S. Ives proceeded with the utmost vigour to persuade the nobles of his diocese to accept the peace which they were tempted to reject as contrary to their privileges, and also to see that it was observed thereafter by them and by others within the limits of his own jurisdiction. And thus, by helping to deliver the weak from the power of the strong, he contributed towards preparing the way for the movement which was soon to give the people a voice in their own affairs and procure for them their municipal franchise in the form of ‘Communes.’
Meanwhile this same Council of Clermont had provided an outlet for the energies of the knights of Christendom, which were restricted by the Truce of God. The Crusade had been promulgated.
The enthusiasm of the people had been carefully prepared. The fantastic figure of Peter the Hermit, dressed in a woollen tunic and a cloak of coarse cloth, his arms and feet alike bare, and his eyes flashing with magnetic frenzy, had appeared among them and heated their imaginations. At the sound of his eloquence every heart caught fire, and a nation of soldiers was burning to exhibit at once its piety and its valour by the conquest of the Holy Land. The merit and glory of that undertaking had also been preached by the clergy in every diocese. When, therefore, the Pope ascended a lofty scaffold in the market-place of Clermont his eloquence was addressed to a vast concourse of well-prepared and impatient enthusiasts. The answer to the summons to arms was unanimous. The orator was interrupted by the shout of thousands, ‘Diex el volt! Diex el volt!’ For so the popular tongue corrupted the cry of the clergy, ‘God wills it!’ (Deus vult). ‘It is indeed the will of God,’ replied the Pope, and he gave them as a mark of their sacred and irrevocable engagement the symbol of the red, the bloody cross to be worn on their breast or shoulder.
Thus in a paroxysm of religious fervour began that Crusade which was to end in the rapine of a mediæval raid, and in the disastrous _dénouement_ of Nicæa.
The effects of the Crusades were as varied as the motives of the Crusaders. For though all were inspired, one need not doubt, by a genuine religious desire to regain the Holy Sepulchre for Christendom, by the belief of merit, the hope of the reward of plenary indulgence promised by the Pope, and the assurance of divine aid, yet other motives and instincts were present in the breasts of many. Collectively, the Crusading Gaul exhibited a perversion of that instinct of expansion to which French excursions into Britain and Russia, across the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine, to America, India, Madagascar and Algiers, have continually borne witness, and which now survives the population’s power to expand. Individually, the desire to rescue the Church, mingled with the hope of military glory and the prospect of unlimited plunder, were sufficient inducements for the barons to cease from petty wars in their own land, and to gratify, as a penance and against the nations of the East, those passions which, when indulged at home, had involved them in the discipline of penance. And in the case of their followers, among many other motives, the love of freedom prompted. For, under the sign of the Cross, the peasant attached to the servitude of the glebe might escape from a haughty lord and transplant himself and his family to a land of liberty, just as the monk might release himself from the discipline of his convent and the criminal elude the punishment of his crime.