Introduction
The First Crusade was a military campaign on an unprecedented scale organised around a singular unifying concept; that fighting for faith was not only the most justified reason to fight but in fact the only true way for a warrior to fulfil their purpose in a society charged with religious devotion. The ultimate success of the First Crusade obscures one the crucial fact that the recruitment and organisation was a complete and unmitigated disaster. At almost every stage of the journey the Crusaders suffered extreme famine, drought, ravaging weather, disease, betrayals and the constant looming threat of assault from any direction from an enemy force with superior knowledge of the countryside. How the Crusaders managed to travel to the Holy Land and take the crown jewel of the Levant, but also establish a series of large territories that became known as the Crusaders States was nothing short of a staggering amount of human determination that was characterised as being made possible by the grace of God in the deeply religious Christian society. The extent of the famine and total lack of infrastructure to distribute supplies became apparent almost immediately. Within the time it took the Crusaders to march the relatively short journey from Constantinople to Nicaea food was already running short and the besieging soldiers had to be resupplied by following contingents who arrived at the city some time later. The blame for this total mismanagement of supplies is rooted firmly in the recruitment campaign helmed by the enigmatic Pope Urban II. Though the Pope may have had designs for a campaign resembling a Crusade, arguably the ultimate catalyst was likely a letter from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios asking for military help to reclaim territory from the Seljuk Turks. Doubtlessly Alexios expected the call for aid to result in no more than a few thousand knights and their retinues, but Urban II saw in his letter the opportunity to forge his name into the annals of history.
Using his familiarity with the complex relationship between the Papacy and the unparalleled power of the Frankish war machine, Urban was able to create a narrative that would appeal to the emotions of the warrior classes, and thus recruit people en masse for a campaign designed from the outset to reconcile the contradictory nature of a knight in Medieval society. What was often repeated in later records of the speech delivered by Urban at Clermont (all of which were written after the capture of Jerusalem) was the horrifying abuses of the Christian faith by the Muslim forces in the Holy Land in order to rouse a sense of unity among the knights of Europe to defend the apparently abused Christian peoples in the East. By forming a message that would present the idea of violence that was sanctified by God, a concept that Urban himself had experience with in Spain only a decade prior to the Crusade, he managed to frame a military campaign as an armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land to fight for their faith. And this was the fundamental problem with his recruitment strategy. Instead of recruiting soldiers, the Pope had started a pilgrimage and was thus completely unable to directly control potential pilgrims. The worst example of this poorly organised recruitment strategy was the so-called People’s Crusade, in which tens of thousands of people too eager to wait around for the professional armies of Europe to organise themselves departed from France, well before the bountiful harvests of 1096, and were thus compelled to begin ravaging the landscape of the Rhineland and justifying their horrific persecution of the Jewish settlements as simply an extension of their armed pilgrimage. Without a greater degree of control over the entire recruitment authority was seized away from what little control Urban was exerting over the campaign by unofficial agents who were able to usurp a great deal of power from the overall Crusader ideology. In particular the message of the First Crusade was deeply warped by the man known as Peter the Hermit, whose direction of the People’s Crusade was remembered with a great deal of disdain among the contemporary chroniclers. Guibert, the Abbot of Nogent, actually met Peter and characterised him as one of many wandering preachers at the time, yet made it very clear that he had amassed an almost cult like status among his followers. Clearly subverting authority away from the official leaders of the Crusade, Peter the Hermit and his followers were able to maintain an atmosphere of partial legitimisation, yet this body of pilgrims hardly resembled an army. Though likely filled with many knights among the leadership and the rank and file being middle class free holders who may have had the initial capital to buy the equipment they needed for the campaign but seriously lacked any sense of unity and discipline needed for a legitimate military campaign. Subsequent records of the People’s Crusade, notably the account of Albert of Aachen who took a more sympathetic opinion of the victims of the People’s Crusade, typically popularised the view that this campaign was filled with the thieves, adulterers, murderers, and thousands of sinners who were seen as the outsiders from civilised society. Likely this viewpoint was presented as an attempt to explain why this unofficial campaign proved to be such a spectacular failure despite it apparently following the same ideology as the First Crusaders. Such acts of barbarism committed by these unofficial forces were a deeply problematic symptom of this new form of recruitment, and the lack of mention of this particular campaign of persecution reflects the need to try and re-establish control of the overall narrative after losing control of the actual recruitment drive.
