There was only one problem, and Urban II was educated enough to recognize it: The plan was insane. A military expedition from Europe would have to attract sufficient manpower, travel all the way to Jerusalem, consistently turn back armies along the way—armies that had already proved too powerful and skilled for the Greek Empire and its well-paid mercenaries—save Constantinople, and in the end take possession of Jerusalem, a city that had been under Muslim rule for over four hundred years. It was impossible. The most Urban could hope for was some sort of muted success. Western Christians at his behest might fight alongside the Greeks and create some sort of alliance that could eventually lead to the accomplishment of some of Rome’s larger goals: a new spirit of détente with Constantinople and perhaps an eventual attack on Jerusalem. But from an immediate and practical standpoint, Urban was setting himself up for failure.
And things got off to a bad start. If the pope believed in signs—and he most likely did—the prospects for success would have looked bleak once the Council of Clermont, where he would proclaim the crusade, had begun. For just before the opening ceremonies, Bishop Durand of Clermont, the host for the gathering of “107 bishops and an even greater number of abbots,” unexpectedly died. He had been healthy enough to welcome Urban II to his city, but then he passed away the day before the council began.
The news must have cast a pall over the gathering. One of the abbots in attendance, named Baudry—who would later write a history of the crusade—left Clermont thinking that the main thing people would remember about it was not Urban II’s sermon but rather the sight of Durand’s body, blanching before the eyes of all the assembled dignitaries. Baudry wrote two epitaphs for Durand, saying that the council served as a kind of triumph for the newly deceased bishop, a man who had created in his city a veritable golden age after a time of mud.8
Even so, ten days later, on November 27, 1095, with due solemnity and determination, in an open field near the church where Durand, the host, had been freshly laid to rest, Pope Urban II announced his plan to remake Christendom.
The Lost Sermon
Unfortunately, we don’t know what he said. No one kept a copy. A few years after the fact, several historians composed versions of the speech, but none of them made any particular claim to accuracy. One of them, a participant at the Council of Clermont, blandly observed, “The apostolic lord gave his sermon in these words—or in others like them.” Another writer, not an eyewitness, said his sermon captured the pope’s intentions, not his language. That is inevitable, he further explained, since most of those in attendance forgot what the pope said. We have, then, only echoes of the first call to crusade. We can only speak about what Urban II likely said and not what he actually proposed.9
Setting aside the details, we can say that the sermon largely concerned Jerusalem. The very name “Jerusalem” inspired passion and poetic flights of fancy. Urban II understood the word’s power and would have wanted to exploit it. All of the crusader chroniclers expressed that theme as well. Jerusalem was the center of the earth—“the navel of the world, a land fertile beyond all others, like another paradise of delights.” It was “a desirable place, an incomparable place,” the city where Christ had suffered, died, and been resurrected, and a place where the ground had since drunk up the blood of martyrs. In a culture that placed extraordinary value on relics—including objects touched by saints and the actual bodies of saints—the entire city of Jerusalem was a holy artifact. It radiated spiritual energy. A traveler to Jerusalem could not take a step without touching a spot made sacred through contact with the Savior’s body or His mother’s or else their shadows. More than a relic, the earthly Jerusalem was “the image of the heavenly Jerusalem. This city is the form of that city for which we long.” Just as the bread and wine consecrated by a priest contained deeper heavenly realities, disguised by otherwise drab earthly forms, so did the physical city of Jerusalem connect to deeper, hidden truths.10
As an image of the heavenly city, Jerusalem was also a byword for peace. If the “r” changed to an “s,” the name would become “Jesusalem,” or “peaceful salvation.” And that name, counterintuitively, points to a crucial aspect of the crusade and of Urban II’s message at Clermont: the need for peace. It was, by 1095, a long-standing plea and aspiration among churchmen. For a century they had been trying to impose on warriors a code of conduct, known variously as “the Peace” or “the Truce of God,” to compel them to limit their aggressive impulses. The unarmed—monks, clerics, and women—were to be kept safe from bloodshed at all times, and for four days out of the week, Thursday through Sunday, no one was to strike a blow against anyone at all.
