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caedite eos

Latin Phrases
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Kill them all; associated with the notorious command to massacre regardless of innocence, from the Albigensian Crusade.

Detailed Definition
Caedite eos is associated with the reported command of the Papal legate at the massacre of Béziers, followed by the phrase God will know his own. In poetry, it appears in works dealing with religious violence, moral atrocity, and the abuse of power. Poets invoke it to expose the horror of ideological extremism and the capacity of institutions to sanctify brutality. It is a phrase that resonates in any verse confronting genocide, war crimes, or the corruption of righteous authority.
Example
Example in poetry:
Caedite eos appears in poems about the Albigensian Crusade and more broadly about religious violence — it is the phrase that names the logic of sanctified massacre; Carolyn Forché's "The Colonel" draws on the tradition of caedite eos — the brutal commander whose violence is systematic, authorized, and indifferent to individual innocence; A poet writing about genocide — the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia — must reckon with caedite eos, the ideology that authorizes mass killing through the dehumanization of the victim; W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" meditates on the political psychology that produces caedite eos — the authoritarian structures that make mass murder possible and normal; A student analyzing political poetry might use caedite eos as a concept for examining how poets respond to atrocity — what language can do in the face of a command that negates all human individuality
Additional Notes
Caedite eos is the short form of a longer sentence reported by the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius (Kill them all. For the Lord knows those who are his). It is associated with the papal legate Arnaud Amaury at the massacre of Béziers in 1209, though historians debate whether the attribution is accurate. Students should note that whether or not the phrase was actually spoken, it encapsulates a real logic of religious violence that pervades history: the dehumanization of the enemy combined with the claim that divine omniscience will sort the innocent from the guilty, thus removing moral responsibility from the killers. This logic — that the ideological end justifies the massacre of the innocent — is one of the most important and terrible concepts for politically engaged poetry to grapple with. Related terms include damnatio (condemnation), bellum iustum (just war), and the history of crusading ideology.
Also Known As
kill them all slay them all caedite eos omnes
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