God's War: A New History of the Crusades

It is sometimes argued that Urban’s original plan had been for a limited expedition to assist Alexius I and press on to the Holy Sepulchre rather in the fashion of Gregory VII’s embryonic scheme of 1074, and that it was only the astonishing response to his call that forced him to change his rhetoric and policy. This underestimates the grandeur of his scheme. His tour of France was extensive and exhausting. At Clermont in late November and again at Tours in March, the sixty-year-old pope preached in the open air. His schedule was punishing, with the travelling followed by regular public appearances at long-winded liturgical ceremonies even without preaching. He presided over three major church councils, at Tours (March 1096) and Nîmes (July 1096) as well as Clermont. The vigour and geographic embrace of Urban’s preaching argues against modest recruitment plans; his role in local consecrations of altars and the like, the ease of passage through different provinces and lordships and the orderly crowds of notables assembled reflected careful premeditation. Despite the attempts of apologists to imply otherwise, enthusiastic crowds were not gathered by chance in the early weeks of Urban’s tour. On Christmas Day 1095 at Limoges he attended three separate services, progressing between them in full regalia. Within the week he had rededicated the cathedral and the chief local shrine of St Martial. Only then did he preach about Jerusalem.³⁹ His visit to Poitiers coincided with the feast of that city’s patron saint, St Hilary (13 January). At Angers (January 1096) and at Tours and Marmoutier (March), his preaching was linked to local ceremonies or assemblies that were far from haphazard and probably long planned (dedications of churches, translations of bodies of local dignitaries, church councils, etc.). The liturgical theatricality, emphasized by regular processions in full ceremonial finery, was not staged at random. His successor Paschal II noted Urban’s attention to towns (civitates). While he tried to impose a southern French bishop, Adhemar of Le Puy, as leader of the expedition in his place, he still wrote to the Flemish in the north urging participation and dispatched a legate to the Anglo-Norman realms. Although the expedition lacked the cohesion Urban may have wished for, Adhemar’s authority was widely accepted on the march once the armies had combined at Nicaea in June 1097. Urban’s later injunctions to the Bolognese (September 1096), prohibiting clergy from joining and encouraging laymen to consult their parish priests or bishops, do not speak of alarm at numbers but canonical rectitude, very much part of the package from Clermont or even Piacenza onwards. The timing of the preaching, seen by some as oddly late in the year, suited elaborate recruitment. Urban’s journey to France covered two penitential seasons, Advent and Lent, appropriate to his message of repentance, as well as the major Christocentric festivals of Christmas and Easter, when images and dramatic representations of Jerusalem accompanied church and civic celebrations. Urban’s announcement that the expedition would set out on 15 August 1096 provided time for armies to be raised: in the event all the main contingents north of the Alps left by October. It also recognized the importance of waiting for the harvest, traditionally begun in northern Europe on 1 August. Thus the timetable of the church year, including the departure date, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a major cult in Le Puy itself, was suited to military requirements; logistics matched liturgy.

Urban’s own preaching seems to have been highly effective. From the admittedly partial and limited evidence of charters between recruits and monasteries, it has been observed that a ‘high proportion’ of noble recruits came from areas Urban visited or within a couple of days’ ride from his itinerary. His preaching impressed eyewitnesses, and he had an advantage that Gregory VII lacked, in that he himself came from precisely the arms-bearing aristocratic milieu of the French nobility that he sought to exploit, as did his chosen legate, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, a nobleman reputed as an excellent horseman.⁴⁰ Like many contemporary bishops, Adhemar was evidently almost as at home on a battlefield as in a cathedral, some of his colleagues even donning armour (like Odo, bishop of Bayeux at the battle of Hastings as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry) and wielding maces in deference to the canon law prohibition on clergy spilling blood, a ban that apparently did not include crushing and bruising.