The First Crusade (3 page)

might marry, hold two or three ecclesiastical offices at once and perhaps even fight in wars. Around 1068 Urban turned aside from this worldly 'secular
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arm of the Church to become a monk, although his decision was probably inspired by a mixture of personal ambition and piety. He was professed into perhaps the most influential and respected monastery of the day, the Burgundian house of Cluny, an institution just reaching the apogee of its power. Cluny epitomised two interlocking concepts: liberty and purity. In an age when even monasteries commonly fell prey to worldly contamination, as lords, princes and bishops sought to meddle in their affairs, Cluny had one massive advantage. From the moment of its birth, in the early tenth century, it had been placed under the direct protection of the pope in Rome. Immune from local interference, Cluny was effectively its own master, free to appoint its own abbots, govern as it saw fit and pursue monastic perfection in true isolation. Under the guidance of its energetic and long-lived abbot, Hugh (1049-1109), the monastery itself grew to accommodate three times as many monks, and a vast new abbey church was built that would become the largest enclosed space in western Europe. At the same time, the tendrils of Cluniac power continued to spread across Latin Christendom, as existing monasteries in France, Germany, Spain, England and northern Italy reformed to adopt Cluniac principles. By the end of the eleventh century, more than 11,000 monks in some 2,000 religious communities had joined the Cluniac movement. Even within this vast, supranational edifice, Urban's piety and administrative skill did not long go unnoticed. He rose to become grand prior of Cluny, .second in command to the abbot, and helped to cement the monastery's reputation as a bastion of uncompromising spiritual purity.
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But Urban's career was not to end within the confines of a monastery. As a papal protectorate, Cluny had long enjoyed an intimate, mutually beneficial alliance with Rome. It is no surprise then that Urban's position within the monastery brought him to the notice of the pope. Around 1080, he was recruited to become cardinal-bishop of Ostia, one of the most powerful ecclesiastical offices in Italy. Urban had now entered the inner sanctum of spiritual authority, but he could not have arrived at a more tumultuous moment, for the papacy was in the midst of a ferocious dispute.

The medieval papacy

To understand the arena now confronting Urban, one must first appreciate the differences between the theoretical and actual status of the medieval papacy. In Christian tradition there were five great centres of ecclesiastical power on earth, five patriarchates, of which Rome was just one. But late-eleventh-century popes claimed pre
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eminence among all these on the basis that Christ's chief apostle St Peter had been the first bishop of Rome. Scripture indicated that St Peter had been empowered by Christ to manifest God's will, becoming, in essence, the most potent spiritual figure on earth. The papacy maintained that an unbroken chain of descent ran from St Peter across the centuries, connecting all popes and thus making them successors to this authority. Indeed, it went one step further, arguing that this unique 'apostolic power' was not handed down from pope to pope and thus subject to dilution, but was instead directly conferred, fresh and unsullied, upon each new incumbent of the office. As far as Rome was concerned, this meant that papal authority was unassailable and infallible. Medieval popes thus regarded themselves as the world's foremost spiritual power and believed they were entitled to exert absolute control over the Latin Church of Europe.
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When Urban joined the Roman camp, however, the reality of papal authority was but a pale, almost pathetic, reflection of these lofty aspirations. Far from being recognised as the leader of the Christian faith on earth, the pope struggled to manage the spiritual affairs of central Italy, let alone all western Christendom. The theoretical underpinnings of papal power had for centuries lain dormant and untapped, as the office of pope remained mired in localised interests and abuse, and any attempts to break free of these confines faltered in the face of massive obstacles.

The same centrifugal forces that had fragmented political power in the wake of the Roman Empire's decline worked simultaneously to disorder and dislocate ecclesiastical authority. By the year 1000, bishops in England, France, Germany, Spain and even northern Italy had little or no expectation of, nor reliance upon, guidance from the pope, sitting in impotent isolation upon the throne of St Peter in Rome. Accustomed to the practice and rewards of independent government, these prelates were unresponsive, even resistant, to any shift towards centralisation and conformity.

At the same time, any hope of wielding absolute ecclesiastical power in Europe was unrealistic, because the dividing line between the spiritual realm of the Church and the temporal world of kings, lords and knights was at best blurred, at worst non-existent. In the medieval age, these two spheres were so intertwined as to be practically inseparable. Kings, believing themselves to be empowered by divine mandate, felt a responsibility to care for and, if necessary, govern the Church. Meanwhile, virtually all bishops wielded a measure of political authority, being major landholders in possession of their own wealth and military forces. To curb the political independence of these powerful figures, many kings sought to control the selection, appointment and investiture of churchmen based within their realm, even though in theory this was a papal prerogative. At the end of the first millennium of Christian history, the Latin Church was in disarray and the limited efforts to control it were being offered not by the papacy, but by secular rulers.

It was not until the mid-eleventh century that the first significant steps towards redressing this imbalance were taken. Amid a general atmosphere of heightened devotional awareness, inspired in part by the example of monasteries like Cluny, western Christians began to look at their Church and perceive sickness. A clergy rife with abuse and 'governed' by a powerless pope offered little prospect of guiding society towards salvation. Arguing that the Latin Church would have to clean up its act, starting in Rome itself and working outwards, a 'Reform Movement' emerged, advocating a twin agenda of papal empowerment and clerical purification. This campaign enjoyed some early success, establishing a rigorous new process for electing popes and launching public attacks on vices such as clerical marriage and the buying and selling of ecclesiastical office.
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The champion and chief architect of the cause was Pope Gregory VII (1073-85), the very man who recognised Urban's talents and brought him to Italy. A profoundly ambitious, wilful and intransigent figure, Gregory fought harder than any pope before him to realise the potential of his office, struggling to unify and cleanse Latin Christendom under the banner of Rome. With audacious single-mindedness, he identified what he believed to be the root cause of the Church's problems - the polluting influence of the laity - and then set about attacking it with near-rabid tenacity, in what has been termed the Investiture Controversy'. Gregory was not interested in tempered diplomacy or negotiated reform - he went straight for the jugular of the mightiest secular force in Europe, hoping to cow the rest of Christendom into submission by example.

