God permitted the western Church to be afflicted because of its sins ("exigentibus peccatis"). For there arose certain pseudoprophets, sons of Belial and witnesses to Anti-Christ, to seduce Christians with inane words and by their vain preaching compel all kinds of men to go against the Saracens for the liberation of Jerusalem. This preaching was so enormously powerful that almost all the inhabitants of the regions by a kind of communal vow spontaneously offered themselves, as it were, to a disastrous common fate.

Different people moreover had different intentions. Some, keen on new experiences, went for the novelty of seeing the world. Others, ruled by need, in tight circumstances at home, were ready to relieve their poverty by fighting not just against the enemies of Christ's cross but against any friends of the Christian name when it seemed opportune. Others still, oppressed by debt, or thinking of abandoning the services they owed their lords, or even in anticipation of penalties due for crime, pretended to be full of God's zeal and hurried off mostly in order to escape the inconvenience of such great problems. Hardly any of them failed to bend their knees before Baal; very few were directed by a sound, holy intention or genuinely inflamed by the love of divine majesty to risk their blood fighting for the holy places of the saints. But we leave these matters to be more fully discussed in due course with God, the inspector of hearts, adding only that the Lord knows who are His. What therefore? All hastened to the place where the feet of Jesus Christ once stood, signing their clothes plausibly yet presumptuously ("non improbabiliter sed presumptuose") with the sign of the cross. They forced into baptism almost all the Jews they found on their route, killing the reluctant ones without hesitation. That explains why some of the Jews compelled to be washed at the baptismal font persevered in the faith they had taken up, but others eventually returned to the obscene observances of their rites, once peace was restored, like dogs to their vomit.