Part 22

d) The Pope referred to Jerusalem as an earthly paradise in the centre of the world, which had witnessed the birth of Christ and been purified by his death. He told his listeners that it was calling upon them to save it from the control of its infidel occupiers. I would like to affirm here that this city represented a prominent idea of central importance, in order to stir up the religious sentiments of the Pope's audience. In most of the texts that have come down to us concerning this speech, we find that Jerusalem occupies a prominent and pivotal place, which is quite logical on the basis of its status and religious significance. It also represented the collective dream of Christian pilgrimage at that time. e) The Pope was eager to support his speech with a number of Biblical texts in order to stir up the religious sentiments of his listeners or perhaps to lend sanctity to his speech, especially since the phrases of the Bible were part of the common European consciousness at that time, for example the texts from the Gospel of Matthew which say: "He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" [Matthew 10:37]98 "And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me." [Matthew 10:38]99 f) Pope Urban II had a certain order of priorities. This Pope was very skilful in presenting some of his ideas whilst at the same time concealing others. He focused on the issue of Jerusalem so as to present a single path on which the West could march without hesitation and a single goal that he could present to his contemporaries through the oneness of the religious institution that was propagating it, as represented in the papacy. To this aim, no mention was made in his speech of his great ambition to unite the churches and subjugate the church of Constantinople to the control of the mother church in Rome. Similarly, no mention was made of the goal of Christianisation, which was a major aim of the papacy by means of the proposed enterprise. The reason for this covertness may be that the papacy realized that there were priorities in presenting the enterprise that should not be overlooked, and that the unity of the Christian world depended on not listing and announcing too many goals at once, lest that lead to confusion from the outset. It may be noted here that the language used by the pope in this speech was aimed at concealing other goals. After the enterprise succeeded and the main religious Christian symbol, namely Jerusalem, was captured, we find — in examples that are too numerous to mention — the other goals expressed clearly and frankly. This clearly indicates that this influential religious establishment decided to achieve its aims step by step and not all in one go. This is what was most cunning about the entire enterprise, in my view.100 This idea was never far from the mind of Pope Urban II, because he was the engineer of this project and its main sponsor. In fact, the speech that the Pope gave at the Council of Clermont was of great historical importance. We have never heard before in the history of mediaeval Europe of any speech that was as expressive of its era as this speech, or of any speech that motivated the European masses to move from their original homelands to the east at such a level as contemporary sources tell us happened. Hence we cannot regard it as being an ordinary type of speech, rather it is more akin to a declaration of a mediaeval "world war" on the part of western Europe against the Muslim east. This is not an attempt to exaggerate or pass unfair judgement; rather it is on the basis of historical evidence of what took place subsequent to this speech. It was reported that immediately after the Pope had concluded his speech, the people shouted with one voice, "God wills it!" This was the Christian call to fight Islam and its followers. They took the cross as their symbol; hence they were called Crusaders (ultimately derived from the Latin word for cross, crux)}01 g) Pope Urban II focused on presenting an enterprise that held universal appeal. He managed to unite all the peoples of Europe in this general enterprise despite the fact that these peoples' languages, local customs and interests differed greatly. But the idea of the crusades which united the masses of Western Europe could not have succeeded if it had not been in harmony with the social dynamics; this harmony between thought and reality, between the moral justification for the war and social dynamics, is what created the ideology that motivated the European masses to act within its framework. At the popular level, the people's way of thinking in Western Europe in the eleventh century was in line with papal policy and the idea of holy war to some extent, because a religious revival had begun in Europe at the beginning of that century. At the end of the first millennium after Christ, there was in Western Europe a wave of guilty feelings and a desire to repent. The sense of sin was particularly profound in western Christians.