It is impossible to accurately determine how many people actually travelled east on the Crusade; some place the number at 100,000, others a more conservative 40,000 and one account written by the Papal legate after the capture of Jerusalem claimed that as many as 300,000 people crossed the Bosphorus in 1097. By far the most outlandish number presented comes from the eye witness Fulcher of Chartres who claimed that the combined Crusader forces who mustered outside the city of Nicaea numbered ‘six hundred thousand strong for war’, of whom one hundred thousand were considered well-armed and trained enough to be considered professional soldiers. The issue was, however, not the number of people on the Crusade, but the number of non-combatants that were a constant and significant drain on resources for the soldiers. Typically, military recruitment in the Medieval Age was incorporated into society through a series of agreements between vassal and liege, forming the very basic foundation of Feudalism. But this model was unrealistic for such a long campaign as the Crusades. The recruitment strategy for the First Crusade implored the knights of Christendom to fight for their faith, rather than demanding their service. Consequently, soldiers brought their families, an untold number of Priests and thousands upon thousands of unarmed and untrained pilgrims followed the soldiers East. Elizabeth Siberry set out a few qualifications for what the ideal crusader should be; someone who was physically fit, a layman and who could afford to equip themselves for the campaign. Urban apparently took steps to try and restrict recruitment to only those that met similar standards, though we can clearly see that he was wholly unable to stick to these qualifications.
The establishment of the military orders was by far the largest development in the Crusader recruitment strategy in Western Europe. The three most popular of these were commonly known as; the Templars, the Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights, and all three provided the opportunity to pursue a career as a soldier in perpetual service of the Christian faith. ‘The most important institutional development in this period was the creation of the military orders.’ This powerful sentiment expressed by Andrew Jotsichky perfectly characterises the extent of the change brought to the Levant by the evolution of the Templars and Hospitallers to the secular interests of the citizens. The unquestionable influence of these military orders renders them inseparable from many of the key thematic developments of the age and are thus at the forefront of much of the changes in the recruitment strategies.
The biggest obstacle to any historian wishing to study the Crusades is also the most immediate; the entirety of contemporary evidence available to us was written after the conquest of Jerusalem. The obvious issue with this problem with this simple fact is that it calls into question whether Jerusalem was the intended target of the Crusaders from the very beginning, or if this was inserted into the narrative once the city had been taken. This problem is multiplied out several times by another major problem with the contemporary evidence; that almost all of the written accounts of the First Crusade drew the vast majority of their narrative from an account written by an anonymous author attached to Prince Bohemond of Taranto’s Southern Italian contingent known to us as the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum. This account is a deeply biased presentation of the campaign designed specifically to inspire reverence for Bohemond and justify the actions of the Crusaders and as a result the interpretation of the events is at best significantly unreliable and at times blatantly filled with falsities. The fruit born from this poisoned seed has resulted in a multitude of accounts who based their works on the narrative of the Gesta that can be viewed only as what the writer wished his audience to read. Problems do not persist merely in the contemporary literature. There has been something of a perception that the study of the Crusades is a somewhat well-trodden subject, leading to a drought in new perspectives on the topic in recent years with only a few Historians attempting to revive the study. The result of this is that much of the available literature available to scholars is fairly outdated.
