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.
The threat to Latin Christendom?
The first point to acknowledge is that the call to arms made at Clermont was not directly inspired by any recent calamity or atrocity in the East. Urban’s sermon may have been stimulated, at least in part, by the Byzantine appeal for military aid received some eight months earlier at the council of Piacenza, but this request was not itself tied to any recent Greek defeat, resulting instead from decades of mounting Muslim aggression in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). And although the Holy City of Jerusalem, the expedition’s ultimate goal, was indeed in Muslim hands, it had been so for more than 400 years – hardly a fresh wound. At the start of the eleventh century, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thought to enclose the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, had been partially demolished by the volatile Islamic leader known to history as the Mad Caliph Hakim. His subsequent persecution of the local Christian population lasted for more than a decade, ending only when he declared himself a living god and turned on his own Muslim subjects. Tensions also seem to have been running high in 1027, when Muslims reportedly threw stones into the compound of the Holy Sepulchre. More recently, Latin Christians attempting to make devotional pilgrimages to the Levant, of whom there continued to be many, may have reported some difficulties in visiting the Holy Places, but the volume and severity of such complaints was far from overwhelming.18
The reality was that, when Pope Urban proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont, Islam and Christendom had coexisted for centuries in relative equanimity. There may at times have been little love lost between Christian and Muslim neighbours, but there was, in truth, little to distinguish this enmity from the endemic political and military struggles of the age. When, in the seventh century, Muhammad first revealed the teachings of Allah and Islam exploded out of the Arabian peninsula, the eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium faced a seemingly unstoppable tide of expansion. Arab forces swept through Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor, finally breaking upon the walls of the Greek capital, Constantinople. As the years passed, Islam and Byzantium developed a tense, sometimes quarrelsome respect for one another, but their relationship was no more fraught with conflict than that between the Greeks and their Slavic or Latin neighbours to the west.19
At the other end of the Mediterranean, Islamic forces had overwhelmed the Iberian peninsula in 711 CE. So dynamic was their advance that only the might of Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles the Hammer, could turn them back from the borders of France and the heartlands of Latin Christendom. Partially detached from the rest of Europe by the physical barrier of the Pyrenean mountains, these Muslims settled in Spain and Portugal, leaving the indigenous Christians only a thin sliver of territory in the north. Muslim power held fast for generations, allowing culture, learning and trade to flourish, and Islamic Iberia blossomed into one of the greatest centres of civilisation in the known world. When decay and political fracture finally set in during the eleventh century, the surviving Christian realms of the north were quick to capitalise. In the decades leading up to the First Crusade, the nature of Iberian Latin–Muslim contact did alter: animosities hardened; the Christians went into the ascendant; and the frontier dividing these two faiths gradually began to inch southwards. But even in this period the scavenging Latins were far more interested in draining the Muslim south of its fabled wealth than they were in prosecuting any sort of concerted religious warfare. When blood was shed in battle, it was usually the result of Christian in-fighting, fractious squabbling over the spoils.20
At the end of the eleventh century, Christendom was in one sense encircled by Islam, with Muslim forces ranged against it to the east along Byzantium’s Asian frontier and to the south in the Iberian peninsula. But Europe was a long way from being engaged in an urgent, titanic struggle for survival. No coherent, pan-Mediterranean onslaught threatened, because, although the Moors of Iberia and the Turks of Asia Minor shared a religious heritage, they were never united in one purpose. Where Christians and Muslims did face each other across the centuries, their relationship had been unremarkable, characterised, like that between any potential rivals, by periods of conflict and others of coexistence. There is little or no evidence to suggest that either side harboured any innate, empowering religious or racial hatred of the other.21
Most significantly, throughout this period indigenous Christians actually living under Islamic law, be it in Iberia or the Holy Land, were generally treated with remarkable clemency. The Muslim faith acknowledged and respected Judaism and Christianity, creeds with which it enjoyed a common devotional tradition and a mutual reliance upon authoritative scripture. Christian subjects may not have been able to share power with their Muslim masters, but they were given freedom to worship. All around the Mediterranean basin, Christian faith and society survived and even thrived under the watchful but tolerant eye of Islam. Eastern Christendom may have been subject to Islamic rule, but it was not on the brink of annihilation, nor prey to any form of systematic abuse.
