The First Crusade: 1096–1099

Fulcher of Chartres, a northern French cleric who walked all the way from Lorraine to Jerusalem with the army of Stephen of Blois, opened his account of the expedition by reminding his readers of something easy to forget. “Consider, I pray, and reflect,” he wrote, “how much hardship, sweat, and toil we endured, and how many times we despaired of life itself, before we reached the city of Jerusalem.” It is one of the quieter openings in medieval historiography, and it is worth quoting because everything that came after — the slaughter at Antioch, the barefoot entry into Jerusalem, the establishment of four Latin states that would last almost two hundred years — has to be set against the bodily reality of getting there.

This pillar is about that journey. For the broader story, see the main article on the Crusades. For deeper dives into specific episodes, follow the links to the People’s Crusade, the Battle of Antioch, the Siege of Jerusalem in 1099, and the question of who called for the First Crusade.

A note on the scholarly argument, since it shapes how this pillar is written. The first modern history of the First Crusade, by Heinrich Hagenmeyer (the 19th-century German scholar who finally assembled the Latin and Arabic sources into a critical edition), read the expedition as a serious military operation led by serious men. The mid-20th-century view, especially Runciman’s, treated it as a near-miraculous accident — a triumph of will, faith, and disorganised enthusiasm over a divided Muslim world. The view that has dominated since Riley-Smith’s The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1986) is closer to Hagenmeyer’s: the First Crusade was more organised, more deliberate, and more successful than the older view allowed. Thomas Asbridge’s The First Crusade: A New History (2004) is the best single-volume narrative; Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War (2006) places the Crusade in its wider history of Christian holy war. I have leaned on the first three for what follows.

The speech at Clermont and the preaching

On 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II, the former monk Odo of Châtillon-sur-Loing, opened the Council of Clermont in the Auvergne. The Council had a long agenda — clerical reform, the prohibition of lay investiture, the simony cases that had been eating the Church for fifty years — but the speech that day is the one that has survived. The exact text is lost; we have four accounts, the most famous being Fulcher’s, who was in the room.

The substance of the speech, as best we can reconstruct it, was an appeal to the knights of France to help the Byzantines, to free the Holy Sepulchre, and to take as their reward the remission of their sins. Fulcher gives the call to march in a voice of restrained wonder, and reports the famous crowd response: “Deus vult! Deus vult! Deus vult!” — “God wills it!” — which would become the slogan of the whole movement. The Pope, by all accounts, was a brilliant orator; the response was not. The preaching continued through the winter of 1095–96 across France and into the Rhineland, and by the spring of 1096 the popular response was well beyond anything the papal curia had anticipated.

For more on the Council itself, see what happened at the Council of Clermont.

The People’s Crusade (spring–autumn 1096)

The history of medieval Christendom has no stranger chapter than the People’s Crusade. It was led by two men, Peter the Hermit and Walter Sans-Avoir, neither of them a major figure; the army that gathered around them was enormous by the standards of the time — perhaps 20,000 people, including many women, children, and non-combatants; and it set out in April 1096, well in advance of the main army, with no real plan beyond getting to Jerusalem. Peter, by all accounts, was a charismatic preacher; Walter, the minor noble, was probably the more capable military leader. The army was, in the words of one modern historian, “an undisciplined migration of the desperate and devout.”

The People’s Crusade crossed the Rhine, where it stopped to slaughter the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne — the first major episode of Crusader violence against Jews, and the one to which the term “the Rhineland massacres” still refers. The Jewish chronicler Solomon bar Simson recorded the events in the Nürnberger Memorbook and in his own chronicle, and his account is one of the most important Jewish sources of the Middle Ages. The army then marched to Constantinople, where the Emperor Alexios, who had not asked for this, ferried them across the Bosphorus as quickly as he could.

The end came at Civetot, in Anatolia, in late October 1096. The Seljuk Turks, who had not yet heard of the main army, treated the People’s Crusade as a mob and destroyed it. Walter was killed. Peter escaped (he had been sent back to Constantinople on a diplomatic mission) and joined the main army, where he played a small but symbolically important role. The episode matters not for its military weight — it had none — but for what it revealed about the popular appeal of the Crusade, the fragility of the movement, and the readiness of Christians to use it to settle local scores.