This problem, however, represents an opportunity. The warped version of reality we are left with is one that was carefully crafted for two very specific reasons: to glorify (and in some cases justify) the actions of the Crusaders, and to recruit people for subsequent campaigns to recreate the successes of those who captured Jerusalem. The skewed narrative and biased accounts may not accurately depict the events, but they perfectly embody the popular contemporary understanding of the Crusades, and by extension strategies used to recruit people. Superficially, many thematic elements of the recruitment for the Second Crusade resembles that of the First, but beneath the surface becomes apparent that a great deal had changed. Contrary to the somewhat arbitrary naming scheme the Second Crusade was by no means the second attempt to send soldiers to the Holy Land. The political landscape had been irreversibly changed and the borders of Christendom now stretched from western Spain to Jerusalem itself. And so the question follows, how did recruitment strategies for the Crusades develop across the period for subsequent campaigns?
Opportunity
Warfare is a profession. A brutal and grisly one which resulted in unimaginable death and misery, but a profession nonetheless. Subsequently, without the proper incentive it was next to impossible to engage the services of a knight based on such abstract concepts as knightly honour. Those running the recruitment for the Crusades were well aware of this fact, and thus despite the objectives allegedly being the apparently honourable goal of capturing Jerusalem, a great many promises were made to the Crusaders about what they all stood to gain by swearing an oath to accompany the Crusade all the way to Jerusalem. These incentives can be divided into two distinct categories; material wealth, and pursuing a degree of greater spiritual purity. To this end, the First Crusade grew a reputation in subsequent literature of being a campaign led by second sons and lesser lords. This is somewhat reflected in leaders of the Crusades. After all, no kings accompanied this Crusade, unlike the Second Crusade of 1147 – 1150, and the representative of the Capetian dynasty was Hugh of Vermandois, the younger brother of King Phillip VI of France. There was a particular focus on the potential for the individual to benefit from their service in the First Crusade, but as time passed the recruitment ideology became more sophisticated and abstract; leading to a focus on the pursuit of wider goals that didn’t necessarily reflect the interests of the individual.
Gold
The allure of material wealth was a promise made by many of the recruitment strategists for the First Crusade. It was mentioned as a primary motivator in many versions of Urban’s speech, although this was of course an after the fact revision. Warfare was an extremely high risk profession, and therefore in order for it to be worth a soldier’s time there needed to be some guarantee of appropriate compensation. In a shorter campaign, of a more private nature that was more typical of the age, a knight could still rely on the income from his own fief to pay for his own upkeep and that of his retinue, but for a campaign that would be as long as the First Crusade, the desire for loot was superseded by the very real and more immediate need to pay for the soldiers. A knight of modest means would have to multiply his income by a factor of five in order to fund this expedition, a feat not easily attained in a foreign land. This, almost inevitably, led to looting being the primary method of generating income, an act that may well have been condoned by the clergymen who were organising the recruitment for the First Crusade back in France. Baldric, the Archbishop of Dol in the early twelfth century, wrote an account that has become largely understood as a religious reimagining of the Gesta, yet despite this much heavier religious spin on the narrative even he explicitly states that ‘The possessions of the enemies, too, will be yours’. This is a rather peculiar addition to what is a far more spiritual account than its predecessors since it seems to represent the clergy condoning the desire of the soldiers to in some way profit from the Crusade materially, and this is further reflected in other popular works produced around the same time. ‘Afterward, the army scattered throughout the city and took possession of the gold and silver, the horses and mules, and the houses filled with goods of all kinds’ wrote the author of the Gesta about the aftermath of the capture of Jerusalem. Fulcher of Chartres, a cleric who eventually became the chaplain to Baldwin of Boulogne, took the description of the looting of Jerusalem to a rather grisly extreme; claiming that the poorer Crusaders went as far as cutting open the corpses of the dead to extract any gold coins supposedly ingested by the inhabitants of Jerusalem to prevent their wealth from being stolen! The image painted in many of these sources is that of the Crusaders amassing a great deal of cash wealth from their conquests, but the reality was very different. Any material assets the Crusaders had managed to loot barely made a dent in their expenses on the journey to Jerusalem in the first place, and what little was left was spent either on the journey home or was apparently donated to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Despite what the sources may tell us, tens of thousands of cash starved, battle fatigued and famine stricken pilgrims returning home would have spread the fact that their journey did not result in a vast amount of wealth coming their way, and to that end the stress on the potential for monetary rewards was rarely repeated in subsequent recruitment strategies.
The potential for amassing personal wealth was not abandoned, however, as the promise of landed estates for people who accompanied the Crusade was a theme that was carried on for much of the period. A serious limitation in the power of the landed nobility in Europe was their inability to fund their lifestyles without demesne lands to extract incomes. Other methods of income were available to the nobility, such as duties and protection monies, but for many the only way to recoup their costs and to make the expedition worth the ultimate risk was the promise of landed properties in Outremer which ultimately became a huge part of the propaganda surrounding the recruitment campaigns. The one man seemingly credited with the greatest desire for material wealth in the form of landed estates in the Holy Land was the formidable Southern Italian Bohemond (later self-styled as Prince Bohemond I of Antioch), though other sources make similar claims of Raymond St Giles, the Count of Toulouse. Having been unable to establish himself properly in Italy due to his brother Roger and uncle, also called Roger, Bohemond quite suddenly took up the cross in the middle of a siege at Amalfi. Even contemporary writers saw this act as a rather thinly veiled attempt to carve out territory and establish a dynasty for himself with some even claiming that he had no intention of actually fulfilling his Crusader vow to capture Jerusalem. The Alexiad, an account written by Bohemond’s lifelong arch-nemesis the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Comnenus, characterised Bohemond as a blood and power hungry warlord whose lust for wealth could only be satiated by constant warfare against the Empire. Her account is obviously a very biased opinion of Bohemond but as daughter to the Emperor Anna’s words held a great deal of influence in the Greek Orthodox world of the Byzantine Empire. Irrespective of his initial motivation for taking the cross, Bohemond ultimately focused his efforts on establishing the principality of Antioch for himself by using whatever means were available to him including the apparent use of subterfuge and a traitor within the besieged city to allow his forces inside first. Bohemond makes for an interesting case study for this particular subject. While during the First Crusade his motivations were at best questionable, after consolidating his territory around Antioch and being captured in 1103, he was ransomed back to his people and returned to Europe with the expressed intention of gathering soldiers to continue the fight in the Holy Land. The significance of Bohemond’s own recruitment campaign was that the promise of landed estates, castles and other properties were among the many enticements made by Bohemond to attract soldiers to his cause. Pope Paschal II wrote multiple letters to Bohemond authorising his recruitment of soldiers for a new Crusade, and even permitted him to take the Papal Standard into battle with him, providing the campaign with total legitimacy and the official backing of the highest clerical office in Western Europe, a clear message that his recruitment narrative was backed by the Church. This Crusade ultimately failed, however, and subsequently the promotion of conquest to provide estates for the participants was dropped from the recruitment narrative as it was beginning to cause a problem for the message of unity through Holy War. The very fact that this campaign had ended so dramatically poorly perhaps created the idea that conducting a campaign of conquest for selfish means was besmirching the very idea of the Crusade and was thus no longer sanctioned under their doctrine.
