ABSTRACT
In the most famous speech of the Western European Middle Ages, Pope Urban II (1088–1099) announced to his audience at Clermont in the Auvergne on 27 November 1095 a new initiative: a military campaign to Jerusalem to liberate the church there and in Eastern Christendom from Muslim occupation and threat. Those who participated out of correct selfless moral conviction were offered full remission of the penalties of confessed sins. From the success of this expedition, over the subsequent decades the Jerusalem war became a normative model not just for similar armed forays in the eastern Mediterranean, but more widely for Church-sanctioned public violence addressed to those outside the ecclesia. Yet it had been conceived within traditional ecclesiastical understanding of violence and war in a Christian society, which itself requires some preliminary discussion to provide the necessary context.