It is true that, ten years before the council of Clermont, Iberia entered a period of heightened religious intolerance. In 1086, a fanatical Islamic sect invaded Iberia from north Africa, supplanting surviving, indigenous Muslim power in the peninsula. This new regime set about resisting and then repelling the acquisitive Christian north, scoring a number of notable military victories that reestablished the balance of power in Islam’s favour. This did cause a reaction in the Latin West. In 1087 the king of France urged his subjects to offer military support to their Iberian brethren, and a number of French potentates duly led companies across the Pyrenees, among them a number of knights who later joined the First Crusade. Then in 1089 Pope Urban II took a limited interest in Iberian affairs. He focused his attention upon the ancient Roman port of Tarragona in north-eastern Spain, a city which had for generations lain in ruins, adrift amid the unclaimed wasteland between Christian and Muslim territory. Urban sponsored the rebuilding of Tarragona as a papal protectorate, but, although he created a new archbishopric there and construction was apparently begun, it is not clear whether the port was actually reoccupied. Iberia did serve as something of a testing ground for crusading ideology, because Urban offered a remission of sin to those engaged in the restoration of Tarragona, but his involvement on the peninsula was still extremely limited and there was no direct link between the needs of this theatre of conflict and his eventual decision to launch a campaign to the Levant.22
Pope Urban’s motives in 1095
The problems addressed by the First Crusade – Muslim occupation of Jerusalem and the potential threat of Islamic aggression in the East – had loomed for decades, even centuries, provoking little or no reaction in Rome. Urban II’s decision to take up this cause at Clermont was, therefore, primarily proactive rather than reactive, and the crusade was designed, first and foremost, to meet the needs of the papacy. Launched as it was just as Urban began to stabilise his power-base in central Italy, the campaign must be seen as an attempt to consolidate papal empowerment and expand Rome’s sphere of influence. It was no accident that Urban chose to unleash the concept of crusading in France, a region in which his roots gave him connections and local knowledge, and over which the papacy had long wished to strengthen its hold. Indeed, the crusade was just one of the weapons used in pursuit of this agenda, Urban’s entire grand tour of France in 1095–6 being a transparent attempt to manifest papal authority.
But for Urban the real beauty of the crusade was that it also had the potential to fulfil a range of other papal ambitions. Since the start of his pontificate, Urban had sought to re-establish friendly contact with the Greek Church of Byzantium, whose relationship with Rome had soured after the two Churches were, in 1054, forced into schism by a heated disagreement over liturgical practice. Orchestrating a positive response to the Byzantine appeal for military aid promised to cement a new period of détente with Constantinople. At the same time, it offered the prospect of expanding Latin influence over the Levantine Church in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, a significant step along the road towards papal pre-eminence in all Christendom.
The First Crusade also held more altruistic benefits. It is likely that Urban earnestly desired to help his Byzantine brethren and those eastern Christians living under Islamic rule. Although probably aware that the latter were not suffering desperate abuse, he still sought to liberate all Christendom, thus ending any threat of oppression. And while the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land might have been willing to grant pilgrims access to the sacred sites of Jerusalem, in Urban’s mind it was still infinitely preferable for that revered city to be under Christian control. At the same time, he came to realise that the very means by which these goals might be achieved could also serve to purify the Latin West. Having grown up among the Frankish aristocracy, the pope was only too aware of the spiritual dilemma facing this knightly class. Bombarded by a stream of warnings about the dreadful danger of sin, but forced to resort to soul-contaminating violence in order to fulfil their duty and defend their rights in this lawless age, most nobles were trapped in a circle of guilt, obligation and necessity. As Roman pontiff, the father of the Latin Church, Urban was personally responsible for the soul of every single Christian living in the West. It was incumbent upon him to lift as many of his flock as possible towards salvation. The campaign launched at Clermont was therefore, in one sense, designed to answer the prayers of a polluted class in Urban’s care, because it offered the nobility a new path to redemption. The message in 1095 was that knights would now be able to prosecute violence in the name of God, participating in a holy war.23
The long road to holy war
Turning bloodshed into a sacred act required the pope to reconcile Christian teaching with the ruthlessness of medieval warfare. With the preaching of the First Crusade the Latin Church went far beyond simply condoning violence; it energetically encouraged military conflict and promoted carnage as an expression of pious devotion. This sanctification of warfare, in which two seemingly immiscible elements – violence and Christianity – were fused, now stands as the defining characteristic of the First Crusade, the feature which has catapulted this expedition into the popular imagination and aroused generations of scholarly attention. The very concept of Christian holy war, of which the crusade was the dominant species, can elicit a sense of dismay and censure in modern observers, who view it as a distortion of Christ’s teaching, an abomination that directly contradicts his promotion of pacifism. Many are driven to ask how the medieval papacy could have developed such an extraordinary concept.24
In fact, the First Crusade was not utterly abnormal, but an extreme product of concerns common to all ages of human society: the need to contain mankind’s innate appetite for violence; and the desire to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ warfare. Across millennia of recorded history and in every corner of the planet, civilisations have struggled to control and harness human aggression, most often by categorising certain types of bloodshed as acceptable and outlawing or vilifying the remainder. Even modern societies posit a moral distinction between ‘private’ murder and killing performed in the midst of sanctioned ‘public’ warfare. Ruling elites also tend to promote their own wars as justifiable and those of their enemies as morally corrupt. The medieval theory of crusading similarly sought to redirect the energies of Europe’s feuding warlords, channelling their bloodlust out beyond the borders of the Latin West for the ‘good’ of all Christendom. In the long term, however, this approach to the management of violence had a bleak and lasting impact upon the relationship with Islam.
This still begs the question of how Christianity, seemingly a pacifistic religion, was so readily militarised. Pope Urban II did not conjure the idea of a crusade from thin air, nor did he consider the concept of holy war to be revolutionary or even novel. In his mind, centuries of Christian, and even pre-Christian, tradition legitimised the principles espoused at Clermont. It was inevitable that his ideas would be influenced by precedent because eleventh-century Latin society was profoundly retrospective. Being Christian to the core, it accepted two immutable truths: scripture, the cornerstone of the faith, was utterly unassailable, the unquestionable word of God; and at the moment of its foundation by St Peter, the Roman Church had been a precise expression of divine will, the Lord’s design for mankind made manifest on earth. These two ancient rocks of perfection left a heavy imprint upon the medieval mind. Fixated by this vision of a golden age in which the apostles supposedly created an ideal Christian order, and governed by an immoveable, authoritative text, the medieval world was obsessed with the past.
But Urban and his contemporaries viewed their Christian history through a cracked and clouded lens. The glorious ‘perfection’ of a bygone era to which they aspired too often owed more to fiction than to fact. The sheer malleability of history – stretched and distorted by the imprecisions of memory and twisted through wilful manipulation and forgery – meant that the ‘past’ that informed and enabled Urban’s sanctification of violence was actually a shifting, tangled web of reality and imagination. Although the pope earnestly believed that the campaign he preached in 1095 conformed to Christ’s teaching, a deep chasm separated the ideals promoted by scripture and those that sustained the concept of crusading.
Weathered by a thousand years of human history, Christian attitudes to violence had undergone an incremental but drastic transformation.
Christianity does, at first glance, appear to be an unquestionably pacifistic faith. The Gospels of the New Testament record numerous occasions when Jesus seemed to reject or prohibit violence: his Sermon on the Mount recommended a policy of peaceful resistance in the face of aggression, turning the other cheek in response to a blow; he instructed his followers to offer love to their enemies; and, at the moment of his betrayal by Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane, when St Peter sought to defend Christ from his captors, Jesus ordered the apostle to sheath his sword, cautioning that he who lived by violence would die by violence. At the same time, the Old Testament appears to offer incontrovertible guidance on the question of violence when Moses reveals the divine law ‘thou shall not kill’ in the Ten Commandments.
Urban’s vision of his religion was, however, coloured by the work of Christian theologians who, in the course of the first millennium CE, decided that scripture might not actually offer such a decisive or universal condemnation of violence and warfare. In part, these theorists were initially sent scurrying to reconsider Christian doctrine by the living reality with which they were confronted. It was always going to prove difficult to maintain an unwavering policy of pacifism in the face of mankind’s inherent bellicosity, but, with the conversion of the Roman Empire, it became virtually impossible to sustain the absolute rejection of violence. From the fourth century onwards, Christianity underwent a gradual but deep-seated transformation as it fused with a Roman ‘state’ for which warfare was an essential feature of existence. Attempting to balance the proscriptions of faith with the needs of empire, some of the earliest Christian scholars, known as the founding fathers or patristic writers, sought to refine man’s understanding of the message contained in the Bible. They did not have to look far to realise that, on the question of violence, scripture was riddled with apparent contradictions.
In spite of its stated ban on bloodshed, Mosaic Law actually endorsed military defence in the face of aggression. Elsewhere, the Old Testament went even further. Being an ongoing history of the Hebrews’ long struggle for survival, it describes a series of holy wars, conflicts sanctioned and supported by divine licence, in which God was held to be the author of victory. To patristic theologians, these examples appeared to indicate that, under the right circumstances, even vengeful or aggressive warfare might be permissible. Even the New Testament, if judged from a certain perspective, could appear to be ambivalent in its approach to physical conflict. Jesus had after all said that he came to bring not peace but a sword, and at one point had used a whip of cords to drive moneylenders out of the temple.
The most influential patristic writer to grapple with these problems was the north African bishop St Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE), perhaps the most eminent theologian in all Christian history and author of a long series of works exploring human existence and religious devotion. St Augustine’s work on Christian violence laid the foundation upon which Pope Urban II eventually erected the crusading ideal. St Augustine argued that a war could be both legal and justified if fought under strictly controlled conditions. His complex theories were later simplified and consolidated to produce three prerequisites of a Just War: it must be proclaimed by a ‘legitimate authority’, like a king, prince or bishop; it ought to have a ‘just cause’, such as the recovery of lost property or defence against enemy attack; and it should be fought with ‘right intention’, that is without cruelty or excessive bloodshed. These three Augustinian principles were the basic building-blocks of the crusading ideal. But, although Augustine’s work shaped the format and nature of Pope Urban II’s crusade sermon at Clermont, it did not actually provide the western Church with a working doctrine of holy war. St Augustine broke Latin Christian theology from the shackles of pacifism, and his ideas gradually filtered down into European society, helping to salve general anxieties about the relationship between faith and military service. But there were distinct limitations to his theory as it was applied to the medieval West. It was seen to demonstrate that certain forms of necessary, public warfare might be ‘justified’ – that is, acceptable and lawful in the eyes of God.25
A significant conceptual divide separates this from ‘sanctified’ violence. This latter form of warfare was not deemed simply to be tolerable to God, a potentially sinful act to which he was prepared to turn a blind eye because its evil would lead to a greater good. Instead, a holy war was one that God actively supported, even demanded, which could be of spiritual benefit to its participants. Pope Urban’s crusading ideal was an extension of this second class of sanctified warfare, but it was not until the eleventh century that the Latin Church really developed a working theory of holy war.
Between the age of St Augustine and the council of Clermont, western Christendom gradually became acculturated to the concept of sanctified violence. This was an incremental, organic process, marked by sporadic episodes of theological experimentation, not a driven programme of linear development. Before the year 1000, the papacy occasionally dabbled in the rhetoric of holy war when facing significant threats. In the ninth century, two successive popes sought to rally military support by promising rather vaguely defined spiritual benefits – a ‘heavenly reward’ or ‘eternal life’ – to those who fought and died in defence of Rome. But this type of appeal seems to have garnered only a limited response and soon fell into disuse. At the same time, Latin society underwent a fitful awakening to the idea that ‘just wars’ might encompass elements of sacred obligation or reward. The prominent role of Carolingian bishops in sponsoring, even directing, brutal campaigns to conquer and convert the pagans of eastern Europe helped stimulate the idea that warfare might have a pious goal. The Christianisation of Germanic ‘barbarian’ traditions also encouraged reverence for the martial qualities of the warrior class and the adoption of the ritual blessing of the weapons of war by the clergy. It was a relatively small step to imagine that esteemed Christian knights, bearing sanctified arms and armour, might be capable of performing some sort of devotional service to God. Even so, at the turn of the millennium, any receptivity to the potential sanctification of violence was still balanced by an ingrained, almost instinctive suspicion that, amid the endemic disorder afflicting society, much of the ‘public’ warfare proclaimed as ‘just’ by feuding lords was, in fact, illicit and thus sinful.
