The Crusades were a very dark time in the history of Christianity. The years in which they took place were riddled with massacres, butchery, torture, and many other horrendous acts. It has left many modern scholars wondering why members of Christianity, which preaches peace, would condone such actions. They are left with trying to derive the motivations of the crusaders from pieces of writing that have survived. In this vein, a speech of Pope Urban II’s has provided an interesting avenue for investigation. With there being five different version of the same speech it has allowed scholars to get a glimpse of different motivations for the Crusades as well as how the Christians viewed Muslims at the time of the conflict. Fulcher of Chartres presented …show more content…
an interesting take in the version of the speech that he recorded. In it Pope Urban rallied men to his cause by speaking to their own personal desires. A major concern for Christians during that time period was their eternal life and how they might ensure that they would reach heaven once they had died. Pope Urban understood this and used it to persuade men to march east when he said, “All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. ” Once Pope Urban had assured the people that their eternal life was secured it would have been extremely easy to find volunteers, especially among the poor. This was not the only motivation that Pope Urban provided in his speech, but it was a very manipulative one since he understood that the common person feared that their eternal life was not guaranteed. However this was only one point that Pope Urban used. A little earlier in his speech he also attempted to play on the people’s feeling of security. To most who lived in western Europe the east seemed a distant place and what happened there would not spread to them. Pope Urban countered this when he said, “They have killed and captured many, and have destroyed the churches and devastated the empire. If you permit them to continue thus for awhile with impurity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them.” He tried to make it appear as if the Muslims were on their doorsteps and none were safe from their armies. With this perception that their homes were under threat, men would come in droves to protect what was theirs. In Fulcher’s version of the speech there were two of the more potent of the reasons the common person should march east and both of these reasons dealt with personal motivation to save one’s belongings and to guarantee their eternal lives. Fulcher’s account also showed how Pope Urban chose to paint the Muslims. One of the more blistering comments from Pope Urban was, “...to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends. I say this to those who are present, it meant also for those who are absent. Moreover, Christ commands it.” Pope Urban tired to make the Muslims appear as a lesser race and religion to the Christians. Once he had done this it made it easier for the Christians to kill them, which is an act that Christianity explicitly tells its followers not to do. Once he had made the Muslims appear as a lesser people it would have been easy enough to get Christian men to sign on and protect their land from the “barbarian people”. Robert the Monk used many of the same motifs that are were present in Fulcher’s account, but he did add several new devices that would serve to convince Christian men to join Pope Urban’s Crusade.
Robert chose to elaborate upon Pope Urban’s description of the actions committed by the Muslims once they had conquered a Christian territory.These descriptions were brutal, gut-wrenching, and undoubtedly served to stir up anger within the listeners. At one point Robert recorded that Pope Urban said, “When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. Others they bind to a post and pierce with arrows.” These kind of actions would have seemed uncivilized to the Christian men and served to convince them to march east. The description of these acts also played upon the compassion of the men and their desire to help those who were suffering. This can be compared to Fulcher’s account where Pope Urban played upon a man’s own personal desires and feelings of security. These two different versions could easily make one wonder which account is more accurate and which manner of persuasion would have worked better. On the one hand a man’s personal desires and feeling of safety has been one of the best motivators throughout history because if someone felt that they were directly threatened by something they would be more inclined to do whatever was necessary to protect themselves. On the other hand the suffering of other has moved people to do great things in order to relieve said suffering. A modern example would be the picture of the young Syrian boy who was covered in blood while he sat in an ambulance. In Pope Urban’s speech he tried to portray to same type of image through his words when he painted a picture of Christians being brutally tortured and
killed in horrendous ways. A similarity between Robert’s and Fulcher’s account is how Muslims are depicted. Near the beginning of Robert’s version he wrote, “...that a race from the kingdom of the Persians, an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God, a generation forsooth which has not directed its heart and has not entrusted its spirit to God, has invaded the lands of those Christians and has depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire:...” In both reports Pope Urban has described the Muslims as a race that is beneath the Christians, that has been abandoned by God and has murdered good Christians because they can. While both are extremely biased and most likely very far from the truth of why the Muslims attacked the Christian settlements, these descriptions have shown that there was this fiery hatred towards Muslims. With this kind of feeling being present, it would have made it so much easier for Pope Urban to convince to Christians that the Islamic religion needed to be defeated since they were a blight on the world. Within the Gesta Version of the speech there were many similar tropes that were contained within Fulcher’s and Robert’s accounts but, despite being very short, it does present some new ideas that Pope Urban used to motivate the men to leave for the east. In one section the Gesta Version has recorded Pope Urban as having said, “Whoever wishes to save his soul should not hesitate humbly to take up the way of the Lord, and if he lacks sufficient money, divine mercy will give him enough….Brethren, we ought to endure much suffering for the name of Christ - misery, poverty, nakedness, persecution, want, illness, hunger, thirst, and other (ills) of this kind….” In the previous two speeches Pope Urban used either a man’s own personal desires or a man’s compassion in order to motivate him to join the Crusade. However in this version the main point of influence was that if the men suffered by going east then their lord would love them more. In this way Pope Urban used the men’s spirituality to motivate the men because, for most people at this time, one of their goals was to become closer to God. And so if they suffered for Christ then, in their minds, surely he would would reward them once they had passed on from this world.
