Eventually, the Pope got wind note According to tradition, from a fanatical fellow named Peter the Hermit. The Emperor (or someone in his court) conceived an idea: Why not turn these bloodthirsty, land-hungry Normans (and their equally uncouth Catholic friends) against the Turks? Hence the letter to the Pope, who in turn considered all sorts of angles to convince the Normans-whom he also disliked, since the Normans had kidnapped his predecessor and were generally wreaking havoc in Italy as well - to fight the Turks.

The Normans for their part were to the Byzantines emblematic of Catholic Christendom's small-mindedness and stupidity - attacking the only thing keeping the ascendant Turks from rampaging all over a completely unprepared Europe.

Manzikert was symptomatic of the Byzantines' major problem to the East- the arrival and rise of the Turks, who had upset the balance of power that had existed between the Empire and the Arabs for over 200 years. Alexios' request was a somewhat delayed response to the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and to the ongoing campaigns of Norman lords based in southern Italy against Constantinople's holdings in the Balkans. The immediate cause was the petition from the Eastern Roman Emperor Alexios I to Pope Urban II. Arab historians of the medieval era simply called it 'the Frankish Wars', while modern historians returning to the Crusades after their experience with colonialism and Arab nationalism, also call it Crusades (or 'campaigns of the cross' or ḥamalāt ṣalībiyya with the word ṣalībiyyūn used to describe Crusaders and Westerners in general).

The word 'Crusade' comes from croisade which referred to the practice of stitching a cross on garments, a heraldic practice which metaphorically certainly fits the era. The warriors going to the Holy Land saw their duty as essentially religious in nature, a holy quest to a holy place, defeating and crushing heathens and heretics, earning glory in earth and a place in heaven. During the era, the expeditions were described as iter or peregrenatio which means 'pilgrimage'. The word 'Crusade' is a coinage from a later era. The Crusades were a series of military campaigns that took place between the 11th and 13th centuries, most famously against the Muslims, or Saracens, to reconquer the Holy Land (modern-day Lebanon, Israel and a part of Syria, more or less), but it also included other conflicts, such as the campaigns against the Moors in Spain as well as pagans in the Baltics, and the Albigensian heretics.

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