The third cathedral of the city, and that which immediately preceded the present one, was consecrated in 946 by Bishop Étienne II. Clermont had suffered grievously by Saracen invasion, followed by the Northmen inroads. After the second Norman sacking the ruined houses smoldered for a month, and in the streets corpses lay unburied, for the population in terror had fled to the countryside. The bishop called back his flock to remake their homes. In his new church was a precocious use of ambulatory and radiating chapels, a disposition which was to lead to the chief beauty in the Gothic cathedrals of the land, but which made its appearance in the Ile-de-France only in the XII century. Bishop Étienne's Carolingian cathedral became the prototype for the Auvergnat-Romanesque school. In the good Étienne's church prayed the first crusaders when by papal bidding there gathered at Clermont a mighty council at whose tenth and last session was preached the First Crusade. Nature herself seemed to have prepared the people's minds for some vast enterprise, for all the chroniclers of western Christendom describe the sublime shower of astral stars, thick as snowflakes, which whirled in the sky. So in this same primeval Auvergne, some six centuries earlier, at the break-up of Rome's empire before the invading Barbarians, there had for three years been earthquakes and fiery volcanic eruptions. Tradition says that the momentous gathering of 1095 took place in what is now the Place Delille and the adjacent Cours Sablon. Many of our building friends were present--Bishop Odo from Bayeux, Bishop Ives from Chartres, Bishop Hoël from Le Mans, the abbots Geoffrey of Vendôme, Jarenton of St. Bénigne, and St. Hugues of Cluny, and from Spain came the great Bernardo who ruled the see of Toledo. For the people of Clermont to-day, November 28, 1095, is as vivid a reality as any of the revolutions of yesterday. A statue of Urban II stands outside the cathedral. Even so he stood, said a witness, as one having authority, high above the vast throng, on one side of him the stunted Peter the Hermit of Picardy, and on the other the Norman-Italian Bohemund of Taranto, a veritable Greek god in build and feature. From end to end of France Urban journeyed to arouse the people. Now he used persuasion, now invective; sometimes he appealed to idealistic motives or propounded colonial policies very like modern ideas. Europe had good cause to be apprehensive. The Almoravids had advanced into Spain. The Seljukian Turks were a menace more serious than the Saracens. Urban understood the peril and raised his voice in warning. "Cease to be a terror to peaceful citizens," he exhorted the gathered barons. "Turn your arms to the defense of the soil trod by the King of Kings, of the tomb over which rose the sun of the Resurrection.... The great cities of Asia Minor have fallen a prey to the Mussulman, who has planted the crescent by the Hellespont, whence he menaces Europe....