Nobody wrote down Urban II's crusade speech as he gave it
The sermon Pope Urban II preached at Clermont in November 1095 set off the Crusades, yet no exact transcript survives. Five versions exist, all written years later, and they differ widely. Historians looking for his real motives turn instead to four letters in the pope's own words, which show his thinking far more reliably.
Urban was born Odo around 1035 into a noble family of Chatillon-sur-Marne in France and studied at the cathedral school of Reims. He became prior of the great abbey of Cluny, and Pope Gregory VII made him cardinal-bishop of Ostia, where he became a leading champion of Gregory's church reforms. In March 1088 a small gathering of cardinals at Terracina elected him pope by acclamation.
He inherited a crisis. Emperor Henry IV had seized Rome and installed his own antipope, Clement III, so Urban spent much of his reign away from the city, touring Italy and France. He kept up the campaign against simony, lay control of church appointments and clerical marriage, but with more diplomatic finesse than his predecessor, building alliances through marriages and backing Anselm of Canterbury in his dispute with the English king.
The call to crusade grew from an appeal. At the Council of Piacenza in March 1095, envoys from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked for help against Turkish groups who had taken most of Anatolia. At Clermont, after sessions on church reform, Urban addressed a crowd so large the speech had to be held outdoors, urging nobles and commoners to free the Holy Land and the eastern churches. Participants were promised forgiveness of past sins, and the same reward was offered to those fighting in Spain.
Accounts by Fulcher of Chartres, who attended, and Robert the Monk, who may have, were composed around 1101 and 1106, and most versions borrowed from an earlier chronicle. Those retellings, with the crowd crying that it was the will of God, shaped popular ideas about the Crusades far more than his letters did. Urban also organised the Roman Curia as a kind of royal court. He died in July 1099 without hearing that the crusaders had captured Jerusalem, and was beatified in 1881.
Source: Pope Urban II
