By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 8, 2026
What Was the First Crusade?
The First Crusade (1096-1099) was an armed pilgrimage launched from Latin Christendom in response to Pope Urban II’s sermon at Clermont on 27 November 1095. Tens of thousands of fighters and non-combatants travelled overland to Constantinople, fought through Anatolia and Syria, and stormed Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 with a massacre that the participants themselves recorded.
The expedition is one of the best-documented religious wars of the Middle Ages because three hostile traditions wrote it down. Latin chroniclers travelled with the army and described the marches in granular, sometimes shocked detail. The Byzantine princess Anna Komnene reconstructed the same campaign from imperial archives a generation later, watching the Franks with sceptical eyes. Muslim historians, writing in Mosul and Damascus, recorded the catastrophe from the receiving end. To read the First Crusade honestly is to hold three accounts open at once and notice where they disagree.
This article walks through the campaign as it actually unfolded: the council that started it, the unauthorised “People’s Crusade” that preceded the main armies, the Rhineland massacres that disfigured the journey before it left Europe, the long sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem, and the Crusader states that survived its violence. The aim is to follow the sources where they lead, including where they lead into the broader landscape of historical and archaeological mysteries and into atrocities that no later piety should soften.
Pope Urban II at Clermont, November 1095
On the last Tuesday of November 1095, Urban II preached an open-air sermon to a crowd assembled outside the cathedral of Clermont in central France. Five chroniclers later wrote down what he said, no two of them identical, all of them composed years after the fact and shaped by the outcome. Fulcher of Chartres (c. 1059-c. 1128), who heard the sermon, gives the most measured account; Robert the Monk and Baldric of Dol embellish it with rhetorical flourish [1]. Across the variants, three themes recur: a plea from the eastern emperor Alexios I Komnenos for military aid against the Seljuk Turks, an accusation that the holy places had been defiled, and a promise of remission of sins for those who took the cross.
The crowd’s response was extraordinary by medieval standards. According to Fulcher, listeners cried “Deus vult” — “God wills it” — and pressed forward to receive cloth crosses to sew onto their tunics. Within months, recruiters were preaching from village to market town, and the army that eventually departed in August 1096 numbered perhaps sixty thousand fighters and a similar number of camp followers, though estimates remain disputed [2]. The historian Jonathan Riley-Smith argued in The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1986) that the Clermont call drew on a pre-existing pilgrimage culture and on lay anxieties about salvation; the cross was a vow already legible to its recipients [3].
The Byzantine Request Behind the Sermon
The Latin chroniclers tend to dramatise Urban’s sermon as a spontaneous appeal. The Byzantine perspective is colder. Anna Komnene’s Alexiad, written around 1148, treats the crusade as the unintended result of a routine diplomatic request. Her father had asked Western mercenaries for help, expecting professional troops he could direct; what arrived instead were independent armies under their own princes, who swore conditional oaths to Alexios at Constantinople and then proceeded on their own terms [4]. The disjunction shapes everything that follows.
The Rhineland Massacres of 1096
Before any crusader reached the Holy Land, the movement turned on Jewish communities in the Rhine valley. In the spring of 1096, bands following preachers like Peter the Hermit and the German knight Emicho of Flonheim attacked the Jews of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. Mainz was the worst. Hebrew chronicles, particularly the account of Solomon bar Simson, describe the bishop’s palace surrounded, the gates breached on 27 May 1096, and roughly eleven hundred Jews killed in a single day, with many choosing to die by their own hands rather than accept forced baptism [5]. Worms had been attacked eight days earlier; Cologne followed in late June.
These were not anonymous mob outbursts incidental to the crusade. The attackers framed themselves as crusaders, financed by Jewish coin extorted under threat, and several local bishops who tried to shelter the communities were overrun by their own retinues. The historian Robert Chazan, drawing on the Hebrew chronicles, argued that the massacres represent the first systematic mass violence against Jews in Latin Europe and a pattern that recurred in later crusades [6]. The point bears keeping clearly: the First Crusade’s first sustained military action was the killing of perhaps five thousand European Jewish civilians by people wearing the cross.
The People’s Crusade and the Disaster at Civetot
A separate, unofficial wave preceded the princes’ armies. Peter the Hermit, a charismatic ascetic from Picardy, gathered a column of perhaps twenty thousand pilgrims, most of them poorly armed and provisioned, and marched east through Hungary in the spring of 1096. A parallel force under Walter Sans Avoir followed the same route. They crossed Byzantine territory in disorder, raided villages for food, and reached Constantinople on 1 August 1096. Alexios, alarmed, ferried them across the Bosphorus to a camp at Civetot, hoping to keep them away from the city until the better-organised armies arrived.
From Civetot, splinter groups raided into Seljuk territory and were ambushed. On 21 October 1096, the main camp was attacked by the forces of Kilij Arslan, the Seljuk Sultan of Rum. The slaughter was near-total. Anna Komnene records that the Turks heaped the bones of the slain into pyramids visible from the coast, where Latin chroniclers later described them with grief and shame. Peter himself, conveniently absent in Constantinople negotiating supplies, survived to join the second wave [7].
