Urban II’s 1095 sermon launched two centuries of holy war
At Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II called western Christians to retake Jerusalem, promising spiritual rewards. Papally backed campaigns for the Holy Land then ran, with interruptions, from 1095 to 1291, joined by unofficial popular crusades and a vocabulary that only later settled on the word crusade.
The First Crusade seeded Outremer; the bungled Crusade of 1101 showed how fast momentum could fail, yet smaller follow-ons still thickened Frankish holdings. Edessa’s fall triggered the failed Second Crusade. Later waves swung between bargain and disaster: Jerusalem returned by negotiation in 1229, the Barons’ Crusade of 1239–41 clawed land back, freebooters then sacked the city, and Louis IX struck Egypt and Tunis on later expeditions.
Early Latin preferred journey-words—iter, expeditio, passagium—tied to the Holy Sepulchre. Vernaculars spoke of taking the cross; Spanish crozada appears in 1212, Middle English croiserie later, and modern English crusade only by 1706. Scholarship now distinguishes papally directed Holy Land wars from a wider crusading movement against other foes.
The backdrop was a century of upheaval. Drought and cold spells between about 950 and 1070 brought famine and migration across North Africa and the Middle East, the Holy Sepulchre was briefly destroyed in 1009, and in 1055 the Seljuk leader Tughril I took power within the Abbasid caliphate. In the West, the Peace of God movement tried to rein in knightly violence, and mutual excommunications in 1054 split the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Gregory VII planned a campaign against the Turkomans in 1074 that never launched, and in March 1095 Urban II received envoys from the Byzantine emperor Alexios.
The Muslim world the crusaders entered was fractured. After Nizam al-Mulk and Sultan Malik-Shah died in 1092, the Seljuk realm slid into civil war, with Tutush's sons holding Aleppo and Damascus and a former slave soldier, Yaghi-Siyan, ruling Antioch. Fatimid Egypt suffered its own succession split, which produced the Nizaris, better known as the Assassins. Later, the Second Crusade's collapse in 1148 drained enthusiasm and left the Frankish states exposed to Saladin, while Louis IX's campaigns against Egypt in 1248 to 1251 and Tunis in 1270 both failed.
Source: Crusades