Foss explains, “What Urban needed was an enterprise, clearly virtuous in serving the ends of Christiandome… in these moments of reflection, the popes mind turned towards Jerusalem.” Urban II reflects back on the first taking of the Holy City after the defeat of the Byzantine Empire in 1071, and begins to question what his people know about the Turkish race and really the ideology of Islamic thought. Foss goes on to examine the ignorance of westerners and needed to be “reminded [by the pope] of the infamous heathens, their cruelty and hatred of Christians,” hoping this would justify the first Holy Crusade. However, Foss identifies the creativity of the Pope’s language to persuade the knights and army of the people to embark on the Holy Crusade based on the Muslims cruel actions turned onto their fellow Christians. Claiming the Muslims “Killed captives by torture…poor captives were whipped…and others were bound to the post and used as a target for arrows.” Foss examines the Popes words as an effective effort of persuasion in creating an army of crusaders to help clean “…Holy places, which are now treated with ignominy and polluted with Filthiness” and any sacrifice in Jerusalem is a “promise of a spiritual reward… and death for
According to the Medieval Sourcebook Urban II: Speech at Clermont 1095 written by Robert the Monk, he is stating Pope Urban II is trying to let the people of the Catholic Church know what is happening to Jerusalem and also to the Christians in the East. In the speech, Christians in the West began to be moved to embark on a dangerous journey to fight in the Holy Land after hearing the Pope Urban's speech at Clermont, leaving the people of the Catholic Church a deal if they go and take back the Holy Land, the pope riled them up to get them fired up to want to fight and then promised forgiveness and washing away of all the sins for all who died in the service of Christ.
Pope Urban II, just like many popes before him, was a part of the Investiture Controversy, which stemmed from a dispute between King Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII. For the duration of the 11th and 12th centuries, religious leaders like Urban faced conflict with the ruling class of Europe, and this sense of contention impacted and fueled many of Urban’s decisions, including the choice he made to so strongly encourage the Crusades. Due to the fact that there were “political forces at work… since the Crusades were also tied to the Investiture Controversy” and because Urban attempted to and succeeded at “usurp[ing] the prerogative most secular rulers had claimed traditionally to declare an enemy and muster troops for battle,” it is undeniable that he was caught up in – and winning – a political battle, which means that he must have been acting with politics in the forefront of his mind (Crawford). Furthermore, Pope Urban II used the crusades as a way of undermining the king's authority while simultaneously increasing his own – now he was the one who was calling the shots and sending the European people off to war, when usually, that job belonged to the king. Although this may seem insignificant, the pope knew that if the king could not even control his own people, he would have no power left. The pope's decision to rally the people up for a crusade was a meticulously calculated one that effectively and purposefully resulted in him becoming the most politically powerful person in Europe, when previously almost all of his power stemmed from
Contrary to many commonly held notions about the first crusade, in his book, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, Jonathan Riley-Smith sets out to explain how the idea of crusading thought evolved in the first crusade. In his book, Riley-Smith sets out five main arguments to show how these ideas of crusading evolved. Firstly, he argues that Pope Urban’s original message was conventional, secondly that a more positive reaction was drawn from the laity (due to the ideas surrounding Jerusalem), thirdly, that the original message of crusading had changed because of the horrible experiences of the first crusaders, fourth, that due to these experiences the crusaders developed their own concept of what a crusade was, and lastly, that these ideas were refined by (religious) writers and turned into an acceptable form of theology. Riley-Smith makes excellent points about the crusade; however, before one can delve directly into his argument, one must first understand the background surrounding the rise of the first crusade.
