Pope Urban II: Call to Crusade

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

It is natural to wonder how close the four authors come to what Urban said at Clermont. They are excellent sources in some respects. At least two and probably three of them (Robert, Baldric, and likely Fulcher) attended the Council of Clermont. The fourth, Guibert of Nogent, had access to eyewitness accounts. Despite being well positioned to record Urban’s words, the authors present different versions of the sermon. While Guibert of Nogent, for example, has Urban describe the Crusade as a prelude to the Last Judgment, the others do not. We might expect eyewitness accounts to agree more closely, but even here there are variations. Urban speaks at length about Jerusalem in Robert’s and Baldric’s versions but says nothing about it in Fulcher’s. Such differences among equally well-placed eyewitnesses make it impossible to declare one version more authentic than any other. Moreover, all of the versions are colored by the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders in 1099, an event that took place between the delivery of the speech and its recordings. This unexpected triumph may have caused the authors to imbue the sermon with a momentousness that the original occasion lacked. Like many medieval historians, they felt free to recreate a famous speech according to what they believed should have been said at a moment of historical significance. These sources may not tell us what Urban said at Clermont, but they still have historical value because they reveal how contemporaries and participants understood the origins of the crusading movement.

Fulcher of Chartres

Fulcher has Pope Urban address the mainly clerical participants in the Council of Clermont. These churchmen were to serve as “Christ’s heralds” in spreading the message of the Crusade to those who would actually do the fighting. The tone is terse and direct, with little figurative language. Fulcher offers the basic case for war against the Turks, presenting in outline form arguments that the other versions develop more fully.

In Fulcher’s account Urban begins by appealing to the audience to help their Christian brothers living in the East. Medieval Europeans were comfortable with the idea of fighting for family members. In a world where governments were small and provided minimal law enforcement, family members looked to one another for protection. When a person was killed or injured, members of the injured party’s family were obliged to exact vengeance from the offender or the offender’s family. By having Urban speak of brotherhood, Fulcher brings this sense of obligation to the war against the Turks: It would be family feud writ large, a vendetta waged in the name of fraternal defense.

While couching Urban’s appeal in the familiar language of feud and vengeance, Fulcher gives a new dimension to the idea of fighting for family. His concept of brotherhood transcends any particular fraternal bond—it is the tie that binds all Christian men to one another. In Fulcher’s eyes, warfare within this Christian fraternity was illicit. It was wasteful, private war against supposed rivals who were actually, in Fulcher’s expanded conception, Christian “brothers and relations.” Christian men must turn away from internecine strife and fight the real enemy: the Turks whose conquests posed a threat to Christians everywhere. The cause of this new kind of war was so righteous that God himself commanded it and would grant remission of sins to those who died fighting it.

Robert of Reims

In Robert’s version Urban directly addresses those who would fight on the campaign. Speaking to knights, he makes sure to highlight the material rewards of participation. He compares Jerusalem, the land that “floweth with milk and honey,” to a homeland that is too small for its population and that lacks food, natural resources, and wealth. Urban’s main focus, though, as Robert presents it, is on another set of worldly concerns for the warriors of eleventh-century Europe: honor, reputation, and pride in family and ethnicity.

Urban begins by praising the Franks—the traditional name given to the tribes who settled in modern-day France during the later days of the Roman Empire, established successor states when the empire collapsed, converted to Catholic Christianity, and rose to new heights of power under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties. For Robert the Franks were a new chosen people, beloved of God for their devotion to the Roman church and blessed with all the martial virtues. They had a proud tradition of fighting for the faith, exemplified by the campaigns of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious in the eighth and ninth centuries. Urban’s reference to these famous Frankish leaders does more than conjure up a heroic past. It invokes an alliance between the papacy and the Franks that dated back to the eighth century, when the papacy had recognized the legitimacy of the new rulers of the Frankish kingdom, the Carolingians, and they in return had conquered the central Italian lands that the popes would rule as independent sovereigns until the unification of Italy in 1870. The Crusade would offer a fresh opportunity for the Franks to come to the aid of the church. In Robert’s version of the sermon, ethnic pride has replaced fraternal solidarity as the driving force behind the campaign.

To live up to their heroic past, the Franks must confront an enemy whose ravages would seem to mock their status as stalwart defenders of the faith. Briefly mentioned in Fulcher, here the Turks are denounced at length. Scholars now agree that these characterizations are far from accurate. The Seljuk campaigns of conquest disrupted typical patterns of life in the Middle East; however, the Seljuks did not systematically persecute Christians or radically disrupt European pilgrimage traffic to Jerusalem, which was, after all, a major revenue source for the city. Nevertheless, Urban describes a series of Turkish insults to the Christian faith. The Turks did not just destroy churches; they defiled them by circumcising Christian men and spreading their blood over the altars. They did not just kill Christian men; they tortured them by cutting open their stomachs, extracting their intestines, tying them to a stake, and walking the victim in a circle until the guts lay all over the ground. They did not just capture Christian women; they raped them. At the end of this litany, Urban challenges Frankish pride: Whose responsibility was it, if not theirs, to avenge these wrongs? The answer, when it comes at the end of the sermon, affirms the divine nature of the enterprise. In a famous moment, the audience shouted in unison, “It is the will of God!” (Thatcher and McNeal, p. 520).

