Christopher Tyerman - God's War - A New History of the Crusades

When Urban II stood before the crowd at the end of the council at Clermont neither was unprepared. In March 1095, at a council at Piacenza in Lombardy, ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, appealed for military aid against his hostile neighbours, the latest in a succession of such requests. A few years earlier, Alexius had asked Urban to organize help against the Pechenegs in the Balkans. Now, according to a western account, the enemy were described as ‘pagans’ who threatened eastern Christians and were menacing even Constantinople itself. 5Whatever the strategic validity of such claims, the combination of military danger and religious solidarity bore strong echoes of the schemes of the 1070s. Urban turned this opportunity to his own purposes. After years of defensiveness since Gregory VII’s expulsion from Rome by the imperialists in 1084, the papal party had begun to consolidate its position in Italy, France and Germany. The Council of Piacenza, a clear demonstration of papal power as the first international ecclesiastical assembly of Urban’s pontificate, witnessed Gregorianism in action, sitting in judgement on the state of the church and the morals of the clergy and debating the sins of emperors and kings, specifically the conduct of Henry IV of Germany and the adultery of Philip I, the Fat, of France. This latest Greek request could be incorporated into this new confident papal assertiveness. It was recorded that the pope exhorted ‘many’ to promise to help Alexius against the ‘pagans’ by taking an oath. 6

To capitalize on the achievement of Piacenza, Urban planned his elaborate tour of France, the first by a pope for almost half a century. This was to culminate at the Council of Clermont, attended by at least thirteen archbishops, eighty-two bishops, countless abbots and a host of other clerics. The geographical embrace of this gathering was impressive, from the Anglo-Norman realms and Artois in the north to Upper Austria in the east to Italy in the south; the assembling of such a gathering was a matter of weeks if not months; its business neither random nor spontaneous but premeditated. However, the council provided only part of the pope’s business and itinerary. Urban arrived in Provence in July 1095. During the following fourteen months before returning to Italy in September 1096, he conducted a unique papal tour, covering much of southern, central, western and south-eastern France: Provence, Languedoc, the Rhône valley, Burgundy, the Auvergne, the Limousin, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, the Bordelais, his journey punctuated by theatrical ceremonies, assemblies and preaching in some of the most important religious and urban centres: Nîmes, Avignon, Lyons, Cluny, Mâcon, Clermont, Limoges, Angers, Le Mans, Tours, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Moissac, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Montpellier, Arles. His avoidance of the territories under the direct control of the Capetian king, in the Orléannais and the Ile de France, and those of the feuding heirs to the Anglo-Norman lands, William II of England and Duke Robert of Normandy, was political and deliberate; the French king was to be excommunicated at the Clermont Council; the Normans were too successfully old-fashioned in their control of their clergy and too ambivalent in their loyalty to the Urbanist cause for comfort. Flanders and Lorraine were too far north and close to strong imperialists. The impact of the papal visit was great, the physical presence of such an august figure attracting special excitement in regions unused to such grand progresses.

By the time he reached Clermont in November Urban had already been on the road for four months, visiting significant religious and secular centres in Provence, Languedoc and Burgundy, including his alma mater , the abbey of Cluny, where on 25 October he dedicated the high altar of the new church that Abbot Hugh had begun to build, the ruins of which still stand as a reminder of the awesome scale and grandeur of Cluniac monasticism. Before arriving at Clermont he had almost certainly discussed his eastern project with Raymond IV of St Gilles count of Toulouse, a veteran of wars in Spain, and Adhemar of Monteil, bishop of Le Puy, both of whom were to play central roles in the expedition, as well as the bishop of Cahors and, very probably, the archbishop of Lyons and the abbot of Cluny, in addition to the cardinals and Italian clerics in his entourage, which included Daimbert, archbishop of Pisa, later patriarch of Jerusalem after its capture in 1099. To the Clermont meeting, diocesans were asked to bring with them the most powerful magnates from their regions ( excellentiores principes ); the bishop of Arras was specifically encouraged by his archbishop to invite Baldwin of Mons, count of Hainault, who was later to join up, dying in an ambush while on an embassy to the Greek emperor in Asia Minor in 1098. 7In Burgundy, a story persisted that at a regional council at Autun, possibly held during Urban’s stay in late October 1095 on his way to Clermont, ‘the first vows for the Jerusalem journey were sworn’. 8

The consistency of Urban’s correspondence with what was later thought he had said at Clermont by eyewitnesses and with contemporary perceptions revealed in charters of departing soldiers and in accounts such as that of Count Fulk le Rechin (the Sour) of Anjou, who left a description of the pope’s preaching in the Loire valley in early 1096, strongly suggest that Urban travelled to France with most, if not all, the elements of his eastern project in place: a penitential journey in arms to Jerusalem to recover the Holy Sepulchre and to ‘liberate Christianity’ and the eastern Christians, the expedition earning warriors satisfaction of penance and remission of sin, signalled by a vow to enforce the obligation and the adoption of the sign of the cross to distinguish those who, in the words even of a grudging papal critic, had swapped the ‘militia of the world’ ( militia mundi ) for the ‘militia of God’ ( militia Dei ). 9With him, Urban carried relics of the True Cross, one of which he used to consecrate the abbey church of Marmoutier, near Tours, in March 1096, an event that coincided with local magnate recruits ‘in the presence of the pope stitch(ing) onto their clothes the insignia of the holy cross’. 10Taking the cross became the emblematic and defining gesture of crusading. The crosses to be worn were usually of textile, wool or occasionally silk, large enough to be noticed but small enough to be sewn on to the shoulder of a cloak or tunic.

The planning was meticulous, part of a wider programme. At the Council of Clermont, the Jerusalem decree was one of more than thirty that promulgated a general Peace and dealt with issues of penance, ecclesiastical organization and discipline, simony, clerical marriage, lay investiture and sanctuary. The call to arms sat squarely within this assertion of church discipline, moral reform of clergy and laity, and papal authority. Geoffrey, abbot of Vendôme, recalled Urban personally distinguishing between the journey enjoined on the laity and the prohibition on the participation of monks, signals of discipline confirmed in Urban’s own correspondence. Papal spiritual and temporal authority was expressed by the grant of the remission of sins and the appointment of Adhemar of Le Puy as leader of the expedition ‘in our place’, as Urban wrote to the Flemish in December 1095; it was confirmed by the enthusiastic response. 11The link between the Jerusalem journey and papal power politics so impressed the gossipy English writer William of Malmesbury a generation later that he insinuated that Urban dreamt up the whole idea in order to create enough upheaval and turmoil to allow him to recapture Rome. 12Yet, if the context was a restatement of Gregorian ideals and practices, the expedition to Jerusalem was both novel and distinct, a bold, radical reformulation of Gregorian ideas and expedients concerning penance, war and moral regeneration presented in a succession of carefully designed public demonstrations of which that at Clermont was only the most lavish, and, in fact, not even the most successful.