Pope Urban II

7 Key excerpts on "Pope Urban II"

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  Crusading and the Crusader States

  • Andrew Jotischky(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 The papacy, the knighthood and the eastern Mediterranean          

  Key Dates
  1042	Neuvy Saint-Sépulcre (Berry) founded in imitation of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem
  1053	Normans in Italy defeat papal army of Leo IX
  1054	mutual excommunication of patriarch of Constantinople and papal legate
  1057	Bishop Lietbert of Cambrai’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem cut short by Seljuq threat
  1064	siege of Barbastro (Catalonia)
  1066	Norman conquest of England
  1073	Gregory VII becomes pope
  1076	Seljuq victory over Byzantines at Manzikert
  1080	Emperor-elect Henry IV invades Italy
  1081	Alexios Komnenos becomes emperor in Constantinople
  1080s	emergence of Fideles Sancti Petri
  1084	Gregory VII calls on faithful to defend Church with arms
  1089	Urban II becomes pope
  1092	death of Seljuq sultan Malikshah and Fatimid khalif Al-Mustansir

   

  The origins of Urban’s call to arms in 1095, and of what was to become in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries part of political and religious life throughout Europe, can be found in the previous half-century in a series of events and developments in both the West and the East. This chapter will examine the impact of reforming ideals in the papacy in the eleventh century; the religious convictions of the western knighthood; and the political fragmentation of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds before the First Crusade.

  The papacy on the eve of the First Crusade

  Modern historians have tended to follow most of their medieval predecessors in seeing the Council of Clermont, in November 1095, as the starting point of the Crusades. If we are looking for a single moment at which crusading can be said to have started, then the final day of the council, on which Urban II publicly proclaimed the expedition to the east to an audience comprised of senior clerics and some of the nobility of the Auvergne, certainly has more claim than any other. But we cannot hope to understand Urban’s dramatic words at Clermont, still less the events of the First Crusade, without first considering the context in which the pope delivered his rousing message of holy war. If we are to trace his own thinking on the subject of sacralised violence, we need first to examine how the nature of the papal office that he held and its ideological direction had changed during the eleventh century. We must also consider the nature of the audience, and ask why his preaching struck such a responsive note in western European society. Finally, we need to look beyond Clermont, indeed beyond Rome and the West, to explore the geographical context of the First Crusade. The crusade was conceived and born in the West, but it was only successful because of a coincidence of political factors in the Islamic and Byzantine worlds, and its impact was felt throughout the eastern Mediterranean.

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  Godfrey of Bouillon

  Duke of Lower Lotharingia, Ruler of Latin Jerusalem, c.1060-1100

  • Simon John(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3  The coming of the First Crusade, 1095–1096

  Pope Urban II’s call for the First Crusade

  The origins of the First Crusade have been much discussed in modern scholarship. It is therefore necessary only to sketch a few details here. In March 1095, at the council of Piacenza, an embassy from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos (1081–1118) reached Pope Urban II and reported on the situation in the Near East.1 These messengers informed those present at Piacenza that the powers of Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt were divided and weakened. They beseeched the pope to send military assistance there to help recover some of the Byzantine territory which had been lost in the late eleventh century.2 The Byzantine assessment of the Near East was accurate. In the mid-1090s, the Shi’ites of Fatimid Egypt were firmly divided from the predominantly Sunni powers of Palestine, which in theory was part of the Abbasid Caliphate centred upon Baghdad. Moreover, the political map of Palestine itself was extremely fragmented. Asia Minor had slipped out of Baghdad’s ambit into the hands of local rulers.3

  The Byzantine appeal seems to have prompted Urban to instigate a plan he had already been formulating. In August 1095, he crossed the Alps and embarked on a year-long tour of southern and central France (as a result of a dispute with King Philip I of France (1059–1108), he only travelled as far north as Le Mans). He was the first reigning pope to visit France for half a century. During his time there, he visited a number of towns, consecrated churches, and held several reforming councils. He also passed legislation aimed at extending the Peace of God to the areas he visited.4 On the penultimate day of the council he held at Clermont (18–28 November 1095), Urban called for an armed expedition to go to the East to free the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the other holy places from Muslim hands, and bring aid to the Christians who lived there. The pope apparently framed the enterprise as a pilgrimage to the Holy City, and instructed participants to distinguish themselves by adopting the sign of the cross. He told participants to depart on the feast of the Assumption (15 August) 1096, so that their journey east would coincide with the gathering of the harvest at the end of summer.5

