Urban II: Call to Crusade (1095) Commentary by Michael Lower, University of Minnesota

Context

Before traveling to France, Pope Urban II had held a church council at Piacenza in northern Italy in March 1095. There he received envoys from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I, who asked for military support against the Seljuk Turks on his eastern border. The Seljuk threat to Byzantium would provide the rationale for Urban’s call to crusade.

The Seljuks were a powerful new force in the Near East. They had their roots north of the Oxus River (modern-day Amu Dar’ya), in what is now Uzbekistan. After converting to Sunni Islam in the tenth century, they embarked on a series of conquests that brought Iran, Iraq, and northern Syria under their control by the 1050s. Seljuk success came at the expense of the traditional ruling dynasty of the Islamic world—the Sunni Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. When the Seljuks occupied Baghdad in 1055, they allowed the Abbasid caliph to carry on as a figurehead of Sunni orthodoxy but took real power into their own hands. Soon the Seljuks were...