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On Tuesday 27 November 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a vast crowd gathered outside Clermont cathedral. Telling of atrocities in eastern Christendom, Byzantium from where the Emperor Alexius had appealed for aid. The Turks, he told them, were advancing into the very heart of the Christian lands; Christian inhabitants were suffering abuses and shrines were being desecrated. According to Robert the Monk, who claims to have been an eyewitness to the Council of Clermont, Urban claimed that the Turks "cut open the navels of those whom they choose and flog them as they lie prone to the ground with all their entrails out." And that the blood from these atrocities was spread on the altars and poured into the baptismal fonts. But Urban was more than a mere propagandist; he was building up to a declaration of war and a call to arms, which would change the course of history. The war, or armed pilgrimage as it was termed giving it a penitential status, was not only to aid the fellow Christians in the east, but its final goal was to liberate Jerusalem from the clutches of the Infidel it had been a Muslim territory since AD 638 and Caliph Omar. Jerusalem was a very sacred place in the minds of medieval Christians for many reasons; for one thing it was associated strongly with the life, passion and death of Christ and the scriptural stories that people heard in church. It was therefore thought of as sacred ground where Christ and his disciples had walked, it was one giant religious relic. Also, because it was so far away, very few western Christians, even members of the warrior aristocracy the upper class in eleventh century European society ever ventured so far on such a dangerous journey. The physical Jerusalem was therefore, in the medieval mind, closely linked with the heavenly Jerusalem that is to say, Heaven itself.

Pivotal in the calling of the Crusade and the recruiting of an army, was Urban's promise of the remission of sins to whoever would undertake the Church's quest, however, there was one important condition, "Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance." Western medieval society was obsessed by Christianity, and therefore by inference, with sin and the state of their individual souls. People were convinced of the Christian version of the afterlife and the existence of heaven and hell was very real to them, they would live their entire lives trying to avoid

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