He displayed great generosity in the disposal of all things that were given him.

He restored wives to their husbands, not without the addition of gifts from himself, and he re-established, with marvellous authority, peace and good understanding between those who had been at variance.

In all that he did or said he seemed to have in him something divine, insomuch that people went so far as to pluck hairs from his mule to keep as relics.

In the open air he wore a woollen tunic, and over it a serge cloak which came down to his heels; he had his arms and feet bare; he ate little or no bread, and lived chiefly on wine and fish." In 1095, after the preaching errantry of Peter the Hermit, Pope Urban II.
was at Clermont, in Auvergne, presiding at the grand council, at which thirteen archbishops and two hundred and five bishops or abbots were met together, with so many princes and lay-lords, that "about the middle of the month of November the towns and the villages of the neighborhood were full of people, and divers were constrained to have their tents and pavilions set up amidst the fields and meadows, notwithstanding that the season and the country were cold to an extreme." The first nine sessions of the council were devoted to the affairs of the Church in the West; but at the tenth Jerusalem and the Christians of the East became the subject of deliberation.

The Pope went out of the church wherein the Council was assembled and mounted a platform erected upon a vast open space in the midst of the throng.