en the princes were
separated from the church, and the people from their princes, by the
excommunication which himself and his predecessors had thundered
against the emperor and the king of France. Philip the First, of France,
supported with patience the censures which he had provoked by his
scandalous life and adulterous marriage. Henry the Fourth, of Germany,
asserted the right of investitures, the prerogative of confirming his
bishops by the delivery of the ring and crosier. But the emperor's
party was crushed in Italy by the arms of the Normans and the Countess
Mathilda; and the long quarrel had been recently envenomed by the revolt
of his son Conrad and the shame of his wife, [5] who, in the synods of
Constance and Placentia, confessed the manifold prostitutions to which
she had been exposed by a husband regardless of her honor and his own.
[6] So popular was the cause of Urban, so weighty was his influence,
that the council which he summoned at Placentia [7] was composed of two
hundred bishops of Italy, France, Burgandy, Swabia, and Bavaria. Four
thousand of the clergy, and thirty thousand of the laity, attended this
important meeting; and, as the most spacious cathedral would have been
inadequate to the multitude, the session of seven days was held in
a plain adjacent to the city. The ambassadors of the Greek emperor,
Alexius Comnenus, were introduced to plead the distress of their
sovereign, and the danger of Constantinople, which was divided only by
a narrow sea from the victorious Turks, the common enemies of the
Christian name. In their suppliant address they flattered the pride of
the Latin princes; and, appealing at once to their policy and religion,
exhorted them to repel the Barbarians on the confines of Asia, rather
than to expect them in the heart of Europe. At the sad tale of the
misery and perils of their Eastern brethren, the assembly burst into
tears; the most eager champions declared their readiness to march; and
the Greek ambassadors were dismissed with the assurance of a speedy and
powerful succor. The relief of Constantinople was included in the
larger and most distant project of the deliverance of Jerusalem; but the
prudent Urban adjourned the final decision to a second synod, which he
proposed to celebrate in some city of France in the autumn of the same
year. The short delay would propagate the flame of enthusiasm; and
his firmest hope was in a nation of soldiers [8] still proud of
the preemin