Baldric of Dol

In Baldric’s version of the sermon, Urban offers a fuller justification for crusading violence, a more lavish description of Jerusalem, and a broader theological context for the campaign. In Baldric’s day the most influential Christian thinker on the use of force was Augustine of Hippo (354–430), an African bishop and a scholar in the last days of the Roman Empire. For Augustine a war was just if it met three conditions: just cause, such as fighting to defend oneself or to avenge an injury; legitimate authority, such as fighting at the command of a public authority (a Roman emperor, for example); and right intention, such as fighting for a loving, altruistic purpose. Augustine saw nothing good in violence. It was usually sinful and usually to be avoided, but it could be condoned under these limited conditions.

Baldric uses Augustine’s categories to make a more radical claim for Christian violence: The war that Urban proclaims would not merely be blameless; it would be positively holy. The Crusade would be righteous because it would be fought for a just cause: the defense of Eastern Christians and the recovery of formerly Christian lands. The legitimate authority is Christ himself. He is the “Commander” and “our Leader”; the crusaders would be “His army.” Those who joined him would fight with the right intention of helping their Christian brothers in the East. Baldric calls the Crusade “the only warfare that is righteous, for it is charity to risk your life for your brothers.”

Jerusalem was at the heart of this new kind of holy war. Urban declares that Christians should be ashamed at allowing the Turks to possess the city and to pollute its holiest sites. Medieval maps located Jerusalem at the center of the world. The city was a growing source of concern to Europeans in the eleventh century. It was by far the most prestigious destination for pilgrims because of its remote location, its central role in the Last Judgment, and its links to Christ’s life, Passion, and Resurrection. By the 1060s European pilgrims were traveling there in enormous bands, sometimes reaching into the thousands. In an age that venerated saints and their remains, the whole city could be described as a relic. Urban urges the Crusade in order to restore this holiest of cities to Christian control.

In the Old Testament, God promises the Holy Land to the Israelites. Urban holds up their experience as a model for the new Crusade. Just as the Israelites had conquered the Holy Land by force of arms, so must the crusaders conquer it again, but now with Jesus as their leader. Just as the Israelites had fought the peoples of Canaan—Baldric specifically mentions the Amalekites, a perennial Israelite foe, and the Jebusites, who controlled Jerusalem until King David conquered it—so must the crusaders fight the Turks. The force of Baldric’s analogy is clear. Like the Israelites of old, the crusaders were part of God’s plan for humankind; their providential role would be to restore the Holy Land to (Catholic) Christianity. In this way Baldric uses Christian providential history to make sense of the seemingly miraculous success of the First Crusade.

Guibert of Nogent

Of all the versions of Urban’s speech, Guibert’s least resembles an actual sermon that a pope might have delivered at Clermont on November 27, 1095. It is less an emotional appeal to fight the Turks than a learned attempt to define the Crusade in a theologically satisfying way. The title he gives his history of the First Crusade—The Deeds of God Performed through the Franks—sums up the message he has Urban deliver: The Crusade is God’s work, and the crusaders are instruments of divine will. Like Baldric, Guibert dips into the Christian past to make his point. This time it is the Maccabees who show the way. Judah the Maccabee was the leader of a Jewish revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who had outlawed Jewish religious rites in 167 bce. After twenty-five years of war, the Maccabees liberated the Jews from Seleucid rule and rededicated their temple in Jerusalem. The crusaders, of course, lived under a new dispensation. Medieval theologians held that Christians had supplanted the Jews as God’s chosen people. As a result, the Jewish homeland for which the Maccabees fought is now, as Urban declares to the “Christian soldiers” in his audience, “your country.”

In trying to understand the Crusade as a manifestation of God’s will, Guibert looks to the future as well as the past. Urban argues that the end of the world is near and that the Antichrist will soon appear. As the name suggests, the Antichrist’s appointed role is to fight against Christians: He is supposed to take up residence on the Mount of Olives and from there launch attacks that will destroy the Christians of Egypt, Africa, and Ethiopia. For the prophecy to come true, Christians had to be living in these countries. The crusaders, then, would conquer this vast region just in time for the Antichrist to come along and destroy them. Some commentators have wondered whether promoting the Crusade as a way of winning death at the hands of the Antichrist would have been an effective recruitment technique. By assigning the crusaders this glorious but ultimately doomed role, Guibert underscores his theological concerns.