Council of Clermont - A Call For Orthodoxy

A Call For Orthodoxy

In Gesta Dei per Francos by Robert the Monk, writing about twenty years after the council, an extended version of the speech presents the call to the "race of the Franks" as a peroration climaxing Urban's call for orthodoxy, reform and submission to the Church. Robert records that the pope asked western Christians, poor and rich, to come to the aid of the Greeks in the east, because "Deus vult," ("God wills it"), the rousing cry with which Urban ended his final address. Robert records that Urban promised remission of sins for those who went to the east, although the 'Liber Lamberti', a source based on the notes of Bishop Lambert of Arras, who attended the Council, indicates that Urban offered the remission of all penance due from sins, what later came to be called an indulgence. Robert makes Urban emphasize reconquering the Holy Land more than aiding the Greeks; the intervening decades and the events of the First Crusade had certainly shifted the emphasis. According to Robert, Urban listed various gruesome offenses of the Muslims: They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. and more alleged atrocities expressed in inflammatory images that were derived from hagiography. Perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight, Robert makes Urban advise that none but knights should go, not the old and feeble, nor priests without the permission of their bishops, "for such are more of a hindrance than aid, more of a burden than advantage... nor ought women to set out at all, without their husbands or brothers or legal guardians."

About the same time, Baldrick, archbishop of Dol, also basing his account generally on Gesta Francorum, focused on the offenses of the Muslims and the reconquest of the Holy Land in terms likely to appeal to chivalry. Like Fulcher he also recorded that Urban deplored the violence of the Christian knights of Gaul. "It is less wicked to brandish your sword against Saracens," Baldrick's Urban cries, comparing them to the Amalekites. The violence of knights he wanted to see ennobled in the service of Christ, defending the churches of the East as if defending a mother. Baldrick asserts that Urban, there on the spot, appointed the bishop of Puy to lead the crusade.

Guibert, abbot of Nogent also made that Urban emphasize the reconquest of the Holy Land more than help to the Greeks or other Christians there. This emphasis may, as in the case of Robert and Baldric, be due to the influence of the Gesta Francorum's account of Jerusalem's reconquest. Urban's speech, in Nogent's version, emphasized the sanctity of the Holy Land, which must be in Christian possession so that prophecies about the end of the world could be fulfilled.

On the last day of the council, a general call was sent out to the knights and nobles of France. Urban apparently knew in advance of the day that Raymond IV of Toulouse, exemplary for courage and piety, was fully prepared to take up arms. Urban himself spent a few months preaching the Crusade in France, while papal legates spread the word in the south of Italy, during which time the focus presumably turned from helping Alexius to taking Jerusalem. The general population, upon hearing about the Council, likely understood this to be the point of the Crusade in the first place.

Urban's own letter, addressed to the faithful "waiting in Flanders," does lament the fact that Turks, in addition to ravaging the "churches of God in the eastern regions," have seized "the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection—and blasphemy to say it—have sold her and her churches into abominable slavery." Yet he does not explicitly call for the reconquest of Jerusulem. Rather he explicitly calls for the military "liberation" of the Eastern Churches, and appoints Adhemar of Le Puy to lead the Crusade, to set out on the day of the Assumption of Mary, August 15.