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 unequivocaclass="underline" ‘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 heading for Jerusalem with the good intent of liberating Christianity’.21 The restoration to Christendom of the scene of the ideal church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles represented more than a propaganda device or a sop and capitulation to ill-informed populism, as some twentieth-century historians such as Carl Erdmann have implied. Rather it signalled the ultimate libertas ecclesiae for which the whole church reform movement of the previous half-century had been striving.
Jerusalem in the eleventh as in other centuries defined an ideal as much as a terrestrial city. It could stand as a metaphor, ‘the holy city, God’s celestial Jerusalem’, as an English royal charter of 1093 put it, for the world redeemed by Christ.22 Jerusalem could represent a spiritual condition and aspiration, as in the religious life of an individual or community, or its attributes could be geographically transposed to create a virtual reality in relics and shrines. Clairvaux abbey in the mid-twelfth century was likened to Jerusalem by its abbot, St Bernard, as had been the imperial courts of Charlemagne or Byzantium. More pervasively, the liturgy recreated scenes from Jerusalem in the mass or enacted whole episodes, as in the increasingly popular Easter plays, each a glimpse of the Holy City. Yet for all its liminality, poised between heaven and earth, God and man, Jerusalem remained a place as well as an ideal, temporal as well as spiritual, corporal as well as supernatural. In the tenth and eleventh centuries its distance – loca remotissima, as one historian of Urban’s expedition put it23 – and association with Christ’s life, Passion and Resurrection ensured Jerusalem as the most meritorious goal of pilgrimage to such an extent that the chronicler Ralph Glaber noted that such a trip was in danger of becoming a fashionable social accessory rather than an act of piety.24 The difficulties of the journey, magnified a hundred-fold by war, secured its penitential attraction.
Scriptural history and the pseudo-history of Christian prophecy confirmed this unique numinous status. Earlier in the eleventh century the Limousin monk Adhemar of Chabannes insisted on the historical primacy of Jerusalem over Rome itself as ‘the fountain of Christianity… the mother of all Churches’.25 Throughout the century, notably in the 1030s and 1060s, huge bands of pilgrims trekked east, inspired by chiliastic enthusiasm condemned as misguided by one commentator, who nonetheless recorded the potency of such emotions to attract ‘not only the common people but the elites (primores)’.26 Jerusalem played a prominent part in the genre of eschatological literature popular in western monasteries, cathedrals and courts from at least the mid-tenth century, the setting for the final scenes of Judgement at the end of the world. There, it was widely asserted, the Last Roman Emperor would surrender his crown as a preliminary to the Last Things. Unsurprisingly, such prominence in the Divine Plan appealed to imperialists during the contest between Henry IV and the reforming popes, Benzo of Alba advising the king to fulfil these Jerusalem prophecies himself. Western obsessions with the Holy City may have been sufficiently strong to have persuaded the Byzantine emperor Alexius I to cite the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre in enticing western nobles into his service in the years before 1095.27