The First Crusade (6 page)

Working alongside these Matildine scholars, Gregory VII made the leap from concept to practice, taking significant steps towards the creation of a papal army and marking a distinct turning point on the road leading to Urban IPs speech at Clermont. Early in his pontificate, Gregory laid plans for a grand military enterprise that can be regarded as the prototype for a crusade. In 1074 he tried to launch a holy war in the eastern Mediterranean that would, had it come to fruition, have borne a striking resemblance to the campaign initiated by Urban II in 1095. Gregory sought to recruit lay military support in France and Germany for an expedition to bring aid to the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who were, he claimed, 'daily being butchered like cattle' by the Muslims of Asia Minor. He proposed to lead this bold defence of Christendom in person, declaring that the venture might take him all the way to the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, and expressed the hope that success might bring about the reunification of the eastern and western Churches under the authority of Rome. Although Gregory declared in a letter of December 1074 that he had already amassed an army 50,000 strong a claim that was sheer fantasy - his grandiose project soon fizzled out, tarnished by its intimate association with Gregory's own personal authority and then extinguished by the scouring-wind of the Investiture Controversy.

Gregory's planned expedition did, nonetheless, begin to crystallise the ideal of holy war. His predecessor had already implied that violence in the service of God might be meritorious; Gregory's 1074 scheme explained why. The spiritual benefits of participating in his campaign still seem to have been somewhat vague, described simply as a 'heavenly reward', but the reason why such a prize might be on offer was made much clearer. Gregory argued that his projected war would be fought in defence of the Christian faith and that the very act of bringing aid to Byzantium was an expression of love for one's Christian brethren and thus charitable. This formula of charitable defence made it much easier for contemporaries to believe that fighting in a holy war might truly earn them merit in the eyes of God. Events later in Gregory's pontificate also helped to clarify the penitential nature of sanctified violence. In the midst of the Investiture Controversy he urged Matilda of Tuscany to fight Henry IV 'for the remission of her sins' and instructed her 'to impose on [her] soldiers the danger of the coming battle for the remission of all their sins'. The scholar Anselm of Lucca later interpreted this to mean that participation in this war had the same purificational value as other forms of penance precisely because it promised, just like a pilgrimage, to be both difficult and perilous.

For all this, Gregory VII cannot be regarded as the sole architect of the crusading ideal. He certainly never successfully launched a campaign on the scale of the First Crusade, nor was he particularly concerned to direct the energy of sanctified violence against Islam. But he did break crucial ground on the road to the idea of crusading. Gregory's radical, unrelenting drive towards militarisation prompted considerable criticism in ecclesiastical circles, as he was accused of dabbling in practices 'new and unheard of throughout the centuries'. His vision was so extreme that, when Urban II offered a more measured ideal, he appeared almost conservative in comparison and attracted little censure.
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Gregory's achievements and those of his predecessors also meant that, by the start of Urban's pontificate in 1088, the concept of holy war had been formulated. The Latin West had been acculturated to the idea that certain classes of violence might be justified, and was slowly waking up to the notion that warfare directed by the papacy might have a penitential character and thus be capable, in some sense, of cleansing the soul of sin. Within a year of his assumption of the papal throne, Urban had begun to experiment with this new weapon: participants in the reconstruction of Tarragona were offered a remission of sin, but on this occasion the pope achieved a subtle shift of theological emphasis by equating this merit to that of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the years that followed, as the Gregorian papacy slowly enjoyed a renaissance of authority, Urban pondered the full potential of sanctified violence. It was only at the council of Clermont, in the wake of the appeal at Piacenza, that the full range of his ambition became evident.

THE SERMON AT CLERMONT

The First Crusade was proclaimed in November 1095 during Urban IFs momentous visit to France. His was the first journey made by any pope outside Italy for almost half a century. With the ongoing Investiture Controversy and the recent diminution of papal authority, the journey north of the Alps was designed to affirm Urban's legitimacy and assert Rome's presence in his old homeland. Even with the papal reputation besmirched by years of chaotic conflict, Urban's grand tour of the region cannot have failed to impress. It had been decades since most of the towns and villages through which his lavish entourage passed had witnessed a visit from a bishop or prince, let alone that of a pope accompanied by a host of senior clergymen. For many, this was the spectacle of a lifetime.

To rally the Latin Church to his cause, Urban called the clergy to a grand ecclesiastical council. Held in late November at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of south-eastern France, this meeting was attended by some twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots - not a massive assembly by medieval standards, but the largest of Urban's pontificate to date. For more than a week, the council considered an array of ecclesiastical business, as Urban sought to disseminate his plans for the continued reform of the Church. Then, on 27 November, with the council drawing to a close, the pope announced that he would deliver a special sermon to an open-air assembly held in a field outside Clermont. Urban probably arranged for this public spectacle in the hope that his preaching would draw a large crowd, and later tradition maintained that the meeting had to be moved outside because of the sheer weight of numbers that gathered to hear him speak, but in reality perhaps only 300 or 400 people braved the chill November air. These select few were to bear witness to a captivating sermon.
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Pope Urban s message

Unless new evidence comes to light, we will never know exactly what Pope Urban II said in his momentous sermon. Even though this speech initiated a campaign that would change the face of European history, no precise record of Urban's words survives. In the years that followed, a number of men, including three eyewitnesses, did record versions of his address, but all of them wrote after the end of the First Crusade. Their accounts must, therefore, be read with a healthy dose of suspicion in mind, given that their versions of the events at Clermont were composed with the benefit of hindsight. They knew only too well what powerful emotions Urban's words would stir in western Christendom, the tide of humanity that would respond to his call and the dreadful progress of the crusade that followed. Only by carefully cross-referencing these versions of Urban's sermon with the pope's own letters, composed around the time of the council of Clermont, can we approach some understanding of his message and intentions.

