Pope Urban Thesis

The Gesta Version recorded that Pope Urban said as much, “Great is your reward in Heaven.” This previous quote follows the same path that the first two accounts discussed as well. Pope Urban knew that if he could make the men confidant in their eternal life then they would march wherever he told them to. This manipulation of a man’s spirituality was a very cunning move since a lot of the regular soldiers would have to come from the peasants of the nation. Thus, when Pope Urban told them that if they left behind their meager conditions in their home nation in order to fight the Muslims, he made sure they knew that their life after their mortal one would be better by tenfold. One could see how a decision to leave poverty in order to secure a
This is not the (true) soldiery of Christ which rends asunder the sheepfold of the Redeemer. The Holy Church has reserved a soldiery for herself to help her people, but you debase her wickedly to her hurt.” In this way Pope Urban made sure that if anger did not move the men then shame would. It would have been no small thing to be told that the way one was leading a life was disgraceful to the church. This would have filled the men with a desire to atone for their misdeeds and to do it in the most prominent way possible. Their atonement could have been easily fulfilled with the army that the church was so conveniently gathering to march east. Shame and anger were two excellent motivators and Pope Urban understood exactly how to elicit them from his
Unlike the others, this version is the only one that mentioned the Antichrist, “And if Antichrist finds there no Christians (just as at present when scarcely any dwell there), no one will be there to oppose him, or whom he may rightly overcome.” This would have been the best tool to elicit a sense of duty from the men. As unique as it was for this version to use the Antichrist it still shared similarities with the other versions. Once Pope Urban invoked the Antichrist it would have elicited anger, like Balderic of Dol’s version, a need for security, similar to Robert the Monk’s version, and the idea of trying to earn redemption, like the Gesta Version. Those three feelings would have motivated the men to march east and could have been the deciding factors that pushed the men to