Urban II
Urbano II (Lagery, 1042-Rome, July 29, 1099) was the 159th Pope of the Catholic Church from 1088 to 1099, in opposition to Antipope Clement III (1080- 1100). He succeeded the reformist Gregory VII in the middle of the Investiture dispute between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, a conflict that overlapped with the regeneration of the Church, due to the widespread practice of simony, Nicolaism and nepotism at that time..
He is known for his preaching of the First Crusade (1096-1099) for the recovery of the Holy Land, then under Muslim rule, although he died before its culmination with the capture of Jerusalem. He also reformed the pontifical administration and established the Roman Curia in its present form.He is venerated as blessed in the Catholic Church.
Biography
Early Years
Born as Odo (also spelled Eudes, Otto, Otho, or Odon) at Lagery, near Châtillon-sur-Marne, Kingdom of France in 1042, he was of noble descent.
He received an ecclesiastical education and entered the Benedictine Order, holding his first post as Archdeacon of Reims.
Under the influence of his teacher, Bruno of Cologne, he entered the monastery of Cluny, where he became prior. In 1078, Pope Gregory VII called him to the Italian peninsula, where he was appointed Cardinal Bishop of Ostia He also then became assistant and chief adviser to Pope Gregory VII.
The then Odo de Lagery stood out from the outset as one of the staunchest defenders of the Gregorian reform, especially in the post of papal legate to the Holy Roman Empire which he held between 1083 and 1085. His first clash with The Holy Roman Emperor came about in 1083, when Henry IV of Germany had him imprisoned for a short time.
Detached in Saxony in 1085, he ensured that most of the sees were occupied by clergy who were supporters of Gregory VII.
Pontificate
Rise to power
By then he began to be considered one of the possible successors of Gregory VII, although on his death, in 1086, the one chosen to succeed him was Desiderio, abbot of Monte Cassino, who led the Church of Rome under the name of Victor III for the next two years and with whom Odo de Lagery had originally clashed. Finally, Odo was unanimously elected pope on March 12, 1088, after a small council held in Terracina, a mountainous region located a short distance from Rome. It is said that both Gregory VII and Victor III, with whom he had reconciled, proposed her as his successor before they died. In the proclamation he chose the name Urban II.
Conflicts for power
From the first moment, Urban II manifested himself as a strict continuator of the policy carried out by Gregory VII, going so far as to say in his first act as Pontiff that "everything he rejected, I I reject him, what he condemned, I condemn, what he loved, I embrace, what he considered true, I confirm and approve". His arrival in Rome was complicated by strong opposition from the Holy Roman Emperor and Antipope Clement III, who had occupied the city. However, he obtained the support of Roger I's Normans after a lightning visit to Troina, Sicily, which allowed him to enter Rome definitively, although he had to fight for three days with the antipope's troops before he could reach the Basilica of Saint Peter. During this difficult access to the throne, Urbano excommunicated Clement III and Emperor Henry IV, who had allied with him.
In the following years Urban II tried to recover his former sphere of influence in the empire, in clear confrontation with the Germanic emperor. To do this, he married the widowed Countess Matilde of Tuscany to Duke Welf II of Bavaria, just eighteen years old, in order to join his forces in the war against Henry IV in northern Italy. He also sanctioned that ecclesiastics could not be forced to swear allegiance to lay authorities, which would have great consequences in later centuries. Despite these efforts, in 1089 he was forced to leave Rome, which was reoccupied by Clement III, and he spent the next three years convening various synods at Amalfi, Benevento, and Troia, in which he took action against simony, the law of investiture and marriage of ecclesiastics. In 1093 the pope joined the Lombard League in supporting the coronation as King of Italy of Conrad II of Italy, son of Emperor Henry IV, through which he tried to wrest the government of the Italian peninsula from his father..
In 1094 Urban II returned to the pontifical seat of Rome thanks to the financial help offered by the French abbot Geoffroi de Vendôme. Likewise, funds received from the regions of Apulia, Calabria and Sicily allowed the capture of the Castel Sant'Angelo in August 1098 thanks to bribery.
In 1095, Urban II also excommunicated the King of the Franks, Philip I of France, because he had abandoned his wife Bertha of Holland to marry Bertrada de Montfort.
