A divided Muslim world and the First Crusade (1095-1099)

Part oneA world of rival rulers

In November 1095, a crowd gathered in the open air outside the town of Clermont in central France. Pope Urban II spoke to bishops and knights there and asked them to take up arms and march east. Earlier that year the Byzantine emperor, Alexios I, had sent envoys to the West asking for soldiers, because Turkish armies had taken most of Anatolia from him in the years after the battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Pope spoke of helping the eastern Christians and of the pilgrim road to Jerusalem. Thousands took the vow in the months that followed. They sewed a cloth cross onto their clothes, and the word crusade comes from it.

Now look at the lands they were heading for. For a generation the Seljuk Turks, Sunni Muslims who had entered Baghdad in 1055, had held the greatest power in the Muslim east. Their sultan Malik Shah died in 1092, and so did his great vizier, Nizam al-Mulk. The empire broke into pieces ruled by sons, brothers and generals who distrusted each other, and each ruler weighed the newcomers against his own rivals first. A few even thought the Franks might make useful allies against a neighbour. In Syria two Seljuk princes, Ridwan in Aleppo and Duqaq in Damascus, were brothers and rivals, and each worried far more about the other than about any stranger from the West.

In Baghdad the Abbasid caliph was honoured as the head of the Sunni world, but he held little real power. In Cairo ruled the Fatimid caliph, who was Shia and a rival of both the Abbasids and the Seljuks. The Fatimids and Seljuks had been fighting over Syria and Palestine for years, and Jerusalem passed from one side to the other. The Fatimids took it back in 1098, just as the crusaders were closing in.

Jerusalem mattered deeply to every one of them. For Muslims it was the city of al-Aqsa and the place of the Prophet's ﷺ Night Journey, and it had come under Muslim rule in the time of Umar, around 637 to 638. Muslims, Jews and Christians of the eastern churches had lived side by side there for centuries. The newcomers were Latin Christians from Western Europe, and the people of the Levant called them the Franj, the Franks.

From the hadith

Narrated Abu Huraira:

The Prophet (ﷺ) said, "Do not set out on a journey except for three Mosques i.e. Al-Masjid-AI-Haram, the Mosque of Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) , and the Mosque of Al-Aqsa, (Mosque of Jerusalem)."

Part twoFrom Clermont to Jerusalem

The leaders of the main armies were French, Norman and Lorrainer nobles, among them Godfrey of Bouillon, his brother Baldwin, Bohemond of Taranto and Raymond of Toulouse. The first bands to leave, in 1096, were poorly armed and were destroyed in Anatolia before the main armies arrived. Those armies gathered at Constantinople, where Alexios asked their leaders to promise to return any old Byzantine land they won. The Seljuk sultan of Anatolia, Kilij Arslan, whose capital was Nicaea, had been away fighting another Turkish ruler when the crusaders arrived. In June 1097 they took the city with Byzantine help. A few weeks later the sultan hurried back and met them at Dorylaeum. The Turkish horse archers were fast and deadly, but the heavy Frankish horsemen held their ground, and the Turks withdrew. After that nothing stood between the crusaders and Syria.

They reached Antioch in October 1097. The city had strong walls, and the siege lasted through the winter and into the summer. Hunger and sickness thinned the besiegers. Relief armies came from Damascus and from Aleppo, one after the other, and each was beaten off alone, because the two brothers never joined forces. The city fell in June 1098, when a man inside let the attackers in at night. Days later a large army under Kerbogha, the ruler of Mosul, arrived and camped around the city. The Franks marched out to meet it, and quarrels inside Kerbogha's own camp helped break his army. The road south lay open.

The Fatimid vizier al-Afdal had sent envoys to the crusaders, hoping to share Syria with them, and his army held Jerusalem for Cairo. The crusaders began the siege in June 1099 and entered the city on 15 July. Muslims and Jews were killed there in large numbers over the following days. The Muslim world remembers it as a deep wound. The Franks remembered it as the goal of the whole expedition. Refugees carried the news to Damascus and Baghdad, and some preachers called on the people to resist, but no army came together to answer.

Godfrey of Bouillon became the ruler of Jerusalem, and after his death his brother Baldwin was crowned its first king in 1100. Four Frankish states now stood where there had been Muslim and Byzantine lands: Edessa, which Baldwin had taken in 1098, Antioch under Bohemond, Jerusalem and, from 1109, Tripoli, held by the family of Raymond. They were small and depended on castles, on Italian ships that carried pilgrims and supplies, and on fresh knights from Europe. They survived mostly because their neighbours were busy fighting each other.

Four years after a Pope spoke in a French field, the armies he sent stood inside Jerusalem.

WatchThe lecture for this chapter

Lecture

[[LECTURE]]slot for the chapter lecture embed, to be supplied by the owner.

The mapWhere it happened

• Clermont
• Constantinople
• Nicaea
• Dorylaeum
• Antioch
• Aleppo
• Damascus
• Jerusalem
• Cairo

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter