Kevin: November 27, 1095. A field outside the Cathedral of Clermont in France. Too many people came to fit inside, so they're standing outside in the cold, waiting for a 60-year-old French pope named Urban II to speak. He's seven years into a papacy, he spent mostly on the road. When he was elected in 1088, an antipope backed by the Holy Roman Empire was holding Rome. So Urban had to govern the Catholic Church from abbeys and noble houses across France and Italy. By 1095, he's finally consolidated power, and this French-speaking tour is partly a victory lap. In front of him are 13 archbishops, 82 bishops, 90 abbots, and a gathering of knights and laymen who came from across the region to hear him. Most of the council's business has been internal church reform, but that work is done. He's about to deliver one more speech. A different subject. Eight months earlier, ambassadors from the Byzantine Emperor showed up at a church council in Piacenza asking for help fighting the Seljuk Turks. The Byzantines wanted what they always wanted from the West paid soldiers. A few thousand professional Frankish cavalry integrated into the Imperial Army on contract. Urban heard them out. He sat with the request for eight months. What he's about to say isn't what they asked for. He tells the audience that their Christian brothers in the East are suffering under a barbaric race of Persians, that God has chosen the Franks for a holy purpose, and that anyone who takes up the cross and fights to free the Holy Land will receive remission of every sin they've ever committed. According to the chronicler Robert the Monk, who wrote it all down a decade later, the people in front of him shouted back, Deus votes, God wills it. The speech launches two centuries of religious warfare, gets somewhere around a million people killed, and sets the template for the Christian-Muslim relationship we're still living inside today. But Urban had a different option. The Byzantines asked for soldiers, not a holy war. Let's hit Ctrl Z and rewrite history. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask, what happens if they go the other way? Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls with alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision. We hit Control-Z, try it the other way, and see what changes. Urban's choice was a choice. To see why, you have to go back 24 years before Clermon to the worst day in the Byzantine Empire's medieval history. August 26, 1071, a Friday. The Byzantine Emperor Romanos is leading an army into eastern Anatolia to deal with the Seljuk Turkish raiders. His force is a mess. Byzantine regulars mixed with mercenaries who don't trust each other and Anatolian levies who don't really want to be there. The Seljuk Sultan, Arslan, ambushes him near a fortress town called Manzikert. By nightfall, the Byzantine army is shattered and the emperor is in chains. Romanos is the first Roman emperor captured alive by an enemy in 800 years, since Valerian in the year 260. Arslan reportedly asks his prisoner what he would have done if their positions were reversed. Romanos very honestly says he'd probably have killed him or paraded him through the streets of Constantinople. Arslan, who comes off looking very graceful in this story, ransomed him and sent him back. Romanos made it back to Byzantine territory, but was promptly deposed, blinded, and dead of his wounds within the year. Civil war broke out in Constantinople. While the Byzantines were fighting each other for the throne, Turkish nomads poured into the suddenly undefended Anatolian heartland. By ten eighty, an area of roughly seventy eight thousand square kilometers had passed from Greek Christian to Turkish Muslim control. The Seljuks set up a sultanate at Nisa, less than a hundred miles or so from Constantinople on the Asian side. This is the empire that Alexius Cominos inherited when he took the throne in a coup in ten eighty one. He was twenty four years old. The next fourteen years of his reign were Are the start of what historians call the Comenean Restoration. The short version here is that he was very good at his job. He defeated a Norman invasion led by Robert Giscar, the rough-edged adventurer who had carved a kingdom out of southern Italy. And by the early 1090s, he was stabilizing the currency, restructuring the army, and starting to claw back coastal territory from the Turks. By 1095, Alexios is in a position to think about taking Anatolia back. What he needs is more cavalry, specifically the heavily armored Frankish kind that Western Europe specialized in. Now, hiring foreign soldiers is standard Byzantine practice. The Empire's elite bodyguard, the Pharangian Guard, was made up mostly of Norse and Anglo Saxon warriors. So Alexio sends ambassadors to a church council Pope Urban II is holding in the northern Italian city of Piacenza in March 1095. The ambassadors make their pitch. We need Frankish knights. We can pay. The chronicler, Bernold of Constanz, reports that Urban was sympathetic and even induced some of the audience to swear they'd go to Constantinople to help the emperor. Urban himself matters here. Born Odo of Chatillon around 1035 in Champagne. Cluniac monk, then prior at Cluny, the most important monastery in 11th century Europe. The Cluniac movement was the engine of church reform in this period, anti-corruption, pro-celibacy, focused on getting secular rulers out of the business of appointing bishops. Pope