THE CRUSADES
On November 26, 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a fiery
speech at Clermont in southern France urging the believers
to 'enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre, wrest it from
the wicked race and subject it' to themselves. Judged by its
results this was perhaps the most effective speech in history.
'Dens vult' (God wills [it]) became the rallying cry and was
reiterated throughout Europe, seizing high and low as if by
a strange psychological contagion.
The response, however, was not all motivated by piety. Besides the devout there were military leaders intent upon new conquests for themselves; merchants from Genoa and Pisa whose interest was more commercial than spiritual; the romantic, the restless, the adventurers ever ready to join a spectacular movement; the criminals and sinful who sought absolution through pilgrimage to the Holy Land ; and the economically and socially depressed individuals to whom ' taking the cross' was more of a relief than a sacrifice. Other factors were involved: papal aid in pushing back the Moslems had repeatedly been solicited by the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus, whose Asiatic possessions had been overrun by Seljuks almost as far as Constantinople. The pope viewed these importunities as providing an oppor- tunity for healing the schism between Byzantium and Rome and establishing himself as head of Christendom.
By the spring of 1097 some hundred and fifty thousand men, mostly from France and adjacent lands, had re- sponded. They set out overland for Constantinople, wear- ing as a badge the cross which gave them their name. Their route lay across Anatolia, then the domain of the Seljuks of Konya. They restored Nicaea to the Byzantines, defeated