The Princes’ Crusade, August 1096 – June 1097
The main expedition assembled in four contingents that left Western Europe in late summer 1096. Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, marched overland through Hungary. Bohemond of Taranto, the Norman lord of southern Italy and son of Robert Guiscard, crossed the Adriatic. Raymond IV of Toulouse, the eldest and wealthiest of the princes, took a difficult Dalmatian coastal route. Robert of Normandy, brother of England’s William II, sailed from Italy with a Northern French force. By spring 1097 all four had reached Constantinople and sworn the oaths Alexios required.
The combined army, perhaps thirty-five thousand effective soldiers, crossed into Anatolia and besieged Nicaea, the Seljuk capital, in May 1097. Nicaea fell on 19 June, surrendered to Byzantine envoys before the Latin army could storm it — a manoeuvre that denied the crusaders the customary plunder and bred lasting resentment toward the emperor. The army then defeated Kilij Arslan at Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097 and began the long, hungry march across the Anatolian plateau, losing horses and men to thirst and disease before reaching the gates of Antioch in October.
The Siege of Antioch, October 1097 – June 1098
Antioch was one of the great fortified cities of the eastern Mediterranean: a circuit of walls four hundred towers strong, well-provisioned, garrisoned by Yaghi-Siyan and his Turkish troops. The crusaders sat outside it for seven and a half months. Winter brought famine. The anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum, written between 1099 and 1101 by an Italian-Norman participant, describes soldiers eating boiled hides, dead horses, and worse; perhaps a sixth of the army died of hunger or disease before the spring [8].
Bohemond engineered the breakthrough. He bribed an Armenian tower-captain named Firouz to lower a ladder on the night of 2-3 June 1098. The crusaders climbed in, took the city, and massacred its Turkish garrison and many of its Muslim inhabitants. Within days, however, a relief army under Kerbogha of Mosul arrived and besieged the new occupiers, trapping them inside the walls they had just stormed. Provisions ran out almost at once. Many Latin soldiers slipped down the walls and fled — Stephen of Blois among them, a desertion he never lived down.
Peter Bartholomew and the Holy Lance
It was during this second siege, in mid-June 1098, that a Provençal pilgrim named Peter Bartholomew began reporting visions. Saint Andrew, he said, had told him the Holy Lance — the spear that pierced Christ’s side at the Crucifixion — was buried beneath the floor of the cathedral of St Peter in Antioch. On 14 June, after extended digging, an iron spearhead was produced from the pit. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to Raymond of Toulouse and an eyewitness, treated it as authentic in his Historia Francorum (c. 1100); the anonymous Gesta is more reserved [9]. Whatever the artefact’s nature, the army’s morale rose enough to march out and break Kerbogha’s force at the Battle of Antioch on 28 June. Peter Bartholomew later died in 1099 after submitting to a fire-ordeal whose results were ambiguous and bitterly contested.
The Siege of Jerusalem and the Massacre of 15 July 1099
After delays and political disputes through the winter, the depleted army — perhaps twelve to fifteen thousand fighters by then — reached the walls of Jerusalem on 7 June 1099. The city was held by a Fatimid Egyptian garrison; the Seljuk-Fatimid antagonism that the historian Carole Hillenbrand has called the Muslim “fitna” or political fragmentation had repeatedly worked in the crusaders’ favour, and Jerusalem itself had changed hands between the two Muslim powers only the previous year [10]. Christopher Tyerman in God’s War (2006) emphasises how decisively this Seljuk-Fatimid split shaped the crusade’s outcome; a unified Muslim front would almost certainly have ended the expedition before it reached the coast [11].
The siege lasted five weeks. Genoese ships at Jaffa supplied timber for siege towers. On the night of 14-15 July 1099, Godfrey’s tower was wheeled against the northern wall, and a small party crossed the parapet just before dawn. The defenders broke. What followed is described by every primary source on every side of the conflict, with little disagreement about its character even where the numbers diverge.
Raymond of Aguilers wrote that men rode “in blood up to the knees and even to the bridles of the horses” through the streets near the Temple Mount. The Gesta Francorum reports the killing of “Saracens and Turks” without quarter, men and women, and notes that the synagogue where Jerusalem’s Jewish community had taken refuge was burned with the people inside. Fulcher of Chartres, returning to the city six months later, wrote that the stench of the unburied dead remained noticeable. The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir (1160-1233), composing the al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh in the early thirteenth century, reports a death toll inside the Aqsa mosque alone of “more than seventy thousand,” including imams and ascetics from across Islam [12]. Modern estimates of the total dead range from roughly thirty thousand to seventy thousand depending on which primary account is weighted; the lower end is sometimes preferred by Western historians, the higher by Muslim chroniclers, but no source from any tradition treats the killing as small.