Gregory VII pulled Odo to Rome and made him Cardinal Bishop of Ostia around 1080. When Gregory died, the papacy went through a brief succession crisis, and then Odo was elected Pope in March 1088 and took the name Urban II. When the Byzantine ambassadors made their request, Urban was looking at it as someone who had just spent half a decade fighting for legitimacy. He had a French audience that loved him. He had a network of Cluniac monks across Europe who would carry his message anywhere he wanted it carried. And he had a hundred ways to respond to a request for mercenaries. He could have written letters to the Dukes of Normandy and Flanders asking them to lend Alexios their younger sons in exchange for Byzantine gold. organized a small papal expedition under a single legate, or done what his predecessor Alexander II had been doing for decades and offered remission of sins to individual knights who took the contract. Quiet, professional, exactly what was asked for. He took eight months and gave Europe something else. He called a council in Clermont, packed it with bishops, and on November 27, 1095, He stood in front of a crowd in an open field and told them God himself wanted them to march to Jerusalem. Now, we don't actually know what Urban said that day. Five different versions of that speech survive, and all of them were written down years or decades later by men with their own agendas, and they don't agree on the details. What we do know for certain is that he offered something new, a plenary indulgence, full remission of sins for everyone who joined. Anyone who grew up Catholic understands what plenary indulgence is. This was the first time in church history a pope had done that. He set an official departure date of August 15, 1096, the Feast of the Assumption, and appointed a French bishop named Adamar of Lepuy as the expedition's papal legate. What we know mattered most is that he badly miscalculated the response. Urban probably expected a few thousand knights, the kind of force that could plausibly help Alexios. He got something between 60,000 and 100,000 people taking up the cross. Knights, peasants, women, children, criminals, mystics, the sick, the desperate. A comet had appeared over Europe in 1095, along with a meteor shower, auroras, and a lunar eclipse. An outbreak of ergotism, a fungal poisoning that causes hallucinations, swept through grain supplies. Famine and plague had been hammering peasants for years. Belief that the end of the world was near was at one of its periodic peaks. Urban lit the match in a room full of gasoline. What followed over the next two centuries was a category of human violence Europe had never invented before. In April 1096, before the official crusade had even left, A French priest named Peter the Hermit arrived in Cologne with 40,000 followers. War bands, inspired by the crusading message, moved through the Rhine Valley that spring. The worst of them, led by a German nobleman named Count Emicho of Flanheim, who had decided that fighting Muslims in Jerusalem was a fine idea, but fighting Jews at home was easier. Emicho's men killed somewhere between 800 and 1,000 Jews in Vorms in May. Days later, They reached Mainz, where Archbishop Ruthart had sheltered the Jewish population in his palace. The mob overran the palace. Some of the archbishop's own men reportedly handed Jews over. The chief rabbi committed suicide rather than face conversion. A Jewish woman whose name doesn't survive killed her own children rather than let crusaders take them. The death toll from the Rhineland massacres of ten ninety-six Has been estimated at anywhere from 2,000 to 12,000 Jews. The historian Edward Flannery's estimate is that 10,000 were killed between January and July, roughly a quarter to a third of the entire Jewish population of Germany and northern France. The historian Arno Mayer, in his study of the Holocaust, called the events of 1096 a fatal poison deposited in the European psyche. The path forward from the Rhineland is direct. Blood libel accusations begin in England in 1144. Jews are expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306, and then again in 1394, and then from Spain in 1492. The Black Death or Bubonic Plague is blamed on Jews, and entire communities are massacred across Europe in 1348 and 1349. The pattern set by Imicho's men keeps reproducing itself for the next eight years. Centuries. The official First Crusade departed in stages through the summer and fall of 1096. Four major contingents led by some of the most ambitious nobles in Europe: Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Toronto, Raymond of Toulouse, and Baldwin of Boulogne. They captured Nicaea in June 1097 and handed it back to Alexios per their oath. They fought off a Seljuk relief force at Dorleum the following month. They besieged Antioch for almost eight months and took it on June 3, 1098. They reached Jerusalem on June 7, 1099, with 1,300 knights and 12,000 infantry remaining of the army that had left Europe three years earlier. They built siege engines from wood scavenged out of caves, fought their way over the walls on July 15th, and And slaughtered most of the Muslim and Jewish population of Jerusalem. The Crusader chronicler Raymond of Aguilar wrote that men rode through blood up to the knees of their horses, which is geometrically impossible, but tells you something about the energy of what happened. Pope Urban II died on July 29th, 