It was not until the second half of the eleventh century that Latin Christendom truly began to edge towards the acceptance of sanctified violence and thus became receptive to the idea of crusading. The first step was the accelerated incidence of papally sponsored warfare. With elements of the Reform Movement urging Rome to pursue an energetic policy of empowerment, successive popes began taking a more active interest in the protection of their Italian territories and the extension of their international influence. It soon became apparent that, if Rome wished to stand on the world stage, it would, on occasion, need some form of material military power with which to enforce its spiritual will. It was nothing new for the papacy to seek martial support from its secular allies; the difference was the degree of its direct, even personal, involvement in warfare. In 1053, Pope Leo IX (1049–54) actually participated in a battle against the aggressive Norman adventurers who had recently invaded southern Italy, offering his supporters absolution from sin as reward for their military service. A decade later, one of Leo’s successors, Alexander II (1061–73) lent papal support to Christians fighting against Islam in Iberia, suggesting that this type of warfare might, of itself, be penitential.26
Pope Gregory VII and sanctified violence
During the pontificate of Gregory VII the doctrine and application of sacred violence underwent a radical transformation. Gregory’s ambitious and uncompromising vision of papal authority prompted him to pursue the sponsorship and sanctification of warfare at an unprecedented pace. His work created the platform upon which Urban stood in 1095. Possessed by an intensely personal notion of his office and believing more wholeheartedly than any pope before him that he was the literal, living embodiment of St Peter, Gregory was utterly convinced that he could wield full apostolic authority on earth. In his mind, there seems to have been no question but that the pope should have total, unchecked control over the spiritual wellbeing of mankind. He was, equally, in no doubt that this power took precedence over that exercised by kings and princes. To realise this audacious ideal, Gregory took a massive step towards the militarisation of the Latin Church. He decided that what Rome really needed was not the martial backing of potentially unreliable secular allies, but a fully fledged papal army owing its allegiance, first and foremost, to St Peter.
In pursuit of this goal, Gregory made a series of sweeping pronouncements that slowly percolated throughout western society, threatening to reshape the Latin world order. He set about reinterpreting Christian tradition in order to establish a precedent for his combative policies. Centuries earlier, patristic theologians had described the internal, spiritual battle waged against sin by devoted Christians as the ‘warfare of Christ’. In time, it became popular in learned circles to conceive of monks as the ‘soldiers of Christ’, ascetics armed with prayer and ritual, engaged in a metaphorical war with temptation. Gregory appropriated this idea and twisted it to suit his purpose. He proclaimed that all lay society had one overriding obligation: to defend the Latin Church as ‘soldiers of Christ’ through actual, physical warfare.
The laity had, in recent decades, been encouraged to reimagine their spiritual relationship with God and the Latin Church in terms that mirrored the structure of temporal society. With God conceived of as ‘lord’ and ‘ruler’ of the ‘kingdom’ of heaven, Christians were conditioned to believe that they owed him loyalty and service as they would a mortal king. To turn this diffuse theory into reality, Gregory harnessed and adapted a popular fixture of Christianity. Latin Europe was accustomed to the notion that saints – Christians who had lived meritorious lives or been martyred, and thus, in death, attained a special place in heaven – deserved reverence. Throughout the West, men and women championed patron saints, offering them dutiful veneration in return for protection and support. Gregory sought to transform this localised patchwork of allegiance by harnessing the universal appeal of St Peter. Rome had, for some time, described its supporters as fideles beati Petri, the ‘faithful’ of St Peter. But Gregory chose to focus on a different aspect of the word fideles, emphasising its implication of service and vassalage to suggest that all Latin Christians were, in fact, ‘vassals of St Peter’ and so by implication vassals of the pope.
By fusing the vision of Christendom as God’s ‘kingdom’, the practice of venerating saints and the feudal connotations of the term fideles, Gregory concocted an elaborate justification for his claim that all lay society owed him a debt of military service. In truth, much of Europe would not have fully understood this intricate web of distorted precedent and warped tradition, and certainly, in the divisive atmosphere of the Investiture Controversy, not all Latins answered Gregory’s call to obedience. But he did manage to recruit a powerful network of fideles willing to do the bidding of Rome, many of whom would later support Urban’s crusade.
The most devoted and influential of these fideles was Countess Matilda of Tuscany, the great matriarch of northern Italy. Ruling one of the grandest princedoms in Europe, Matilda commanded respect in all corners of western Christendom. The not inconsiderable military resources of this ‘daughter of St Peter’, as she liked to be known, lent real force to the papal cause. As a wealthy patron Matilda also attracted some of the finest minds in Europe to her lavish court. Men like Anselm of Lucca, a master of canon law (the history of Church law and papal judgements) and the arch propagandist Bonizo of Sutri set out to shore up the theological underpinnings of Reform policy and cement the doctrine of Christian warfare. Throughout the 1080s, their work served to consolidate Gregorian theories in some areas and to fuel the pursuit of papal authority in others. This ‘think tank’ amassed an array of textual authorities with which to defend Matilda’s reputation and rebut any criticism of the papacy’s militarisation. Anselm scoured the annals of ecclesiastical law in search of precedents for the sanctification of violence, while Bonizo wrote a series of popularised, polemical histories of the Church, designed to demonstrate that God actually had a long record of endorsing holy war. One of their colleagues, John of Mantua, even managed to reinterpret a key pacifistic passage in scripture. John noted that, although Christ had ordered St Peter to sheathe his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, he had not told him to cast it aside. On this basis, John maintained that Jesus had, in fact, wanted his chief apostle to keep the weapon by his side for use at a later date. John’s allegorical argument was that, while God did not intend the pope to wield the ‘sword’ in person, he did expect him to direct a material ‘weapon’ – the armed laity – in defence of Christendom. The work carried out at Matilda’s court played a vital role in the genesis of the crusading ideal, serving to assemble and shape centuries of Christian thought on the question of violence into a coherent theory of sanctified violence, a resource upon which Urban would later draw.
