On Thuesday, 27 November, the Council fathers were summoned to meet in a field ouside Clermont's eastern gate for a session that was open to the public. Here the papal throne had been set on a platform to enable Pope Urban II to address the huge crowd that had gathered to hear what he had to say. Although the accounts of his speech were written after the event, and were posssibly coloured by what it inspired, it appears that the Pope first told of the reverses of the Byzantine Christians in the East and the suffering they had endured at the hands of the Seljuk Turks; then went on to describe the oppression and harassment of Christian pilgrims to the holy city of Jerusalem, conjuring up images of Zion that would have been wholly familiar to his audience from the constant singing of the Psalms. With the winning eloquence and genuine fervour of an experienced preacher, he reminded his audience of the example set by their ancestors under Charlemagne. He exhorted them to stop fighting one another for base motives of vengeance and greed, and to turn their weapon instead on the enemies of Christ. He in his turn, as the successor to Saint Peter with his God-given powers to 'bind and loose' on this earth, promised that those who committed themselves to this cause in a spirit of penitence would be forgiven their past sins and earn full remission of the earthly penances imposed by the Church.Urban's apeal was received with enthusiastic cries of 'Deus le volt' - 'God wills it' - and, in a dramatic gestures that had almost certainly been rehearsed by the two church leaders, Adhemar of Monteil, Bishop of Le Puy, went down on his knees before the Pope and asked to be allowed to join this Holy War. A cardinal in the Pope's entourage also fell to his knees and led Urban's audience in the Confiteor, the confession of their sins, after which the supreme pontiff granted absolution.One twentieth-century writer has describe Pope Urban's appeal as a 'combination of Christian piety, xenophobia and imperialistic arrogance'. Others have suggested that, in proclaiming Jerusalem as the crusade's objective when Emperor Alexius's appeal had been for military assistance in Anatolia against the Seljuk Turks, the Pope was taking advantage of the ignorance and gullibility of his flock.
I learnt of the phase from reading The Templars by Piers Paul Read. On page 71,
Just read something about FreeMason and learned that this is a slogan of the Templars.......
I think it turned out to be a slogan after the formation of the Templars and Deus le Volt is the French version. In Latin, it is "Non Nobis, Domine, Sed Nomini Tuo Da Gloriam"
