First Crusade

The expedition called by Pope Urban II at Clermont in 1095 that took Antioch and Jerusalem and founded the Crusader states.

The First Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, in response to a Byzantine appeal for mercenary aid against the Seljuk Turks. The campaign, framed as an armed pilgrimage with the remission of sins for those who took the cross, drew an extraordinary mobilisation of western European nobility: Godfrey of Bouillon and his brothers Eustace and Baldwin, Raymond of Saint-Gilles, Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred, Robert of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, and Stephen of Blois were the principal lay leaders; Adhemar of Le Puy was the papal legate.

The crusader armies marched in stages through the Balkans and across Anatolia. They captured Nicaea (1097), won the field battle of Dorylaeum (1097), endured the murderous siege and counter-siege of Antioch (1097–98), and reached Jerusalem in June 1099. The city fell to assault on 15 July 1099, in scenes of indiscriminate slaughter that shocked even contemporary chroniclers, and a Latin kingdom was constituted under Godfrey of Bouillon as Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri.

The First Crusade is the only fully successful crusade of the central Middle Ages: it founded four Latin polities — the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem — and inaugurated nearly two centuries of Frankish presence in the Levant.

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