Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

Which is how it came about that Urban proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont in central France in 1095. There he delivered a highly emotional and rhetorical speech to the assembled knights, appealing both to their piety and to their more earthly interests. He dwelt at length on the sufferings which Christians were experiencing at the hands of the Turks, and the threat of Muslim invasion that hung over both Byzantium and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.* Using a famous biblical phrase, Urban described Palestine as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ and, in promising papal protection for the property and family of any crusader, he introduced an idea that was to have far-reaching consequences. He said that, as keeper of the keys to the kingdom of heaven, he vouchsafed the crusaders ‘plenary indulgence’ for their sins.49 The origin of this idea may well have lain in the Islamic assurance that any warrior who died fighting for the faith was guaranteed a place in heaven. But the Christian idea of indulgence was soon expanded and abused, so much so that it was one of the practices attacked by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century and, eventually, by the Council of Trent. By the twelfth century the Catholic Church had extended the institution of indulgence not just to crusaders but to those who supported them financially, and it is this which seems to have done the damage. By the fourteenth century, the papacy allowed the sale of indulgences even without a crusading pretext t...