5,000 others. Michael the Syrian wrote: “As the Turks were ruling the lands of Syria and Palestine, they inflicted injuries on Christians who went to pray in Jerusalem, beat them, pillaged them, and levied the poll tax [jizya]. Every time they saw a caravan of Christians, particularly of those from Rome and the lands of Italy, they made every effort to cause their death in diverse ways". Crusades In the Middle Ages, the crusades were promoted as defensive response of Christianity against persecution of Eastern Christianity in the Levant. Western Catholic contemporaries believed the First Crusade was a movement against Muslim attacks on Eastern Christians and Christian sites in the Holy Land. In the mid-11th century, relations between the Byzantine Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate and between Christians and Muslims were peaceful, and there had not been persecution of Christians since the death of al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. As a result of the migration of Turkic peoples into the Levant and the Seljuk Empire's wars with the Fatimid Caliphate in the later 11th century, reports of Christian pilgrims increasingly mentioned persecution of Christians there. Similarly, accounts sent to the West of the Byzantines' medieval wars with various Muslim states alleged persecutions of Christians and atrocities against holy places. Western soldiers were encouraged to take up soldiering against the empire's Muslim enemies; a recruiting bureau was even established in London. After the 1071 Battle of Manzikert, the sense of Byzantine distress increased and Pope Gregory VII suggested that he himself would ride to the rescue at the head of an army, claiming Christians were being "slaughtered like cattle". In the 1090s, the emperor Alexios I Komnenos () issued appeals for help against the Seljuks to western Europe. In 1091 his ambassadors told the king of Croatia Muslims were destroying sacred sites, while his letter to Robert I, Count of Flanders, deliberately described emotively the rape and maltreatment of Christians and the sacrilege of the Jerusalem shrines. Pope Urban II, who convoked the First Crusade at the 1095 Council of Clermont, spoke of the defense of his co-religionists in the Levant and the protection of the Christian holy places, while ordinary crusaders are also known to have been motivated by the notion of persecution of Christians by Muslims. According to Fulcher of Chartres, the pope described his holy wars as being , while the pope's own letters indicate that the Muslims were barbarians