One theme of conquest that originated from Urban II’s recruitment narrative was that of establishing new territories in the name of Christ. Once again the idea of singular unifying doctrine was the principle method of justifying warfare, and thus the most sanctified manner of conquest was in order to expand the borders of Christendom itself. By tweaking the narrative to promote the idea that conquest was in the name of unifying new territory under Christian doctrine rather than providing additional income for the participating nobility those in charge of the recruitment strategies could continue to push people to conquer new territory and still maintain the narrative of justifiable action. Urban II had spent several years in Spain a decade before his preaching of the First Crusade, and thus the Reconquista of Spain was an integral part of the Crusader narrative due to its occupation by the predominantly Muslim forces of the Moors. This concept was carried on throughout the entire period and was a major part of the recruitment drive for the Second Crusade in 1147. In Northern Europe the nobility of Saxony were not too pleased to be left out of the Crusade, but the flame of crusader rhetoric had taken hold in the country. They therefore seized the opportunity to expand their territory into neighbouring Wendish lands, arguing that they were apostates and therefore just as dangerous to Christ’s kingdom as the Muslim forces in the Holy Land. Their campaign was officially legitimised by the Papacy and therefore often considered part of the Second Crusade. Equally as important was the siege of Lisbon, likely the most successful aspect of the entire Second Crusade since the main contingents led by King Conrad III and King Philip VII were defeated rather unceremoniously in Asia Minor before even reaching Jerusalem. Despite the success of the siege, there was an increasing amount of literature reflecting the contemporary views of the Crusades; namely that warfare for selfish motivations was the reason why the victory at Jerusalem was not being replicated in other Crusading expeditions. In particular there was the De Expugnatione Lyxbenensi written by an eye witness of the siege of Lisbon. In this account the author, a chaplain called Raul, recounts that ‘”A war is just”… “which is waged after a declaration, to recover property or to repulse enemies.”’ This wasn’t necessarily a new development in the popular imagination at the time, since Urban II was largely pushing a narrative of spiritual conquest rather than amassing material wealth, but by the Second Crusade recruitment strategies were steering rather violently away from stressing the opportunity to gather what Jonathan Riley-Smith referred to as ‘crude materialism’.
God
The promise of spiritual reward in the afterlife was far more enticing than amassing material wealth to many people living in Western Europe at that time. As leaders of the spiritual lives of the Christian people in Europe, the Catholic Church (whose very name derived from a Greek term for a single unifying doctrine) sought to end the constant fighting between Christian peoples, and ideally heal the rift with the Greek Orthodox Church, by unifying the knights of Europe with the idea that fighting for the Christian faith superseded any secular alliance. In order to effectively accomplish this the promise of rewards that only spiritual leaders could grant. By far the most popular of these was the promise for the remission of sin for anyone who vowed to travel the Holy Land and fight on the Crusade. Baldric of Dol even wrote in his account about a promise from the Church to pray for their souls during the campaign so that they might save their souls even calling upon the Old Testament to justify their claim of religious warfare being righteous. This has even led to many historians believing that spiritual reward was in fact the primary motivator for the majority of the Crusaders. Notably Thomas Asbridge argued this very case in not only his book, The First Crusade, a New History, but also in a documentary series. That said, some have taken this argument to an extreme, in particular there is D.C. Munro who, back in 1906 claimed that the First Crusade was primarily motivated by the abhorrence of Islam in the Christian world. Such an outdated view is symptomatic of the subject and isn’t based on much evidence aside from the fairly dubious accounts of the Crusade that were largely designed for propaganda purposes rather than a reflection of accurate contemporary views. What remains is a very clear strategy of motivating soldiers to fight for their faith in exchange for the promise of eternity, with the Gesta, the earliest of these written accounts, claiming that ‘great is your reward in heaven’.
