Which pope initiated the crusades

His penance was cumbersome, incoherent, and also rather mechanical. It is not surprising that one of Gregory VII's main concerns in his bid at his Roman synods, especially those of November and March , to effect the moral re-armament of Latin Christendom, was to order and direct the system of penance.

He was concerned to establish the difference between true and false penances. In , his criterion was simple and based upon current penitential tariffs : false penances were those not duly imposed according to the gravity of the offence pro qualitate criminum. Gregory attempted no definition of true penances.

To the knight or merchant or steward whose daily business could not be engaged in without sin but who also fell into major offence, he could offer true penance only if he also effectively suspended his avocation. Lest such a one should despair, Gregory could offer only the provisional advice interim that he should do some good deeds so that God might enlighten his heart towards penitence It was an unsatisfactory canon which Gregory evidently intended to reconsider.

A letter of November to the clergy and people of Brittany suggests that, by a year later, he had begun to think how best to deal radically with what he called the ingrained custom of false penitence. He offered no such definition of false penances as he gave in , but he clearly had in mind penances that were either lightly regarded or ignored. He turned his attention to 'unfruitful' penance, which he described as penance for a major sin which, because the penance was not taken seriously, left a man involved in the same sin or in some other which was about as bad.

This was pretence, not penitence; Gregory took the decisive step, in principle, of breaking the parameters of the current penitential system and insisting upon total amendment of life :. Whoever would be worthily penitent must return to the beginning of faith. He must be careful vigilantly to keep what he promised in baptism : to renounce the devil and all his pomps, and to believe in God by discerning what is right about him and by keeping his commandments Following this line of thought, Gregory enacted a decree at his Lent synod of which had an altogether new theological sophistication, moral force, and clarity of expression.

In a text which reads like a papal sermon, Gregory dismissed succinctly the false penance that men must avoid : as false baptism does not wash away original sin, so after baptism false penance does not erase a sin that has been committed.

As regards true penance, the decree treated heinous sins like murder and perjury apart from the 'vocational' sins of merchants, warriors, and officials. It was upon heinous sins that the decree concentrated. It first demanded conversion : let each man turn to God. It then required that a man should so turn to God as to abandon all his iniquities and henceforth to continue in the fruits of good works.

As the climax of his statement, Gregory cited the Lord's word by the prophet Ezekiel : 'If the unrighteous shall be converted from all his sins and shall keep the whole of my commandments, he shall surely die and not live' cf.

In what reads like an explanatory gloss rather than Gregory's own words, it is affirmed that warriors, merchants, and officials who continue in sinful ways cannot be held to have turned to God or to have done true penance. The decree as a whole reads as a warning that no man who deliberately remained in sins of any kind, whether by committing some grave offence like Peter Raymundi's, or whether in the course of of his avocation as warrior, merchant or official, or whether by regarding sins and penances with levity, could be deemed to have performed true penance There should be no mistaking the novelty, in terms of eleventh-century penitential practice, of what Gregory was now saying.

True penance, true penitence, called for the complete inner conversion of a man's whole life -the life of the layman no less than the monk. Gregory was foreshadowing the moral theology of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But our concern is with November When he became pope, Urban II professed a total commitment to follow in Gregory's footsteps : 'Believe about me', he wrote, 'just as about the blessed Gregory.

I want to follow wholly in his footsteps. Whatever he. There are indications that, at the council of Clermont, this was the case as regards penance. According to one twelfth-century memorandum of its canons, Urban, too, insisted upon the necessity of inner conversion :. Penance profits nothing save where there is compunction of heart. Therefore medicine cannot be given save to him who is penitent with his whole heart Other records confirm the testimony of this memorandum that Urban like Gregory insisted that penance for one sin does not profit unless there be penitence for all sins The Crusading canon of Clermont, too, may be set in the light of the development of thought that Gregory initiated in There is certainly a verbal similarity : Urban's requirement that a man should not set out 'pro honoris vel pecunie adeptione' uses language that Gregory used of the sin of perjury -'periurii pro cupiditate honoris aut pecunie facti'.

