Today in European history: the Council of Clermont (1095)
Pope Urban II issues his call for what we now know as the First Crusade.
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The title of this post is a bit misleading. The Council of Clermont actually ran from November 18 through November 28, 1095, so November 27 is the anniversary of neither its beginning nor its end. It is, however, the anniversary of the day on which Pope Urban II (d. 1099) got to the main point of the conference. It was on November 27 when Urban turned the council’s focus toward the challenges facing the Byzantine Empire in the aftermath of the Battle of Manzikert. Urban’s speech, calling for an army of Christian warriors to head east and drive the Turks out of Byzantine territory, kicked off the Crusades.
Most of the council was actually taken up with internal Church matters, like instituting the Benedictine Reforms of monastic life and extending the excommunication of King Philip I of France for marrying (sort of) Bertrade de Montfort even though both Philip and Bertrade were, uh, already married to other people at the time. Oops!
In fact, part of Urban’s rationale in calling for a crusade, aside from a desire to rescue his fellow Christians (schismatic, but still in the ballpark) from the Muslim menace, was the fact that the political/religious situation in Western Europe was pretty tense. Philip obviously didn’t care for Urban, but that actually wasn’t the pope’s biggest problem. His biggest problem was that he’d inherited the Investiture Controversy, his predecessor Gregory VII’s feud with the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, over whether the Pope or the Emperor had the right to appoint bishops and abbots in imperial territory. If you’re a good Catholic, then you probably know the story of Henry IV donning a hairshirt and walking barefoot over the Alps to Gregory’s palace at Canossa, where he knelt in the snow for three days waiting for an audience with the pope in order to beg forgiveness for his transgressions. That was in 1077. The lesser-known part of that story is that by 1080, a much stronger Henry appointed his own “pope,” who took the name “Clement III” and served as what’s (affectionately, I’m sure) known as an “antipope” until his death in 1100.
(We should take a quick side trip to the future Spain at this point, because obviously something gave Urban the idea for a “crusade,” in the sense of a broad Christian expedition against Muslims, and I think the general consensus is that it was events in the Reconquista. In particular, the Kingdom of Aragon’s 1064 siege of the city of Barbastro—often called the “Crusade of Barbastro” in pure hindsight—was a Europe-wide affair, spurred by Pope Alexander III’s declaration the previous year that the situation on the Iberian Peninsula was a “Christian emergency.”
Alexander’s rhetoric sparked knights and warriors from across France and Burgundy (which was not yet French) to make their way to the region to lend support, and all that extra support was a key part of the success of the Aragonese siege. Sound familiar? That rhetoric also probably contributed to the horrific violence that the besiegers inflicted upon the Muslim inhabitants of the city after it fell, but I digress. Even if we can’t point specifically to Barbastro as the Crusades’ pilot project, the connection between what was generally happening in Iberia and the idea of Crusade is pretty hard to miss. And eventually the Church would come to explicitly identify campaigning in Spain with the Crusading movement.)
So Urban had a lot on his own plate, and he probably thought that this Crusade idea would unite Europe behind his leadership. He also, we think, saw the Byzantine Empire’s peril as a chance to end the schism between Rome and Constantinople—in Rome’s favor, of course, as Constantinople’s rescuer. In this respect Urban appears to have misread the room a bit. Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (d. 1118), had been trying to repair relations with Rome as far back as 1090, mostly hoping for Latin help against the Seljuks. Earlier in 1095 he sent an embassy to the Council of Piacenza to request aid. Alexios wanted soldiers from the Latin west, there’s no doubt about that. There is even evidence that Alexios was looking to recruit whole units, armies even, of Latin warriors to supplement his own army. All that said, it’s unlikely that he wanted an autonomous Latin army that would be following its own leaders and its own agenda. That is, however, what he got, and as we know it didn’t work out so well for the Byzantines. It certainly didn’t do anything to end the schism.
Philip did finally agree to stop acting like he was married to Bertrade in 1104, but Urban, sadly, was too dead by then to appreciate it. The Investiture Controversy similarly resolved itself after Urban’s death, when Emperor Henry V and Pope Calixtus II agreed on the Concordat of Worms in 1122. But that whole Crusade thing kind of took on a life of its own, didn’t it? The main Crusading movement, the one that took place in and around the “Holy Land” (and that one time in, uh, Tunisia), went on until 1291, and people were still using the term “Crusade” to describe Christian military campaigns against Muslim powers (and against Christian heretics) through the 15th century (or to the present day, if we go by some of the rowdier folks on the far right).
Urban’s speech calling for the Crusade has been preserved in several forms, which of course don’t entirely agree with one other because that would just be too easy. The biggest variation among them is probably around the issue of Jerusalem, which relates to the way Urban sold his Crusading idea as a religious enterprise. Pope Gregory VII had already issued a call for Christian lords to send forces to aid the Byzantines, but he’d been ignored. Urban recast Gregory’s military mission in religious terms, as a martial pilgrimage. Europe was full of Christians who spent their time fighting other Christians, which was immoral and even illegal under Church law. In his speech, Urban decried that violence and then gave these men a new enemy—Muslims—along with a war that wasn’t only legal but was practically a religious obligation, one that would allow them to obtain absolution for past sins.
Importantly, this was not a full pardon for life, but rather penance for sins already confessed. This was how Urban ensured that his demand for soldiers would get the attention that Gregory’s didn’t, and how he tried to ensure that the new army would stay receptive to papal orders. The Crusaders would surely sin along the way, so they’d need absolution from the campaign’s papal representative, Adhemar of Le Puy. Anyone killed in battle with Muslims would, of course, have their sins instantly expunged.
But did Urban demand the conquest of Jerusalem? This is where all the various accounts disagree. In at least one of them, Jerusalem isn’t even mentioned, while in others Urban makes taking Jerusalem the most important goal of the campaign. Obviously any chronicler writing after the First Crusade, which abandoned the Byzantines and focused on capturing Jerusalem, would have some incentive to write Jerusalem back into Urban’s speech in order to justify what actually happened. Reality may be somewhere in the middle. Urban himself talked about the coming campaign in a letter he wrote not long after the council ended. In that document, he writes about the need to liberate the Christian Churches of the east—but he doesn’t say anything explicit about capturing the Holy Land.
That said, the phrase “the Christian Churches of the east” presumably includes—presumably especially includes—churches in Jerusalem, so I think at least you have to say that Urban wasn’t uninterested in the fate of the Holy City. Additionally, it’s hard to imagine Urban’s call gaining as much traction as it did—enough even to tempt knights fighting against Muslims in Spain to abandon their cause and join this new one (Urban tried to discourage that attitude)—without some connection to Jerusalem.
Ultimately this question is mostly a historical curiosity. Whatever Urban’s aims may have been, what he meant to happen matters much less than what did happen.