The use of the remission of sin as an almost contractual pledge for taking up arms in the defence of their faith was quickly becoming a very regular theme for the period. The mantra of spiritual reward in the afterlife was a powerful motif to the contemporary witnesses. For those that took the cross in 1096 they were promised that faithful service for the devotion of their faith would be rewarded with the remission of all of their sins, absolving them of their earthly crimes. Such a reward surely served as the primary motivator for the majority of the Crusaders, and such a reward was liberally granted by the senior clergy. After the capture of Jerusalem many of the accounts of the Crusade took great care to show that the remission of sin would be granted to anyone who took the cross and fought for their faith. Guibert, the Abbot of Nogent, explained in his account Dei Gesta per Francos that anyone who travelled east to Jerusalem, regardless of military action, would be absolved of their sins, and Baldric of Dol mentioned that the Church would be constantly praying for the souls of everyone who took the cross. The policy of frequently using this as a reward began to muddy the narrative and as with the overall recruitment campaign, began to spiral out of the control of the initial leaders. Instances of the granting of remission were rapidly growing in frequency to the point of it no longer even being restricted to Crusader ideology. For the ill-fated 1101 Crusade, Duke Welf IV of Bavaria was apparently recruited, along with a significant contingent of Germans, with the promise of the remission of their sins. This may well be considered an appropriate use of this recruitment strategy, but by the latter half of the 1130s the entire doctrine was being confused with the sheer frequency of its use, yet it was next to impossible to contradict this policy since criticising the narrative of spiritual reward in exchange for fighting for the church was one of the core tenants of Crusader ideology. In 1135 remission of sin was granted at the council of Pisa for fighting against the Anti-Pope, a political rival to the established Pope, and even more bizarrely before the Battle of Standard in 1138 a local Bishop granted all of the soldiers the remission of their sins for defending their homeland. Neither of these very high-profile cases had the slightest thing to do with Crusading and perfectly represented the lack of centralised control of a Crusading narrative. This problem may have gone even deeper if certain allegations of the behaviour of the clergy are to be believed. Apparently there were some worries among the senior clergy that any monks that took the cross and travelled East might forget their clerical vows and leave the church for good to become Laymen once again. Monks were known to remove their habits and then don the dress of a warrior to actually fight, despite this being strictly against canon law. Monks were more than within their rights to compel others to fight, but were themselves forbidden from taking part in any conflict. This suggests that somehow pursuing the grace of God was equally valid through violence as it was through prayer and devotion, a dangerous idea that was causing a great deal of friction within the church, especially when it came to recruiting people for subsequent Crusades. A solution presented itself in what may very well have been the most significant evolution of the Catholic Church; the creation of the holy military orders.
These orders comprised of laymen within a religious institution, with the key differentiating factor between them and monastic orders being that the members were not ordained as priests, since priests were forbidden to shed blood. Monastic orders did indeed include non-ordained members, but these military orders specifically recruited soldiers for the purpose of fighting, completely contrary to typical clerical behaviour. Growing from humble origins in the Holy Land, the Templars (an organisation whose history is often obscured by popular imagination and fiction) was an organisation whose explicit goal from their foundation was the protection of pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem, fulfilling a role left empty by returning Crusaders. They quickly drew the attention of the church who saw them as continuing the work of the Crusaders, and began to rapidly rise in power and influence as the fascination of certain clerical leaders led to their continual promotion. There was a certain degree of respect among the clergy in the 1130s for the military orders. With the state of Europe at this time being a series of smaller scale private wars between powerful land magnates, most violence was committed between secular powers, all of whom were Christians. By creating the military orders, there was a belief that this was the true manifestation of Christian power. These orders allowed people to continue their role as knights but in a way that was praised by the clergy and fulfil the ultimate goal of defending the kingdom of Christ. In short, the Military Orders were seen as restoring the knighthood to their true nature. Consequently, the Papacy saw the potential for the Templars and other orders and began to issue absurdly beneficial bulls (a special public decree named after the lead seal used to authenticate the document) to the orders. Among these included the Milites Templi Hierosolymitani which compared the Templars to the Maccabees, a group of warriors who fought against the gentiles in order to defend the land given to the Israelites. This was not a new concept to the contemporary writers. There had been a belief persisting from the beginning of Frankish prowess in Europe that they had the potential to be the legitimate successors to the Christian Kingdom by being the new Chosen People by God, and therefore the creation of the Templars was the natural succession from the Old Testament. If the goal was for those in Europe to send resources to aid the Crusaders in the Levant, one might assume that the protection of the pilgrims in the Holy Land was the central reason for the overwhelming support for the military orders, but interestingly this doesn’t seem to have been the case. The Hospitallers differed from their more famous counterparts by simple virtue of their interpretation of protecting pilgrims meaning caring for the sick and wounded in the Holy Land. The Hospitallers were a largely demilitarised order, whose obscure origins predated that of the Templars by some twenty years at least, and should in theory have been the far more attractive for both clergy and laymen to support, yet their reception in Europe was tepid at best. While the Templars toured the continent they were showered with extensive gifts and high profile recruits, yet the Hospitallers remained somewhat side-lined. That was until St Bernard of Clairvaux, the spokesman for the Second Crusade, began to encourage the Hospitallers to respond to increasing aggression by Muslim forces in the east. There was a very clear bias towards supporting institutions that could continue military aggression as a defence of the Crusader states, particularly around the time of the recapture of Edessa by the Muslim war chief Zenghi. The opportunity presented by the military orders was therefore that of the continuation of the Crusader military ideology. It was impossible to separate the two. The Templars and Hospitallers were in every sense embedded in the very idea of embracing both the life of a cleric and of a warrior, the very justification of the Crusade itself.