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  The Crusades

  • Mike Paine(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Pocket Essentials

    (Publisher)

  In 1095 however, a reclaimed Spain was centuries away. At the great council at Piacenza, Pope Urban II, amongst his other duties, received ambassadors from the Emperor Alexius. What messages they delivered are unknown. Alexius was making some headway in his fight against the Muslims and it is probable that he used a combination of his successes and the cost to the West should he fail as a lever to try and extract help from the Pope. The model was there in Spain, haphazard as it was, for uniting Christian forces against unbelievers. To Urban II, many personal reasons must have sprung to mind. What greater achievement could mark his papacy than a colossal campaign to free the sacred sites of the Holy Land? What effect might western involvement have on the possibilities of rapprochement with that 'dissident' eastern half of the Church? Regardless of the details, the idea for the Crusade - the taking up arms against Christ’s opponents, the great unifying cause in a Christendom split by petty disagreements and squabbles - took root in his mind between Piacenza and the first official announcement, in Clermont in France. Clermont was to be a council concerned with other clerical matters. Alongside the launch of the crusades, the Truce of God – a policy seeking to promote peace between Christian leaders in Europe – was strongly advocated. But it was to be remembered as the start of the Crusades.

  THE FIRST CRUSADE

  On Tuesday, 27 November 1095, before a rapt and huge crowd outside the city of Clermont, Pope Urban II announced the call to arms. His speech, legend has it, was interrupted by shouts of 'Deus lo volt!' (God wills it!). Spontaneously (or so it appeared) both rich and poor present offered to go in an enormous outpouring of emotion. Despite the popular reception of his plan, there was a problem – Urban had not signed up any leading members of the nobility to his cause. He had an experienced and capable cleric, the Bishop of Le Puy, to take charge on behalf of the church, but who were the men who would organise and lead the armies?

  Yet this issue was quickly resolved. Beside the noble intent to fight for Christ, the spiritual pull of the call to arms, a more prosaic, more secular reason encouraged young nobles to go should the thought of rewards in the hereafter prove insufficient: primogeniture. On the death of a male member of the nobility his property and wealth would, in most of Europe, pass to the eldest son. This meant that after exhausting that pool of fighting men who were motivated by faith, or by the desire for battle and for glory, there were many ambitious young men who saw the opportunity of making their fortune under the excuse of doing good. Living in an age without newspapers, without television, their prime source of information about the Holy Land was the Bible. The Land of Milk and Honey

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  The Crusader World

  • Adrian Boas, Adrian Boas(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Gabriele, 2012 , 812–13, who argues that “Gregory VII and Urban II belonged to similar, yet distinct, textual communities” and held differing views on Christian reconquest and restoration.
• Others disagree ; cf. Ashe, 1999 , who fragments medieval religious experience and medieval crusading experience by suggesting that the Church expounded one model of crusading, reflecting papal resolve to assert control over secular rulers, while the Song of Roland expounded “a subversive antimodel of reality,” reflecting “its own, distinctive, form of secularized Christianity … opposed not only to Church theology, but to Church power.”
• Urban II to the counts Bernat of Besalú , Hugo of Ampurias, Guislabert of Roussilon, and Guillem of Cerdanya and their knights, c. July 1096, in Kehr, 1926 , 287–88 (no. 23); trans. based on O’Callaghan, 2003 , 33, with additions and amendments made by the author.
• Ibid. See also Erdmann, 1935 , 294–95/1977, 317; Riley-Smith and Riley-Smith, 1981 , 40; Goñi Gaztambide, 1958 , 60–61; Becker, 1964 –2012, 2:347–48; Housley, 1992 , 32–33; McCrank, 1974 , 264, 284–85 n51; Chevedden, 2005  b, 299–302. Pope Urban’s coordinated strategy of engaging the enemy on two fronts simultaneously finds a parallel in the Islamic world. When Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) was asked about a man who wished to journey to Tarsus to fight the Byzantines while his own region of Islamic Central Asia was contending with the Turks, Ibn Ḥanbal responded by quoting the Qurʾānic Sūrat al-tawbah, āyah 123: “‘O believers, fight the unbelievers around you.’ It is not for anyone that he go from his own land while the enemy is in it, and fight someone other than them. Let him fight in defense of his lands, and drive away the enemies of God” (quoted in Sizgorich, 2009