God's War: A New History of the Crusades

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 1098.⁷ In 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).⁹ With 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’.¹⁰ Taking 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.¹¹ The 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.¹² Yet, 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.