God's War: A New History of the Crusades

be sewn on to the shoulder of a cloak or tunic.

The planning was meticulous, part of a wider programme. At the Council of Clermont, the Jerusalem decree was one of more than thirty that promulgated a general Peace and dealt with issues of penance, ecclesiastical organization and discipline, simony, clerical marriage, lay investiture and sanctuary. The call to arms sat squarely within this assertion of church discipline, moral reform of clergy and laity, and papal authority. Geoffrey, abbot of Vendome, recalled Urban personally distinguishing between the journey enjoined on the laity and the prohibition on the participation of monks, signals of discipline confirmed in Urban’s own correspondence. Papal spiritual and temporal authority was expressed by the grant of the remission of sins and the appointment of Adhemar of Le Puy as leader of the expedition ‘in our place’, as Urban wrote to the Flemish in December 1095; it was confirmed by the enthusiastic response.¹¹ The link between the Jerusalem journey and papal power politics so impressed the gossipy English writer William of Malmesbury a generation later that he insinuated that Urban dreamt up the whole idea in order to create enough upheaval and turmoil to allow him to recapture Rome.¹² Yet, if the context was a restatement of Gregorian ideals and practices, the expedition to Jerusalem was both novel and distinct, a bold, radical reformulation of Gregorian ideas and expedients concerning penance, war and moral regeneration presented in a succession of carefully designed public demonstrations of which that at Clermont was only the most lavish, and, in fact, not even the most successful.

Urban II’s speech at Clermont was the first public declaration of his new concept of holy war that we know of. The event itself was carefully orchestrated, its theatricality aimed at establishing a concrete image and memory. In a partially literate society, ceremonies acted as media for information, exhortation and formalized debate, as in the regular crown-wearings by kings such as William the Conqueror, or at the Peace and Truce of God assemblies. In the repeated familiar ritual of church liturgy, the mass exposed with particular force basic issues of the relationship of God and man, sin and redemption; it provided an ideal setting for preaching the Jerusalem expedition. At Clermont, the presence of such a grand figure as the pope itself lent power to the imagery of language and action, the flavour of penance in his Christocentric message strengthened by its proclamation five days before the beginning of the penitential season of Advent. During the speech, chanting of the slogan ‘Deus lo volt’, probably led by a papal claque, established the participation of the congregation in the ritual as well as symbolizing the correct submissive acceptance of divine guidance.¹³ At Clermont the unfamiliarity of the new ritualistic forms, notably taking the cross, and the uncertainty of the correct response presented problems. As with all revivalist meetings, Urban’s sermon demanded a physical as well as vocal reaction; nothing destroys the message of ritual more certainly than unease or confusion in its performance. Later crusade preachers were in no doubt of the importance of a member of the audience to set an example, to use an analogy from modern Christian evangelists, by promptly ‘coming on down’ to take the cross. ‘Converts’ were often planted to be the first to respond in this fashion after the end of the sermon.¹⁴ At Clermont this role was taken by Adhemar of Le Puy, who, following Urban’s address, demonstrated to the rest what was expected of them by immediately taking the cross, numbers of which, some recorded, had been prepared earlier. At the end of the subsequent oath-taking, a cardinal led the congregation in the general confession, a prayer familiar to all from the mass. The ceremonial of commitment, confession, penance, oath and cross proved iconic and effective, its imagery and language lending distinctive identity to the recruits in the exercitus Dei. Some of those ‘signed’ with the cross saw themselves as pilgrims, peregrini, receiving the recognized symbols of pilgrimage, such as the napkin or satchel and staff. Thus novelty and familiarity could be satisfyingly and effectively blended. The crusade and the pilgrimage were originally distinct. Yet official correspondence and chroniclers suggest a rapid fusion of language, images and ideology; charters recording departing crusaders’ property transactions talk of penitential journeying as often as explicit fighting, their models similar contracts struck by earlier pilgrims; it is frequently very difficult to see the difference. Members of the mass German pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1064–5, said to number 7,000, had, according to one account, worn crosses. The attitudes and social rituals of Urban’s new war and of traditional pilgrimage were often identical; to the pope’s apparent concern, many took up or followed the cross in 1095–6 with little or no soldierly skill or intent.¹⁵ The key to Urban’s success in 1095–6 lay in the incorporation of existing images and emotions into a fresh concept of secular spirituality.

