There was no strong political power in western Europe to which Alexius could appeal. The Empire was drifting asunder under the rule of Henry IV., and France was hopelessly broken up into a mass of feudal states, hardly recognising the authority of Philip I. The Roman Church alone was sufficiently vigorous and representative to help him. Already Michael VII. had sent similar requests to Gregory VII., who had caught eagerly at the prospects of a holy war against the Turks, but the expulsion of Islam was so united in his mind with the necessity of ending the Greek and Armenian schisms, that it was not an unmixed evil to the Eastern Empire that the Pope was too much occupied at home to embark seriously upon the undertaking. Yet it is a fact of no small significance that Gregory, who created the mediæval Papacy, was also the first Western to whom a Crusade seemed a practicable thing. His ally, Robert Guiscard, shared his eastern projects, but the campaign at Durazzo showed how little the fierce Norman distinguished between the schismatic and the infidel.
[Sidenote: Urban II. and the Council of Clermont, 1095.]
Alexius’ envoys appeared before Urban II. at the Council of Piacenza, and at Clermont a few months later the active French Pope preached with extraordinary force and fervour a holy war against the infidel. The vast crowd received the Pope with unmeasured enthusiasm. ‘It is the will of God,’ resounded from churchman and layman alike the answer to Urban’s appeal. Thousands pledged themselves to fight against Islam, and Urban himself distributed the crosses which the armed pilgrims were to bear as their special badge, and which gave the holy wars the name of Crusades. Preachers, like Peter the Hermit, stirred up the passion of the multitude, and before the lords and knights were ready, huge swarms of poor pilgrims gathered together in northern France and the Rhineland, under the leadership of Peter himself and of a French knight called Walter the Penniless. These disorganised hordes either perished on the long land journey through Hungary and Greece, or fell easy victims to the first encounter with the Turks of Roum, but their misordered zeal showed how the movement had touched the heart of Europe.