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

folks, what you'll hear today are two episodes from a brand new, limited edition podcast series that we did with Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison from American Prestige called Welcome to the Crusades: The First Crusade. it's a ten-episode deep dive into the famous and infamous First Crusade, undertaken by Catholic Europe at the instigation of the Byzantines in 1095 to retake Anatolia and Jerusalem. given it is one of the most fascinating and important events in human history, we thought it would be perfect to discuss, especially given its continuing contemporary relevance with Christian Nationalists in power across the globe. Episode 1: Rome details the background and lead up to the preaching of the First Crusade. Further, episode 2: Taranto, will show up in your podcast feed shortly after this one, so you can get a feel for the whole series. if you enjoy them, and we know you will, you can unlock the final 8 episodes, plus a bonus reading list mini-episode for just $8. after two weeks, the price will go up to $10 but we think it's worth it regardless, clocking in at well over 10 hours of history on the First Crusade. if you're interested in listening to the whole series, please visit https://americanprestige.supportingcast.fm/welcome-to-the-crusades-the-first-crusade

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Hello, and welcome back to We're Not So Different, a
podcast about how I've always been idiots. Folks. We've got
no patron questions this week. Because you're hearing my voice
like this, you know it's time for a very special episode.
For the past few months, Eleanor and I have been
working very hard on a limited series with Daniel Bestner

(00:54):
and Derek Davidson from the American Prestige podcast called Welcome
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,

(01:16):
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

(01:38):
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

(02:01):
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

(02:23):
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

(02:45):
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

(03:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Hello everyone, and thanks for joining this collaboration between American
Prestige and We're not So Different. I'm Danny Bessner here
as always with my comrade Derek Davison, and we're joined
by Eleanor Yanniga and Luke Waters, our favorite medievalists to
explore the Crusades. We'll talk about everything from the Catholic
Church to Islam, from the papacy to programs. Thank you

(03:48):
for joining us on this journey.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
In January ten ninety five, one single decision permanently altered
the whole long course of world history in ways so
monumental that it still affects the lives of every single
human being alive today. However, far from what we might imagine,
this decision wasn't considered particularly significant or exceptional at the time.

(04:22):
It was instead an ordinary bit of state craft, a
mere request to form an unofficial alliance from one world
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

(04:47):
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

(05:09):
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

(05:32):
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

(05:53):
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

(06:15):
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.

(06:35):
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

(06:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
Hello, everyone, Welcome to the Crusades. Before we get going,
I think it would be useful to talk about why
the Crusades. What are we trying to understand here? What
do the Crusades teach us about today? Why are we
focusing on them?

Speaker 3 (07:37):
I think for me, the deal with the Crusades is
they're one of the organizing principles of the High and
Late Medieval period in Europe. These are a series of wars, yes,
but they're also a series of almost psychically what am

(07:57):
I trying to say here, psychically driving forces for all Christians.
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.

(08:19):
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

(08:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
Yeah, And for me, I think a big part of
it is the scale. This is a mass movement, it's
not it's not a class movement. It's not a revolution,
but it is a mass movement. It is a literal
mass of people, tens of thousands of peasants coming out,

(09:15):
people who were disabled, the sick and infirm, and the
elderly just coming out so they could try to go
to the Holy Land. And this unleashed a fervor amongst
European Christendom that resulted in you know, pogroms and and
all of this just stuff. And it started because the

(09:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
And also, my sense is that we're going to talk
about Islam a little bit, and so Derek, maybe you
should talk how does this reshape Islam? How do the
crusades basically push the world of Islam in a different direction.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
So the immediate effect on Islam, the Islamic world is
not huge. The effect comes later because this is a
key point in the road toward the age of Discovery
and eventually the European conquest of pretty much everything which
the Middle East is dealing with, you know, the Islamic

(10:37):
world broadly is dealing with still to the present day. Initially,
I think, you know, there are effects on the Islamic world.
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.

(10:59):
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

(11:21):
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,

(11:43):
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

(12:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:10):
I think that's such a good point, Derek, because one
of the things that is just true of the Middle
Ages often is this way of Europeans thinking that they
have some kind of cultural touchstone or they're really organizing things,
and the Islamic world is like, what, huh, didn't notice it?
You know, And because of how things have shaken out,

(12:33):
we tend to put everything at the doorstep of Europeans
and say, oh, look, these guys are really the ones
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.

