Council of Clermont

Pope Urban II's council at Clermont in Auvergne, held from 17 to 27 November 1095, was mostly concerned with church reform and regional disputes. It is remembered, however, for the sermon the pope preached on its last day, urging the knights of the West to go to the aid of Christians in the East. That appeal set in motion the First Crusade, which would end with the capture of Jerusalem.

Clermont lay at the time within the Duchy of Aquitaine, in the Kingdom of France. About 300 clerics attended, though no official list of participants survives. Most of the council's work concerned the programme of church reform associated with Cluny, along with local and regional matters. It extended the excommunication of King Philip I of France over his adulterous remarriage to Bertrade of Montfort, and renewed the Truce of God, the church's effort to limit private warfare among the Frankish nobility.

Behind the sermon lay a request from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, whose envoys had asked the earlier Council of Piacenza for military help against the Seljuk Turks. The Turks had recently overrun much of Byzantine Anatolia.

No single authoritative text of the sermon survives. Six main sources describe it: a letter Urban himself wrote in December 1095, the anonymous Gesta Francorum, and the chronicles of Fulcher of Chartres, Robert the Monk, Baldric of Dol and Guibert of Nogent. The reconstructed speeches differ widely. Fulcher, who was present and wrote within a few years, is generally considered the most reliable.

In Fulcher's account Urban first addressed the clergy, urging them to avoid corruption and simony, lamented the lack of order among the Franks and called for the truce protecting the clergy to be restored. He then turned to the East, describing how the Turks had advanced as far as the Sea of Marmara, slaying and enslaving Christians and destroying churches. He asked the clergy to spread his appeal to rich and poor alike, promised remission of sins to those who died on the way or in battle, and urged men who had been fighting their own brothers to turn their arms against the enemy instead. Those who meant to go were to raise money and set off when winter ended.

Robert the Monk, writing in 1107, gave a more dramatic version in which the crowd answered with cries of "Deus vult" ("God wills it") and Urban put the recovery of the Holy Land ahead of aid to the Greeks. Many historians suspect that this emphasis, which also appears in Baldric and Guibert, reflects knowledge of the crusade's later success. Urban's own letter mentions Jerusalem and its churches, names Adhemar of Le Puy as leader of the expedition and fixes the departure for 15 August 1096.

News of the appeal spread rapidly by word of mouth, and the Gesta Francorum describes how Franks sewed crosses onto their right shoulders as a sign of their commitment. Historians have long debated how far Urban's efforts to pacify the Frankish lands were linked to channelling their violence outwards. The expedition that followed began the long era of the Crusades.

Our 1100 map shows Clermont within the Kingdom of France, with the Byzantine Empire and the lands of the Seljuks further east.