In the year 1095 Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade on a cloud of lies and ambition to an audience wholly susceptible to pious manipulation. Christian Knights, Men-at-Arms, and peasants, the largest army the world had seen in centuries, marched across the Mediterranean to wage a “Holy War” sanctioned by God himself against a people of kindred but divergent faith. The spearhead of the Crusade was mostly poor men, women and children without property or political obligations who could mobilize faster than the mighty European warring classes. Lead by charismatic religious leaders and a few enterprising Frankish & German Knights, this first group was dubbed the People’s Crusade.

The People’s Crusade is of particular interest because unlike the better organized and well financed Princely main contingent, it is harder to pin ulterior motives on the peasant rabble. The Frankish nobility wanted to assert dominance over their eastern brethren, restore Papal glory in Rome and shift power west. The Norman and Italian nobility had post-war tensions with the Greco-Roman Byzantines and their eye on the throne. Others had a desire to enact revenge on Muslims for battles lost in Moorish Spain. But the central cause of the simple masses was truly religious, not political or economic. The average person was enraptured by sermon and bent on Papal promises of personal salvation - through forcibly asserting the will of God on the “infidels.”

In this fevered mindset the People couldn’t wait until Antioch to unleash the power of their faith. They turned on those in their midst who were non-Christian; their Jewish compatriots. The “First Holocaust” was born in Christian religious frenzy, while rallying to the First Crusade. It spread from city to city all across Western Europe until every last Jewish woman and babe found on the road East was put to the sword, by the People.

These then were the emissaries of Christianity who met Muslims, most for the first time in 1097 AD. And 400 hundred years of fairly peaceable Muslim/Christian cohabitation in the Holy Land came to a rapacious end. The rest is history, and for those who say the Islamic world is backwards for remembering the Crusades like they were yesterday, it is evident that the same undercurrent still flows through Christendom too. Atrocities at the hands of Muslims abound, but this is not about them. Christianity derailed nearly 2000 years ago when the teachings of Jesus were inexplicably abandoned. This is not about “them.” They don’t celebrate the same New Year, this is all ours.

Time for a new kind of People’s Crusade.

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own.”
Matthew 7:3