The tattoo that is far harder to dismiss as simply an innocent sign of commitment to the Christian tradition is the Deus Vult across his bicep. Literally meaning “God Wills It,” it is in the Latin imperative form, a command to go and do something — God wills that you do. Going by language alone this could sound neutral — a belief in the Abrahamic God after all comes with all sorts of commands to obey. But the history of the phrase is more specific than this: It is traceable back to the Crusades, and it has never, unlike the Jerusalem cross, absorbed a second meaning.
Its origins are contentious, with medieval historians demurring over modern claims that it was how Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade back in 1095. Although there are sporadic mentions of the phrase, for example in chronicles from 1100 and 1130, the close connection between the phrase and crusading knights is a much later invention. “Deus Vult being closely associated with the Crusades is a 19th-century idea,” Charlotte Gauthier, a historian of religious conflict and nationhood, told me. “Virtually all of our contemporary understanding of crusading culture is traceable to the Victorians or the early 20th century.”
The reinterpretation of the past was a key part of the 19th century and had a lasting impact on the European history we still learn today. It was a period when many countries were inventing national stories. “What historians in the 19th century tended to do is look at the medieval past to find stories: what it means to be whatever — English, German, Czech, French. These interpretations that come to us such as the “code of chivalry,” they’re all Victorian formulations to establish historically rooted ideals of the nation,” says Eleanor Janega, a medieval historian and co-host of the podcasts We’re Not So Different and Gone Medieval. One of the outcomes was what we might recognize as reconstructions or cosplaying. “By the end of the 19th century you have all these people who are literally cosplaying as Crusaders, making themselves some funny costumes and crap armour and riding around,” Gauthier says. “When the alt-right say they’re going back to the traditions of their ancestors, they mean — without knowing it — the 1880s, not the 11th century.”