Pope Urban II: Call to Crusade

Impact

Urban’s message at Clermont was revolutionary. By offering a spiritual reward to wage war, he was declaring that violence could be righteous and even a form of penance—a way of redressing sin akin to prayer or fasting. Urban’s promotion of sacred violence marked a turning point in Christian thinking about the legitimate use of force. It certainly provoked a massive response. The first wave of crusaders set out in spring 1096. Sometimes called the People’s Crusade, it consisted of some trained troops but many more poor and ill-prepared men and women under the leadership of popular preachers, such as Peter the Hermit. A second wave of crusaders departed for the East in late summer 1096. Dominating these forces were powerful nobles—among them Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto, and Raymond of Saint Gilles—who commanded contingents of knights. We can only guess at the size of the First Crusade. Recent estimates suggest that around one hundred twenty thousand people took the cross in response to Urban’s appeal. Of these, roughly eighty-five thousand departed for the East.

The crusaders who answered the pope’s call remade the map of the Middle East and transformed relations among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the process. On their way to the Holy Land in 1096, bands of crusaders attacked Jewish communities in the Rhineland, offering them the choice of conversion or death. The massacres and mass suicides that ensued set the stage for worsening Jewish-Christian relations in Europe through the later Middle Ages. Three years later, on July 15, 1099, the forces of the second wave of the Crusade captured Jerusalem. The conquest led to the establishment of crusader states that would survive for almost two hundred years. The crusader presence in the Holy Land provoked a complex response in the Muslim world, combining indifference;, misunderstanding; attempts at accommodation; and, in the late twelfth-century campaigns of Saladin, a “countercrusade” that aimed to restore Sunni Islam orthodoxy in the Middle East even as it sought to drive the European settlers into the sea. Over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, crusading spread to frontier regions in Spain and the Baltic and even, in the form of campaigns against heretics, took root in the European heartland. It remained a characteristic feature of European life into the sixteenth century, bequeathing a controversial legacy to the modern world.

If the sermon itself was influential, so too were the ways in which it was recorded. The themes that Urban is made to address in the four main versions—renouncing unjust wars at home for righteous ones abroad, aiding Christian brethren in the East, and fighting out of love of God and neighbor—would appear repeatedly in later Crusade propaganda. The sermons also shaped contemporary understandings of the origins of the crusading movement. Especially influential was the idea—expressed briefly by Fulcher and developed more fully by the three French Benedictines—that the Crusade was a miraculous demonstration of God’s will on earth. This notion was crucial to the emergence of a full-fledged ideology of Christian holy war.