A statue of Pope Urban II. is en face to the right of the cathedral.
At the Council of 1095 Urban II. preached for the first crusade to avenge the slaughter "of pilgrims, princes, and bishops," which had taken place at Romola in Palestine, and to regain possession of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre from the Turkish Sultan, Ortock.
The enthusiasm of the pontiff was so great that the masses forthwith entered fully into the spirit of the act, the nobles tearing their red robes into shreds to form the badge of the crusader's cross, which was given to all who took the vow.
By command of the Pope, every serf who took the cross was to obtain his liberty from his overlord. This fact, perhaps, more than any other led to the swelled ranks of the first crusade under Peter the Hermit.
The rest is history, though really much of its written chronicle is really romance.
Clermont was a bishopric in the third century, with St. Austremoine as its first bishop. The diocese is to-day a suffragan of Bourges.
At the head of the Cours Sablon is a fifteenth-century fountain, executed to the order of a former bishop, Jacques d'Amboise.
The bibliothèque still preserves, among fifty thousand volumes and eleven hundred MSS., an illuminated folio Bible of the twelfth century, a missal which formerly belonged to Pope Clement VI., and a ninth-century manuscript of the monk, Gregory of Tours.
Near the cathedral in the Rue de Petit Gras is the birthplace of the precocious Blaise Pascal, who next to Urban II.—if not even before him—is perhaps Clermont's most famous personage. A bust of the celebrated writer is let into the wall which faces the Passage Vernines, and yet another adorns the entrance to the bibliothèque; and again another—a full-length figure this time—is set about with growing plants, in the Square Blaise Pascal. Altogether one will judge that Pascal is indeed the most notable figure in the secular history of the city. This most original intellect of his time died in 1662, at the early age of thirty-nine.