making things bad for everyday people, for the peasants, because if you're a peasant in France and you're anywhere near the coast, there's a decent chance your land has either been raided and destroyed by some form of former Viking reform Viking as Eleanor would say, some you know, just just any of these groups, any Frenchman, someone from you know, Toulouse or whatever, is just going to come through and destroy it. And so there's a lot of

like the world is going to ensue. God is mad at us, and when this call comes down, these people who are so afflicted, and their lives are very difficult and very very hard. There are there are famines and everything across the land. They see this as a chance to maybe improve their station. But even if they don't, they can die and go to heaven and they can,

you know, and they could deal with that. And that was the thing that Urban completely misunderstood here because he thought he would get like the warrior peasantry, who are like the better fighters when it comes, you know, to these little forays between local lords, and they just got

they got those guys. But then they for every one of those, they got ten others and it was you know, a few women, a guy missing a leg, a guy who has leprosy, and so you know, it's just like you just you get all these people and they're just like, if I go and I die, then I go to heaven. It doesn't matter. I'll go. And when everything was so bad, why wouldn't they go? And then for the second sons and the nobility and all that I talked about it earlier,

but they needed land. They wanted land. For a lot of these people. It was a very for I'm sorry, not a lot of these people, for a lot of people of that stature and above in terms of the nobility. They thought about it in those worldly terms, and they were like, I am going to make my name for myself. I'm going to take some land, and I am going to be a big man over here because my big brother and my dad suck. And that's what they did.

And when you combine all those things together, you just get this massive call out of people who are tired of being poor and hungry and want to go to heaven. If they're going to die, they might as well, you know, be assured of heaven.

What you tend to do when you're proselytizing is you go to the highest level of society you can. You try to convert the king, you try to convert a couple members of the nobility, and then you hope that they organize society in such a way that it encourages the uptake of Christianity. And that happens really successfully within Rome. So there is this idea of a kind of marshall Christianity.

Because Rome is first and foremost an empire which does things very violent and brutally, so there is very much an idea of kind of expanding Christendom that is part and parcel with military violence. But then this is written a little bit more about by Saint Augustine of Hippo. You know, your boy, my boy, we all love the city of God, we all love his major concerns about boners,

et cetera, et cetera. But he is one of the church fathers as we call them, so basically the guys who sat around and came up with the rules of Christianity in the late Antique period. And he thinks about a lot of this and he says, Okay, there is a way of doing a holy war or a just war, and it requires a few things. The first one is it requires being called by a king or a bishop, right, the bishop's being the princes of the church. Right, you need someone on that stature to say, okay, let's go

do violence. They can't just be like a couple of cousins having a slap fight in a field. Right. The second thing is that it either needs to be defensive because of course it's okay to defend you if you're being violently attacked, duh, Right's that's absolutely fine, no brainer. Or it needs to be involving the recovery of lands, which is how we're going to get around this in the case of the Crusades. Right. Basically, what we're saying is that all of this had been Christendom and now

it's being overtaken. But then it also requires no excessive violence. So you need to use just enough violence, right, And that's where things get off track, and that's where there is a lot of hand ringing, because excessive violence means not only are you not supposed to just be massacring people in the street, but it's all the attendant stuff as well, because we've got to understand these are not professionalized armies. No one is coming in with MREs for them.

When troops start to move in the Middle Ages, they feed themselves by essentially just ravaging the countryside as they move through. And so one of the things for things, one of the things that is required for a war to be just is that you are not supposed to be like stealing the pig out of some peasants field. You're not supposed to be raising crops of people who go through. And that is going to come up time

and again underneath this. So it's possible to have a holy war, but it requires particular rules be followed, and that's going to end up being a problem.

to participate in something like this. It's it also looks a lot like some of the aftermaths of some of the sieges we'll be talking about in the series. Is because they do horrible things to the Muslim inhabitants of Barbastro after the city falls. But it is, it does sort of look like a pilot project. I don't know, Eleanor and Luke if you guys have other you know, interpretations, but it sort of looks like the proof of concept.

forgiveness of sins for people who undertake the journey. They you know that that becomes a thing in the world, and the popes begin to use that, and you start It doesn't all come at once, you don't get because they're like smaller Holy wars, and some of the Spanish Kingdom's been trying to reconquer their territory for a long time, but none of them finally pull it all together where you have, you know, the indulgences, the Holy war and everything like that, and then in order to get the crusade,

you have to add the church on top of it, managing and organizing the thing, and that's what turns it from you know, these kind of piecemeal things into a real top down operation in the sense that you could call it that because you know, as we said, they got a lot more people than they bargained for.

guys show up. In particular, we have chronicles that state a gond chevalier de flans it did bids ultiplicate, right, like, so we have the French and the Burgundians, who are not the same underlined, you know, show up in order to prosecute this war in Sicily. It's Normans, right, and you know Normans are just newly Frenchified, right, and you know, we've got a French pope that is really pushing for

everyone to go over on crusade. So this is actually really appealing to a really specific group of people.

it comes is like with Normans, who were absolutely doing that shit right. Like the Normans were one hundred percent like ya, homie, if you come over here and help me take over this country, you will get a fief. We're one hundred percent doing that, right. And so you have this group of marauding military guys whose basic reason

for existing is to take over stuff. And yeah, okay, that also applies to for example, the English, but the English are Norman at this point, right, So you know, you just have a bunch of French speakers being very French, who think that they have a right to kind of go and mess with anyone who isn't necessarily Christian because they're like, well, we got to point these guys at something, right, otherwise they're going to come over in my backyard and

start messing with this thing. So I mean, if you had Norman's messing with you, you'd be like, I don't know, man, go over to the Holy Land, get like, go on, get right. And that links into what we call the Peace and Truce of God, which is basically the US.

really have first hand encounters with Islam. But there's also like going back a couple of centuries, you have the Battle of Tours, which gets blown up into this like Charles Martel saved Christendom, which a little exaggerated, but like you know, it gets this, you know, great reputation, and you know, I'm sort of curious whether that was on people's minds as well, this idea that Christianity needed to be saved from the Muslims and that you know, this

was a great, great mission that had been you know, great men of the past had done this, and we have to follow on their footsteps.

And you know, the the the veneration of Charles Martel had already had already begun to some degree. And you know, the when they converted to when when the peoples of Europe converted to Christianity, they did so and they brought along the martial nature that a lot of those tribes and groups had across the continent. And when they did that, it was okay, we're going to take Christianity to you know, whatever they considered at the time to be its logical

extent or whatever. And it was the if you were in Western Europe and you thought about this. For the most part, I think it would be because maybe somebody had rolled you up into thinking like this about Muslims.

You maybe maybe a preacher had mentioned it or something like that, especially like the encroachment into Iberia, as we mentioned, because you know, people in France are going to be really worked up about, oh, they're going to come over the Pyrenees one day, even though they tried that once and they were like, yeah, we're not going to deal with that, and they went back and they kind of stayed over there. But whatever, that's a different you know whatever,

And yeah, I think it was on their mind. However, it should be noted that there were people at the time who were like, yeah, I know, that's insane. Those are just people. And there were you know, business people, merchants and and everyone who were just like, you know, I own a Mediterranean shipping concern, like I deal with Muslims all the time. They are you know, fine trading partner,

you know. So there, I think I think they could uh get the rabble up and raise them into a furor about this with anti Muslim sentiment that resembles what you're talking about. But there were definitely people who are like, no, that's fucking stupid, like you know, no, oh.

best you can living alongside Muslim people. But then you know, every once in a while violence breaks out, and I think the thing that we tend to do, you know, probably thanks to Aperin and historians like this, is we have a tendency to pause it that Christianity and Islam have always been in violent contention with each other, Whereas I mean, I guess that my thing is I'm like, who was it in violent contention with each other in

the medieval period? Like, I'm sorry, was there like a group of people who are like hanging out, not attacking each other?

do it. It's just that you've got a really great, baked in excuse between Christianity and Islam.

That is like up here for me. And this one is wild because actually, if you're a big old nerd such as myself and you're into the papal imperial rivalry, this is a hot one because at the time, the big thing that everyone is focused on is that Henry the Emperor, Henry's wife eupraxy f Kiev shows up to be like, Henry is basically forcing me to do orgies, said that I could shag his son and try to use me in a black mass, which is awesome and

gets completely overshadowed, and everyone at the time it's just like, oh my god, Henry is so bad. You know, he's doing like black masses and having like Satan orgies and that that was the headline, right, And it's only later that we have said, okay, wow, really the thing that was going on at the Atenza is that the ambassadors who were sent by Alexias Comminanos showed up and said, Hey, guys, who who's heard of Who's heard of? Manzi Kurt? You

got anyone? Anyone Anatolia, anyone. And but I bring up these two things because this is going to part and parcel for Pope Urban. The second right, is that on the one hand, he's really trying to establish himself as the head of Europe, as the guy who calls the shots, who tells the Holy Roman Emperor what to do, who can point the military forces of Europe in any directions that he wants to, which is why he's sitting here chatting with the Emperor Henry's wife, who's claiming that he's

a Satanist or whatever. Right, So, when you have a request from Constantinople saying, oh, we have these meanies in our backyard, could you help clean them out? You say yes because it places you in opposition to an emperor who is seen as particularly lax, particularly sexual, and not a very good Christian, and that kind of pushes things over. So the Council of Vigenza is important because this is where the request comes from for Western intervention. And also

it's just a hot mess. Oh my god, I love it so much.

oh my god, what do you you know? All of these people just showed up and I had no idea that they were coming, which is completely unbelievable, like absolutely, but but but you know, the also that that the pope was like that there were no pre machinations about this or anything like that, which is completely false because the idea of a crusader of this kind of been discussed by previous popes and blah blah blah, and they and he and Urban and Alexios had even discussed a

prior kind of military alliance against the patch and eggs that fell apart. But it both of both parties in this knew what they were going into, they knew what they were asking for, and they thought that they were going to get something out of it, and there was a source that was finally found in like the nineteen fifties where it's like it's a it's a Greek source and the Greek is like you know from it's from

the early eleven hundreds. And he's like, ha ha ha, we got those idiot Latins to come in and we tricked them and we're getting we're getting and it totally it back and they're just gonna be stuck down there in the Holy Lands or whatever. Oh, Alexios fooled them good. And it's like, it's so funny because like they both sought this. They were like, I'm getting I'm getting this for free. You know, Oh you can't. You don't get

anything for free these days. Yeah, I'll show you, and yeah, you got a lot for free.

another there's another sex scandal happening in European royalties. It's always good, I think, to headline these things with a sex scandal before you get into the real reason that everybody's there. But the main event happens this is in November ten ninety five, and the main event happens on November twenty seventh, which is when Urban gives his big, you know, big barn burner of a speech calling for people to go east to you know, assemble and go

east to fight the infidels. It's we can talk about this. It's not percent clear what he said because they're different sources and they all say different things. Of course, that would be too easy if they said the same thing about what he actually said about Jerusalem and what the goal was initially as he set it out. But yeah, maybe eleanor you could talk a little bit about how all of these different sources go into this, you know, describe the speech.

frank Worum Jerusalem ex Bundinatium. You and I both know and love it, obviously, but because he was there, and so he was there and he wrote this down first, and it's a big, long speech where basically he comes up and says like that this is something that the Christians in the West need to do for their brethren in the east, right, And he's got some good stuff.

He says, your brethren who live in the East are in urgent need of your help, and you must hasten to give them that age which has been promised them. The Turks and Arabs have attacked them and have conquered the territory of Romania, which is the Greek empire as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont. So if you permit them to continue thus for a while with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. And so basically this is

like you know that there's too many of them. You need to get over there and basically cut the snake's head off, because otherwise things are going to get worse

and worse and worse. But importantly, what he then says is on this account, I, or rather the Lord, beseech you, as Christ's heralds, to publish this everywhere, and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot, soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians, and to destroy the vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present, it meant also for those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it.

So days volt like this thing like that. God commands and wiels these things. And then he says, all who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the Pagans, She'll have immediate remission of sins. So there you go, that's what you need. Right immediate remissions of sins. This is for everyone. It's your duty, not just if you're here right now, but it's your duty to publicize this, to go tell everyone about this. And one way or another, all versions of

the speech agree on this, right. We all agree that there was a plentiary indulgence involved. It was said that everyone needs to be involved, not just you know, the lordly classes. But the only thing we actually have recording this is a letter that Urban wrote in ten ninety five, and it's a letter of instruction to crusaders, and basically he says that the same thing, but in less florid terms.

