[8][9] He promised forgiveness and pardon for all of the past sins of those who would fight to reclaim the holy land from Muslims and free the eastern churches.

Desiderius, the abbot of Monte Cassino, was chosen to follow Gregory in 1085 but, after his short reign as Victor III, Odo was elected by acclamation at a small meeting of cardinals and other prelates held in Terracina in March 1088.

Urban took up the policies of Pope Gregory VII and, while pursuing them with determination, showed greater flexibility and diplomatic finesse.

A series of well-attended synods held in Rome, Amalfi, Benevento, and Troia supported him in renewed declarations against simony, lay investitures, clerical marriages (partly via the cullagium tax), and the emperor and his antipope.

Likewise, despite the importance of French support for his cause, he upheld his legate Hugh of Die's excommunication of King Philip over his doubly bigamous marriage with Bertrade de Montfort, wife of the Count of Anjou.

[18]) Urban further authorised itinerant preachers such as Robert of Arbrissel to spread the knowledge of Christian faith and promote the ideas of the reform movement, contributing to the mass phenomenon of spirituality at the end of the 11th century.

[23] Urban II's sermon proved highly effective, as he summoned the attending nobility and the people to wrest the Holy Land, and the eastern churches generally, from the domination of the Seljuks.

[32] The chronicler Robert the Monk put this into the mouth of Urban II: this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population; nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators.

Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves ... God has conferred upon you above all nations great glory in arms.

When the venerable Roman pontiff heard that, [he] said: "Most beloved brethren, today is manifest in you what the Lord says in the Gospel, 'Where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.'

Urban II's own letter to the Flemish confirms that he granted "remission of all their sins" to those undertaking the enterprise to liberate the eastern churches.

[10] One notable contrast with the speeches recorded by Robert the Monk, Guibert of Nogent, and Baldric of Dol is the lesser emphasis on Jerusalem itself, which Urban only once mentions as his own focus of concern.

In the letter to the Flemish he writes, "they [the Turks] have seized the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection, and blasphemy to say—have sold her and her churches into abominable slavery."

Some historians believe that Urban wished for the reunification of the eastern and western churches, a rift that was caused by the Great Schism of 1054.

A third theory is that Urban felt threatened by the Seljuk conquests in Europe and saw the crusades as a way to unite the Christian world into a unified defense against them.

[42] A similar line is taken by Erdmann, who views the conflict in Iberia as being premeditated by the Mahdia campaign of 1087 conducted by Pope Victor III[43] due to the granting of an indulgence.

[44] This campaign, Erdmann argues, was considered a success because of the elevation of the see of Pisa in 1092 in which Urban acknowledges the recent "triumph" of the Pisans over Saracen forces.

In return he granted Roger I the freedom to appoint bishops (the right of lay investiture), to collect Church revenues before forwarding to the papacy, and the right to sit in judgment on ecclesiastical questions.

[47] In 1098 these were extraordinary prerogatives that Popes were withholding from temporal sovereigns elsewhere in Europe and that later led to bitter confrontations with Roger's Hohenstaufen heirs.