Speaker 4 (12:48):
I mean, not to like dwell on him because we're
not going to talk about him in this series. But
like the my, my concept of Saladin when I you know,
started studying Islamic history we got to the Crusades was
completely turned upside down because in Europe he's this like
great hero. I mean, he's a romantic figure. He and
Richard are you know, fighting duels all over the place.

(13:09):
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

(13:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
The only Muslim in Dante's Inferno who is not in
a lower part of Hell. Celady gets to be up
there at the top circle one with the righteous Pagans.

Speaker 2 (14:03):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (14:04):
That's what you need to know about how high solid
and was held in therapy and imaginations.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Yeah, sorryveral hundred years later. Yeah, he really occupied a
particular space. So, as you all know, the title of
this first episode is Rome. So let's talk about the
eternal city. What is Rome's function in the medieval period
during this time? Why is it an important city to
focus on? And we could talk about a lot of

(14:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
So we've chosen to start with Rome for a number
of reasons. But the first is definitely linked to the
fact that the Crusades, in one way or another are
kicked off because over in Constantinople they need some help.
And fundamentally, Rome and Constantinople are the two anchors, certainly

(15:06):
of the late Antique period. You know, they are two
sides of the same coin, and the two religious and
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

(15:26):
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

(15:50):
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

(16:13):
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

(16:35):
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

(16:56):
of light conquest here and there once they gained full power.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
I just want to say something here because American Prestige
believes that the investiture or the donation of Constantine was
a real thing. So I don't know, definitely demigrating Rome.
So like, this is our position on the podcast that
he definitely gave power to the popes to rule the
Western Empire.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
Point of disagreeing here, this is our first immediate class
because we're not so different is team Holy Roman Empire.
We are imperial in this bitch, you know, we Constantine
in this monucker. All right, So I.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Don't really I really didn't expect you to say that, Derek.
I don't know what I thought it was going to be.

Speaker 4 (17:41):
You know, I got to stand up for what I
believe in here, guys.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Well we believe in Derek and I believe we believe
in it. I'm the only Jew on this podcast, so
I will also be playing a particular role. But for
people who might not be aware of, like the relationship
between state and church in this period, how does the
church which actually function? Is it a proto state form,
does it have an army? How is it actually organized

(18:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:24):
I think that when we look back on it with
our with our modern view, we look back on it
with hindsight, one thing that is very hard, you know,
because we're not so different. We literally believe that we
are not so different. But one thing is very that
is very different and very hard is the pervasive nature
of Christianity, the way that it is wrapped into everything.

(18:49):
The way that it is enmeshed in not just the
spiritual lives or even the cultural lives, but the daily lives.
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.

(19:13):
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

(19:35):
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

(19:59):
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

(20:19):
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

(20:40):
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.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
So we're gonna be talking a bit more when we
get into the main content, But before we go on,
I think it would be useful to situate listeners with
who are the main characters are going to be focusing
on in this episode? Where did they come from? So
the big three are Alexios the first, Komenos, Pope Urban
the second, and Peter the hermit. So who are these

(21:13):
three wonderful gentlemen, that we'll be spending our time talking about.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
Alexios the First Comninos is the emperor of the Byzantine
Empire based in Constantinople. He is the first emperor of
the Komninos dynasty. As I referenced earlier, he overthrew, helped
overthrow the Duca who came before him, and he and
Urban are kind of funny because they literally both think

(21:39):
they're going to get something for nothing out of this.
They both are like, I'm going to do this, and
they have a secret motive behind it that they're not
telling the other party about. And Alexios does this because
it's his only option and he had no way of

(21:59):
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?

