From the rape of the Holy City by an alien enemy to the promise of a new path to redemption, the pope conjured a persuasive and emotive blend of images and ideas in support of his call to arms. The effect on his audience appears to have been electric, leaving ‘the eyes of some bathed with tears, [while others] trembled’. In what must have been a pre-planned move, Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, was the first to step forward to commit to the cause. On the following day the bishop was proclaimed papal legate (Urban’s official representative) for the coming expedition. As its spiritual leader, he was expected to promote the pope’s agenda, not least the policy of détente with the Greek Church of Byzantium. At the same time, messengers arrived from Raymond of Toulouse proclaiming the count’s own support for the cause. Urban’s sermon had been a resounding success, and over the next seven months he followed it up with an extended preaching tour, which saw his message crisscross France.⁵

And yet, in spite of the fact that Clermont must be regarded as the First Crusade’s moment of genesis, it would be wrong to regard Urban II as the sole architect of the ‘crusading ideal’. Previous historians have rightly emphasised his debt to the past, not least in relation to Pope Gregory VII’s pioneering exploration of holy war theory. But it is equally important to recognise that the idea of the First Crusade–its nature, intentions and rewards–underwent ongoing, largely organic development throughout the expedition. Indeed, this process even continued after the event, as the world sought to interpret and understand such an epochal episode. It is all too easy to imagine the First Crusade as a single, well-ordered host, driven on to Jerusalem by Urban’s impassioned preaching. In reality, the months and years that followed November 1095 saw disjointed waves of departure. Even what we commonly term the ‘main armies’ of the crusade began the first phase of their journey not as a single force, but rather as a rough conglomeration of smaller contingents, gradually feeling their way towards shared goals and systems of governance.

Within a month of the pope’s first sermon, popular (and often unsanctioned) preachers had begun to proclaim the call to crusade across Europe. In their demagogic hands some of the subtleties surrounding the spiritual rewards associated with the expedition–what would come to be known as the crusading ‘indulgence’–seem to have been eroded. Urban had likely intended that the remission offered would only apply to the temporal punishment for confessed sins; a rather complex formula, but one that adhered to the niceties of Church law. Later events suggest that many crusaders thought they had been given assured guarantees of heavenly salvation and thus believed that those who died during the campaign became sacred martyrs. Such notions continued to inform thinking about the crusading experience for centuries to come, establishing a gnawing rift between official and popular conceptions of these holy wars.

Notably, Pope Urban II did not invent the term ‘crusade’. The expedition he launched at Clermont was so novel, and in some ways still so embryonic in its conception, that there was no word with which it could be described. Contemporaries generally termed this ‘crusade’ simply an iter (journey) or peregrinatio (pilgrimage). It was not until the close of the twelfth century that more specific terminology developed, in the form of the word crucesignatus (one signed with the cross) for a ‘crusader’, and the eventual adoption of the French term croisade, which roughly translates as ‘the way of the cross’. For the sake of convention and clarity, historians have adopted the term ‘crusade’ for the Christian holy wars launched from 1095 onwards, but we should be aware that this lends a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity to the early ‘crusades’.⁶

The call of the cross

In the months that followed the Council of Clermont, the crusading message spread throughout western Europe, evoking an unprecedented reaction. While Pope Urban broadcast his message throughout France, bishops from across the Latin world who had attended his original sermon took the call back to their own dioceses.

The cause was also taken up by popular, rabble-rousing preachers, largely unsanctioned and unregulated by the Church. Most famous and remarkable of these was Peter the Hermit. Probably originating from a poor background in Amiens (north-eastern France), he became renowned for his austere, itinerant lifestyle, repellent appearance and unusual eating habits–one contemporary noted that ‘he lived on wine and fish; he hardly ever, or never, ate bread’. By modern standards he might be deemed a vagabond, but among the poorer classes of eleventh-century France he was revered as a prophet. Such was his sanctity that his followers even collected the hairs of his mule as relics. A Greek contemporary noted: ‘As if he had sounded a divine voice in the hearts of all, Peter the Hermit inspired the Franks from everywhere to gather together with their weapons, horses and other military equipment.’ He must have been a truly inspirational orator–within six months of Clermont he had gathered an army, largely made up of poor rabble, numbering in excess of 15,000. In history this force, alongside a number of other contingents from Germany, has become known as the ‘People’s Crusade’. Spurred on by crusading fervour, its various elements set off for the Holy Land in spring 1096, months before any other army, making ill-disciplined progress towards Constantinople. Along the way, some of these ‘crusaders’ concluded that they might as well combat the ‘enemies of Christ’ closer to home, and thus carried out terrible massacres of Rhineland Jews. Almost as soon as the People’s Crusade crossed into Muslim territory they were annihilated, although Peter the Hermit survived.⁷

This first wave of the crusade may have ended in failure, but, back in the West, larger armies were gathering. Public rallies, in which massed audiences were bombarded with emotive rhetoric, prompted fevered recruitment, and crusading enthusiasm also seems to have been propagated more informally through kinship groups, networks of papal supporters and the links between monastic communities and the nobility. Historians continue to dispute the numbers involved, primarily because of the unreliability of wildly inflated contemporary estimates (some of which exceed half a million people). Our best guess is that somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Latin Christians set off on the First Crusade, of which 7,000 to 10,000 were knights, perhaps 35,000 to 50,000 infantry troops and the remaining tens of thousands non-combatants, women and children. What is certain is that the call to crusade elicited an extraordinary response, the scale of which stunned the medieval world. Not since the distant glories of Rome had military forces of this size been assembled.⁸

At the heart of these armies were aristocratic knights, the emerging martial elite of the Middle Ages.* Pope Urban knew only too well the anxiety of these Christian warriors, trapped in a worldly profession imbued with violence, but taught by the Church that sinful warfare would lead to damnation. One contemporary observed:

God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their wake…might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain some measure of God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.

The pope had constructed the idea of an armed pilgrimage at least in part to address the spiritual dilemma threatening the knightly aristocracy, and he also knew that, with the nobility on board, retinues of knights and infantry would follow, for even though the crusade required a voluntary commitment, the intricate web of familial ties and feudal obligation bound social groups in a common cause. In effect, the pope set off a chain reaction, whereby every noble who took the cross stood at the epicentre of an expanding wave of recruitment.