We know that Urban urged western Christendom to pursue two interlocking goals: the liberation of the eastern Churches, most notably by bringing military support to the beleaguered Byzantine Empire; and the reconquest of the Holy Land, in particular the city of Jerusalem. From the start, he conceived of the campaign as a war of defence and repossession. The crusade was not launched as an evangelical enterprise to bring about the conversion of Muslims, forced or voluntary, but to protect and recover Christian territory. This was to be a war of religion, but one that focused upon physical power, not ephemeral theology. Rather than emphasise complex questions of dogma and creed, Urban promoted a war that his audience could understand, stressing the theme of Christian brotherhood and highlighting the fact that all Latin knights had a duty to defend Christ's patrimony by participating in an impassioned battle to recover the Holy Land.
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His appeal seems to have been loosely structured around the three Augustinian principles of Just War - legitimate authority, just cause and right intention - bolstered by remodelled Gregorian ideals. He took 'just cause' as the key theme for his proposed campaign, launching into a polemical oration, peppered with inflammatory images of Muslim atrocities.

We want you to know what grievous cause leads us to your territory, what need of yours and all the faithful brings us here. A grave report has come from the lands of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople that a people from the kingdom of the Persians, a foreign race, a race absolutely alien to God . . . has invaded the land of those Christians [and] has reduced the people with sword, rapine and fire.
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A central feature of Urban's doctrine was the denigration and dehumanisation of Islam. He set out from the start to launch a holy war against what he called 'the savagery of the Saracens', a 'barbarian' people capable of incomprehensible levels of cruelty and brutality.

Their supposed crimes were enacted upon two groups. Eastern Christians, in particular the Byzantines, had been overrun right up to the Mediterranean Sea'. Urban described how the Muslims, occupying more and more of the land on the borders of [Byzantium], were slaughtering and capturing many, destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God. So, if you leave them alone much longer they will further grind under
their heels the faithful of God.
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The pope also maintained that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being subjected to horrific abuse and exploitation. While the wealthy were regularly beaten and stripped of their fortunes by illegal taxes, the poor endured even more terrible treatment:

Non-existent money is extracted from them by intolerable tortures, the hard skin on their heels being cut open and peeled back to investigate whether perhaps they have inserted something under it. The cruelty of these impious men goes even to the length that, thinking the wretches have eaten gold or silver, they either put scammony in their drink and force them to vomit or void their vitals, or - and this is unspeakable - they stretch asunder the coverings of all the intestines after ripping open their stomachs with a blade and reveal with horrible mutilation whatever nature keeps secret.
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These accusations had little or no basis in fact, but they did serve Urban's purpose. By expounding upon the alleged crimes of Islam, he sought to ignite an explosion of vengeful passion among his Latin audience, while his attempts to degrade Muslims as 'sub-human' opened the floodgates of extreme, brutal reciprocity. This, the pope argued, was to be no shameful war of equals, between God's children, but a 'just' and 'holy' struggle in which an 'alien' people could be punished without remorse and with utter ruthlessness. Urban was activating one of the most potent impulses in human society: the definition of the 'other'. Across countless generations of human history, tribes, cities, nations and peoples have sought to delineate their own identities through comparison to their neighbours or enemies. By conditioning Latin Europe to view Islam as a species apart, the pope stood to gain not only by facilitating his proposed campaign, but also by propelling the West towards unification.

*It was also a popularly held belief that the 'Last Days' prophesied in the Bible -when all mankind would be judged and the 'saved' would enter eternal paradise -could only come to pass once the city of Jerusalem was once again in Christian hands. The First Crusade was thus viewed by some as a crucial step towards the realisation of Christian destiny.

Urban did, however, have one major problem at Clermont. No recent, overwhelming calamity or crime stood out to act as the igniting spark of his holy conflagration. To ensure that his sermon prompted a fevered response, the pope worked hard to lend his appeal some sense of burning urgency. A heated theological schism had for decades divided Rome and Constantinople, but Urban nonetheless emphasised the shared Christian heritage that united East and West, suggesting that Latin Christendom had a fraternal obligation to act. According to one account, Urban urged his audience 'to run as quickly as you can to the aid of your brothers living on the eastern shore'; in another he is reported as encouraging them to think of eastern Christians as your blood brothers, your comrades-in-arms, those born of the same womb as you, for you are sons of the same Christ and the same Church'. He also capitalised upon the immediate devotional resonance of Jerusalem, describing the Holy City as 'the navel of the world', the birthplace of all Christian faith and scene of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. Urban hoped that the image of a captive Jerusalem would be so distressing as to prompt an immediate reaction, and he is recorded exhorting his listeners to 'be especially moved by the [fate of the] Holy Sepulchre of Our Lord and Saviour, which is
in the hands of unclean races'.
The pope may have also played on the theme, previously used by Gregory VII, of the 'kingdom of God', representing the Holy Land as Christ's 'realm' or 'patrimony' and reminding Latin Christians of their obligation to defend their lord's territory.
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The pope promoted the crusade as a distinct form of warfare, set apart from the grubby contamination of the inter-Christian struggles afflicting the West. According to one account, he proclaimed: