At the great Council of Clermont Urban II. described to the noble crowd of prelates and barons, assembled from all parts of Western Christendom, the sufferings of the Eastern Christians at the hands of the Saracens. With burning eloquence, and, no doubt, considerable exaggeration, he depicted the dark deeds of “the enemies of God”: their destruction and desecration of Christian churches; their slaughter, torture, and forcible conversion of Christian men, and their violation of Christian women; and he ended with a passionate appeal to all present to hasten to the assistance of the Holy Land, “enslaved by the godless and calling aloud to be delivered”; promising, at the same time, a plenary indulgence and general remission of sins to all who should enlist under the banner of the Cross. The effect of the Pontiff’s harangue on his chivalrous, sinful, and bigoted hearers was stupendous. It was the first official instigation to that hatred of the non-European and non-Christian which, however loth we may be to acknowledge the fact, in a less furious form, still survives amongst us. Many obeyed the summons with fervour born of pure piety; many more saw in the enterprise a comparatively cheap means of obtaining pardon for all their crimes, past and to come; while others welcomed an opportunity for satisfying their adventurous dispositions, for gaining wealth and renown, or for quenching in the blood of foreigners that fanatical zeal which could not find its full gratification in the butchery of fellow-countrymen. Among such foreigners--Asiatic at once and infidel--the nearest were the Jews. Cruelty, like its opposite, begins at home. It was natural that the champions of the Cross should begin the vindication of their sacred emblem by the extermination of the race which had made so criminal a use of it. The shadow of the Old Crime once more fell upon the hapless people, and darkened their lives. Religious frenzy kindled the ancient feud, and greed fanned it. The vast and motley rabble of savage peasants who, under the command of a monk and the guidance of a goat, followed in the wake of the knightly army, incited by the lower clergy, fell upon the Jewish colonies which lay along their route through Central Europe--at Rouen, on the Moselle and the Rhine, at Verdun, Trèves, Speyer, Metz, Cologne, Mayence, Worms, Strasburg--massacring, pillaging, raping, and baptizing, without remorse or restraint.