The First Crusade
The idea of a military alliance between all the countries of Christian Europe in order to attack a common enemy, hitherto unheard of, began to take shape in March 1095, during the Council of Piacenza. Faced with a large concentration of French, Burgundian and Italian bishops (their number was such that the meeting had to be held on the outskirts of the city), Urban II received a visit from an ambassador of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who asked for help. against the Seljuk Turks. They had resoundingly defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and from 1073 they had taken control of the interior of Anatolia, which until then had been the main area of production of grain, horses and horsemen of the Byzantine Empire.. From there they threatened to expel the Byzantines from their few remaining possessions on the peninsula's shores.
However, Urban II did not simply guarantee his support to the Byzantines and soon conceived the idea of recapturing Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land from the Seljuks. In November 1095 he convened the Council of Clermont, to which clergymen of French origin attended for the most part, in order to publicize his project. Urban II considered that everyone who participated could atone for the temporal penalty of already forgiven sins whose eternal penalty (called guilt) had already been forgiven, that is, it would be a meritorious action.
The following year a large expedition of European knights, soldiers, clergymen and peasants set out for the East. Most were French (which is why French would become the lingua franca of the Crusaders and their future states in the Near East), although there were also Normans, Lorraines and Flemings in large numbers. Led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin of Flanders, Robert II of Normandy and Raymond of Toulouse among others, the crusaders reached Constantinople, took Nicaea, slowly drove the Turks out of Anatolia (which was returned to the Byzantines) until they reached Antioch and Once this was conquered, they headed south to lay siege to Jerusalem, the goal of the adventure. Urban II tried to keep informed of the progress of the company as soon as possible, but finally died in Rome on July 29, 1099, 14 days after the Crusaders were able to overcome the Muslim defenses and finally recapture Jerusalem, although the good The news did not reach him in life. His successor on the pontifical throne was Pascual II.
The Catholicization of Sicily and Campania
Almost as ambitious as the proclamation of the First Crusade in the East was Urban II's policy of Catholicizing the southern Italian peninsula and Sicily, whose population was mostly Christian despite Muslim rule over some territories. This Catholicization was such since, because of the Eastern Schism, the majority of the inhabitants of these regions did not recognize the Supreme Pontiff of Rome but the Patriarch of Constantinople and followed the Greek rite instead of the Latin one. In Sicily, after several centuries of Muslim domination until its conquest by the Normans in 1061, there was also a small submissive community.
The process consisted for the most part, therefore, in a substitution of the influence of the Orthodox Church in the area for that of the Roman Church, an objective that Urban II achieved thanks to his good relations with the Normans who administered the country. These were reinforced from 1098 with the granting of various extraordinary prerogatives to Count Roger I of Sicily, which enabled him, among other things, to appoint bishops and collect rents from the churches built in the region. This power made Roger a kind of papal legate in his lands, and over time the kings of Naples and Sicily would come to be considered almost as feudatories of the Pope (which would strongly influence the subsequent confrontations between France and Aragon for dominance). Of the territory).
Several churches were built in Sicily, new dioceses were delimited and a new local ecclesiastical hierarchy was defined from scratch. For her part, Adelaida del Vasto, the wife of Roger I, personally directed the emigration of peasants from the Po Valley to the eastern part of the island, hitherto sparsely populated.
Beatification
There are certain indications of the existence of a cult to the figure of Urbano II from shortly after his death. Thus, for example, among the figures drawn in the apse of the oratory of the Lateran Palace, built by Callisto II, a portrait of Urban can be seen under which the label Sanctus Urbanus Secundus (& #34;San Urbano II"). This figure appears crowned by a square cloud and located at the feet of the Virgin Mary.
Despite this, the beatification was not formally proposed until the Archbishop of Reims presented the corresponding cause in 1878. On July 14, 1881, Pope Leo XIII gave his approval to the proposal and beatified Urban II.
Urban II in popular culture
In the so-called Garcineida, a satire against the corruption of the Roman Curia and a contemporary work of Pope Urban II himself, the pontiff is drawn with the worst possible strokes, as a gluttonous and lustful character.
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