From Cluny to the Chair of Peter

Urban II was born Odo of Chatillon sur Marne and trained as a monk at Cluny, rising to prior there before Pope Gregory VII brought him into the Roman curia and made him a cardinal bishop. He inherited Gregory's reform program on his own election in 1088, the effort historians call the Gregorian reform, which sought to free the appointment of bishops and abbots from the control of kings and emperors and to enforce clerical celibacy against long resistance. For much of his pontificate Urban could not even hold Rome itself, since Henry IV of Germany backed a rival antipope, Clement III, who occupied the city for years while Urban governed through a circuit of councils held across France and Italy. He also maintained regular contact with the Byzantine court in the years before Clermont, diplomatic groundwork the council's own appeal built directly upon. It was one of those councils, held at Clermont in central France in November 1095, that made his reign historic. The meeting had been called in part to answer an appeal from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos for soldiers to help hold back Turkish advances into Anatolia. No verbatim transcript of Urban's sermon at Clermont survives; the accounts that do survive were written years later by chroniclers who each had reasons of their own for shaping what he was remembered to have said.