First Crusade example essay topic

Pope Urban II was responsible for assisting Emperor Alexus I (1081-1118) of Constantinople in launching the first crusade. He made one of the most influential speeches in the Middle Ages, calling on Christian princes in Europe to go on a crusade to rescue the Holy Land from the Turks. In the speech given at the Council of Clermont in France, on November 27, 1095, he combined the ideas of making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with that of waging a holy war against infidels. The First Crusade began on November 27, 1095, with a proclamation from Pope Urban II delivered to clergy. His topic: an appeal for help that he had received from the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius I Comnenus. Pope Urban tried to encourage people to go on the crusade in which he began with a general denouncement of the continual warfare which plagued the Europe of his day.

He then described in lurid detail the attacks of the Turks upon the Christian Byzantine Empire, and begged the soldiers present to travel to the east to attack the Muslims, rather than their fellow Christians. As a further encouragement Urban offered them a Papal Indulgence, which promised the immediate remission of all sins of any who participated in the expedition (at that time been forgiven your sins and being sin free was very important). The crowd responded with the chant the was to become the war cry of the first crusade - Dieu li volt! Which means God wills it! Afterwards, Bishop Adh " ear of Le Puy handed out crosses made of cloths that were sewn onto the clothes of those who had vowed to take part. What Pope Urban II had in mind when he preached the First Crusade was.

He hoped for the reunion of Christendom, which at that time was divided between the Latin Church and the Greek Church. He hoped also to recapture Jerusalem, which had been under Muslim rule for many centuries. And it was also a matter of giving the largely unemployed and over-aggressive nobility of France something to do, get them out of Europe and stop them devastating the... lands. All these factors played a part in his mind. Whether he himself had any particular beliefs about the imminence of the End. But that is what was read into his speech by many uninformed people.

He undoubtedly wanted the knights to go on this great military expedition. He had not foreseen that they would be followed by a mass of upstart peasantry. That, however, is what happened. And it was the peasantry which wreaked the great destructions, the murder of the Jews all down the Rhine and the savage assaults on Muslims by those who got to Jerusalem. The first mass killing of the Jews was carried out by the so-called People's Crusade, which attached itself to the army of knights and followed on behind them. They came largely from Flanders.

But they proceeded down the Rhine, where there had been large Jewish settlements, ever since Roman times, the oldest Jewish settlements in Europe. And they were really destroyed by these hordes, who felt that as a necessary preliminary to the Second Coming, it was necessary to kill all Jews. This was not the official Church doctrine. The official doctrine was that all Jews must be converted to Christianity before the Second Coming. But one way of settling this matter was to kill them, and there would be no unconverted Jewish left.

Some of the men cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into the flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. The day after Urban's speech, the Council formally granted all the privileges and protections Urban had promised.

The red cross was taken as the official sign of the pilgrims, and Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy was chosen as papal legate and the spiritual leader of the expedition. The First Crusade was the most successful from a military point of view. Some of the results of the first crusade were not expected. Alexus I thought that the Byzantine territories would be returned to him and the Eastern Empire, but instead the European conquerors established four independent Latin kingdoms. In addition, three military orders (Hospitallers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights) came into power. The stated purpose of these orders was to protect pilgrims and holy sites.