The First Crusade is often cited as one of the most damnable consequences of religious fanaticism. A careful inspection of the circumstances and outcomes, however, will reveal a resultant political restructuring of Europe under the banner of Christendom. The purpose of this investigation is to investigate Pope Urban II’s motives in initiating the First Crusade, with a particular focus on the consolidation of the Western Church’s influence in Europe. Among the primary sources that will be consulted are the letter sent by Patriach Alexios of Constantinople to Urban, and an account of Urban’s speech at Clermont. Relevant excerpts from both of these primary sources, as well as contextual evidence and a wide array of historiography, will be taken
Urban’s decision to begin the Crusade was based on more than just the idea that he was doing the Lord’s will. The Christian idealism was mind over m...
The first crusade was held only in order to fulfill desire of the Christians of the recapturing the center of the Christian faith-Jerusalem, which has been controlled by the Muslim nation for more than 400 years. This military campaign was followed with severe cruelty and harsh actions against Muslims which cannot be justified with anything but religious and material interest.
In 1095 Pope Urban II called all Christians to take part in what would become the world’s greatest Holy War in all of history. Urban’s called on Christians to take up arms and help fight to take the Holy Land of Jerusalem back from the accursed Muslims. During this time of war, the whole world changed. Land boundaries shifted, men gained and lost and gained power again, and bonds were forged and broken. The Crusades had a great impact on the world that will last forever.
How did the Crusades affect the Christians, Muslims, and Jews? The crusades impacted them all greatly for they were all a key part of the Crusades. Occasionally A religion may get a positive consequence but most of the time it was a negative one. Why did they all want Jerusalem? They all wanted it because it had a religious value to them. For the Jews, it was their spiritual city where the great temple once stood. For the Christians, it was where Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. Last but not least for the Muslims it was where Muhammad rose to heaven during the night journey.
Pope Urban II naturally had a religious control over his people and when he gave his speech at the Council of Clermont in November 1905, he constantly referred to it as the will of God. His speech reminded them that the Crusades were their “concerns as well as God’s” . Throughout his speech, the Pope is constantly trying to align the need for men to fight with t...
The Crusades were one of the most prominent events in Western European history; they were not discrete and unimportant pilgrimages, but a continuous stream of marching Western armies (Crusaders) into the Muslim world, terminating in the creation and eventually the fall of the Islamic Kingdoms. The Crusades were a Holy War of Roman Christianity against Islam, but was it really a “holy war” or was it Western Europe fighting for more land and power? Through Pope Urban II and the Roman Catholic Church’s actions, their proposed motivations seem unclear, and even unchristian. Prior to the Crusades, Urban encouraged that Western Europe fight for their religion but throughout the crusades the real motivations shone though; the Crusaders were power hungry, land coveting people who fought with non Christian ideals and Morales.
The First Crusade from 1095 to 1099 has been seen as a successful crusade. The First Crusaders carefully planned out their attacks to help promote religion throughout the lands. As the First Crusade set the example of what a successful crusade should do, the following crusades failed to maintain control of the Holy Land. Crusades following after the First Crusade weren’t as fortunate with maintaining the Holy Land due united forces of Muslims, lack of organization, and lack of religious focus.
God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades by Rodney Stark, will cause readers to question much of what they know about the Crusades, the Crusaders themselves, and the formidable Muslim forces they encountered along the way in liberation of the Holy Land. Stark gives compelling reasons for the Crusades, and argues that readers should not be too quick in following the lead of historians who cast the Crusaders in less than positive light. Stark makes his case supported by evidence that vindicates the valiant struggles of the Crusaders who accomplished the task of keeping Christianity alive through troubled times.
A major turning point in Medieval history were the Crusades. The Crusades were a series of wars fought between the Christian Europeans and the Muslim Turks, which occurred between the years of 1096 to 1272. In this Holy War the Christians goal was to obtain the Holy Land from the Turks, in which they did not succeed. Although the Christians did not meet their goal, many positives did come out of their attempt. Due to the reason that they did not meet their goal, yet numerous positives came out of their effort, many refer to this as a successful failure.
In order for the crusades to begin, the Christians needed to gather an army to travel and fight the forces of Muslims. With all the power being held by monarchies at this time, the church needed to be cleaver in order to gain troops to put their lives on the line. To gain the support of these warriors and dedication of men, Pope Urban II (1088-1099) challenged those morals of men by telling them to grab their weapons and join the holy war to recover the land of Jerusalem. It was not the challenge that convinced men to take part in this war. The promise of “immediate remission of sins” attracted the men to stand up for their religion and beliefs while at the same time, promising them a trip to heaven when life comes to an end. With this statement, men instantly prepared for battle which in a very short period of time gave the church power which has been held by the monarchies. Men of rich and poor prepared for battle, some wearing ...