Alexios I Asks the West for Help and Gets the First Crusade
An emperor seeking mercenaries against the Seljuks instead triggers a mass movement of western armies
Quick facts
- Byzantine emperor
- Alexios I Komnenos
- Appeal made
- March 1095 CE, Council of Piacenza
- Pope
- Urban II
- Crusaders reach Constantinople
- November 1096 to April 1097 CE
What happened
Alexios I Komnenos took the Byzantine throne in 1081 CE and spent his reign fighting the Normans, the Pechenegs, and the Seljuk Turks who had overrun Anatolia after Manzikert. Worried about continuing Seljuk advances, Alexios sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza in March 1095 CE asking Pope Urban II for military aid, expecting western mercenary reinforcements of the kind Byzantium had used before. Instead, after Urban preached a much larger call to arms at the Council of Clermont later that year, waves of western crusaders set out for the east, including an unarmed peasant movement called the People's Crusade. The main crusader armies departed Europe in August 1096 CE and gathered outside Constantinople's walls between November 1096 and April 1097 CE, arriving in far greater numbers and with far more independent ambitions than Alexios had sought.
Why it matters
The mismatch between the modest aid Alexios requested and the massive, independently motivated crusading movement he received created lasting friction between Byzantium and the western crusader states, planting seeds of mistrust that would culminate in the Fourth Crusade's attack on Constantinople itself just over a century later.
How we know
The World History Encyclopedia's biography of Alexios I Komnenos, supplemented by his daughter Anna Komnene's contemporary account in the Alexiad, documents his appeal to Urban II and the unexpected scale of the crusading response.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Alexios I Komnenos · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Anna Komnene · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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