the wills between the papacy and the imperial throne. His predecessor Pope Gregory VII had excommunicated Emperor Henry IV for his attempts to circumvent Church authority by giving out (or rather selling, what’s known as simony) religious offices as sort of grace-and-favour rewards to his loyal nobles.

Once excommunicated, the allegiance of his subjects was null and void and effectively ended his reign—except that Henry went one better and installed his own anti-pope in Rome to rechristen him as the Holy and Roman emperor of the Germans. The genuine Holy See elevated an anti-king, and so on. Urban was a powerful public speaker and his arguments and railing against the nobles appealed to a vast audience, but a chance plea for assistance from the Byzantine emperor of the Eastthree Abrahamic religions—and under Muslim rule, which had taken hold in the Middle East over four centuries earlier, practising other faiths was tolerated and even protected. Not everything was peaceable, of course, but given the threats that confronted daily life a thousand years ago, disease, brigandage and the general cheapness of life, it was a pretty manageable arrangement.Such facets of the complicated geo-politics of the day (and the Muslims surely had their own sectarian and sacred and mundane intrigues to contend with and spin as well) were too bothersome to try to extract, so in the year 1095 with fire-and-brimstone Urban rallied the crowds to commit themselves to retaking the lands lost in the Eastern Empire—and, with spot-on improvisational skills, the Holy Land itself—with tales, harking back to