In two respects Urban seems in substance to have followed Gregory's line of thinking. First, Urban's requirement that a man set out for devotion alone pro sola devotione or, as he urged the citizens of Bologna in a letter dated 19 September which echoed the Crusading canon of Clermont, 'for the salvation of their soul alone and for the liberation of the church pro sola animae suae salute et ecclesiae liberatione '54 ,.

Secondly, Urban's provision at Clermont that the journey to Jerusalem should be reckoned 'for all penance', when taken with his expansion of it in the letter to the Bolognese that there would be remission of all penance for sins of which they had made 'true and full confession veram et perfectam confessionem ' , is reminiscent of Gregory's insistence that men should abandon all their sins.

In such respects, Urban's thinking at Clermont seems to have grown from Gregory's attempt of to revitalize the practice of penance, not least among the laity. A military expedition to Jerusalem which, subject to a right disposition in those who took part, would be reckoned for all penance was well calculated to appeal to knights who, in the words of contemporary charters, sought remission of their sins and purposed to save their souls Still more, it would appeal to those Gregorian-minded bishops and abbots upon whom Urban relied for the organization and success of his journey in France, and who were the willing agents of his purposes.

To sum up. After the battle of Manzikert, the reform papacy was impelled to respond to the afflictions of eastern Christians and to the predicament of Constantinople because it saw the church of Constantinople as the daughter of the church of Rome; Rome had a mother's duty to come to its rescue in its time of need. Its duty to respond was intensified by the prevailing appraisal of Constantine the Great as a model emperor and as the benefactor to whom it owed, among other things, the Lateran palace and its endowment of relics.

These relics were a daily reminder of Jerusalem and of the saving events there which made its being in heathen hands an especial scandal among the misfortunes of the eastern churches. The holy cross, with its overtones of Constantine's assurance of victory in battle, was a powerful symbol in recruiting for and in warranting warfare rightly undertaken. In the conflict between sacerdotium and regnum, the imperial associations that, through Constantine's withdrawal to the east, gathered about the pope in the west, led the pope to claim a leadership in promoting peace in the Christian west and in extending it to the Christian east.

This involved diverting the energies of the military classes to a warfare which was envisaged as centring upon Jerusalem and as extending to the walls of Constantinople. If it was for the pope thus to promote peace and order among Christians, so, by a duty that complemented. Those who were directed to Jerusalem 'for devotion alone' appear to have been given to understand that their penances were set aside on account of a total conversion.

They are certainly not a full survey of the origins of the Crusade, the deeper roots of which lay, not at Rome, but more generally in western society But, considered together, they suggest a conclusion that I should like to draw. Especially through the part that Gregory VII plaved in revising papal ideas about penance, Urbans preaching at Clermont was probably able to derive much of its force from his anticipation of developments that historians have associated with St Bernard and the Second Crusade.

The First Crusade as Urban proclaimed was, no less than the Second, intended both to free the east from the heathen and to free from sin the soul of the individual Crusader As Gregory VII's association in of inner conversion with true penance indicates, the time was ripe for such a combination of ideas.

Gregory's final decree about penance helps to explain how the creative genius of Urban II was able to marshal the forces of the west for the novelty of an armed pilgrimage which would free the sepulchre of the Lord at Jerusalem and bring help to afflicted Christians from Jerusalem to Constantinople.

The Origin of the Idea of crusade by M. Baldwin and W. Goffart Princeton NJ, Will, Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae Graecae et Latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant Leipzig and Marburg, , p. Thaner, MGH Libelli, 1. Fuhrmann, MGH Fontes iur. Hinschius Leipzig, , p. Mombritius, Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum, new ed. A new edition is in preparation ; see W. Schwartz and T. Mommsen, GCS 9 Leipzig, , p.

Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Fonti per la storia d'Italia, 81, , 4 vols Rome, , 3. The only printed text of the original version is in : D. For the recensions and a stemma of MSS, see C. Thus began over three hundred years of similar expeditions and pilgrimages, which gradually became known as crusades , because of the cross worn on the clothing of the crusaders.