The Crusader States and Their Aftermath
Out of the killing came four Latin polities along the eastern Mediterranean: the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099), the County of Tripoli (1102, formalised 1109), the Principality of Antioch (1098), and the County of Edessa (1098). Godfrey of Bouillon refused the title of king of Jerusalem, taking instead the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri, “Defender of the Holy Sepulchre.” His brother Baldwin, less reluctant, accepted the crown in 1100. Bohemond established himself at Antioch in defiance of his oath to Alexios, fuelling Latin-Byzantine hostility for decades.
Thomas Asbridge, in The First Crusade: A New History (2004), argues that the four states survived as long as they did — until 1291, when Acre fell — because they exploited the Seljuk-Fatimid fracture and absorbed local Christian populations rather than displacing them wholesale. Their endurance, however, depended on a steady stream of Western reinforcements that grew thinner with each generation. The Second Crusade in 1147 already failed to retake Edessa; Saladin’s victory at Hattin in 1187 began the long retraction. The world the First Crusade made could not, in the end, sustain itself [13].
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the First Crusade begin and end?
The First Crusade is conventionally dated from Pope Urban II’s sermon at Clermont on 27 November 1095 to the capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 and the consolidation of the Crusader states by 1100. The main armies departed Western Europe in August 1096 and reached Jerusalem in June 1099, a journey of nearly three years.
Why did Pope Urban II call the First Crusade?
Urban responded to a request from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos for Western military aid against the Seljuk Turks who had taken much of Anatolia. He framed the response as armed pilgrimage with spiritual reward, drawing on existing pilgrimage culture, lay penitential practice, and rhetoric about the eastern holy sites. The Clermont sermon was preached on 27 November 1095.
Who were the main leaders of the First Crusade?
The four princely contingents were led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto, Raymond IV of Toulouse, and Robert of Normandy. Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy served as papal legate until his death at Antioch in August 1098. Peter the Hermit led the unofficial People’s Crusade. Each contingent retained its own command structure throughout the campaign.
What was the People’s Crusade?
The People’s Crusade was an unofficial early wave led by Peter the Hermit and Walter Sans Avoir in spring 1096, composed largely of peasants, lesser knights, and pilgrims. It reached Constantinople in August and was largely destroyed by Seljuk forces under Kilij Arslan at Civetot on 21 October 1096. Survivors joined the later princes’ armies.
What were the Rhineland massacres of 1096?
In May and June 1096, crusader bands attacked Jewish communities in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. The worst killing took place at Mainz on 27 May, where roughly eleven hundred Jews died. Hebrew chronicles by Solomon bar Simson and others document the events. Estimates of total Jewish deaths in the Rhineland that spring run to about five thousand.
What happened during the Siege of Antioch?
The crusaders besieged Antioch from October 1097 to June 1098, suffering severe famine through the winter. Bohemond of Taranto bribed an Armenian tower-captain to admit the army on the night of 2-3 June 1098. They were then besieged inside by Kerbogha of Mosul. The “discovery” of the Holy Lance by Peter Bartholomew on 14 June helped sustain morale before the breakout victory on 28 June.
What was the Holy Lance found at Antioch?
The Holy Lance was an iron spearhead that Peter Bartholomew, a Provençal pilgrim, recovered after a vision on 14 June 1098 from beneath the cathedral of St Peter at Antioch. He claimed it was the spear that pierced Christ. Raymond of Aguilers treated it as authentic; the anonymous Gesta Francorum was more cautious. Peter died in 1099 after a contested fire-ordeal.
How many people died at the fall of Jerusalem in July 1099?
Estimates vary widely. The Gesta Francorum and Raymond of Aguilers describe killing without quarter; Ibn al-Athir reports more than seventy thousand killed in the Aqsa mosque alone. Modern historians estimate total deaths between thirty thousand and seventy thousand, including the Muslim garrison, civilian Muslims, and Jerusalem’s Jewish community burned in their synagogue.
What were the Crusader states?
The Crusader states were four Latin polities established after 1099: the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099), the Principality of Antioch (1098), the County of Edessa (1098), and the County of Tripoli (1102, formalised 1109). They survived for varying periods, with Edessa lost in 1144 and the final stronghold of Acre falling in 1291.
Why did the First Crusade succeed when later crusades failed?
Christopher Tyerman and Thomas Asbridge both stress the role of Muslim political fragmentation. The Seljuk-Fatimid rivalry, what historians call the Muslim “fitna,” meant no unified resistance met the Latin army. Jerusalem itself had changed hands between Seljuks and Fatimids the previous year. Later crusades faced increasingly consolidated Muslim states under Zengi, Nur al-Din, and Saladin, and most failed.
What primary sources document the First Crusade?
The principal Latin sources are the anonymous Gesta Francorum (1099-1101), Raymond of Aguilers’ Historia Francorum (c. 1100), and Fulcher of Chartres’ Historia Hierosolymitana (c. 1106). The Byzantine perspective comes from Anna Komnene’s Alexiad (c. 1148). The Muslim view is preserved in Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kāmil fī al-tārīkh (early thirteenth century). Hebrew chronicles record the Rhineland massacres.