Speaker 3 (22:08):
Our buddy Urban, Oh, our buddy Urban. He's a good one.
Like in the pope rankings, he's one of the wilder ones.
But one of the things I think is incredibly important
to understand about Pope Urban the second is our boy
was actually born Odo of Chatillon, so he's coming from
a French context, which is going to be a big

(22:30):
deal in terms of recruitment and who gets pulled onto crusade.
So we're often used to thinking of pope's as coming
almost exclusively from the Italian lands, except for, you know,
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

(22:51):
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

(23:13):
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

(23:34):
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

(23:58):
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

(24:21):
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,

(24:45):
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

(25:10):
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,

(25:32):
who was a very clever guy and had completely different
designs on Constantinople.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
Yeah, and now let's turn to one of my favorite
things about the medieval period, which is people with dope names. So,
Peter the Hermit? Was he a hermit? Why did he
become a hermit? And tell me about this wonderfully name Peter.

Speaker 4 (25:56):
I like Peter because he's just an absolute scout as
far as I can tell, Like, he's a crap.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
So, yeah, he was a.

Speaker 4 (26:05):
Priest in Amian. And you know, there's sort of the
like with as with any great undertaking, you have the
idea guy. And then you have the guy who goes
out and makes things happen. And like Urban is the
one who proposes the crusade. He makes this big speech
which we'll get to, uh, you know, proposing that everybody
go on this crusade. But Peter's the one who has

(26:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (26:37):
And just you know, Eleanor can go into much more
detail about this, but I I he's he's just got
such a great story because he recruits mostly commoners. And
and we'll we'll talk about this in a later episode.
In what's known as the People's Crusade, just a ragtech
group of people who show up on the doorstep of Constantinople,

(26:58):
and Alexios is like, what are you people doing here?
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.

(27:24):
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

(27:45):
the ground to make this all happen.

Speaker 3 (27:47):
Yeah, and this is one of the things that's really
really interesting about this period of time in general, because
you know, Alexios just wants to get his lands back
and have a better taxation base, and he didn't realize
that it's going to rile up every single blessent in
Western Europe. I mean, then, you know, basically everyone who's
like completely shocked. They're like, oh no, the poorts think

(28:10):
they're people and that they have something to do with
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.

(28:32):
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,

(28:52):
and God bless them. They make historiography a much more
fun place.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
History's first podcast esters. So I think it might make
sense now to talk about the Crusade itself, and to
do that, I think let's contextualize it, and let's begin
with the East West schism, and maybe it might make
sense to zoom out a bit and talk about conditions
in Europe and how they engendered this schism that became

(29:21):
really the one of the major forces of the Crusade.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
So you know, in ten fifty four, the Eastern and
Western parts of Christianity they split apart because years and
years of disagreements over various things, things that have been
building for at that point seven hundred years since Constantine

(29:51):
really introduced Christianity to the Roman Empire and you know,
decided to be baptized at his death and everything like that.
So it's these things that have been bubbling up, and
it's that the popes in Rome. One of the things
that popes in Rome feel that they are very, very important,

(30:11):
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

(30:34):
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

(30:57):
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?

Speaker 3 (31:11):
Now for them, the real rift comes from the fact
that the Catholic Church decides to go all in.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Right.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
You know, I've said several times already in one podcast,
because I simply love to do it that. You know,
by the time we get to the Crusade, the papacy
has finally pulled off this confidence trick of saying, guys,
we control Christendom, we control Christendom, we control Christendom. And
they've done it at long last. But they've been trying

(31:41):
this on on Constantinople for centuries, and Constantinople is very
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

(32:03):
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.

Speaker 5 (32:17):
This is cute, but you get that I'm the head
of Christianity, right, you know, this is like I receive
head of Christianity, you receive pat on the back, right,
and this is a terrible offer as far as we're concerned.

Speaker 3 (32:31):
Over in Constantinople. Meanwhile, as Luke has mentioned, the pope's
have been doing crazy stuff, you know, as far as
Constantinople is concerned, like calling other people emperors, crowning Charlemagne,
like who is this Henry the fourth guy? Right, as
far as Constantinople is concerned, there's one emperor. He lives
in Constantinople. Whatever you're doing over there is some kind

(32:52):
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

(33:12):
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

(33:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
And Derek let us what's going on in Byzantium, Byzantine area,
Manzikert tell us about all those good things.

Speaker 4 (34:08):
Yeah, So there's a couple of things that are happening
in what we would today consider the Middle East, which
is a horrible term in general and especially for the
period we're talking about, but I'm going to use it
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

(34:29):
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

(34:49):
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

(35:09):
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.