The renewed proclamation of this code was the opening decree at Clermont. The goal was to create peace for its own sake, to be sure, but this peace also related to the crusade. Peace was, in fact, the precondition for a war in Jerusalem. For only peace at home would allow large armies to abandon their families and properties, leaving everything they valued unprotected for months and even years, all in the name of fighting abroad for the survival and expansion of Christendom but with no tangible benefit for themselves.11
The creation of peace did not come easily. Simply stated, knights wanted to fight—with one another, with peasants, with all and sundry. It was their calling, part of the job description. Quiet amity, even with a promise of salvation attached, could not compete with the pleasure of war. Urban II realized as much. That’s why the call to peace in 1095 came with a proviso: Knights could continue to fight and loot and plunder so long as they did so against a foreign, unbelieving enemy. In that case, not only would their violence be tolerated, as it had been from time to time in the past in so-called just wars, but it also would be positively laudable. In previous wars, to kill an adversary was, at best, a morally neutral act, an unfortunate necessity created by political circumstance. To kill a Muslim, by contrast, increased a warrior’s store of virtue, giving him some security as he contemplated the fearsome stakes of Judgment Day. This novel (if not entirely unprecedented) proposal surely formed one of the key elements behind the crusade’s popularity, its specific terms constituting the one authentic sentence about the crusade that survives from the Council of Clermont: Whoever might set forth to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God, can substitute that journey for all penance.12
This is a fairly guarded promise and a deceptively complicated one as well. The process of applying it to crusade warriors would have required a small army of well-educated clerics and confessors. What is most striking about this crusade indulgence is what it is not. It is not, for example, a guarantee that anyone who fights for Jerusalem will have his sins forgiven. It is not even a promise of martyrdom—that anyone who dies while fighting for Jerusalem will receive an immediate welcome into heaven. It instead establishes a sort of procedure allowing knights, under the right circumstances, to exchange the performance of their job (making war) for the forgiveness of sins already confessed. That is, a military expedition to Jerusalem would function essentially like a common devotional rite: the penitential pilgrimage. Pilgrims, too, like crusaders, could confess their sins and then, in exchange for a journey to a holy site, receive an indulgence for those sins.
The addition of warfare into the mix made the crusade an inspired, galvanizing idea. Urban’s audience loved it, bursting out with shouts of “God wills it! God wills it!” At such an apparently miraculous show of unity, the pope raised his eyes up to heaven as if to offer silent, humble thanks.13
The lure of Jerusalem and the chance to obtain forgiveness for sins were two of the key components behind the crusade’s appeal. For many historians, they are sufficient by themselves. I am more skeptical. The indulgence, as just described, was deliberately cautious. If warriors found it exciting and inspiring, that was only because they willfully misunderstood the indulgence’s terms—they believed themselves eligible for more forgiveness than Urban II had in fact promised. The argument that the indulgence and pilgrimage alone explain the crusade’s popu
larity also presumes that eleventh-century knights lived in continual terror of the afterlife, overcome with awe at the sacramental authority of the church. There is some truth to this caricature. But it remains a caricature.
Our best evidence that knights felt burdened by an unbearable weight of sin comes not from knights but from monks—that is, from men who had devoted their lives to the idea of expunging their own sins. It is inevitable that they would project similar ideals onto the warriors whom they saw setting out to perform God’s work. Not every warrior, including those who had embraced the crusade, would have felt so timorous. The French could take as an example their own king, Philip. Fearless in the face of damnation, he preferred to live as an excommunicate condemned to hell rather than give up his bigamous marriage.