A spirit of adventure, for one thing. Pilgrimages to the Holy Land had become a feature of medieval piety, and now the pilgrimage was coupled with the prospect of fighting to recapture the pilgrimage sites, to avenge the dishonor their Lord Jesus had suffered. The crusaders also took on an arduous journey in dismal conditions for spiritual reward. This was a holy undertaking, so participants could receive an indulgence remission of sins allowing for direct entry to heaven or reduced time in purgatory.

Finally laypeople could do something that was nearly as spiritually noble as entering the monastery. Further, many of the crusaders hoped to acquire land in the East, to plunder and grow rich.

The first crusaders ventured for Constantinople, slaughtering Jews throughout Germany and occasionally skirmishing with local peoples over food and foraging rights. By late , Emperor Alexius found his city of Constantinople overrun with fifty thousand unruly visitors. The Muslims were divided into rival factions at this time, so the crusaders advanced fairly rapidly, capturing Antioch in and Jerusalem by the following July.

They built numerous structures, especially at the holy sites, and some still stand. Since the 6th century, Christians frequently made pilgrimages to the birthplace of their religion, but when the Seljuk Turks took control of Jerusalem , Christians were barred from the Holy City. This was not the first appeal of its kind, but it came at an important time for Urban. Wanting to reinforce the power of the papacy, Urban seized the opportunity to unite Christian Europe under him as he fought to take back the Holy Land from the Turks.

At the Council of Clermont, in France, at which several hundred clerics and noblemen gathered, Urban delivered a rousing speech summoning rich and poor alike to stop their in-fighting and embark on a righteous war to help their fellow Christians in the East and take back Jerusalem. Urban denigrated the Muslims, exaggerating stories of their anti-Christian acts, and promised absolution and remission of sins for all who died in the service of Christ.

Not all who responded did so out of piety: European nobles were tempted by the prospect of increased land holdings and riches to be gained from the conquest. These nobles were responsible for the death of a great many innocents both on the way to and in the Holy Land, absorbing the riches and estates of those they conveniently deemed opponents to their cause.

Adding to the death toll was the inexperience and lack of discipline of the Christian peasants against the trained, professional armies of the Muslims. As a result, the Christians were initially beaten back, and only through sheer force of numbers were they eventually able to triumph. Meanwhile, the main body of crusaders reached and besieged the city of Antioch in October Its siege lasted months, and low morale deepened still further.

Finally, after Bohemond persuaded a traitor to open the gates to the crusaders, the city fell in June and its inhabitants were massacred.

Almost immediately, the crusaders were themselves besieged by a new Muslim army led by the formidable Kerbogha, the atabeg of Mosul. In dismay, Alexius and other Christian deserters, including Stephen of Blois, returned to Constantinople. The crusaders marched out of Antioch and routed the Muslims in a famous victory. Bohemond, who by now had no intention of marching onwards to Jerusalem, seized control of the city and established the principality of Antioch.

The latter continued their march to Jerusalem and, led by Raymond IV of Toulouse, laid siege to the town of Arqa in the spring of On reaching Jerusalem, they besieged that too, and on 15 July Godfrey of Bouillon and his troops entered the city, slaughtering the inhabitants. Yet the capture of Jerusalem did not bring harmony. Godfrey and Raymond argued over who now owned the city. The kingdom of Jerusalem was born. Raymond had lost the ultimate prize, and had to content himself with carving out land to the north of Jerusalem, which became known as the county of Tripoli.

So, through their combined endeavours, western crusaders had managed to create four distinct territories in the east which together formed the crusader states: the county of Edessa, the principality of Antioch, the county of Tripoli and the kingdom of Jerusalem.

Many knights now went home, but Urban II had already commissioned the archbishop of Milan to preach the cross anew in Lombardy, and in new recruitment drives began in France and Germany. Starstruck by the exploits of their illustrious predecessors, new armies arrived to support the crusader states, which then saw the imposition of western European culture on eastern indigenous peoples including Muslims, Greeks and Jews.