1a) In a speech given in Western Europe in 1095 CE, Pope Urban II (r.1088 – 1099) called for all Christians regardless of social status to rise up and reclaim Jerusalem; arguing that “Christian blood … and Christian flesh, akin to the flesh of Christ”, meaning Christians living in the Byzantine empire and the east in general, were living under brutal conditions and facing oppression under the rule of Muslims and it was the job of other fellow believers of Christ to go and liberate them. I think that by comparing eastern Christians’ supposed mistreatment under the Turkish Muslims to that of what Jesus had to deal with from the Romans, Urban II is trying to enforce the point that as Jesus is described to be the son of God in the Bible, that therefore means that all his followers are also God’s children. Urban’s cries about the mistreatment of eastern Christians seems to be the biggest motivation for the Crusade among other reasons; Urban urged people, knights especially to stop fighting amongst themselves and to turn …show more content…
Albert, himself, never took part in the Crusades but the accounts that he wrote about were from individuals who were. So, it’s safe to say this story could be accurate because it’s a retelling of accounts of returning crusaders, but it could also be ‘biased’ in that Albert could’ve changed certain accounts from crusaders to fit a certain narrative. I think that there are some biases in Albert’s recounting of the crusaders’ tales. Though the actions of the crusaders pretty much line up with what Urban II called on them to do, I think the way that Christians were presented in these accounts, especially considering the height of anti-Semitism during this time, it would’ve been easy to make every crusader seem as if they were just a bunch of murdering barbarians, when that could’ve been a case of a few men and women but not children or the elderly who also took part on the