In 1074 Pope Gregory VII., himself a product of the Cluniac movement, laid a programme of reform before a council assembled at Rome; the liberation of Jerusalem did not actually figure in this programme, but later in the same year (on Dec. 7) we find it expressed in a letter to Henry IV. (cf. Gregor. Pp. VII. _Epist._ II. 31, in Jaffe: _Mon. Greg._, pp. 14415, but a previous suggestion had been made by Silvester II. as far back as 999). No doubt the news of the Saljuq advance into Asia Minor had something to do with his proposal, the report of vast numbers of “Christians living beyond the seas” slain by “the pagans” so that the Christian community was reduced to nothing (id. p. 145), but the chief point was that Gregory and his party looked at the world through a Cluniac medium and so to them Palestine was the “Holy Land,” and it was a terrible thought that the sacred sites of Christ’s passion were in the hands of unbelievers. The violent storms aroused by the reforming programme of 1074, however, prevented any action being taken in this direction.
(iii) _Third Period. Fatimid decline._ (A.H. 469-564 = A.D. 1076-1168.)
When Urban II. became Pope in 1087 events had moved forward with startling rapidity. In 1076 Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of the Saljuqs, and the Byzantine Empire was practically deprived of all its Asiatic possessions, so that both Egypt and Byzantium were at bay. In this desperate crisis the Greeks made an appeal to the West, and this was laid before two councils assembled in the year 1095, the one at Piacenza in March, the other at Clermont-Ferrand in November, and from these councils proceeded the First Crusade.
At the moment the three great powers in the Near East were the Byzantine Empire, the Fatimid Khalifate, and the Saljuq Sultanate, but of these the two former were on the defensive and steadily losing ground; the Fatimids had just suffered the loss of Jerusalem, the Greeks had lost North-West Syria and practically all of Asia Minor. The Saljuqs were the leading military power and held the Khalifate of Baghdad absolutely in subjection, but they already showed signs of decline, their empire was beginning to be divided amongst provincial rulers known as _atabegs_, and these were getting to be more or less independent of the central authority: it was the old story of the Khalifate over again. Both in Cairo and in Baghdad the real power was in the hands of the wazir or prime minister.