First Crusade
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50 free First Crusade trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The First Crusade is one of the least likely success stories of the Middle Ages. Between 1096 and 1099 tens of thousands of knights, foot soldiers, priests and ordinary pilgrims travelled from western Europe to Jerusalem, starving outside Antioch and quarrelling most of the way, and still took the city. Along the way came visions, relics, desertions, betrayals and some of the darkest episodes in medieval history. This quiz collects the interesting facts people go looking for: who called the crusade and why, what the crowds shouted, which princes led the armies and how they fell out, how the sieges were won, and what became of the states they founded. Each answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up the story as you play. It suits history students revising the crusades, teachers and quiz hosts who need a ready-made round, and anyone who likes the odder corners of medieval history. The questions run from famous names to details only enthusiasts know.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which pope launched the First Crusade with a sermon in France but died before news of Jerusalem's capture reached him?
Urban II
Urban II died on 29 July 1099, fourteen days after Jerusalem fell and before word of it had reached Italy. Born Odo of Châtillon, he was a Frenchman preaching to his own countrymen.
Q 02What does "Deus vult", the Latin battle cry of the First Crusade, mean in English?
God wills it
The cry God wills it is first recorded in a chronicle written about 1100 by an anonymous crusader. A later writer says soldiers first shouted it as a joke during combat drills.
Q 03Which donkey-riding preacher from Amiens led thousands of peasants east ahead of the First Crusade's princes?
Peter the Hermit
Peter the Hermit's followers, the so-called People's Crusade, were cut to pieces by Turkish forces near Civetot in 1096 while he was away. He later preached to the army on the Mount of Olives.
Q 04The First Crusade's barefoot procession around Jerusalem's walls in July 1099 imitated the biblical fall of which city?
Jericho
Jericho's walls fell in the Book of Joshua after the Israelites marched around them. A priest's vision told the crusaders to fast and copy the march, and Jerusalem fell a week later.
Q 05Which famous king's eldest son, Robert Curthose, mortgaged his duchy to pay for his journey on the First Crusade?
William the Conqueror
William the Conqueror's eldest son pawned Normandy to his brother William Rufus for 10,000 marks. Robert was still on his way home when another brother, Henry, seized the crown of England.
Q 06Which act, described by their own chroniclers, made hungry First Crusade soldiers infamous at Ma'arra in Syria?
Cannibalism
Cannibalism at Ma'arra appears in several crusade chronicles, which blame severe hunger. The earliest says some cut flesh from dead bodies into strips and cooked it.
Q 07In which town was the first crusader king of Jerusalem crowned on Christmas Day 1100, rather than in the holy city?
Bethlehem
Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity hosted the coronation of Baldwin of Boulogne. His predecessor, elected ruler a year earlier, had chosen not to be crowned king at all.
Q 08Which bird did one band of 1096 crusaders follow as a guide, believing it was filled with the Holy Spirit?
A goose
A goose and a she-goat were both treated as divinely inspired guides to Jerusalem by one crowd of marchers. The chronicler Albert of Aachen called it a detestable crime.
Q 09Across which narrow strait at Constantinople were the First Crusade's armies ferried from Europe into Asia Minor?
The Bosporus
The Bosporus crossing was arranged by the Byzantine emperor, who had hurried an earlier, unruly wave across within a week after it began pillaging outside his capital.
Q 10At a church council in which town in central France did the pope first call for the First Crusade?
Clermont
Clermont, in the Auvergne, hosted a synod that was mostly about church reform, with the call to arms coming in a speech on its final day. No exact transcript of that speech survives.
Q 11Which First Crusade leader was elected ruler of Jerusalem in 1099 but chose not to be crowned its king?
Godfrey of Bouillon
Godfrey of Bouillon ruled as Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre and died within a year. He was later named one of the Nine Worthies, a pantheon of warriors held up as models of chivalry.
Q 12Which relic did a First Crusade visionary claim to dig up beneath the cathedral floor in besieged Antioch in 1098?
The Holy Lance
The Holy Lance was pulled from a pit dug in the city's cathedral, two weeks before the crusaders broke the siege. Its finder later chose an ordeal by fire to silence doubters and died twelve days afterwards.
Q 13In which German region's cities, including Mainz and Worms, did First Crusade mobs massacre Jewish communities in 1096?
Q 21Which landlocked city became the first crusader state in 1098 after its Armenian lord adopted Baldwin of Boulogne?
Edessa
Edessa's lord Thoros made Baldwin his son and heir and was overthrown weeks later. The city's fall in 1144 was the first major setback for the crusader states and provoked the Second Crusade.
Q 22Which Norman leader from southern Italy, nicknamed after a legendary giant, made himself prince of Antioch in 1098?