Working alongside these Matildine scholars, Gregory VII made the leap from concept to practice, taking significant steps towards the creation of a papal army and marking a distinct turning point on the road leading to Urban II’s speech at Clermont. Early in his pontificate, Gregory laid plans for a grand military enterprise that can be regarded as the prototype for a crusade. In 1074 he tried to launch a holy war in the eastern Mediterranean that would, had it come to fruition, have borne a striking resemblance to the campaign initiated by Urban II in 1095. Gregory sought to recruit lay military support in France and Germany for an expedition to bring aid to the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who were, he claimed, ‘daily being butchered like cattle’ by the Muslims of Asia Minor. He proposed to lead this bold defence of Christendom in person, declaring that the venture might take him all the way to the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, and expressed the hope that success might bring about the reunification of the eastern and western Churches under the authority of Rome. Although Gregory declared in a letter of December 1074 that he had already amassed an army 50,000 strong – a claim that was sheer fantasy – his grandiose project soon fizzled out, tarnished by its intimate association with Gregory’s own personal authority and then extinguished by the scouring wind of the Investiture Controversy.
Gregory’s planned expedition did, nonetheless, begin to crystallise the ideal of holy war. His predecessor had already implied that violence in the service of God might be meritorious; Gregory’s 1074 scheme explained why. The spiritual benefits of participating in his campaign still seem to have been somewhat vague, described simply as a ‘heavenly reward’, but the reason why such a prize might be on offer was made much clearer. Gregory argued that his projected war would be fought in defence of the Christian faith and that the very act of bringing aid to Byzantium was an expression of love for one’s Christian brethren and thus charitable. This formula of charitable defence made it much easier for contemporaries to believe that fighting in a holy war might truly earn them merit in the eyes of God. Events later in Gregory’s pontificate also helped to clarify the penitential nature of sanctified violence. In the midst of the Investiture Controversy he urged Matilda of Tuscany to fight Henry IV ‘for the remission of her sins’ and instructed her ‘to impose on [her] soldiers the danger of the coming battle for the remission of all their sins’. The scholar Anselm of Lucca later interpreted this to mean that participation in this war had the same purificational value as other forms of penance precisely because it promised, just like a pilgrimage, to be both difficult and perilous.
For all this, Gregory VII cannot be regarded as the sole architect of the crusading ideal. He certainly never successfully launched a campaign on the scale of the First Crusade, nor was he particularly concerned to direct the energy of sanctified violence against Islam. But he did break crucial ground on the road to the idea of crusading. Gregory’s radical, unrelenting drive towards militarisation prompted considerable criticism in ecclesiastical circles, as he was accused of dabbling in practices ‘new and unheard of throughout the centuries’. His vision was so extreme that, when Urban II offered a more measured ideal, he appeared almost conservative in comparison and attracted little censure.27
Gregory’s achievements and those of his predecessors also meant that, by the start of Urban’s pontificate in 1088, the concept of holy war had been formulated. The Latin West had been acculturated to the idea that certain classes of violence might be justified, and was slowly waking up to the notion that warfare directed by the papacy might have a penitential character and thus be capable, in some sense, of cleansing the soul of sin. Within a year of his assumption of the papal throne, Urban had begun to experiment with this new weapon: participants in the reconstruction of Tarragona were offered a remission of sin, but on this occasion the pope achieved a subtle shift of theological emphasis by equating this merit to that of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the years that followed, as the Gregorian papacy slowly enjoyed a renaissance of authority, Urban pondered the full potential of sanctified violence. It was only at the council of Clermont, in the wake of the appeal at Piacenza, that the full range of his ambition became evident.