Urban II

Pope Urban II preached the crusade at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095, responding to an appeal from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos for military help against the Seljuk Turks, who had taken most of Byzantine Anatolia after their victory at Manzikert in 1071. Urban's sermon, known only through later and not entirely consistent reports, called on Western knights to set aside the private warfare that consumed so much of their energy at home and turn it instead toward liberating the Christians of the East and recovering Jerusalem, offering those who went a remission of the penance owed for their sins.

The response outran anything Urban had organized for. An unarmed and poorly provisioned popular movement under preachers including Peter the Hermit set out ahead of the main armies in what is remembered as the People's Crusade, and was destroyed by the Seljuks in Anatolia within months. The main crusader armies, drawn from France, Flanders, southern Italy and beyond, assembled separately through 1096 and 1097 and converged on Constantinople, where Alexios required their leaders to swear an oath to return any former Byzantine territory they recaptured to the empire, a promise that later became a major source of Byzantine-Latin friction.

Urban II was born Odo of Chatillon sur Marne and trained as a monk at Cluny, rising to prior there before Pope Gregory VII brought him into the Roman curia and made him a cardinal bishop. He inherited Gregory's reform program on his own election in 1088, the effort historians call the Gregorian reform, which sought to free the appointment of bishops and abbots from the control of kings and emperors and to enforce clerical celibacy against long resistance. For much of his pontificate Urban could not even hold Rome itself, since Henry IV of Germany backed a rival antipope, Clement III, who occupied the city for years while Urban governed through a circuit of councils held across France and Italy. He also maintained regular contact with the Byzantine court in the years before Clermont, diplomatic groundwork the council's own appeal built directly upon. It was one of those councils, held at Clermont in central France in November 1095, that made his reign historic. The meeting had been called in part to answer an appeal from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos for soldiers to help hold back Turkish advances into Anatolia. No verbatim transcript of Urban's sermon at Clermont survives; the accounts that do survive were written years later by chroniclers who each had reasons of their own for shaping what he was remembered to have said.

The response to Urban's sermon outran any army the pope himself had organized. Word of the appeal spread through preachers well beyond his own control, most famously Peter the Hermit, whose so called People's Crusade set out from France months ahead of the organized noble armies and was largely destroyed crossing Anatolia before the main campaign had even begun. The knights who followed under more disciplined leadership took three years to reach their goal, capturing Antioch in 1098 after a long siege and then Jerusalem itself in July 1099, in an assault chroniclers on both sides record as accompanied by a massacre of the city's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Urban never learned any of this; he died in Rome on 29 July 1099, two weeks after Jerusalem fell and well before news of the capture could have reached him. Historians have long debated what he actually intended to set in motion, whether primarily a limited relief expedition for a fellow Christian power in the east, a penitential pilgrimage promising remission of sins to participants, or the opening move of a wider Western expansion, and that promise of remission, applied for the first time to an act of war rather than to prayer or almsgiving, gave the whole enterprise a theological force no earlier appeal had carried.