1099, two weeks after Jerusalem fell. The news hadn't reached Rome yet. He never knew his crusade had succeeded. Four crusader states were established in the wake of the conquest, collectively called Outramir, the French word for overseas. They needed defenders, and the defenders organized themselves into something the medieval world had never seen before: military religious orders. The Knights Templar, founded around 1119 to protect pilgrims, became an international banking network. The Knights Hospitaler, recognized as an order around 1113 and militarized in the following decades, lasted as a sovereign entity into the nineteenth century. The Teutonic Knights, founded in 1190, eventually pivoted to conquering pagan Prussia and building the political ancestor of modern Germany. The two century arc of the Crusader states is mostly the story of slow strangulation. Edessa fell in 1144, which triggered the second crusade. Which failed. Saladin defeated the Crusaders at Hattin on july fourth, eleven eighty seven and retook Jerusalem in October. The third crusade brought Richard the Lionheart, who you might remember from the Robin Hood story, Philip II of France, and the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who drowned crossing a river in Anatolia before he ever even got to the fight. The Fourth Crusade in 1204 never made it to the Holy Land at all. It sacked Constantinople instead, broke the Byzantine Empire, and set the city up to fall to the Ottomans two and a half centuries later. Acre, the last crusader city on the mainland, fell to the Mamluks on May 18, 1291. Two hundred years of Western presence in the Middle East ended with a massacre. The first crusade, by establishing four permanent Christian states in the Muslim land, Gave the Muslim world an enemy that wasn't going to leave. In 1105, a Damasean scholar named Ali ibn Talir al-Sulami wrote the first major treatise calling for a renewed jihad against the Franks. The idea took 80 years to mature. Saladin built his entire political career on it. Without Urban's call, none of this gets started. The other option was sitting on his desk the entire time. The Byzantines told him exactly what they needed. He could have simply said yes. Let's see what happens when he does. Let's move into the alternate timeline. Urban's letter to the Dukes of Normandy and Flanders goes out in the spring of 1096. It asks them to send their younger sons east in exchange for Byzantine gold. There's no plenary indulgence, there's no popular preaching campaign. There's no apocalyptic religious framing at all. It's simply a recruitment notice. A few thousand Frankish knights take the contract. They sail from Italian ports across the Adriatic to come. Constantinople in the summer and fall of 1096, they integrate into Alexios' imperial army, and they start campaigning in Western Anatolia in 1097. Peter the Hermit, in this timeline, is a French priest with strong opinions and no audience. There's no crusade for him to attach himself to. He preaches in the villages around Amiens, attracts a small local following, and dies in obscurity in some monastery a decade later, his name preserved only in the regional church records. Count Emicho of Flonheim never raises an army. Without the religious frame Urban handed him in our timeline, his violent inclinations have nowhere to organize themselves. He stays in his castle in the Rhineland, picking fights with neighboring lords over land and tolls. The Jewish communities of Speyer, Werms, Mainz, and Cologne wake up in the spring of 1096 and go to work. Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz is not asked to shelter anyone. The chief rabbi, who is a respected scholar and a wealthy man, lives out his old age writing commentary on Jewish law. The Hebrew chronicles of Solomon Bar Simzon and Eliezer Barnathan, which preserve the memory of what happened in our timeline, don't get written because nothing happened. Now, unfortunately, European hatred of Jews still exists. Jews have been periodically attacked, expelled, and forced to convert in earlier centuries, and individual acts of violence do continue. But what doesn't happen is the mass form. The link between fighting external Muslim enemies and slaughtering internal Jewish ones, the precedent that armed Christian populist movements could murder Jewish communities by the thousands without serious consequence, is not established in 1096. The blood libel that emerged in England in 1144 in our timeline needs different rhetorical material to take root and may not. The expulsions, the Black Death massacres of thirteen forty eight and forty-nine, the centuries long pattern of European Jewish persecution, all of it loses its founding event. The Jewish population of Germany and northern France grows through the twelfth century instead of being decimated in the spring of 1096. The intellectual centers of Ashkenazi Judaism, which in our timeline kept rebuilding themselves after each catastrophe. Develop without the catastrophes. The history of European Jewry runs along a line that no historian in our world has ever had the data to imagine. In our control Z timeline, Alexios gets exactly what he asked for and uses it well. The Frankish heavy cavalry he hired in 1096 fights for him under Byzantine command. They help him push the Sultanate of Rome back from the Sea of Marmora. They participate in the recovery of Nisa in 1097, just as the Crusaders did in our