Why did Pope Urban want to catch the holy land?

Answer 1

he wanted to capture them because that is where Jesus got crucified and he wanted to defeat the Turks

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Catholic AnswerThe Holy Father did not want to capture the Holy Land, he wanted to rescue the Christians, who had not already been killed by the Muslim invaders and were living under oppressive Muslim rule. The religious reason for rescuing them would be common Charity.

from Seven Lies About Catholic History, by Diane Moczar

Unprovoked Muslim aggression in the seventh century brought large parts of the southern Byzantine Empire, including Syria, the Holy Land, and Egypt under Arab rule. Christians who survived the conquests found themselves subject to a special poll tax and discriminated against as an inferior class known as dhimmi. Often their churches were destroyed and other harsh conditions imposed. For centuries their complaints had been reaching Rome, but Europe was having its own Dark Age of massive invasion, and nothing could be done to relieve the plight of eastern Christians.

By the eleventh century, under the rule of a new Muslim dynasty, conditions worsened. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, site of the Crucifixion was destroyed, along with a large number of other churches, and Christian pilgrims were massacred. In 1067 a group of seven thousand peaceful German pilgrims lost two-thirds of their number to Muslim assaults. By this time the popes, including St. Gregory VII, were actively trying to rally support for relief of eastern Christians, though without success. It was not until the very end of the century, in 1095, that Pope Urban's address at Clermont in France met with a response-though not quite the one he had hoped for.

Answer 2

The Conquest of the Holy Land was not the primary objective of the Crusades. If it had been, the Crusades would have begun centuries earlier when Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and removed it from Christendom. The reason that the Crusades began was that the Byzantine Empire was being threatened and Constantinople (its capital) was being threatened by Turkish (Muslim) armies. As the Patriarchs and Leadership in Constantinople needed additional soldiers to defend their eastern borders, they requested assistance from the Pope. The Pope, in order to sell such an operation to Franks, Germans, Italians, and others who could care less about Byzantine problems was to stir up religious fervor and declare a Holy War. The primary objective was the stability of the Byzantine Empire, but the rallying cry was to free Jerusalem.