To make the idea of a penitential war compelling, to give this message teeth, Urban II would have needed to do more than frighten knights with stories of hellfire or to entice them with promises of heaven. He needed to sell the crusade as a heroic battle, a grand adventure comparable to the deeds being celebrated in the new epic poetry, or chansons de geste, of the eleventh century, as a great war against a worthy, fearsome adversary: Muslims, or as they were more commonly known in eleventh-century Europe, “Saracens.”14
To make this case, Urban II had a number of horrific images to draw upon. He may have even called on volunteers from the audience, veterans of the Jerusalem pilgrimage, to share their stories. The poet and abbot Baudry attributed these words to the pope: “How many injuries pilgrims have endured, you know best, you who are here and who have returned from there, who have sacrificed your possessions and your blood for God.” Baudry may not have remembered exactly what the pope said, but he did at least remember veterans of the Jerusalem pilgrimage, spreading their tales of horror and Muslim atrocities. “Sometimes,” Baudry wrote elsewhere, “we saw among us citizens of Jerusalem, poor and exiled men, as well as beggars from Antioch, lamenting the state of the holy places and begging for some sort of public relief for their own poverty.”15
At Clermont Urban II gave at least tacit endorsement to their complaints (whether he made arrangements to relieve their poverty as well, we don’t know; Peter the Hermit likely did so). In the hands of a skilled preacher, these pilgrims’ tales of woe could become the stuff of nightmares. Consider how another crusade chronicler called Robert the Monk reimagined Urban II’s sermon:
“From the land of Jerusalem and the city of Constantinople, troubling news has arisen and many times has now come to our attention—namely, that the people of the kingdom of Persia, a foreign people, a people entirely hostile to God, a generation whose heart was not steadfast and whose spirit has not kept faith with God, has attacked Christian lands and devastated them with sword, plunder, and fire. Some of the captives they have led into their own land, while others they have laid low with a wretched death. The churches of God they have altogether overthrown or enslaved to their own cult. The altars they have wrecked, polluted with their filth; for they circumcise Christians and either pour the blood from the circumcision over the altars or else use it to fill baptismal vessels. And if it amuses them to punish someone with a truly foul death, they puncture his navel and pull out the ends of his intestines. These they bind to a pole, and then by whipping their victim, they force him to run around and around until his intestines have all come out and he falls dead to the ground. Some they tie to poles and shoot with arrows; others they force to stretch out their bare necks so that with their swords they can cut off their heads in a single blow. What can I say about the wicked violations of women? To speak of it is worse than to keep silent.”16
Such charges sound incredible. But the images were carefully chosen. Consider, for example, the idea of “forced circumcisions.” Most obviously it tapped into fears of castration, which in the eleventh century was not a psychological anxiety but was instead a common judicial penalty. More subtly, circumcision—though associated with Islam—was a Jewish rite. By forcing it on Christians, the Saracens were effectively compelling them to undergo a Jewish initiation and thus, on a ritual and physical level, to renounce their faith. The Saracens were also making a mockery of baptism, filling baptisteries with Christian blood. Baptismal water washed away sins. This Christian blood, shed into baptisteries, polluted churches and robbed fonts of their efficacy. Pouring this same blood onto altars, moreover, made a mockery of the Eucharist—where priests regularly created a more potable manifestation of Christ’s blood.
