CLERMONT, COUNCIL OF

an assembly for church reform called by Pope Urban II in 1095, which, as a result of a request by envoys from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus to aid the Greeks against the Muslim Turks, became the occasion for initiating the First Crusade. Urban II exhorted the French knights at Clermont to rescue the Holy Land from the Turks, closing his speech with the words God wills it, which became a battlecry of the crusaders; the event inaugurated the medieval religious wars against the Muslims.