contrary, was logical, arguing from eleventh-century premises. If he could
but receive a divine mandate, he would raise an invincible army. He
prayed. His prayer was answered. One day while prostrated before the
sepulchre he heard Christ charge him to announce in Europe that the
appointed hour had come. Furnished with letters from the patriarch, Peter
straightway embarked for Rome to obtain Urban's sanction for his design.
Urban listened and gave a consent which he could not prudently have
withheld, but he abstained from participating in the propaganda. In March,
1095, Urban called a Council at Piacenza, nominally to consider the
deliverance of Jerusalem, and this Council was attended by thirty thousand
impatient laymen, only waiting for the word to take the vow, but the pope
did nothing. Even at Clermont eight months later, he showed a disposition
to deal with private war, or church discipline, or with anything in fact
rather than with the one engrossing question of the day, but this time
there was no escape. A vast multitude of determined men filled not only
Clermont but the adjacent towns and villages, even sleeping in the fields,
although the weather was bitterly cold, who demanded to know the policy of
the Church. Urban seems to have procrastinated as long as he safely could,
but, at length, at the tenth session, he produced Peter on the platform,
clad as a pilgrim, and, after Peter had spoken, he proclaimed the war.
Urban declined, however, to command the army. The only effective force
which marched was a body of laymen, organized and led by laymen, who in
1099 carried Jerusalem by an ordinary assault. In Jerusalem they found the
cross and the sepulchre, and with these relics as the foundation of their
power, the laity began an experiment which lasted eighty-eight years,
ending in 1187 with the battle of Tiberias. At Tiberias the infidels
defeated the Christians, captured their king and their cross, and shortly
afterward seized the tomb.

If the eleventh-century mind had been as rigid as the Roman mind of the