Urban recognised that developing the idea of an expedition to aid Byzantium offered a chance not only to defend eastern Christendom and improve relations with the Greek Church, but also to reaffirm and expand Rome’s authority and to harness and redirect the destructive bellicosity of Christians living in the Latin West. This grand scheme would be launched as part of a broader campaign to extend the reach of papal influence beyond the confines of central Italy, into Urban’s birthplace and homeland, France. From July 1095 onwards he began a lengthy preaching tour north of the Alps–the first such visit by a pope for close to half a century–and announced that a major Church council would be held in November at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of central France. Through the summer and early autumn Urban visited a succession of prominent monasteries, including his own former house of Cluny, cultivating support for Rome and preparing the ground for the unveiling of his ‘crusading’ idea. He also primed two men who would play central roles in the coming expedition: Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, a leading Provençal churchman and an ardent supporter of the papacy; and Count Raymond of Toulouse, southern France’s richest and most powerful secular lord.

By November the pope was ready to reveal his plans. Twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots congregated in Clermont for the largest clerical assembly of Urban’s pontificate. Then, after nine days of general ecclesiastical debate, the pope announced his intention to deliver a special sermon. On 27 November, hundreds of spectators crowded into a field outside the city to hear him speak.²

The sermon at Clermont

At Clermont Urban called upon the Latin West to take up arms in pursuit of two linked goals. First, he proclaimed the need to protect Christendom’s eastern borders in Byzantium, emphasising the bond of Christian fraternity shared with the Greeks and the supposedly imminent threat of Muslim invasion. According to one account, he urged his audience ‘to run as quickly as you can to the aid of your brothers living on the eastern shore’ because ‘the Turks…have overrun them right up to the Mediterranean Sea’. But the epic endeavour of which Urban spoke did not end with the provision of military aid to Constantinople. Instead, in a visionary masterstroke, he broadened his appeal to include an additional target, one guaranteed to stir Frankish hearts. Fusing the ideals of warfare and pilgrimage, he unveiled an expedition that would forge a path to the Holy Land itself, there to win back possession of Jerusalem, the most hallowed site in the Christian cosmos. Urban evoked the unparalleled sanctity of this city, this ‘navel of the world’, stating that it was ‘the [fountain] of all Christian teaching’, the place ‘in which Christ lived and suffered’.³

In spite of the undoubted resonance of these twinned objectives, like any ruler recruiting for war the pope still needed to lend his cause an aura of legitimate justification and burning urgency, and here he faced a problem. Recent history offered no obvious event that might serve to focus and inspire a vengeful tide of enthusiasm. Yes, Jerusalem was ruled by Muslims, but this had been the case since the seventh century. And, while Byzantium may have been facing a deepening threat of Turkish aggression, western Christendom was not on the brink of invasion or annihilation at the hands of Near Eastern Islam. With no appalling atrocity or immediate threat to draw upon, Urban chose to cultivate a sense of immediacy and incite a wrathful hunger for retribution by demonising the enemy of his proposed ‘crusade’.

Muslims therefore were portrayed as subhuman savages, bent upon the barbaric abuse of Christendom. Urban described how Turks ‘were slaughtering and capturing many [Greeks], destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God’. He also asserted that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being abused and exploited by Muslims, with the rich being stripped of their wealth by illegal taxes, and the poor subjected to torture:

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.

Christians living under Muslim rule in the Levant were said to have been reduced to a state of ‘slavery’ by ‘sword, rapine and flame’. Prey to constant persecution, these unfortunates might suffer forced circumcision, protracted disembowelment or ritualised immolation. ‘Of the appalling violation of women’, the pope reportedly reflected, it would be ‘more evil to speak than to keep silent’. Urban appears to have made extensive use of this form of graphic and incendiary imagery, akin to that which, in a modern-day setting, might be associated with war crimes or genocide. His accusations bore little or no relation to the reality of Muslim rule in the Near East, but it is impossible to gauge whether the pope believed his own propaganda or entered into a conscious campaign of manipulation and distortion. Either way, his explicit dehumanisation of the Muslim world served as a vital catalyst to the ‘crusading’ cause, and further enabled him to argue that fighting against an ‘alien’ other was preferable to war between Christians and within Europe.⁴

Pope Urban’s decision to condemn Islam would have dark and enduring consequences in the years to come. But it is important to recognise that, in reality, the notion of conflict with the Muslim world was not written into the DNA of crusading. Urban’s vision was of a devotional expedition sanctioned by Rome, focused first and foremost upon the defence or reconquest of sacred territory. In some ways his choice of Islam as an enemy was almost incidental, and there is little to suggest that the Latins or their Greek allies truly saw the Muslim world as an avowed enemy before 1095.*

The pulse-quickening notion of avenging the ‘execrable abuses’ enacted by demonised Muslims may have captivated Urban’s audience at Clermont, but his ‘crusading’ message contained a further, even more powerful, lure; one that addressed the very nature of medieval Christian existence. Bred upon a vision of religious faith that emphasised the overbearing threat of sin and damnation, the Latins of the West were enmeshed in a desperate, lifelong spiritual struggle to purge the taint of corruption from their souls. Primed to seek redemption, they were thus enthralled when the pope declared that this expedition to the East would be a sacred venture, participation in which would lead to ‘the remission of all their sins’. In the past, even ‘just war’ (that is, violence that God accepted as necessary) had still been regarded as innately sinful. But now Urban spoke of a conflict that transcended these traditional boundaries. His cause was to possess a sanctified quality–to be a holy war, not simply condoned by ‘the Lord’, but actively promoted and endorsed. According to one eyewitness, the pope even averred that ‘Christ commands’ the faithful to enlist.

Urban’s genius was to construct the idea of ‘crusading’ within the framework of existing religious practice, thus ensuring that, in eleventh-century terms at least, the connection he established between warfare and salvation made clear, rational sense. In 1095, Latin Christians were accustomed to the idea that punishment owed through sinfulness might be cancelled out by confession and the performance of penitential activities, like prayer, fasting or pilgrimage. At Clermont, Urban fused the familiar notion of a salvific expedition with the more audacious concept of fighting for God, urging ‘everyone of no matter what class…knight or foot-soldier, rich or poor’ to join what was to be, in essence, an armed pilgrimage. This monumental endeavour, laden with danger and the threat of intense suffering, would take its participants to the very gates of Jerusalem, Christendom’s premier pilgrimage destination. As such, it promised to be an experience imbued with overwhelming redemptive potency; functioning as a ‘super’ penance, capable of scouring the spirit of any transgression.