The main army: who came and how they got there

The main army of the First Crusade was not a single force but a coalition. Four regional contingents are conventionally identified: the southern French under Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Count of Toulouse; the northern French and Normans under Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, and Robert of Flanders; the Lorrainers under Godfrey of Bouillon and his brothers Eustace and Baldwin; and the south Italians under Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred. A fifth contingent, smaller and later, came from Provence and southern Italy. None of these leaders was a king, which is one of the underappreciated facts about the First Crusade: it was led by the great territorial princes of France and Italy, not by monarchs.

The army began to assemble at Constantinople in late 1096. The passage of 30,000-odd European soldiers through the Byzantine Empire required the kind of patient diplomacy that Alexios Komnenos was, by general agreement, unusually good at. The individual leaders swore various forms of fealty to him in exchange for supplies and guides; the oaths were not always honoured later, and the political relationship between the Crusader army and the Byzantines soured steadily through the campaign. The capture of Nicaea in June 1097 was the first major joint action, and the Byzantines negotiated the city’s surrender in such a way that the Crusaders were not allowed to sack it. Bohemond, in particular, never forgave Alexios for this. Their feud shaped the rest of the campaign.

For the broader causes that made the expedition possible, see the causes of the Crusades. The standard account of how the army got to Constantinople is John France’s Victory in the East (1994); Steven Runciman’s first volume of A History of the Crusades is still readable but dated.

The march to Antioch

The march from Nicaea to Antioch took the better part of a year. The Crusaders did not, strictly speaking, conquer Anatolia — they marched across it, with the country held on each side of the road by the Seljuk emirs. The army split in two almost immediately. The main body followed the coast, while a smaller force under Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne moved into the interior. Baldwin’s force captured Edessa in March 1098 and held it — the first Latin state in the East, and the one that would be lost first, in 1144.

The march was hard. The Crusaders suffered from heat, thirst, and Seljuk harassment. Discipline was maintained — barely — by the regional leaders. The relationship with the local Greek population was uneasy. By the time the army reached Antioch in October 1097, the effective combat strength was perhaps 12,000 to 20,000 men, out of 30,000–70,000 who had set out. The mortality was overwhelmingly from disease and hunger, not battle. This is one of the underappreciated facts of medieval military history: the deadliest enemy of the First Crusade was the eastern Mediterranean in summer.

The Battle of Antioch (1098)

Antioch, on the Orontes, was one of the great cities of antiquity — it was here, according to Acts 11:26, that the followers of Christ were first called “Christians” — and it had been under Seljuk control since 1084. The Crusaders arrived before it on 20 October 1097 expecting a quick siege. Instead, they got an eight-month siege and a near-annihilation.

The Battle of Antioch is the central military engagement of the entire First Crusade, and it is the one that almost destroyed the expedition. The army starved, the leadership fractured, the Byzantines sent no help, and in early June 1098 a relief army under Kerbogha of Mosul arrived to lift the siege. The Crusaders, in a moment of providential desperation, sortied from the city on 28 June 1098 and won a complete victory — partly through good tactics, partly through the defection of several of Kerbogha’s allies, and partly through the legendary “discovery” of the Holy Lance in the floor of the Church of Saint Peter, which is treated as a fabrication by every modern historian but which shaped the morale of the moment.

Bohemond claimed the city for himself, in open violation of his oath to Alexios, and the relationship between the Crusader army and Byzantium never recovered. Raymond of Aguilers, who was present at the excavation, recorded the events in tones of numbed amazement. His account, like Fulcher’s, is essential reading.

The march to Jerusalem (1098–1099)

After Antioch, the Crusaders paused for several months — too long, by most reckonings — to regroup and negotiate with the local Muslim rulers. Bohemond stayed in Antioch; the rest of the army moved south, taking the ports of Latakia, Tortosa, and Gibelet on the way. The size of the army, never large, was now substantially smaller; the chroniclers estimate perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 effective combatants by the time it reached Jerusalem. The psychological reality of the army, however, was very different. They had taken Antioch. They had survived Kerbogha. They had the Holy Lance. They believed that God was visibly on their side.