(35:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
It was.

Speaker 4 (35:49):
It was all very challenging to do an extended campaign.
There were a couple of times that the Arabs tried
to besieged Constantinople, but they didn't go very well, and
so they settled into this thing where the buses and
teams were kind of secure behind the fortress the mountains
that surrounded them, and anatotally remained this kind of core
part of the empire until the Battle of Mansucret, which

(36:12):
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

(36:33):
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

(36:55):
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

(37:16):
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

(37:37):
empire was in some danger at this point, like you know,
what was going on on the Christian side of things.

Speaker 3 (37:43):
Oh, they made it about them. Basically the major way,
like the major way this news gets back is by
people who are going on pilgrimage getting over to ad
Atolia and going, hey, these Turkish people are take me
down for money. Right, That's like the major complaint, right,

(38:05):
which is and it's interesting because I think that people
assume that there is no real back and forth of
Europeans to the Middle East before the Crusades, and that's
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

(38:26):
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

(38:47):
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

(39:07):
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

(39:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:49):
Right. Obviously this is a Marxist podcast, so I have
to ask the question what were the material conditions of
Europe around the time of the First Crusade, and then
we could talk a little bit about this idea of

(40:10):
Holy war, which obviously becomes so crucial. So first material
conditions and then Holy war.

Speaker 1 (40:16):
The material conditions were, I think they varied, for they
definitely varied between strata of people. But it there is
a lot of violence there and it is almost endemic
to certain parts of Western Europe. At this point. There

(40:37):
is constant fighting in France. In England. You know, we
are less than thirty years from ten sixty six, you know,
when the Norman conquest of England, and that's still settling down.
William the conqueror's sons and bastards are fighting one another
over who's going to lead what and win what. And

(41:02):
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,

(41:25):
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

(41:46):
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

(42:07):
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

(42:28):
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

(42:48):
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

(43:11):
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.

(43:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:48):
And I think that leads naturally into this concept of
holy war and just war and how does that fit
into this?

Speaker 3 (43:56):
So for Christians there is very, very much a doctrine
of holy war. And this goes right back to Romanness essentially,
which you cannot get away from in any way, shape
or form in the medieval period in general, and certainly
not when you are talking about the Holy Land. But
by the time the Roman Empire had Christianized, one of

(44:21):
the requirements of being a Roman citizen was to become Christianized.
This is a pretty normal tactic for Christians in general.
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

(44:41):
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

(45:02):
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

(45:24):
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,

(45:45):
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.

(46:05):
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

(46:26):
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

(46:47):
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

(47:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (47:21):
And what about this notion of reconquest the ten sixty
four Siege of Barbastro, Pope Alexander the Second and ten
sixty three talking about a Christian emergency, what are the
are there models for the Crusade and the sort of
generation before.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
Yeah, the Siege of Barbastro becomes it really looks like
the model for the way that the Crusades were called.

Speaker 1 (47:44):
And that was.

Speaker 4 (47:47):
You know, that was a battle in during the Reconquista.
The Kingdom of Aragon was besieging Barbastro, and you know,
as you said, Pope Alexander the Third basically called on
Christians from around you know, the Christian realms to go
and help because he, you know, says, this is an

(48:09):
emergency for Christianity. We have to, you know, help retake
these lands.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (48:14):
And that sparks knights and you know, random people from
all over, mostly France, I think Burgundy as well, to
kind of go meander to Barbastrow and participate in this siege.
You know, there are a lot of parallels here between
what Alexander the Third does and what what Urban will

(48:35):
be doing at Claremont. And the response is definitely I
think indicates that there is an appetite for this sort
of thing among Christian knights and Christian Christians writ large
to participate in something like this. It's it also looks
a lot like some of the aftermaths of some of

(48:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
It does, and stuff like that, and the Norman conquests
of Sicily, which had happened a few years before, a
few years before ten ninety five, those things were cited
contemporarily as you know, look, we've done this before, we
can do this. And sometime between the siege of Barbastro

(49:40):
in ten sixty four and the middle of the ten seventies,
the idea of using puleinary indulgences, you know, for the
forgiveness of sins for people who undertake the journey. They
you know that that becomes a thing in the world,

(50:00):
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

(50:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:44):
But you know, yeah, the other thing that I think
is really important to keep in mind here is all
of this nonsense is kind of a French thing, right, Like,
you know, certainly the Riconquisa absolutely involves like the Kingdom
of Arragon and that you know, lots of people on
the yes. But when Pope Alexander says, guys, we've got
a Christian emergency down here, get on it, one of

(51:06):
the things that's recorded is that a bunch of French
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

(51:30):
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.

