God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Urban called for a penitential holy war rather than, as many have maintained, specifically an armed pilgrimage. While no authentic account of the Clermont speech exists, the council’s Jerusalem decree and Urban’s surviving letters from the period emphasized the spiritually meritorious temporal goal of the expedition, the liberation of the eastern churches and that of Jerusalem. The method to be employed was unequivocally military. In a letter to his supporters in Flanders written days after the end of the Clermont assembly, Urban talked of the expedition in terms of a procinctus, a military undertaking.³⁴ To the monks of Vallembrosa a year later he referred to his hope that the knights who set out ‘might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom’, warning the monks not to join up ‘either to bear arms or go on this journey’. Urban was remembered as calling for an armed struggle in his preaching at Limoges in December 1095. Count Fulk of Anjou, who entertained Urban in March 1096, shortly afterwards noted how the pope had exhorted recruits ‘to go to Jerusalem to hunt the pagan people who had occupied the city’. Many of those who received the pope’s message of liberating Jersualem by force understood his meaning clearly enough, as a Gascon charter put it, ‘to fight and to kill’ those who had defiled the scene of the Resurrection. The countess of Flanders recalled in 1097 how the Holy Spirit had inflamed the heart of her husband, Count Robert II, to curb the perfidy of the Turks with armed force. In the surviving letters of the crusaders, the sense of the army as a militia rather than a pilgrimage is strong. When Pope Paschal II announced the capture of Jerusalem to the French clergy in December 1099, he described the expedition as a Christiana militia, only the following April adding the word peregrinatio and the language of pilgrimage.³⁵

For Urban, holy war and its associated remission of confessed sin needed no additional justification; he claimed the authority of God. The Clermont decree avoided any direct reference to pilgrimage. The Clermont ceremony of taking the cross appeared deliberately novel, independent of the rite performed by departing pilgrims. Libertas ecclesiae by force needed no further sanction, as the Investiture Wars of Gregory VII had shown – at least to the radicals at the Papal Curia, of whom Urban was one. It has been argued that the oblique language of Urban’s letters, using words such as labor, via and iter, implied pilgrimage. Rather, they implied an equally meritorious penitential military alternative to pilgrimage. Overt language of pilgrimage was avoided or ignored by Urban in his own correspondence, the closest evidence for what he may have been thinking. Urban’s own words explicitly and unequivocally described holy war, in the style of Gregory VII; they did not refer explicitly to an armed pilgrimage even if he were conscious of the tempting parallel. However, the sacralizing of war in all its aspects, shedding blood, killing, securing booty and plunder, appeared extreme and for some, especially among the clergy, no doubt disconcerting. The point was made by the famous battle cry of the hard-pressed crusaders at the battle of Dorylaeum in July 1097 as recorded by a widely circulated anonymous author who gave the impression of being an eyewitness: ‘Stand fast all together, trusting in God and the Holy Cross. Today, please God, you will all gain much booty’.³⁶ This was not, as many have assumed, a surrender to material greed. Instead, the chronicler was attempting to convince his audience of the spiritual legitimacy of the form of warfare in all its practical ramifications, in recognition, perhaps, of its contentious nature.