God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Other witnesses, such as Bishop Gaston of Cahors or Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme, took Urban’s holy war and, whether or not the pope intended it, by analogy interpreted it as a form of pilgrimage, a familiar and more clerically palatable model.³⁷

This was facilitated by the goal of the enterprise being the supreme pilgrimage destination, Jerusalem. The association with pilgrimage diluted the radicalism of Urban’s message, even if it set up an inherent conceptual contradiction by linking extreme violence with a previously pacific activity. Earlier stories of pilgrims carrying arms for defence and fighting attackers, as on the German pilgrimage of 1064–5, simply did not embrace the idea of pilgrims whose whole purpose was to fight. The appeal of thinking of the Jerusalem expedition as a pilgrimage was obvious; the typology of journeying, penance and remission of sins was recognizable, demonstrated by the hordes of non-combatant pilgrims who tagged along with the armed forces. From the evidence of some charters, a few crusaders’ letters, such as those of Count Stephen of Blois, and early chronicle accounts, it is clear that this conservative approach, probably peddled by local clergy in search of a means of comprehending this novel phenomenon, possessed force and acquired ready adherents.

³⁸

Thereafter, pilgrimage and the holy wars of the cross became almost inseparable. This may not have been Urban’s doing. His vision was more radical, more disturbing and more penetrating.