In 1075 Gregory banned the German king Henry IV, a man who could trace the lineage of his office to Charlemagne and beyond, from interfering in the affairs of the Church. When Henry resisted, Gregory mobilised the ultimate weapon in his arsenal. As yet possessing no military might with which to coerce, he chose instead to strike Henry with spiritual censure. In February 1076, he excommunicated the most powerful Latin Christian alive and instructed the king's subjects to renounce him. So dramatic was this act that legend later declared it to have caused the ancient papal throne of St Peter to crack in two. Ejecting Henry from the Church, denying his status as a Christian, was an immense gamble; should Gregory's edict be ignored, his bluff would be called and his authority shattered, but were this condemnation to be heeded, then the Roman pontiff, who just decades earlier had seemed a marginal nonentity on the European stage, would be confirmed as the arbiter of ultimate justice.

In the final analysis, Gregory's strategy did not succeed, his papacy ending with the glorious ambition of papal empowerment unrealised. Henry's excommunication did initially prompt the king to adopt a more penitent stance, but the pope soon overplayed his hand, enraging his enemies and alienating supporters with his radical and unbending vision of spiritual reform and his intensely personal, autocratic notion of papal authority. Along the way, Gregory experimented with the concept of a papal army, a move that prompted indignation in some quarters but broke crucial ground on the road towards the concept of crusading.

It was into a world of unrealised papal aspirations and seething diplomatic discord that Urban was propelled by his appointment as prelate of Ostia c. 1080. In spite of Gregory VII's hard-line fanaticism and failing fortunes, Urban remained among his staunchest allies, backing up his publicly avowed support for the beleaguered pontiff with sterling service as papal legate to Germany between 1084 and 1085. He had, nonetheless, to witness Gregory's ultimate decline, as Henry IV had his own candidate, Clement III, declared pope and finally moved in to occupy Rome itself. On 25 May 1085, Pope Gregory VII died in ignominious exile in southern Italy. In the chaos that followed his death no obvious candidate immediately emerged to champion the Gregorian cause or challenge the authority of the German anti-pope. The first, short-lived choice of a successor was not consecrated until May 1087, and, after his death in September of that same year, it took a further six months of infighting before Urban II could step forward to assume the office of pope.
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Given the extraordinary impact he was to have upon European history, the most striking feature of Urban's early pontificate was the position of extreme weakness and vulnerability from which he began. In 1088, the Latin West seemed ready to turn its back upon the Gregorian party. Urban had to contend with Clement III, the rival German claimant to the papal throne, and recovered possession of the Lateran Palace in Rome in 1094 only through bribery, and even then his hold over the city was precarious. But he did gradually restore papal authority. A far more skilful diplomat than his predecessor, in his dealings with the secular and ecclesiastical powers of Europe Urban chose to encourage gradual change through cautious suggestion rather than affect brazen dominance. He also adopted a more flexible approach to reform and its implementation, stressing inclusion rather than retribution when dealing with transgressors. This temperance won back a good deal of support for the papal cause. Urban capitalised upon the network of contacts established during his days at Cluny and worked to rejuvenate the web of aristocratic clients, known as 'the faithful of St Peter', that had grown up under Gregory VII. Rejecting despotism in favour of consultative government, Urban was the first pope to institute a functioning
curia Romana
or papal court, in which he worked alongside ecclesiastical advisers instead of presenting himself as the sole, perfected mouthpiece of St Peter.

By 1095, Urban's restrained touch had begun to pay off, bringing the doctrine of reform to regions that Gregory's closed fist had failed to penetrate. The papacy was at last beginning to recover some of its international prestige. Rome's power was still far from universal, however, when in March Pope Urban convened a major ecclesiastical council at the southern Italian city of Piacenza. It was during this meeting that a fateful embassy arrived bearing envoys from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), capital of the mighty Greek Christian Empire of Byzantium. Beset by aggressive Islamic neighbours, these Byzantines appealed for military aid from their Christian brethren in the West. The pope's initial reaction was to urge 'many to promise, by taking an oath, to aid the emperor most faithfully as far as they were able against the pagans', but this seems to have provoked little or no reaction. The idea of promoting a more vigorous response was, however, beginning to take shape in Urban's mind. Before the year was out, and with the backbone of papal authority barely rebuilt, he would issue a call to arms that would drive a multitude of Latins swarming to the gates of Constantinople and beyond.
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In the autumn of 1095, with the power of Rome taking its first tentative steps towards recovery, Pope Urban II made a grand preaching tour of France. It was during this visit to his old homeland that Urban launched the First Crusade. He called upon the warriors of the Latin West to avenge a range of ghastly 'crimes' committed against Christendom by the followers of Islam, urging them to bring aid to their eastern brethren and to reconquer the most sacred site on earth, the city of Jerusalem. This speech, the moment of genesis for the concept of a crusade, bound the Christian religion to a military cause. To understand how the pope achieved this fusion of faith and violence and why Europe ultimately responded to his appeal with enthusiasm, we must begin by asking what prompted Urban to preach the crusade when he did.