Pope Urban II's Call to Crusade at Clermont 1095

The call to crusade issued by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095 was one of the most consequential acts of the medieval papacy. The pope responded to a request from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos for military assistance against the Seljuk Turks, and he transformed the request into a pilgrimage armed with the cross, a journey to the Holy Land undertaken in penance for sins. The call to crusade launched the First Crusade and initiated the Crusading movement that would shape the relations between Christendom and the Islamic world for centuries.

The five surviving accounts of Urban II’s speech at Clermont (1095) — Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk, Baldric of Bourgueil, the Gesta Francorum, the Historia belli sacri — are the primary sources. The standard modern edition with English translation is in August C. Krey, “The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants” (Princeton, 1921).

The Context of the Call

The context of the call to crusade is rooted in the Seljuk expansion into Anatolia in the late eleventh century. The Seljuk Turks, a Turkic people from Central Asia who had converted to Islam, had established a dynasty in Persia and Mesopotamia in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and they had expanded westward into Anatolia in the late eleventh century. The Seljuk victory at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 had opened Anatolia to Turkic settlement, and the Seljuk Turks had established a capital at Nicaea (modern Iznik) in Bythnia, within striking distance of Constantinople itself.

The Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos was alarmed by the Seljuk expansion, and he sent a request to Pope Urban II for military assistance against the Seljuk Turks. The request was addressed to the pope in part because the Byzantines and the Latins had a long history of cooperation in the defense of Christendom, and in part because the Byzantines hoped that the Latin assistance would be accompanied by Latin recognition of the Byzantine claims to ecclesiastical primacy in the East. The request was received by the pope in March 1095, and it provided the occasion for the call to crusade.

The Council of Clermont

The Council of Clermont was a major ecclesiastical assembly convened by Pope Urban II in November 1095, in the town of Clermont in Auvergne (central France). The Council was attended by over two hundred archbishops and bishops, along with many abbots, canons, and representatives of the secular rulers of France and other parts of Europe. The Council was primarily a church council that dealt with matters of church discipline and reform, and it issued a number of decrees on ecclesiastical matters — the simony, the nicolaitism, the invasion of church property by secular rulers — that were typical of the Gregorian reform program.

The call to crusade was the most dramatic event of the Council, and it was delivered by Pope Urban II on November 27, 1095, in a public speech in the open air outside the cathedral of Clermont. The speech was recorded by several of the chroniclers who were present, and the accounts vary in details but agree on the main points. The pope described the suffering of the Christians in the Holy Land, called on the warriors of Europe to take up arms in their defense, and promised that those who died on the expedition would receive the remission of their sins — a spiritual benefit known as the indulgence.

The Content of the Speech

The content of Pope Urban’s speech at Clermont was a masterpiece of papal rhetoric. The pope painted a vivid picture of the suffering of the Christians in the Holy Land, describing the desecration of the holy places, the persecution of the faithful, and the humiliation of Christendom at the hands of the infidels. The pope called on the warriors of Europe to take up arms in defense of their faith, and he promised that those who responded to the call would receive the remission of their sins — a spiritual benefit that was unprecedented in the history of the Church.

The pope specifically addressed the knights of France and the surrounding regions, urging them to stop their private wars and to turn their swords to the defense of the Holy Land. The pope argued that the knights of Europe were constantly fighting each other in private feuds that produced only destruction and death, and that the crusade would channel their martial energy into a worthy cause. The pope also urged the knights to emulate the example of Charlemagne and his paladins, who had fought to extend Christendom in earlier centuries.

The pope concluded his speech with a dramatic call to action: “Christ commands it!” — or, in the Latin formula that became the rallying cry of the First Crusade, “Deus lo vult!” (“God wills it!”). The crowd responded with a great shout, and the call to crusade was enthusiastically received. The pope distributed the cross to those who wished to take the crusading vow, and the word crusade (from the Latin crux, cross) was born to describe the expedition.

The Response to the Call

The response to the call to crusade was immediate and overwhelming. Thousands of knights and commoners pledged to take the cross, and the crusade was organized for departure in the autumn of 1096. The crusade attracted a diverse range of participants — dukes and counts, knights and esquires, priests and monks, merchants and craftsmen, peasants and laborers — and the crusade became a mass movement that involved a significant portion of the European population.

The response to the call was particularly strong in France, which provided the largest number of crusaders and the leadership of the expedition. The response was also strong in southern Italy (which had been recently conquered by the Normans), in Flanders, and in other parts of western Europe. The response in England was relatively limited, due in part to the ongoing succession crisis following the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, but Anglo-Norman knights did participate in the crusade under the leadership of Norman lords.

The response to the call was not universal, and there were also critics of the crusade and of the papal rhetoric that accompanied it. Some theologians argued that the crusade was incompatible with the Gospel’s teaching of peace and non-violence, and they criticized the papal promise of the remission of sins as a bribe to encourage violence. Some secular rulers resisted the call to crusade, arguing that the crusade would weaken their realms and expose them to the attacks of their enemies. Yet the call to crusade was overwhelmingly successful, and the First Crusade was the largest military expedition in the history of medieval Europe up to that point.

The Significance of the Call

The call to crusade at Clermont was a major moment in the history of the papacy and of the medieval world. The call established the crusade as a legitimate form of Christian devotion and pilgrimage, and it created a new form of spiritual merit — the indulgence attached to the crusading vow. The call mobilized the military energy of the European aristocracy in a new direction, and it provided a framework for the international cooperation of European rulers in a common cause.

The call to crusade also had a major impact on the relationship between Christendom and the Islamic world. The crusade established a Latin Christian presence in the Holy Land that lasted for nearly two centuries, and it stimulated European interest in the East and in the rich culture of the Islamic world. The crusade also established a pattern of conflict between Christendom and Islam that has shaped the relations between the two civilizations down to the present day, and it is a major subject of historical and theological debate in the modern era.

The call to crusade at Clermont was a defining moment in the history of medieval Europe, and it set the stage for the Crusading movement that would shape the history of the next several centuries. The First Crusade culminated in the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 and the establishment of the Crusader States in the Levant, and the Crusading movement continued until the fall of Acre in 1291 and the failure of the Crusading ideal in the Late Middle Ages. The call at Clermont is a major event in the history of the medieval world, and it is a subject of ongoing historical inquiry and debate.

Sources

Principal sources used in this article:

Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade: A New History (Oxford, 2004).

Further reading:

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Athlone, 1986).

For a recent single-volume synthesis with full scholarly apparatus, see the relevant chapter of Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2014).