Free The Templars by Michael Haag Page A

religious energy in the West and also to win the prize of Jerusalem. Urban let it be known that in response to the appeal from Eastern Christendom for help, he would make a speech on the penultimate day of the council, Tuesday 27 November. He expected that in addition to churchmen his audience would comprise members of the French nobility, for he envisioned the expedition to the East as an armed pilgrimage of knights.
    Three hundred clerics had been attending the council within the cathedral at Clermont, but the crowds, both clerical and lay, that assembled on that Tuesday were huge, and so the Papal throne was set up on a platform in an open field outside the eastern gate of the city, and there, when the multitudes were gathered, Urban rose to address them. The reports of four contemporary chroniclers survive, but all were written years later, were coloured by subsequent events, and differ greatly from one another, so that we can have only a very approximate idea of what Urban actually said.
    He began, it seems, by telling his listeners that the Seljuks were advancing into the heart of Christian lands, maltreating the population and desecrating their shrines and churches. The Emperor of Byzantium had called for help, and it was the duty of the West to respond. But he spoke not only about recovering Byzantine territory. He emphasised the special holiness of Jerusalem and told how pilgrims had suffered on their journeys there. Then he made his great appeal. Let the West go to the rescue of the East. The nobility should stop fighting one another andinstead fight a righteous war. For those who died in battle there would be remission of sins. Let this armed pilgrimage (the word ‘crusade’ did not come into use until the thirteenth century when the Crusades were over) set out in the summer, at the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August, after the harvest had been gathered; and the armies should assemble at Constantinople.
    Cries of Deus le volt! –God wills it!–interrupted Pope Urban’s speech and filled the air again when it was over. Adhemar, the bishop of Le Puy, immediately knelt before the throne and begged permission to join the holy expedition. This apparently spontaneous gesture was probably prearranged, as Urban had stayed at Le Puy in August. Yet the enthusiasm was greater than Urban had expected. Knights and peasants, rich and poor, pressed forward to follow the bishop’s example. Many burst into tears and many were seized with convulsive trembling. Everyone who listened was swept with emotions of overwhelming power.
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    Spinning the Pope’s Speech
    Four contemporary chroniclers–Fulcher of Chartres, Baldric of Dol, Robert the Monk and Guibert de Nogent–wrote accounts of the First Crusade which contained versions of Pope Urban II’s speech at Clermont. None set down their accounts of what the Pope said until years after the event, nor did any pretend to standards of accurate and objective history; rather each used the Pope’s speech to put forward a point of view reflecting the different ways people looked at the crusade.
     
    The earliest account was by Fulcher of Chartres. He was the only chronicler to actually take part in the crusade and wrote about it immediately afterwards, in 1100–01. His account gives the impression that he was at Clermont. Fulcher presents the Pope as a pragmatic strategist who speaks of the Arabs and the Turks as a threat not only to the East but ultimately to the West: ‘If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them.’
     
    Baldric of Dol wrote his account soon after the First Crusade, but he was not a participant, though he does give the impression that he was at Clermont. In this version, references to the Old and New Testaments underline the Pope’s call for a holy war of liberation, with Jerusalem itself as the very image of heaven: ‘Let us bewail the most monstrous devastation of the Holy