Fear of pollution was the essential theme in the eleventh-century Christian depiction of Islam. Abbot Baudry, who, again, attended Clermont, rhymed the name “Turk” with the Latin word for “filthy”: Turci spurci. The same writer dwelt at length on how Saracens tried to spoil all Christian ceremonies in the East. The Turks, he said, drove worshippers from the altars of God, even as they robbed churches of their money. In the very Temple of Solomon (or al-Aqsa Mosque), they set up idols to worship. What the Saracens were doing to the Holy Sepulcher, he preferred not to say. As with the rumored violation of Christian women, readers were left to use their imaginations.17
These missing details can be found elsewhere—at least in regard to women. The Turks, so listeners were told, had raped mothers in front of their daughters, forcing the children to watch, sing obscene songs, and dance as their parents were violated. Wearied with the mothers, the Saracens turned their attention to the daughters, whom they now raped, ordering the mothers to sing and dance in turn. So boundless were Saracen appetites that they also raped men, violating the laws of nature and humanity. Their targets were mainly poor folk, but according to rumor they had also raped and killed a bishop.18
Did Urban II actually use rhetoric such as this in framing his case for the crusade? There is no reason to think that he did not, but without a record of the sermon, we cannot be certain. In a letter written shortly after Clermont to Christians in Flanders, however, Urban did draw attention in a very general way to these charges: “We believe, brothers, that you have already heard through the report of many different people about the savage barbarism that has devastated God’s churches in the East with wretched destruction, including the holy city of Christ, made famous through his suffering and resurrection, now disgracefully reduced to slavery along with the rest of churches, shameful to say!”19
Less certain is whether the pope used another type of rhetoric likely to motivate an army of Christian soldiers—the apocalypticism that had helped inspire the great pilgrimages of 1033 and 1064, among others. Did he describe Saracens as harbingers, or even servants, of Antichrist? To some extent, again, it would be surprising if he did not. Urban had been an active presence in the papal court since 1080, during the worst years of the Investiture Contest, the wars between popes and emperors, when charges of being in league with Antichrist were thrown back and forth with some regularity. On the other hand, Urban II himself used the word “Antichrist” rarely. It can be found only once, in one of his letters, where he described Bishop Otbert of Liège, a supporter of Henry IV’s, as “the standard-bearer of Antichrist and the beast of Satan.”20
Still, it was an effective and easy ploy, and at least one version of Urban II’s Clermont speech made heavy, if eccentric, use of it. Imagine what would happen, Urban II asks his audience, if Jerusalem, “the mother church of all churches,” were to return to Christianity and, more particularly, if God “might not wish some parts of the East to be restored to the faith, in opposition to the times of Antichrist looming on the horizon.” Antichrist would then arise to fight—not against pagans or Jews but, as his name implies, against Christians. As was known from the Book of Daniel, he would also overthrow the kings of Egypt, Africa, and Ethiopia. Logically speaking, Antichrist could accomplish none of these things unless Christianity had first taken root in those three places, where, in 1095, paganism still thrived.
Jerusalem, this literary pope adds, would be downtrodden until “the time of nations” was fulfilled. This expression, “the time of nations,” taken
from Luke 21:24 (and used, as we have already noted, by Peter the Hermit), refers to a point in the future when many unbelievers will finally accept Christianity.
The apocalyptic program outlined here is a convoluted one: Essentially, the crusade had to establish Christianity in the Holy Land so that Antichrist could reverse that gain. But, as we shall see, the language may point toward a more authentic apocalyptic tradition that did play a part in motivating crusaders and in helping them to understand what they were fighting for.21
The Crowd Roars
Though we don’t know exactly what Urban II said, we do know what happened after he finished talking. As the crowd roared its approval, one of the local bishops, Adhémar, from the nearby city of le Puy-en-Vélay, stepped forward and knelt before the pope, the first person to pledge to take up the cross and go to Jerusalem.
Adhémar had been bishop of le Puy since 1089. Its cathedral, dedicated to Notre Dame, sits atop a steep hill but is itself dominated by the tiny church of Saint-Michel d’Aguilhe, or St. Michael of the Needle, an architectural wonder, built in the tenth century atop a steep, sheer volcanic rock nearly three hundred feet high. By the time of Adhémar’s episcopacy, it was attracting copious crowds of Christian pilgrims, many of them on their way to or from the famous shrine of St. James in Com-postela. As bishop of le Puy, Adhémar thus understood the power and the magic of pilgrimage. He had reportedly made the journey to Jerusalem himself around 1086. Nothing is known about his trip, however, except that he seems to have gone. Adhémar also understood warfare, coming from a noble family and having been trained as a knight. At the time of the crusade, he was still considered an excellent horseman. And he had been involved with the planning of the crusade for at least three months before Clermont, when Urban II had consulted with him at le Puy in August 1095. It was probably then that they together choreographed this scene, to be performed on November 27.
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