We remember the Council of Clermont, in 1095, as the launchpad of the First Crusade. But in order to understand why the Crusade was called, we need to look at the Council of Piacenza, held earlier in the same year.
Pope Gregory VII had died shortly after Norman mercenaries drove the King of Germany and his counter-Pope out of Rome. There was a short-lived Pope who doesn’t really enter into our story, and then in 1088, one of Gregory VII’s closest allies became Pope by popular acclaim, just as Gregory had done. The people of Rome were in favor of Papal power and against the Papacy being controlled by the Franks. So when they chose a Pope in this period, it was sure to be an opponent of the French and German kings. The new Pope took the name Urban II.
Urban II took up Gregory VII’s battles, including the counter-Pope who was still around. He held a series of church-wide councils to establish broad support for his own Papacy and Gregory’s reforms. It’s worth noting how important these assemblies were, even in times when monarchy was the normal form of secular government. Many early principles of self-government were worked out in the Church during the medieval centuries. Here, it wasn’t democracy, but the Popes used the apparent will of the people to leverage power against the kings.
By 1093, Urban II had gained such power that he supported the King’s son of Germany in a rebellion against his father, crowning Prince Conrad as “King of the Romans.” He also excommunicated King Philip I of France for divorcing his first wife, Bertha, and remarrying another man’s wife, Bertrade. (Philip, you will recall, was the son of Anne of Kiev.) Additionally, he supported England’s Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury in rebelling against the new Norman dynasty to keep church power separate from the state.
In late 1094, Pope Urban began a formal tour of France and Italy so as to re-establish his personal authority in each locality. At the end, he called many of the people he’d met to come to a Council at Piacenza, Italy. The agenda was to discuss and ratify papal decisions from the past year, but the meeting also served as a royal court. The Pope was not a king but wanted to be acknowledged as even higher than a king. Foreign ambassadors came to address the assembly.
Philip I sent a petition to have his excommunication revoked, but he was denied (unless he repented very soon). The Pope was determined to show himself master over the King of France.
There was even worse in store for the King of Germany. Henry IV had married Anne of Kiev’s niece Eupraxia of Kiev as his second wife. She was the widow of one of his nobles in Saxony, and she probably preferred to enter a convent, which is where Henry met her. However, she consented to a second marriage and was crowned Queen Adelaide. It was a terrible match; by the time Henry was taking his army into Italy, she had to be held prisoner. About a year before the Council of Piacenza, she escaped from his household and fled to Henry’s greatest enemy, the widowed Countess Matilda who claimed much of the same territory. She gave birth to a baby boy who did not live long.
Now, at the Council, Queen Adelaide/Eupraxia stepped forward to make a public accusation. She claimed that far from being the righteous Catholic that the Holy Roman Emperor claimed to be, he had joined a weird cult and forced her to participate in sex orgies and black magic. Further, both Adelaide and Prince Conrad, Henry’s son of his first marriage, claimed that he had even offered his second wife sexually to Conrad. Conrad professed that he had been terribly shocked and not at all tempted, and that it was the reason he rebelled against his father. It’s not clear what the Council did about any of this.
But soon after, the Pope could appear at the height of his power over the kings. Not to them, but to him, to Pope Urban II, came the Byzantine ambassadors. They brought a request from Emperor Alexios I Komnenos for mercenaries to help fight the Turks.
Alexios Komnenos had recently won a huge battle against a nomadic tribe, the Pechenegs, who had been in the region for centuries and had fought on any side they were paid to fight on. When they heard that Constantinople was weak, the whole tribe came with their carts, tents, and flocks. Along the way, they pillaged Byzantine farms for supplies. They had heard correctly that the Emperor was in a weak state; the Byzantine army was not strong enough to fight off even this rabble. But Alexios Komnenos took some of his stored gold and hired another nomadic tribe to join him. They devastated the Pechenegs and all nearby Seljuk Turks.
So Alexios Komnenos was a rising star. He wanted to take back Anatolia from the Turks; it did not yet seem inevitable that that land mass would become “Turkey.” With the Pechenegs dead and few other tribes nearby, his thoughts turned to the despicable Normans who had invaded not long ago in support of another Byzantine would-be Emperor. They were devils, but they fought like madmen. They’d do.