Pope Urban II’s Call to Crusade was a sermon he delivered in 1095 to a large audience at the end of a church council held at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of France. Urban had traveled from Piacenza, in northern Italy, to preside over the council, marking the first time a pope had visited France in nearly fifty years. In Urban’s Call to Crusade, he asked the faithful to aid the Christians of the East against the Turks and to liberate Jerusalem from Turkish rule. To those who took up the challenge, Urban offered a spiritual reward: forgiveness of all the sins they had committed to date. Although Urban’s words would transform the course of world history, no official record of what he said is extant. Historians have to rely instead on later accounts, all of which were written after 1099, when the campaign he inspired resulted in the conquest of Jerusalem.