What the Call at Clermont Set Loose

The response to Urban's sermon outran any army the pope himself had organized. Word of the appeal spread through preachers well beyond his own control, most famously Peter the Hermit, whose so called People's Crusade set out from France months ahead of the organized noble armies and was largely destroyed crossing Anatolia before the main campaign had even begun. The knights who followed under more disciplined leadership took three years to reach their goal, capturing Antioch in 1098 after a long siege and then Jerusalem itself in July 1099, in an assault chroniclers on both sides record as accompanied by a massacre of the city's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Urban never learned any of this; he died in Rome on 29 July 1099, two weeks after Jerusalem fell and well before news of the capture could have reached him. Historians have long debated what he actually intended to set in motion, whether primarily a limited relief expedition for a fellow Christian power in the east, a penitential pilgrimage promising remission of sins to participants, or the opening move of a wider Western expansion, and that promise of remission, applied for the first time to an act of war rather than to prayer or almsgiving, gave the whole enterprise a theological force no earlier appeal had carried.