Pope Urban II's injunction to the first crusaders at Clermont, as related here by the monastic chronicler Robert of Reims, presented the holy war as a journey, a via or iter, to Jerusalem, an undertaking that was simultaneously armed pilgrimage and typological reenactment of the Israelite conquest of Canaan. Modern scholars have amply demonstrated the dual importance of Jerusalem as spiritual lodestone and military objective of the First Crusade; in the words of Jean Flori, the pilgrims who went east in 1096 sought ‘to reconquer the earthly Jerusalem, attain the heavenly Jerusalem, and build the spiritual Jerusalem’. The language used by contemporaries certainly supports this characterization. In the decades around 1100, the venture that we call the First Crusade was widely known as the iter Hierosolimitana and its participants as Hierosolimitani, and many early crusade chroniclers foregrounded the holy city's name in their works’ titles. In this essay, however, I would like to follow the first crusaders along another route, one that, like the Jerusalem road, could be traversed in the spirit as well as the flesh: the road to Babylon.

Early twelfth-century narratives of the First Crusade are replete with references to Babylon. Latin chroniclers tell us that soon after the crusaders arrived at Nicaea in May 1097 they sent representatives to the ruler of Babylon (whom the sources generally refer to as the rex Babyloniae), and ‘entertained’ Babylonian diplomats with a display of severed Turkish heads during the siege of Antioch the following year. Although the sources offer few details, a second exchange of embassies seems to have occurred in 1098 to 1099, when the crusade's leaders dispatched additional ambassadors from Antioch and received new Babylonian emissaries at the siege of Arqa. While relations apparently became quite cordial, and a formal alliance was in the offing at one point, the king of Babylon's conquest of Jerusalem inevitably led to a cooling in the relationship, and the crusaders went on to defeat the Babylonians at Jerusalem and Ascalon in the summer of 1099.