At the Council of Clermont in 1095 he called for a Crusade to save the eastern churches and recover the Holy Land from the Muslims.
This request was seized upon by Pope Urban II, who possibly saw it as an opportunity to further his own aims. Following Manzikert they took nearly all of Anatolia from the Byzantines.Īs the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos struggled to stem the Seljuq advances, he appealed to the West for mercenaries. These nomadic conquerors had recently converted to Islam, and had swiftly established a Sultanate ruling from Afghanistan to Palestine.
All that was to change in 1071, when they suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Seljuq Turks at the Battle of Manzikert. The Byzantine Empire began the 11th century in a strong position – they had pushed their frontier eastwards against the fragmented Muslim emirates, and had completely destroyed the Bulgars in the Balkans.
