Pope Urban II: Call to Crusade

Context

Before traveling to France, Pope Urban II had held a church council at Piacenza in northern Italy in March 1095. There he received envoys from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I, who asked for military support against the Seljuk Turks on his eastern border. The Seljuk threat to Byzantium would provide the rationale for Urban’s call to crusade.

The Seljuks were a powerful new force in the Near East. They had their roots north of the Oxus River (modern-day Amu Dar’ya), in what is now Uzbekistan. After converting to Sunni Islam in the tenth century, they embarked on a series of conquests that brought Iran, Iraq, and northern Syria under their control by the 1050s. Seljuk success came at the expense of the traditional ruling dynasty of the Islamic world—the Sunni Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad. When the Seljuks occupied Baghdad in 1055, they allowed the Abbasid caliph to carry on as a figurehead of Sunni orthodoxy but took real power into their own hands. Soon the Seljuks were making inroads westward, into Anatolia. Here they found the richest provinces of Byzantium, the eastern part of the Roman Empire that had survived the collapse of Roman political power in the West. In 1071 the Seljuks defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert (now Malazgirt). In the aftermath, the Seljuks occupied much of Anatolia, establishing their capital at Nicaea (present-day Iznik), less than sixty miles from Constantinople (called Istanbul today).

The Christian response to the Seljuks was slow in coming for several reasons. First, the Seljuks had turned away from Constantinople. They headed east again and by 1079 occupied southern Syria and Palestine. In addition, the Byzantines chose to confront more urgent threats elsewhere. It was only after a powerful new emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, had stabilized the situation to the west and the north that Byzantine attention shifted to the eastern border. Mainly, though, authorities in Christian Europe were simply not prepared to respond. Alexius had actually requested papal help against “pagan” incursions before Piacenza; a few years earlier he had solicited support against the Pechenegs on the Balkan frontier. Urban denied that request but would respond differently in 1095, because his situation had changed since the early days of his pontificate.

Alexius’s initial appeals for military aid had reached a pope in exile. Odo of Châtillon had been elected pope and had taken the name Urban II in 1088 at Terracina, south of Rome. No pope had lived in Rome since 1084, when Urban’s predecessor and patron, Gregory VII, had been driven from the city by the German emperor Henry IV. The conflict between pope and emperor was over the Reform Movement—a radical effort to remake the church and Christian society—which the papacy had been leading since the mid-eleventh century. The slogans of the reformers were liberation and purification. Powerful secular rulers, such as Henry IV, were long accustomed to appointing bishops and abbots in their realms. By ending secular control over ecclesiastical appointments, the reformers hoped to free the church from the corrupting influence of worldly affairs. A purified clergy would then transform the fallen secular world into a genuinely Christian republic under papal leadership.

Urban II was a product of two centers of reform: the abbey of Cluny, where he rose to the office of prior, and the College of Cardinals around Gregory VII, where he served as cardinal-bishop of Ostia from around 1080. Urban spent the early years of his pontificate in southern Italy, pursuing reformist causes. By careful diplomacy he regained Rome in 1093, and two years later he presided over the first international church council of his pontificate at Piacenza. There, in response to Alexius’s envoys, he urged many men to swear oaths to come to the emperor’s aid against the Turks.

What Alexius expected from the pope was a small force of mercenaries. Urban’s plan was much grander, however, and it was bound up with the aims of the Reform Movement. The campaign was to be a war of liberation, not of church offices from lay control but of Christian peoples and churches in the East. Urban’s advocacy of violence to achieve this goal was consistent with reformist ideology. Gregory VII had recruited soldiers, whom he called “knights of Saint Peter,” for the war with Henry IV. Urban II would recruit soldiers for a new campaign of liberation in the East. Such a project would demonstrate papal leadership over Christian Europe. It might even repair relations with the Byzantines, who had taken offense at the vigorous claims of the early reformist popes to spiritual primacy over their own Greek Orthodox Church.

The reformers wanted to purify as well as to liberate. The war in the East would be a vehicle of purification on two levels. For the individual volunteer, it would be a penitential exercise that would earn remission of sins. For Western Christian society as a whole, it would provide an outlet for the violence that had been an endemic feature of European life for two centuries. When Muslims, Magyars, and Vikings invaded Europe in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, central structures of authority broke down, and local warriors came to power. The violence of this warrior elite posed practical and moral problems for church leaders. Their first response had been to try to suppress it by imposing the Peace and Truce of God. At assemblies of churchmen and local people, a formal ban would be placed on waging war against vulnerable members of society and at certain times of year. The bans proved ineffective, however, and often led to more violence as local churches sought to impose their restrictions by force. When Urban came to Clermont, he began by enjoining the Peace and Truce of God upon the faithful. He then opened up a channel through which the pent-up violence of the knights could pour out of Europe: He preached the way of the cross to Jerusalem.