:: Media Times Review Blog ::

This synod is significant in that it represented a genuine attempt to bring an end to the contentious rivalry, which had threatened the unity of Christendom. That Alexius felt confident enough to initiate such proceedings demonstrates that the first 10 years of his reign had been relatively successful. He confronted the two most prominent questions of the period head-on. On the one hand he had used diplomacy and tact with which to calm the perpetual threat of Norman aggression, and, through sheer force of arms on the other, had successfully crushed the Pechenegs. (See our informational item on the Pechenegs on page 6.)

This allowed Alexius to turn his thoughts toward strengthening and maintaining his frontiers with Asia. However, due to the fact that the Byzantine “treasury was short of money, while recruitment for the navy and army slackened seriously,”2 Alexius was faced with a dilemma. While on the one hand the empire “would previously have resented, and resisted, any attempt by the barbarians of the Latin West to interfere in Palestine or Syria,”3 on the other Alexius “seems to have felt that the western European market, which could provide an abundance of luckless knights and cheap soldiers, had not been sufficiently exploited.”4

When the Byzantines had lost almost the whole of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert, Alexius had appealed for help to Gregory VII, although the Investiture Controversy inevitably meant that the pope was so busy trying to sort out the problems of the West that he had either little or no time to think about those of the East.

In 1090, Alexius also had serious negotiations with Count Robert of Flanders as the latter happened to travel through Constantinople on his return from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Robert agreed to send a contingent of 500 knights to assist the Byzantines in their struggle against the Pechenegs, who at that time were threatening to encroach upon the capital itself. But while Alexius was keen to secure Constantinople’s eastern frontiers and eager to hire Western mercenaries in order to achieve such an objective, he never envisaged that his counterparts in the West would launch anything like a huge military crusade to remove the infidel from the Holy Land. As far as he was concerned, Palestine was irrelevant if the Byzantine Empire itself was in danger of collapse and his primary motive was to reclaim the lands that had been stolen by his enemies.

On November 27, 1095, at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II delivered the emotional speech that launched the First Crusade. Employing a multitude of colorful adjectives with which to motivate and inspire his listeners, the pope described how “the Turks, a Persian race, have overrun the eastern Christians right up to the Mediterranean Sea. Occupying more and more of the land of the Christians on the borders of Romania [the Byzantine Empire], they have conquered them . . . slaughtering and capturing many, destroying churches and laying waste the kingdom of God. So, if you leave them alone much longer they will further grind under their heels the faithful of God.”5

There is little doubt that Urban II sought to play upon the emotions of his audience, but, according to author Marcus Bull—who has recently taken a fresh look at the events leading up to the First Crusade—few people were actually present during the meeting at Clermont, “and only a small minority of those who went on the crusade could claim that they had heard”6 the call to arms. In fact the meeting was mostly comprised of ecclesiastical representatives, and few lay folk were actually present. The pope’s message found its way across Europe by way of preachers—men like Peter the Hermit—but who could have foreseen that tens of thousands of people from all walks of life would seek to converge upon the “Holy Land” in defense of their faith?

While the actual motives of the participants themselves will be discussed in due course, the Catholic Church does seem to have been driven by a genuine sense of religious piety. In addition, “Urban was well disposed toward Alexius as a result of their earlier negotiations, and he sincerely wanted to help and protect the eastern Christians. He felt that if the Christians of the West went to the support of their brothers in the East, the eastern Emperor, who had already shown himself amenable, would be so grateful that all differences would be resolved and the whole of Christendom united (as it must be) under the leadership of Rome.”7

However, Urban II did consciously seek to exaggerate the problems that had beset the eastern fringes of Christendom. Indeed, whilst he vilified the character of the murdering, pillaging Turk, he also severely overestimated the potential of the Turkish army. Despite all the scare-mongering at Clermont, by 1098 the Turks had lost control of Jerusalem to the Egyptians. But my use of this example is not necessarily intended to suggest that the papacy was somehow adhering to a secret agenda or that the pope was seeking to deceive those who sought to take his words in a literal sense. On the contrary, perhaps Urban II simply got slightly carried away by his own propaganda. Any Christian worthy of the name was certain to be outraged by the rise of a “heathen” (since Christians of that era regarded Islam as heathen) enemy that sought to impose its alien methods across the very land in which Christ and his disciples had walked more than a millennium before.

Meanwhile, however, Alexius I was greatly dismayed at the incredible reaction his request for help had inadvertently set in motion: “He had asked for mercenaries and auxiliaries to fight with the Byzantine armies. But what he provoked was a whole army, a succession of whole armies, almost a mass migration from West to East; and he can hardly have enjoyed discovering that four of the eight leaders of the First Crusade were Normans.”8

At first, the crusaders appeared to be guided by spiritual motives, believing that “if people fought God’s enemies on earth and completed a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, their actions would receive a spiritual reward of remarkable magnitude.”9