ABSTRACT
In November 1095, Pope Urban II preached a sermon in a field outside the French town of Clermont in which he exhorted the people of Europe to travel to the Holy Land and retake Jerusalem and other Christian holy places from the Muslims. Unifying a number of strands of medieval European culture, including the obligation to fight for one’s master (in this case Christ), the martial spirit of the knightly classes, pilgrimage, and the perception that Muslims were pagan or heretical, together with relatively new ideas, such as remission of sins for those who died on the journey, his sermon evoked an astonishing response. Tens of thousands of people left their homes for the Levant and, less than four years later, they had captured Jerusalem from the Muslims and set up four ‘crusader states’ based at Jerusalem, Antioch, Tripoli and Edessa. The presence of these Latin Christian states in the Levant was to last, in one way or another, for nearly 200 years.
