Urban II

Pope Urban II, born Odo of Châtillon (also known as Otho or Eudes de Lagery), was a native of the Champagne region of France in the eleventh century. He belonged to a family of the lesser nobility. Educated at the cathedral school of Reims, where he is associated with the circle of Bruno of Cologne, he became a canon and later archdeacon of Reims. Drawn to the monastic reform movement, he entered the Benedictine abbey of Cluny, then under Abbot Hugh, and rose to serve as prior. The Cluniac tradition of independence from secular control and of liturgical and disciplinary reform shaped the program he later pursued as pope.

In the later 1070s Pope Gregory VII called him to Rome and named him cardinal-bishop of Ostia, making him a principal collaborator in the Gregorian Reform. He served as papal legate in Germany and France, promoting the papal cause against imperial interference in episcopal appointments. After the brief pontificate of Victor III he was elected pope in March 1088 at Terracina, because Rome itself was held by the imperial antipope Clement III (Guibert of Ravenna). Taking the name Urban II, he inherited a Church divided by the Investiture Controversy with Emperor Henry IV and by a rival claimant in the city of Rome.

Throughout his pontificate Urban II continued the reform agenda of Gregory VII: he condemned simony, insisted on clerical celibacy, and asserted the freedom of the Church from lay investiture. He reorganized papal administration, developing the Roman Curia as a more effective instrument of government, and held a series of reforming councils, notably at Piacenza and at Clermont in 1095. He also encouraged the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula and maintained complex relations with the Norman rulers of southern Italy, whose military support was essential to his recovery of Rome.

Urban II is remembered above all for launching the First Crusade. At the Council of Clermont in November 1095 he appealed to the knighthood of Western Europe to aid Eastern Christians and to recover Jerusalem. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts of his sermon differ in detail, but they agree that the response was enthusiastic and that the cry that God willed the expedition became associated with it. Armies set out in 1096; Jerusalem fell to the crusaders in July 1099. Urban II died in Rome on 29 July 1099, before news of the capture of the city reached him. He was buried in St. Peter's Basilica. In 1881 Pope Leo XIII confirmed his cultus and beatified him. His feast is observed on 29 July.