SOURCE PROBLEM #1: 

“What Did Pope Urban II Say at the Council of Clermont?”

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II called for an “armed pilgrimage” to Jerusalem. The council, in session since November 18, had passed various reforms and handled much ecclesiastical business.  But November 27 was a public session, moved out of the cathedral and onto a platform built outside the Eastern gate of the city.  There the pope delivered to lay folk as well as to churchmen a summons that, its results suggest, must have been one of history’s most successful speeches.  The good news is that many accounts of it survive, some by eyewitnesses.  The bad news is that they do not agree.

            Such problems are frequently faced by historians.  Sources may conflict, or appear to conflict, because witnesses have different perspectives, interests, and abilities, because authors make rhetorical “improvements,” and because accounts may be deliberately misleading, even falsified.  It may be impossible to determine exactly what actually happened.  Nevertheless, it is the business of historians to seek out the “most probable” reconstruction.  To analyze conflicting sources, they employ principles of evidence that resemble to some extent those used in a court of law:  eyewitness testimony is privileged over hearsay evidence;  greater proximity to events and expertise may give more weight to a witness; the testimony of several independent witnesses is preferred over the testimony of a single uncorroborated witness; on a disputed point a witness whose testimony as a whole has proven to be coherent and to fit the facts should be preferred over a witness whose testimony lacks these qualities.  A historian needs to deal with all the evidence available, and thus not only needs to assemble the facts that support a thesis but also needs to explain away potentially contradictory data.

            Your assignment is to determine, on the basis of the evidence given here, what Urban II said.  Compare the sources.  Discover where they agree and where they disagree.  Indicate clearly the evidence upon which you base your reconstruction.  Be careful in that some sources may have attributed to Urban’s speech decisions made earlier in the Council or decisions made, after the call to crusade was well received, when the churchmen reconvened on November 28 to finalize arrangements.

What are the best ways to mess up this assignment?

1.      Assume primary and secondary sources are identical in value.  Primary sources are the historian’s equivalent of “eyewitness testimony”:  these are accounts written by people who knew or were in a position to know what actually happened.  Secondary sources, such as Thomas Madden's Concise History of the Crusades, are texts written by historians on the basis of the surviving primary evidence.  Their evidentiary value is only as good as the primary sources used, which are the pieces of evidence you ought to be citing.  Thus you cannot prove a point with citations such as  “(Robert the Monk, ¶ 2; Baldric of Dol, ¶ 6; Madden, p. 7).”

2.   Assume that all primary sources are identical in value.  If you are sure that on a particular point each primary witness is an equally informed independent witness, then you can simply “count sources.”  But what if an author who presents an account of Urban’s speech has simply copied it from one of your other sources?  In that case it might not have any independent value at all unless you could argue that the copier was an eyewitness who chose to copy his source just because he knew its testimony was correct.  What if one witness had more expertise than another, such as a clergyman who could understand scriptural and liturgical allusions better than an uneducated knight?  On a particular point might that greater expertise help or hurt the witness’s ability to observe and interpret accurately?

3.   Create a “mosaic” by arbitrarily borrowing sentences from different sources.  The problem here is that the sources do not agree, and therefore cannot all be equally  “true.”  For you to be able to maintain that one sentence is a better choice than another, you need to explain why.  What superior evidence supports this point?  Is it found in the most sources?  In the best sources?  Is it confirmed by supporting circumstantial evidence?   To present the “most probable” reconstruction, you need to be able to justify the choices you make.

4.      Do not cite sources specifically.  For example, just say that “Almost all of the sources say Urban spoke about the atrocities inflicted on pilgrims by Turks” and then do not bother to itemize the evidence.  Your reader cannot easily check such an assertion; and perhaps you yourself have not systematically checked it.   To make your point, you need to identify the evidence by using  footnotes or parenthetical citations.

5.      Cite sources inconsistently by changing your citation system in midstream.  First use parenthetical citations; then use footnotes.  Keep changing your system. You want your readers to be nimble.

6.      Write 25 pages.   If you recapitulate each point made by each source you can fill up all sorts of space without ever using your brain.  But you really have to think in order to keep within the five-page text limit and still concisely isolate and itemize the points that Urban made.

7.  Copy someone else's paper.