Bohemond of Taranto
Bohemond of Taranto was christened Marc. He secretly bargained with a tower commander to let his men over the wall by night, having first pressed the other leaders to promise him the city.
Q 23Which count, the oldest and richest First Crusade leader, set out for Jerusalem barefoot and dressed as a pilgrim?
Rhineland
The Rhineland massacres of 1096 struck the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz. Bishops tried to shelter them and the German emperor ordered them protected, yet at least 1,100 died in Mainz alone.
Q 14Sailors from which Italian port city stripped timber from their own ships to build siege engines at Jerusalem?
Genoa
Genoa's mariners under Guglielmo Embriaco reached Jaffa in June 1099 with skilled engineers as well as wood. Embriaco helped direct the building of two huge wheeled siege towers.
Q 15Which military order was founded about twenty years after the First Crusade to guard pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem?
Knights Templar
The Knights Templar began in 1119, when the French knight Hugues de Payens proposed an order to protect pilgrims from bandits. Their base was a wing of the royal palace in the captured Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Q 16By what name, originally that of one Germanic people, were all western Europeans on the First Crusade known?
Franks
Franks became the catch-all label for Latin Christians in the East, whatever their homeland. Words descended from it, such as farang, still mean any Westerner in several Asian languages.
Q 17The Turkish sultanate that the First Crusade fought its way across in Anatolia was called Rum after which people?
The Romans
The Romans lived on in the name because Byzantium was still the Roman Empire to its neighbours, so land taken from it became Rum. Modern Turkish still uses the word that way.
Q 18Which Italian composer's 1843 opera follows a family from Milan to Antioch and Jerusalem during the First Crusade?
Giuseppe Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi premiered I Lombardi alla prima crociata at La Scala, where Milan's archbishop objected to rumours of Catholic ritual on stage. He later reworked it for Paris as Jérusalem.
Q 19Which Turkish dynasty, victors at Manzikert in 1071, had overrun most of Byzantine Anatolia before the First Crusade?
The Seljuks
The Seljuks captured the Byzantine emperor himself at Manzikert, the only time one became a Muslim commander's prisoner. By 1080 Turks had moved across central Anatolia.
Q 20Which Byzantine emperor's appeals for help against Turkish invaders became the spark that set off the First Crusade?
Alexios I
Alexios I sent envoys to a church council at Piacenza in 1095 to ask for western soldiers. When whole armies arrived, he pressed their leaders to swear to return any former imperial lands they recaptured.
Raymond of Toulouse
Raymond of Toulouse left Ma'arra in January 1099 on bare feet, with other princes' armies following behind. He spent his last five years carving out the County of Tripoli.
Q 24Which lakeside capital of the Sultanate of Rum surrendered secretly to the Byzantines during the First Crusade?
Nicaea
Nicaea's Turkish garrison gave up after the emperor had ships hauled overland to seal off the lake. His general arranged the handover without the crusaders' knowledge.
Q 25Which count deserted the First Crusade at Antioch, then returned east in 1101 at the urging of his wife Adela?
Stephen of Blois
Stephen of Blois left just before Antioch fell, sure the army was doomed, and told the Byzantine emperor the rest were as good as dead. His son and namesake later became king of England.
Q 26Which Italian poet's 1581 epic retold the First Crusade as a love story starring the knights Tancred and Rinaldo?
Torquato Tasso
Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered tells a largely mythified version of the campaign, full of enchantments and invented love stories. Its Tancred falls for a woman warrior he later kills by mistake.
Q 27Which bishop, named papal legate and spiritual leader of the First Crusade, died of illness at Antioch in 1098?
Adhemar of Le Puy
Adhemar of Le Puy died on 1 August 1098, probably of typhus, weeks after the great victory outside the city. Soldiers kept reporting visions of him, one of which inspired the barefoot march around Jerusalem.
Q 28Which Byzantine princess described the First Crusade's arrival at Constantinople in a history of her own father's reign?
Anna Komnene
Anna Komnene wrote her fifteen-book history around 1148 in an artificial Attic Greek, the literary dialect of classical Greece. Two of its books cover the crusade.
Q 29Which atabeg of Mosul led the huge relief army that trapped the First Crusade inside newly captured Antioch?
Kerbogha
Kerbogha arrived in June 1098, days after the city fell, and besieged the besiegers. His coalition came apart when the starving crusaders marched out to fight on 28 June.
Q 30Which sultan recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, ending the Christian rule that the First Crusade had begun 88 years earlier?
Saladin
Saladin took the city after destroying the crusader field army at the Battle of Hattin. The Kingdom of Jerusalem itself persisted until the late 13th century.