Urban declared that Christianity was in dire peril, threatened by invasion and appalling oppression. The Holy City of Jerusalem was now in the hands of Muslims–‘a people…alien to God’, bent upon ritual torture and unspeakable desecration. He called upon Latin Europe to rise up against this supposedly savage foe as ‘soldiers of Christ’, reclaiming the Holy Land and releasing eastern Christians from ‘servitude’. Enticed by the promise that this righteous struggle would purge their souls of sin, tens of thousands of men, women and children marched out of the West to wage war against the Muslim
...more
