Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

49. Moynahan, Op. cit., page 222, lists five accounts of Urban’s historic speech which, he says, ‘are substantially different’.

50. The First Crusade was fortunate in its timing. Emotions among Christians still ran high. The millennium – AD 1000, as it then was – was not long over, and the millennium of the Passion, 1033, closer still. In addition, because of a temporary disunity among the Arabs, which weakened their ability to resist the five thousand or so who comprised the Christian forces, the crusaders reached Jerusalem relatively intact and, after a siege lasting well over a month, took it. In the process they massacred all Muslim and Jewish residents, the latter being burned in their chief synagogue.

51. Steven Runciman, The First Crusade, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press/Canto, 1951/ 1980, page 22.

52. The veneration of saints and relics offered an incentive for large numbers of the pious to make pilgrimages, not just to the three major sites – Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela – but to many other shrines associated with miracles or relics. David Levine speaks of an ‘economic geography of holiness [that] sprouted in rural Europe’. Areas of France were criss-crossed with pilgrimage routes – for example, the chemin de Paris and the chemin de Vézelay, which funnelled the faithful from the north to Spain, where they met up with others who had travelled along the chemin d’Arles. Levine, Op. cit., page 87. The basic view was that as given by Henry of Ghent (c. 1217–1293), the influential Parisian scholastic and metaphysician, who argued that saints and certain visionaries have access to God’s mind and therefore have ‘full and infallible certitude’ in their knowledge. Colish, Op. cit., page 305. Patrick Geary, professor of history at the University of Florida, studied more than one hundred medieval accounts of the thefts of saints’ relics, and found that these were often carried out not by vagabonds but by monks, who transferred the relics to their home towns or monasteries. As the pilgrimage routes showed, relics stimulated a constant demand for hospitality – food and lodging. In other words, relics were a source of economic support. But the cult of the saints may also be seen as a return to a form of polytheism: the saints’ disparate characters allowed the faithful to relate to figures they found sympathetic – humans rather than gods – who had done something extraordinary. Geary shows that the cult of saints was so strong that in Italy at least there were also professional relic thieves, operating a lively trade to points north. Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978/1990.

53. Cantor, Op. cit., page 388, and Moynahan, Op. cit., page 279. See also: Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (editors), Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994, page 94.

54. Bernard McGinn, AntiChrist, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, page 6.

55. Ibid., pages 100–113; see also Moynahan, Op. cit., page 215.

56. McGinn, Op. cit., page 138.

57. Ibid., pages 136–137.

58. Colish, Op. cit., page 249.

59. Cantor, Op. cit., page 389.

60. Biller and Hudson (editors), Op. cit., pages 38–39. Colish, Op. cit., page 251. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 280–281, for an account of the Bogomils.

61. Cantor, Op. cit., page 390.

62. Colish, Op. cit., page 251.

63. Edward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle Ages, Op. cit., page 24.

64. Cantor, Op. cit., page 417. Canning, Op. cit., page 121, agrees that Innocent’s reign was the crux of the medieval papacy.

65. Cantor, Op. cit., pages 389–393.

66. Edward Burman, The Inquisition: Hammer of Heresy, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1984, page 16.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid., page 23.

69. Ibid., See Stephen Haliczer (editor), Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987, page 10, for more statistics.

70. Burman, Op. cit., page 23.

71. Ibid., page 25.

72. James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997, page 11. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 281.

73. Burman, Op. cit., page 33 and Given, Op. cit., page 14, for the early organisation of the inquisition.

74. Burman, Op. cit., page 41. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., page 41.

75. Burman, Op. cit., page 57.