timeline, except this time there's no oath dispute afterwards, because the knights are imperial employees. And the city was always going to be Byzantine. By 1100, Alexios has retaken most of Western Anatolia. And by 1110, he's pushed the Turks back to the Central Plateau. The Comenian Restoration runs further than it did in our world. Alexios dies in 1118, having recovered more territory than he lost. His son John Comenios, who in our timeline was an excellent emperor in his own right, Inherits a stronger empire and continues the Anatolian reconquest. By the middle of the 12th century, the Byzantine Empire holds the Anatolian coast and most of the interior, with a Turkish rump state in the east. There are no crusader states in the Levant because the West never planted any. Jerusalem stays under the management of the Caliphate of Egypt, which in our timeline took it from the Seljuks in 1098 and held it for one year before losing it to the Crusaders. In this timeline, the Fatimids hold on to it for the next century, slowly losing ground to internal Shia Sunni disputes and eventually falling to a Sunni revival movement out of Syria in the late 12th century. Christian pilgrims continue to visit, they continue to pay the standard tolls that Muslim governments had been collecting from pilgrims for four centuries. The Templars and Hospitalers don't exist as institutions. There are no crusader states. For military religious orders to defend, so the orders never form. Philip IV of France doesn't destroy the Templars in 1307 because there are no Templars to destroy. The financial conspiracy theories that have grown up around their suppression and their supposed treasure don't have the historical hook to grow on. On a smaller element, the Assassin's Creed video games probably also don't exist. That's sad for a lot of us. The Sunni Muslim world stays politically fragmented. The Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad continues as a figurehead under Seljuk Turkish military domination. The Fatimid Caliphate in Cairo continues as a Shia counterweight. The Sunni Shia split between Baghdad and Cairo stays the dominant Muslim fault line. Egypt and Syria don't unify under a single ruler who frames his career as defense against Western invasion. Saladin, born into Crete around 1137, grows up to be a competent regional commander in some Kurdish army and dies an officer. But without Saladin, the Ayyubid dynasty never forms. And without the Ayyubids, the Mamluk Sultanate that emerges from the Ayyubid wreckage in the 13th century never forms in the same way, because again, that wreckage doesn't exist. The political map of the medieval Middle East is is unrecognizable from ours. The Fourth Crusade, the disaster that broke Byzantum in the timeline, never happens. There's no institutional infrastructure of crusading for Pope Innocent III to call on in 1198. There's no Venetian financial system built around moving crusader armies. The blind ninety year old doge Enrico Dandolo, who in our timeline diverted the Fourth Crusade to attack first Catholic Hungary and then Christian Constantinople just runs Venice as a wealthy maritime republic until he dies. The four bronze horses on top of St. Mark's Basilica in Venice today, which were looted from the Hippodrome of Constantinople in 1204, stay in Constantinople. Constantinople is not sacked in 1204. The Latin Empire never exists. The Byzantine Empire is not partitioned. The Hagia Sophia is not desecrated. The Greek Orthodox Roman Catholic schism, which had become formal in 1054, but was still seen as bridgeable in 1095, doesn't get cemented by Western atrocity. The two halves of Christianity remain in negotiation rather than mutual contempt for the next several centuries. A stronger Byzantium, holding more of Anatolia undamaged by Latin sacks. With a real army and a real navy, is a much harder target for the Ottoman dynasty that emerges around 1300. The Ottomans cross into Europe at Gallipoli in 1354 in our timeline. In this one, Byzantium holds the Bosporus Straits and the crossing doesn't happen on the same schedule. The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 doesn't decide the Balkans. The Battle of Nicopolis in 1396. doesn't break the last serious Christian counterattack. Constantinople doesn't fall in fourteen fifty three. The Byzantine Empire continues into the early modern era as a diminished but viable state. Greek remains the dominant language of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Hagia Sophia remains the largest Christian cathedral in the world. The Roman political tradition that began with Augustus in 27 BC Which in our timeline ended on May 29, 1453, continues into the era of the printing press, the Reformation, and the New World. Strip out 200 years of crusading, the destruction of Byzantum, and the rise of an Islamic Mediterranean centered on Constantinople as Istanbul, and the rest of European history rearranges. The Italian commercial revolution slows down. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa were already powerful before 1095. They had defeated Muslim raiders in the 10th century and built strong fleets, but the Crusades supercharged them. Without the two-century pump of Crusader armies needing transportation and crusader colonies needing supplies, the Italian commercial revolution still happens, because these were already commercial cities, but it happens smaller and slower. The Venetians don't end up running the Black Sea trade. The Riccardi of Lucca, the Peruzzi of Florence, they develop their banking innovations on a different timeline. The Renaissance also happens later. And takes a different shape. