Bernard II, Count of Besalú III, whose precise relationship with the previous counts of Besalú has not been discovered. Having taken the cross to join the First Crusade after the Council of Clermont (1095), Bernard was nonetheless counselled by Pope Urban II to instead remain in Spain and fight the "Reconquista". In a letter that must be dated between January 1096 and July 1099, Urban wrote to Bernard, his brother Wifred, Hugh II of Empúries, Giselbert II of Roussillon, and their followers, urging the recovery of the city of Tarragona and its vacant archdiocese. In 1097 Bernard ceded the lordship of Olot to Ripoll. In
Pope Lucius II Pope of his temporal power. The principal groups involved in this movement were the merchants and artisans, while the urban nobility kept their neutrality. The Senate, which practically took all temporal power from the Pope during the pontificate of Innocent II, had been managed with considerable skill and firmness by Lucius at the beginning of his pontificate, convincing many senators to either leave the Capitoline Hill or to lay down their magisterium. Now, encouraged by Lucius II's defeat, the Senate, led by Giordano Pierleoni, brother of the former Antipope Anacletus II, rebelled against Lucius II, driving out the papal prefects