Urban II's Call For The First Crusades

It is a common and oft-repeated opinion that religion, throughout history, has fueled and inspired many violent acts. Some, if not many, of the individuals who express this view carry it further, saying that the religions themselves are to blame, and that the religious beliefs inherent to them unduly divide human society. This view, however, unfortunately lacks a level of nuance and historical understanding worthy of the issue at hand. Two historical documents: Urban the II’s Call for the First Crusade and Massacre of Jews illustrate the many different forces and motivations at play in allegedly religiously-motivated violence in one of its most commonly cited examples: the Crusades. In both documents, religious language, justification, and professed understanding act in covert ways to cover the underlying beliefs, needs, and desires in the physical and social contexts of those active within them.
The call which stirred the perpetrating party

As the Pope did not himself commit his address to writing, any understanding and examination of the accounts at our disposal must be gained after first examining those that penned them. The first, Fulcher of Chartres, was a French chaplain and chronicler of the First Crusade, whose brief, measured account of Urban’s address in his Historia Iherosolymitana was written within a short time–“surely not later than about 1100,” according to Dana Carleton Munro