xxiii Introduction: The World of the Crusades heightened religiosity and greater centralization of ecclesiastical authority, many knights embraced such a framework, both increasingly recognizing ecclesiastical authority on matters of warfare and contributing to greater pilgrimage efforts on the part of western Christians during the period. All these events from the late tenth to late eleventh centuries, including ecclesi- astical efforts to rein in intra-Christian warfare in the West, the reform of the clergy, the challenge to secular rulers over matters of ecclesiastical control, increased pil- grimage activity to the Holy Land, and the development of new thinking about the legitimacy of warfare by ecclesiastical leaders, helped lay a foundation for the birth of the crusading movement. This was especially the case when coupled with increasingly frantic calls for military assistance from Eastern Christians who sent graphic and disturbing tales of their abuse by Muslim Turks to the West in their efforts to secure military aid. All of these elements came together in a speech given by the former Cluniac monk Pope Urban II in 1095 that gave birth to the crusading movement. POPE URBAN II AND THE BIRTH OF THE CRUSADING MOVEMENT In 1088, the year when Pope Urban II began his papal reign, he and the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus began to establish diplomatic relations. Because of Emperor Henry IV’s support for the anti-pope Clement III, it was not until around five years into Urban II’s papacy, after touring Italy and France, that he could settle into Rome and begin to exert significant authority. At that point, contacts between Alexius I and Urban II seem to have begun in earnest, with the Byzantine emperor sending his formal ambassadors to the Council of Piacenza in March of 1095 to lobby for and discuss the prospect of military aid for the Byzantine Empire against the Seljuk Turks. Such efforts proved fruitful, as demonstrated eight months later at the Council of Clermont in November of the same year. It was then that Urban II, in front of an audience of hundreds of bishops, priests, monks, and influential laymen, gave a speech calling for what would later become known as the First Crusade. Numerous surviving accounts of Urban II’s speech at Clermont, including some by eyewitnesses, were written in the years following the First Crusade. It is also possible that some of the accounts of the speech were based on earlier written accounts of the council. It is important to keep in mind that all surviving accounts are written in the wake of the successful First Crusade, an event that was of such magnitude, it likely colored how many remembered or reported on the pope’s speech. A number of important themes are contained in these accounts. They
Previous Page Next Page