Storm and Frenzy

A Call for European Unity in Defense of Our Continent

“But what is more than curious—indeed, piquant to a degree—is that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan, should awake like an extinct volcano to a new activity…”

After a council with his bishops, on November 27^th, 1095, Pope Urban II held a speech on a field near the French town of Clermont. He called on all Europeans to stop fighting their brother wars and ushered them to take up arms against the Eastern heathens—the threatful Turks and Saracens that had invaded Europe. According to the Pope, the crimes these barbarians committed against the Eastern European population justified a new kind of war. He called it an armed pilgrimage, a Crusade. Led by Godfrey of Bouillon, a man in his early forties from present-day Northern France or Belgium, the first crusaders would defeat everything in their path and liberate Jerusalem from Islamic occupation.