To the Archbishop of Bordeaux and the Bishops of Saintes, Angoulême and Poitiers.

We have received the tearful complaint, worthy of compassion, of the Jews living in the kingdom of France. The crusaders of your cities and dioceses ought to have prepared their hearts and bodies to fight the Lord’s battle and to free the inheritance of Christ from the hands of the pagans, who, because of the sins of the Christian people, hold and defile the temple of God. Since this battle belongs especially to him, they ought all the more humbly to embrace fear of his name and love for him, so that they would not, God forbid, walk in their harmful desires and provoke divine patience against themselves.

Yet these crusaders, together with other crusaders, formed impious plans against the Jews. They did not consider that, as it were, from the archives of the Jews the testimonies of the Christian faith came forth. Nor did they consider the testimony of the prophet, that even if they should be like the sand of the sea, a remnant of them will finally be saved, because the Lord will not cast off his people forever.

Trying almost entirely to wipe them from the face of the earth, in an excess of unheard-of and unusual cruelty, they slaughtered two thousand five hundred of them, great and small alike, as well as pregnant women, with hostile rage. Some were mortally wounded, while others were trampled under the feet of horses like mud. Their books were destroyed by fire. To increase their shame and disgrace, the corpses of those killed in this way were exposed as food for the birds of the sky and their flesh for the beasts of the earth.

They treated those who survived this slaughter vilely and shamefully, took their goods and consumed them. And so that they might fasten such a monstrous crime with the cloak of virtue and somehow justify the cause of their impiety, they claim that they did these things, and threaten to do worse, because the Jews refuse to be baptized.

They do not wisely consider that, although a storm had arisen on this great and wide sea and the human race was in danger within it, the true Jonah, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came into its depths and allowed himself to be submerged by that storm, so that he might reconcile us to God in his blood and renew us through the washing of regeneration consecrated by that same blood, excluding neither condition nor sex, through which people from every nation might be adopted as children of God.

Yet, since the Lord has mercy on whom he wills, people must not be compelled to the grace of baptism unless they wish it freely. For just as man fell by his own free will when he obeyed the suggestion of the serpent, so, when called by the grace of God, he must apply his free will in order to rise again.

Because of these things, the Jews, placed as though under a new Egyptian servitude and fearing their own destruction, have humbly had recourse to the mercy of the Apostolic See.

Therefore, lest the boldness of such great rashness, if it is not restrained, pass into abuse by others, we command that each of you, after first issuing a warning, compel those offenders living in your dioceses, by ecclesiastical censure and without allowing appeal, to provide suitable satisfaction for the wickedness they have committed and proper restitution for what was taken from the Jews.

Given at Rieti, on the Nones of September, in the tenth year of our pontificate.