In fact, as far as we can tell, at the time the Clermont speech proved something of a damp squib. Very few lay magnates attended, not even the count of Toulouse. Few bishops bothered to record the council’s decree concerning the Jerusalem expedition, most retaining copies only of those canons effecting church reform. Provincial ecclesiastical councils held in the wake of Clermont, such as one at Rouen, ignored the Jerusalem business. There survives no official account of what Urban actually said at Clermont. Three eyewitnesses recorded their versions years later only after the success of the expedition had moulded attitudes and perspectives. Even then they disagreed with each other, using the speech to reflect their own visions of what they later thought worthy of recognition. The artificial literary quality of these accounts established a model for succeeding propaganda exercises, the inspirational set-piece sermon becoming a familiar stereotype of crusade literature if not practice, but they do not record Urban’s own words. In November 1095, success was by no means inevitable. To a large extent, the impact of Urban’s message depended on the subsequent publicity skills of the pope himself. These proved to be formidable.

A key element in a carefully devised strategy to assert the papacy’s political and moral purpose, Urban’s scheme reflected sentiments central to his personal understanding of Christendom, Christian history and the papacy’s role in reform. Close examination of Urban’s thought has revealed that his intellectual approach to the unity and integrity of Christendom, and hence his Jerusalem venture was determined by a particular schematic view of Christian history: an idealized picture of the purity of the early church; its corruption by human sins that allowed the conquest of ancient Christian centres by Islam from the seventh century; the eleventh-century Christian recovery of lands lost in Spain, Sicily and finally the eastern Mediterranean; this reconquest manifesting an opportunity for a general Christian renewal through divine grace, a process in which the pope performed as God’s executor and coadjutor.¹⁶ Hence the intrinsic duality in Urban’s Jerusalem project: the material objective to aid Byzantium and the eastern Christians and recapture the Holy City enmeshed with the transcendent purpose of serving God by liberating the Holy Sepulchre as an individual and collective act of piety and redemption. Going beyond the academic debate on holy war pursued in the circle of papalist intellectuals (e.g. Anselm of Lucca, John of Mantua, Bonizo of Sutri), Urban, following the logic of his mentor Gregory VII, argued in 1095–6 that not only was the war meritorious, and thus participation not blameworthy, so too was the fighting, which, refashioned into a religious act combining penance and charity, ‘for the love of God and their neighbour’,¹⁷ would earn substantial merit rather than dutiful expiation, as with William of Normandy’s troops at Hastings in 1066. To emphasize the unique nature of the enterprise and the special status of participants, probably at Clermont, certainly by the end of his French tour, Urban attached regulations designed to protect crusaders’ property, to prevent husbands unilaterally abandoning their wives, to prohibit indiscriminate clerical and monastic participation and to ensure advice was sought from local priests. One witness at Clermont later indicated that Urban had tried to forbid the participation of unchaperoned women, the old, the infirm and the poor, unless subsidized by the wealthy.¹⁸ These rules merely pointed the central innovation of the plenary indulgence, remission of sins, for fighting in the holy war. This was controversial on two counts: holy war was now classed as penitential; and the pope was assuming the authority of Christ in seeming to remit sin not just penance. Whatever academic unease was aroused, neither innovation provoked much resistance, certainly not after the expedition’s success.

Jerusalem formed the cornerstone of Urban’s concept of penitential warfare in 1095. The Clermont decree, preserved by the bishop of Arras, and repeated almost verbatim by the pope in a letter to Bologna in September 1096, was unequivocal: ‘Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.’¹⁹ Writing to supporters in Flanders a few days after his Clermont speech, Urban talked of the Muslim conquest and ravaging of the eastern church:

Worse still, they have seized the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection, and… have sold her and her churches into abominable slavery… we visited Gaul and urged most fervently the lords and subjects of that land to liberate the eastern churches… [and] imposed on them the obligation to undertake such a military enterprise for the remission of all their sins.²⁰

Contemporary descriptions of his preaching in the Loire valley, echoed in numerous charters drawn up by monastic recipients of departing warriors’ property, confirm that Urban encouraged people ‘to go to Jerusalem to drive out the heathen’. As he expressed it in a letter to the monks of Vallembrosa in October 1096, his recruits ‘are