Speaker 5 (51:48):
You know.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
One of the things as medievalist that I'm always kind
of pushing back is the concept of, you know, the
feudal system, as though there is like one way that
things work, you know, And that's the idea that you know,
there's a king at the top and then nobles underneath,
and they all all apportioned land based on what they
do for a particular king, right, And it's a massive
oversimplification and it never really exists anywhere except the closest

(52:12):
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

(52:33):
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

(52:56):
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.

Speaker 4 (53:17):
Before we get to that, Yeah, I wanted to ask
you and Luke, like, what is the salience at this
point of earlier encounters between Latin Christians and Islam and
not just in in Iberia. That's sort of the frontier,
the one it's the one place where like Western Christians
really have first hand encounters with Islam. But there's also

(53:40):
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

(54:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
Yeah, I think it definitely was. It is referred they
are referred to at the time as a barbarian menace, infidels, uh,
you know, rapers, pillagers, you know, like the whole the
whole litany of of everything that the stuff that our
you know, current fear mongering about the Middle East and

(54:36):
Islam that we see in in Western media is still
doing today. You know, they are you know, portrayed as
this you know, barbaric, you know, like hun type force.
And you know, the the the veneration of Charles Martel
had already had already begun to some degree. And you know,

(54:59):
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,

(55:20):
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

(55:42):
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

(56:04):
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,

(56:25):
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

(56:47):
you're talking about. But there were definitely people who are like, no,
that's fucking stupid, like you know, no, oh.

Speaker 3 (56:53):
Yeah, absolutely, and especially it's a money talks thing, right,
So it really all depends because you know, I beer
is such a difficult one in the Middle Ages because
it really all depends who you're asking and when you're asking, right,
because there are plenty of people who are just kind
of fine in terms of muddling along and doing the
best you can living alongside Muslim people. But then you know,

(57:14):
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,

(57:35):
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?

Speaker 4 (57:44):
Right?

Speaker 3 (57:45):
Part of the reason why the Crusaders gets egged on
or the Reconquista gets built up is because the Church
is trying desperately to get Christians to stop hitting each other.
So they're like, why don't you go, I don't know,
hit some Muslims instead, Why don't you do that?

Speaker 5 (57:59):
Right?

Speaker 3 (57:59):
And it's not like this is a natural state of
being between Christians and Islam. It's just that, I don't know, man,
there's like a lot of war at the time, right.
And I don't always like saying that about the medieval
period because people have a tendency to try to characterize
it as uniquely violent, like as opposed to now when
things are totally peaceful. Guys like I don't know if
you've heard about this, but you know, people fight people,

(58:22):
and they come up with different excuses for why they
do it. It's just that you've got a really great,
baked in excuse between Christianity and Islam.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
So now that we've set the stage, let's move on
to the actual call for the First Crusade. Let's go
to ten ninety five. So how did Byzantine appeal to Rome?
What are these councils that took place in ten ninety
five that eventually lead to the outbreak of the First Crusade,

(58:52):
And it might make sense to start with the Council
of Piazenza.

Speaker 3 (58:55):
Oh, it's my favorite council. This is such a good
So this was this is one for real heads.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Okay, I mean I think they're all good, but yeah, okay,
personally to pick a favorite.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
Vide, Oh oh you think you're you think that you're
into history. Name three councils. Yeah, well, Council of Piacenza.
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

(59:29):
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,

(59:49):
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,

(01:00:10):
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,

(01:00:31):
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

(01:00:55):
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

(01:01:20):
it's just a hot mess. Oh my god, I love
it so much.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
Yeah, I mean, I think the big thing here, the
big thing that I would say to take away from
this is that there are a lot of ideas surrounding
it that have flown around, and some of them were
historical consensus for a long time. But like it's often
said that Alexios was just kind of like, hey, we

(01:01:46):
might need some help, and then when people showed up,
he were like, whoa, I didn't mean like that, Like,
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

(01:02:09):
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

(01:02:31):
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

(01:02:51):
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

(01:03:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Man.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
But they went to the Council of Pichins and knowing
what they were asking for, and yeah, that's what they got.
Unfortunately for them anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
So let's move on now to the Council of Claremont.
And this is a crucial moment in the history of
the First Crusade.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
So what happened there?

Speaker 4 (01:03:43):
The response, Yeah, it's I think it's it's great because
you know, all these councils have like church business. But
there was also a sex thing, just like piacenza that
happened as King Philip the First of France had married
Bertrade de Montforta, and they were both married to other
people at the time. Whoopsie, So you know there was
another there's another sex scandal happening in European royalties. It's

(01:04:05):
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

(01:04:28):
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

(01:04:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):
Yeah, it's apparently the speech was good, Like folks, we
know that, right, But we have tons and tons of
different versions and they're almost all written down years upon
years after the fact. And that's one of the big
issues that we have with it, is no one was
sitting there that on the day, scribbling away in shorthand
getting the words down. We think that perhaps the best

(01:05:25):
example comes from Fulture of Shout in the guest of
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

(01:05:46):
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

(01:06:08):
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

(01:06:30):
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.

(01:06:53):
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.

(01:07:13):
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

(01:07:36):
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.

(01:07:58):
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

(01:08:21):
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,

(01:08:41):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:03):
Yeah, yeah, I think. I think the In the fifties
and sixties, the academic consensus centered around the fact that
Urban mentions four specific things that are kind of widely
agreed upon in the Fulture account, the Robert Account, other

(01:09:24):
things like that, But basically it was, We're going to
liberate Jerusalem because it's Jerusalem. We got to have it back,
you know, we need it. Two, we are going to
reunite Christendom. You know we're gonna we're gonna get back
in communion with the East. Three you guys are too
fucking violent, we are, And and Fulture says this is

(01:09:45):
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

(01:10:07):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:10:19):
I think maybe the question to end on here then
is why do historians think that people responded to a
call to this call? Because I imagine there have been
calls before and people didn't respond.

Speaker 4 (01:10:32):
So well, yeah, I mean I want to jump on
that to it's there's the cynical interpretation that people responded
because this was a new land to conquer. It was
a new place to to you know, extract booty from.
It was a place for all these kind of benighted
second sons who weren't going to hair to go and

(01:10:54):
claim mistake. They're claiming the world. Very material, very worldly
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

(01:11:16):
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

(01:11:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:11:59):
Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Derek, And
I think it's super modern of us to say that
it has to be one or the other, like we're
trying to separate church and state in our heads. And
just like Luke said earlier, you can't do that with
medieval people. Indeed, the concept of the states such as
it is, well, there is no state, right. There are kingdoms,
there are Europe, there are principalities, there are empires, and

(01:12:24):
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

(01:12:44):
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

(01:13:04):
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,

(01:13:27):
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

(01:13:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
Yeah, I think I think another thing real quick on
this is that we just need to remember that people
can hold two things in their heart simultaneously. Cognitive dissonance
is a is a thing that humans have always had
and have always struggled with and have always used as
a coping mechanism. And so, you know, for the for

(01:14:21):
the most part, for these people who are dirt poor,
who are sick infirm, you know, they barely have anything.
You know, they work for a very poor lord or
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,

(01:14:41):
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

(01:15:01):
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

(01:15:24):
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

(01:15:45):
in Jerusalem from this. You know that's not a thing.

Speaker 2 (01:15:49):
So next time we'll talk about the immediate outcome of
the call and what happened. Thank you everyone for listening,
and we'll see you soon.

Speaker 1 (01:15:57):
I Welcome to the Crusades. The First Crusade is co
hosted by Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison of the American
Prestige podcast and doctor Eleanor Yannica and Luke Waters of

(01:16:17):
the We're Not So Different Podcast. Music by Jake Aaron,
cover art by James Montalbano. The show is co edited
and co produced by Jake Aaron and Luke Waters. Thank
you very much for listening.