Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [103]
All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested.
O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God.
As he spoke, the crowd shouted back their assent, Deus lo vult (“God wills it”), and as he finished, Adhemer, bishop of Le Puy, knelt before him, begging his permission to join the great expedition. Suddenly, the crowd surged forward, and the cries of “God wills it” rose to a crescendo. In Guibert of Nogent’s account, it was at this point that Urban blessed them all, making the sign of the cross with his hand, and then giving them the emblem under which they would fight: “He instituted a sign well suited to so honourable a profession by making the figure of the Cross, the stigma of the Lord’s Passion, the emblem of the soldiery or, rather, of what was to be the soldiery of God.”27
At Clermont, Urban II achieved what his quarrelsome (and arguably greater) predecessor Gregory VII had failed to accomplish. He stretched out beyond the issues of papal power and government to galvanize Christian society, clerical and lay, to action. The movement that he unleashed (and plainly, the potential for a war on God’s account existed before he spoke) had no set bounds or limitations.28 It had no name. It would be centuries before the term “Crusade” was first coined, and this did not become common usage until the eighteenth century, long after the first impetus had slackened. For Urban and his contemporaries it was a pilgrimage or a journey, but one made unique by the cross that they wore. Everything was embodied in the emblem, the undeniable mark of Christ, familiar to all Christians.29
The image of the cross marked a boundary between Christendom and the world of Islam. For Christendom it represented an elemental triumph—over death itself. It signified both Jesus Christ’s humanity and his divinity, especially when the body of Christ was depicted hanging on the cross. For the Muslim it marked the essential absurdity of the Christian claims to divinity. Muslims in the Levant were already well aware of the symbolic importance of the cross for Christians. It was for this reason that Al-Hakim had forced them to suffer the weight of heavy wooden crosses around their necks. It was for this reason that Christians were not allowed to place the holy emblem atop their buildings, and the cause of Muslim outrage when the victorious Crusaders placed a cross on one of the most holy Muslim sites in Jerusalem.
Urban’s call for a pilgrimage in arms, under the banner of the holy cross, produced a response among the population at large that exceeded all his expectations. This surge of popular feeling and commitment cannot be properly explained by material causes, like poor harvests, although such issues were certainly a factor. Those who rallied to his call to liberate the Holy Land seemed to have had some hazy idea of what their objective entailed. No practicing Christian could have been unaware that there was a place in the East where Christ had been born. Many must also have heard that this paradisal land was under threat. In some communities there might also have been a pilgrim who had already made the journey, and in a culture where knowledge was still passed by word of mouth, such a testimony spread with remarkable speed. Others might have known of the tales of great heroes like King Arthur, who were widely believed to have made the journey in earlier days. But latterly the pilgrims’ stories had not been of the glories of the holy city, but of their failure to complete the journey: they had found the road blocked and had to retreat. Peter the Hermit, who led the People’s Crusade in 1096, had already failed to reach the Holy Land on a previous occasion.