Anniversary: Pope Urban II Calls the First Crusade — November 27, 1095

On 27 November 1095, the day after a nine-day church council closed in Clermont, Pope Urban II preached to a crowd too large for any building in the town and spoke in a field outside its walls instead, calling on the knights of Christendom to march east and reclaim Jerusalem. The sermon set tens of thousands of people in motion within months. Clermont’s cathedral today, a Gothic building begun a century and a half later, stands on the same ground where the council that heard the appeal first met.