Jerusalem had changed hands. The Fatimids of Egypt, who were the main Shia rivals of the Sunni Seljuks, had taken the city from the Seljuks in 1098 and were now its garrison. The Crusader army arrived in early June 1099 and camped on the Mount of Olives, looking east. The bishop of Le Puy, Adhémar de Monteil — the Pope’s personal legate to the Crusade — gave an open-air sermon. The chroniclers record that the men wept.

The capture of Jerusalem (July 1099)

The Siege of Jerusalem in 1099 lasted about five weeks. The Crusaders built three siege towers, attempted to undermine the walls, and finally launched a coordinated assault on 15 July 1099. The assault was led by the Norman contingent under Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, and the Provençal contingent under Raymond of Toulouse. The Muslim garrison, commanded by the Fatimid eunuch Iftikhar ad-Dawla, fought hard but was overrun.

What followed was a large-scale killing. Raymond of Aguilers, the most graphic of the eyewitnesses, described the Crusaders wading in blood “up to their ankles” — a figure he then partly walked back, noting that the blood must have been deeper than that. Modern historians are agreed that the description is a flourish, but the underlying fact is not in doubt. The Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of the city were killed or enslaved. The accounts differ on the exact numbers, and probably always will. Benjamin Kedar’s 2001 study in the journal Crusades is the standard scholarly discussion.

The news reached the West in the autumn of 1099, and the response was ecstatic. Pope Urban II did not live to hear it. He had died on 29 July 1099, two weeks after the city’s fall, in the middle of a preaching tour. The Christian dead of 1099 included some of the leaders; many of the survivors, weakened by years of campaigning, did not survive the next decade.

The founding of the Crusader States

The capture of Jerusalem led directly to the establishment of the four Crusader States. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was the most important; the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the County of Edessa completed the Latin East. Godfrey of Bouillon, the senior leader on the ground, was offered the title of king and refused. He took instead the title Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri — Defender of the Holy Sepulchre — on the grounds that he would not wear a crown of gold where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. He died in July 1100, and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne, the first Count of Edessa, took the title of King in December 1100.

The new states were ruled by a feudal aristocracy drawn from the leading families of France and Italy, with a unique legal code, the Assizes of Jerusalem, that blended European and local traditions. Joshua Prawer’s The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1972) and Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Feudal Nobility and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1973) are the two most important modern accounts. Both are now more than half a century old, but neither has been replaced. The newer scholarship — by Ronnie Ellenblum, Benjamin Kedar, and the contributors to Crusader Landscapes in the Medieval Mediterranean (2016) — has refined the picture but not overturned it.

The legacy

The success of the First Crusade had a profound impact on Europe. News of the capture of Jerusalem reached the West in the autumn of 1099, and the response was ecstatic. Preachers, including Robert the Monk, Baldric of Bourgueil, and Guibert of Nogent, wrote accounts of the Crusade that were widely circulated. The Gesta Francorum and the histories of Raymond of Aguilers and Fulcher of Chartres became bestsellers of their day.

The success of the Crusade also encouraged further expeditions. The Second Crusade was a direct response to the fall of the County of Edessa in 1144, and the Third Crusade was a response to the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. The success of 1099 set a standard that subsequent Crusaders would feel obliged to match.

The First Crusade also produced new institutional forms. The Knights Templar, founded in 1119 to protect pilgrims, became one of the most powerful military and economic organizations of the Middle Ages. The Knights Hospitaller, founded earlier in 1099, became another. These military religious orders would go on to play central roles in the Crusading movement for the next two centuries.

The First Crusade also had a profound impact on Jewish communities in Western Europe. The massacres of Jews in the Rhineland in 1096, committed by the People’s Crusade, were a prelude to centuries of persecution. The memory of the events of 1096 would be transmitted through Jewish tradition as a tragic episode, and it would influence Jewish-Christian relations in the centuries that followed.

In modern memory, the First Crusade continues to occupy a special place. The capture of Jerusalem in 1099 is one of the most discussed and debated events in medieval history. Some commentators have celebrated the Crusade as a heroic act of religious devotion; others have condemned it as an act of unprovoked aggression. The massacre that followed the fall of the city has been a particular focus of controversy, with some historians emphasizing the violence and others the context of medieval warfare. The First Crusade has also been the subject of numerous modern works of history, fiction, and film, from Walter Scott’s The Talisman to the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Whatever one’s view of the Crusade, its consequences were enormous, and it remains a defining moment in the history of the medieval world.