Holy Smoke, Joan Acocella’s review of two new books on the Crusades, notes “two facts about the Middle Ages that nonspecialist readers must get into their heads”:
The first is that violence was a normal fact of medieval life. Seizing your brother-in-law’s castle, cutting off his nose — these were unremarkable activities. The second is the pervasive religiosity of the period — above all, the fear of damnation, especially on the part of the knights. They were usually the ones committing the violence. Yet every sermon they heard told them that killing was an abomination to God; every church portal they gazed up at showed grinning devils hauling the violent down to Hell. So they were caught in a vise: the thing they were trained to do was also a thing that was going to cause them to burn for all eternity. They tried to stave this off. They went on pilgrimages; they made donations to monasteries. (The rise of the monastic orders in the Middle Ages owes much to knightly guilt.) Still, they knew they were living in a state of sin.Then Urban, in preaching the First Crusade, offered them a solution. He called upon them to kill, and told them that on this occasion it was not a sin — indeed, that it would win them remission of past sins.