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Of course, those who responded to his call were inspired by a range of motives beyond the religious: material, economic, political, social and cultural. Urban promised the crowds that crusading would wipe away all sins, past and present Urban wanted to extend the hand of friendship to the Orthodox church and to heal the schism with Catholicism, which had gone from bad to worse since the time of his predecessor Leo IX. In March that year, at the Council of Piacenza, a desperate Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, had pleaded for western help against the Seljuk Turks, whose conquests were decimating Byzantium and preventing Christians from reaching pilgrimage sites. Urban had been travelling through France accompanied by a large entourage from Italy, dedicating cathedrals and churches and presiding over reforming councils, and his proposed crusade was part of a wider programme of church reform. It was a carefully stage-managed event, in which the pope’s representative, the papal legate Adhémar of Le Puy, supposedly moved by the pope’s eloquence, tore up strips of cloth to make crosses for the crowds. Some years earlier, on 27 November 1095, Urban II preached a public sermon outside the town of Clermont in central France, summoning Christians to take part in the First Crusade, a new form of holy war. So wrote the monk Robert of Rheims in his Historia Hierosolymitana (‘History of Jerusalem’) during the early 1100s.