So basically he talks about a barbaric fury that has been laid waste in the Orient, and he says that intolerable servitude has been placed on the church there, and so he says that people need to actually go over there and do something about this, and he names people who should be at the head of this group of soldiers that are going over But it's a lot more boring, like it's really really dry in comparison to the barn storming speeches that we get out of Fulture and people

like that. So all we know is the basics of what went down. But having said that, look, I tell you what, minieval people simply love a sermon. For them, this is like Friday night television. This is as good as it gets. It's like watching WWE. You know, we might say, oh, this is kind of boring, but for them, they're like, hell yeah, brother, Like I'm going in over there.

And we get lots of lots of versions. But that just tells us how much it still lives rent for in the minds of everyone in the medieval period.

in communion with the East. Three you guys are too fucking violent, we are, And and Fulture says this is a quote quote going to export the violence end quote elsewhere. So so those three things, and then as Eleanor mentioned, the plenary indulgence was also mentioned to some degree, So like those are the things that can be agreed upon, and there's other stuff that's in there or you can make reference from based on later findings. But yeah, it's pretty much that we don't know what it was. It

was really fiery. People got like they were they were the spirit was alive within them after they heard it, and you know, it flowed from there there you go, and they went out and preached.

kind of interpretations. But there's also the genuine interpretation that people felt like this was a religious obligation they had to do it. It was you know, what Jesus wanted us to do was go and you know, kill Muslims and take their land and and you know, these things are often put in conflict with one another, like you have

one interpretation or the other. And I sort of I want you guys to to kind of make them, make them go together, because I don't think you can fully explain why people went on the crusade without some genuine appeal to piety and feeling like this is this is the right thing to do. But at the same time,

there were material opportunities. It seems like at least on this first attempt, right maybe later on it would become a parent that like, you're not going to make a whole lot of money go on a crusade, But at this moment, you could certainly imagine people thinking, Wow, this is going to be a good way for me to kind of, you know, set myself up for the future. So what was the How did these kind of ideas or any sort of motivations exist alongside one another.

these are things that are dictated by God. Right, we're not at the divine right of kings yet, that's an early modern thing, but there certainly is the idea of divine providence and the idea that kings are kings because

God wishes them to be so. So, yes, there might be some monetary gain from you if you go on crusade like this, but I also want to point out that that is something just for the nobility, right, Like, peasants don't think that they're going to go over there and they are going to become, you know, the Prince of Antioch. That's not what they think is going to be happening. It might be something for nobles who have the ability to set this up, but peasants are not

doing it for that reason. And we have a trouble with the historiography, which is that you know, we hear from rich people. That's who can read and write, that's who can store the documents, that is whose voices come through loud and clear over time. And so we have a tendency to say, oh, these guys are just doing it because they're a second son and this was the

only way for them to get land. But most of the people who went on crusade were just a guy, and that isn't what they sought to get out of it. So I think the way to think about it is that this is a genuine religious belief that might have some knock on benefits for you as well. It's kind of a win win and less of a oh yeah, I'm going to paper over my obvious bloodlust and desire

for riches with some idea of spirituality. That's a modern way of doing things at that medieval people are fundamentally kind of uncapable of doing because that's just not how they think.

something like that. They rarely have any food to eat. You can go over there and you can be like, I'm fueled with the righteous fury to retake Jerusalem, while at the same time being like, and if I die, it's better than dying of starvation in a field. And you know, you can go all the way up from there to the people who at the top, where you know, the high lords who are like, I'm going over here to become the Prince of Antioch or whatever. But at the same time, some of those high lords were also

genuinely fueled by religious devotion to some degree. And we'll talk about them next time we get to the Normans and stuff. But you know, they weren't all crass opportunists, even though a whole lot of them were. But you know, I think it's just something where the amount to which the religious fervor fueled them varies from person to person,

as it does nowadays. With any religious thing. But if you try to dismiss that solely, then you dismiss the feelings of ninety seven percent of the people who went on crusade, because there's no way the poor peasant from Tours is going to think that they're getting a lordship in Jerusalem from this. You know that's not a thing.