Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

was the labour of constructing a truly Christian order completed yet. Much still remained to be done – and Clermont could testify to this. Back in 958, the town had hosted the first assembly to be directed specifically against the predations of bullying lords; and although, since the millennial anniversary of Christ’s Resurrection, the Peace of God had faded as a mass movement, it had certainly not been forgotten. Violence continued endemic across much of France. Urban, with his background, knew this well enough. Accordingly, during the week of the Council of Clermont, he sought not only to resurrect the Peace, but to extend it throughout Christendom.

To all those without weapons, wherever and whoever they might be — whether women or peasants, merchants or monks — the full and fearsome protection of the Roman Church was now officially extended. Son of a French nobleman that he was, however. Urban made sure to appeal as well to the lords themselves, and the castellans, and their followers. To the old dream of the peace campaigners – that braggart knights might somehow be transfigured into warriors of Christ – he was preparing to add a novel and fateful twist. On 27 November, with the council drawing to a close, the Pope announced that he would do as the leaders of the Peace of God had done decades previously, and address an assembly of the Christian people in an open field. The number of those who gathered there in the mud and cold of the early Auvergnat winter was not large – perhaps no more than three or four hundred – but what they heard was fated to echo far beyond the limits of Clermont. No accurate record of Urban’s sermon was made; but as to the core of its message there could be no doubt. Listed as an official decree of the council, here was a startling and wholly electrifying formula for salvation: if any man sets out from pure devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.’

Only a century before, contemplating how ‘infidels had won the ruling of the sacred places’, another Frenchman, a native of the Auvergne who had grown up not a hundred miles from Clermont, had despaired of Christian arms ever winning back the Holy Sepulchre. They were, so Gerbert of Aurillac had flatly declared, ‘too weak’. Certainly, by any objective standard, the ambition of securing Jerusalem for Christendom appeared no less impractical in 1095 than it had done back in the lifetime of the first French pope. To embark on a mission that would require the average lord to raise perhaps four or five times his annual income; to aim at the defeat of enemies who had already brought the oldest and most powerful state in Christendom to the very brink of ruin; and to attempt it all for the sake of a city that had not the slightest strategic or military value: here were considerations, it might have been thought, fit to weigh on the mind of any adventurer.

Perhaps even Urban himself, well aware as he would have been of how Gregory’s attempt to win the Holy Sepulchre had subsided into fiasco, was initially braced for a less than enthusiastic response. Certainly, it seemed never to have crossed his mind that the gauntlet which he had flung down with such gusto at Clermont, a challenge targeted squarely at the men of his own class, might prove irresistible as well to those who did not belong to the ranks of the nobility or the castellans. There were forces in play much greater than the Pope had ever appreciated — and now, despite all his reputation for prudence, it was he who had set them loose. The disciple and heir of Gregory he may have been — and yet still, even for Urban, the full scale of the recent changes in Christendom, and of the revolution in the affairs of the Christian people, appeared almost too great to grasp.

‘Dew vult!’ the crowds had shouted at Clermont: ‘God wills it!’ The utter conviction of this, spreading like wildfire wherever the Pope’s message was reported, spoke partly of excitement – and partly as well of sheer relief. To be cleansed, to be spotless, to be at one with the celestial host of the angels: here was a yearning that any man or woman might share. No longer, if it had ever been, was it confined to the ranks of monks, or of those who had sought, over the course of many decades now, and at the cost of unprecedented convulsions, to secure the reform of the Church. A warrior too, one at the service of his lord, and armed with weapons soon to be sticky with blood, might feel it – and feeling it, shiver with dread, knowing the crossroads before which he stood. ‘For which of the two paths was he to follow: that of the Gospels or of the world?’

Such a question, even for those secure in the righteousness of their own cause, even for those fighting beneath a banner of St Peter, had never been a simple one to answer. No matter, for instance, back in 1066, that William’s men had been following their duke to war against a usurper, and with the full blessing of the Pope himself: they had still been obliged, in the wake of the slaughter at Hastings, to undertake penance or else to remain filthy with the sin of murder. A great and excruciating tension, then: for it had set the desperation for salvation against the need -- and perhaps the longing -- to fight. Now, however, with a single sermon, a single ordinance, that tension appeared resolved. No wonder, then, as news of what had been decreed by- Urban spread, that there should have been ‘a great stirring of heart throughout all the Frankish lands’ — and far beyond. A whole new road