HAVOC 137Enter the pilgrims, stage left, complaining of the indignities visited
upon them by heathens in the Holy Lands. Finally, in 1095, Pope Urban
II delivered a fiery open-air speech outside a French monastery called
Claremont. There, he told an assembly of French, German, and Italian no-
bles that Christendom was in danger. He detailed the humiliations that
Christian pilgrims had suffered in the Holy Lands and called upon men of
faith to help their brethren expel the Turks from Jerusalem. Urban sug-
gested that those who headed east should wear a cross-shaped red patch as
a badge of their quest. The expedition was to be called a croisade, from
croix, French for "cross," and from this came the name historians give to
this whole undertaking: the Crusades.
By focusing on Jerusalem, Urban linked the invasion of the east to pil-
grimage, thus framing it as a religious act. Therefore, by the authority
vested in him as pope, he decreed that anyone who went to Jerusalem to
kill Muslims would receive partial remission of his sins.
One can only imagine how this must have struck those thousands of
restless, rowdy, psychologically desperate European knights: "Go east,
young man," the pope was saying. "Unleash your true self as the awesome
killing machine your society trained you to be, stuff your pockets with
gold guilt-free, get the land you were born to own, and as a consequence
of it all-get into heaven after you're dead!"
When the first crusaders came trickling into the Muslim world, the lo-
cals had no idea who they were dealing with. Early on, they assumed the
interlopers to be Balkan mercenaries working for the emperor in Constan-
tinople. The first Muslim ruler to encounter them was a Seljuk prince,
Kilij Arslan, who ruled eastern Anatolia from the city of Nicaea, about
three days' journey from Constantinople. One day in the summer of 1096,
Prince Arslan received information that a crowd of odd-looking warriors
had entered his territory, odd because they were so poorly outfitted: a few
did look like warriors, but the rest seemed like camp followers of some
kind. Almost all wore a cross-shaped patch of red cloth sewn to their gar-
ments. Arslan had them followed and watched. He learned that these peo-
ple called themselves the Franks; local Turks and Arabs called them
al-Ifranj ("the Franj"). The interlopers openly proclaimed that they had
come from a distant western land to kill Muslims and conquer Jerusalem,
but first they intended to take possession ofNicaea. Arslan plotted out the