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent thousands of Greek scholars west, carrying classical Greek manuscripts that fed the Italian intellectual revival. Italian wealth from crusading commerce paid for the Renaissance to flower in Florence and Venice and Rome. In this timeline, though, Constantinople is still standing as the home of Greek learning, and the Italian cities are wealthy, but not. As wealthy. The European cultural rebirth, when it comes, runs through different institutions and probably different cities. Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452, grows up in a very different Florence. The Reconquista runs on its own track. Spanish reconquest of Al Andalus was already underway before 1095. Toledo had fallen to Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile in 1085. Pope Alexander II had been offering remissions of sins to Iberian fighters since the 1060s. Without the First Crusade as the dominant project of papal energy, the Iberian campaign moves to the front burner. Granada falls earlier than 1492. Columbus, born in Genoa in 1451, Looks for a different patron when he wants to sail west and finds one on a very different schedule. The Northern Crusades against the pagan Baltic peoples don't happen on the same template because Urban hasn't established the template. The Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southern France in the early 13th century, which killed somewhere between 200,000 and a million people, doesn't have a precedent for popes calling armed expeditions against fellow Christians. Hussite wars in 15th century Bohemia. Which broke the medieval Catholic Church's monopoly on European Christianity and prefigured the Protestant Reformation, develops on a different basis, or not at all. The civilizational narrative doesn't exist. The word crusader in Arabic, salibi, crossbearer, carries no weight in 21st century political rhetoric because there were no crusaders. Osama bin Laden's 1998 declaration of war against America. Doesn't title itself the World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders because the rhetorical category doesn't exist. George W. Bush doesn't have to walk back the word crusade in September 2001 because the word means what it meant in 1095, a Latin verb meaning to mark with a cross. The Greek Orthodox Church, which lost most of its physical infrastructure when Constantinople fell in 1453, remains the dominant Christian institution of the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia's claim to the title of Third Rome, which Moscow took up after Constantinople fell, doesn't have the same opening to develop. The religious geography of Eastern Europe and the Russian sphere changes shape. Two hundred years of religious war, dozens of follow-up crusades, the Templars, the Hospitalers, the sack of Constantinople, the slow death of Byzantium. The fall to the Ottomans, the Greek scholars fleeing West, the Renaissance, the printing press picking up Greek manuscripts to print, the European voyages of discovery that began in part as attempts to outflank the Ottoman controlled trade routes to Asia, all of it happens differently or not at all, because one French monk in November 1095 chose the smaller option. Urban II had a small option sitting on his desk. A few thousand Frankish knights on contract. A diplomatic letter to the right Norman lords. The kind of administrative response a Cluniac monk who'd spent his career on Vatican business would have produced in his sleep. He chose the bigger thing. He invented the plenary indulgence. He told European peasants and knights. That going to war for Christ would wipe their sins clean. He promised heaven to people who fought, and he made the promise without realizing the promise itself was a weapon he was loosing into the world. He died less than four years later, not knowing his army had succeeded, not knowing the same speech had killed roughly 10,000 Jews in the Rhineland in 1096, not knowing. He'd set the template for two centuries of religious warfare, the destruction of the Eastern Roman Empire by its own Christian successors, and a civilizational wound between Christianity and Islam that is still not closed in nine hundred and thirty years. The control Z version is the version where the bureaucrat wins. Urban sends mercenaries, Alexios gets his cavalry, and the Byzantine recovery continues. The Jewish communities of the Rhineland live. The Crusader states never exist. Saladin grows old in obscurity, and Constantinople doesn't fall in fourteen fifty-three. The word crusade stays a Latin verb meaning to mark with a cross, instead of becoming the most loaded word in religious vocabulary of the next thousand years. That's the world the careful Pope would have made. We're in the one. Where a French monk and a French field decided that what the Byzantines really needed wasn't soldiers, but a holy war. The crowd shouted back Deus Volt, and nine and a half centuries later, we're still living with what God supposedly wanted that day. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find the show, and it helps me figure out whether people are actually enjoying it. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Ctrl Z with