There were of course plenty of detractors of these orders. To a significant portion of the clergy, the idea of a set of institutions that mirrored religious institutions in many ways and lived under the pretence of monks yet whose members were professional warriors was simply too much of a contradiction to stomach. Christianity was, after all, a religion founded on firmly pacifist ideals. Many believed that the practice of violence was so totally contradictory to the doctrine of the church that the military orders themselves made no fundamental sense. Of course, any criticism of the military orders was also a criticism of Crusading ideology in general. Negative commentaries were therefore unsustainable during this period, and it wouldn’t be until the turn of the century that critical thought on the idea of Crusading in general allowed for the open questioning of having militarised holy orders in the world.
Legacy
The First Crusade set a precedent of armed pilgrimage on a scale that had never been seen before. Prior to this, pilgrimage took on a much different appearance and was reserved exclusively for the more contemplative aspects of devotion. As the centre of the messianic religions, Jerusalem was of course a popular destination for pilgrims of multiple faiths. The prospect appealed to the lowest in society and the most powerful of nobility alike. In the 1040s there was a great explosion in the number of people travelling east to Jerusalem during the 11th century. There were a few reasons why, but one of the more practical reasons was the opening up of Hungary, providing a relatively safer land route to the Holy Land. The very concept of pilgrimage traced its origins back to the official foundation of Christianity in the fourth century. The legacy of the First Crusade would change the way people viewed pilgrimage in the Medieval Age irreversibly; no longer just a journey to reaffirm one’s faith, pilgrimage now brought with it the implied obligation to defend their faith with force wherever necessary.
Protection
After capturing Jerusalem, a feat only accomplishable due to the unwavering tenacity of the soldiers against unimaginable odds, the biggest problem the Crusaders would face was yet to come; actually maintaining control over the region. The Crusaders were foreigners, fatigued beyond all reasonable expectation of rapid recovery and most that survived their ordeals wanted nothing more than to return home. Waves of Crusaders leaving en masse from the Levant left a significant void in the region with very few soldiers left to defend the civilians. Those powerful nobles who did remain were far more interested in their own personal endeavours, creating the Crusader States and the Kingdom of Outremer, which often involved a great deal of political rivalries and in-fighting. Establishing the Principality of Antioch following the prolonged siege left the Normans with a powerful dynastic legacy. This in turn led to a tremendous sense of pride among the Norman nobility, aiding their image of invincibility. Raymond of St Giles, the formidable Count of Toulouse, had apparently gone so far as to swear an oath to never return to his native land, committing himself fully to the pursuit of establishing a new home for himself in the Levant by dominating the County of Tripoli to the south of his rival’s territory around Antioch. This was presented in such a manner as to suggest that he was committing himself to the Crusader cause, but in reality this manifested in a bitter rivalry with the equally powerful Bohemond as they struggled against each other over their own personal fortunes. With the establishment of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the County of Edessa to the north of Antioch by Baldwin I, the Crusaders were left with powerful territories that allowed them to maintain nominal control of the coastline of the Levant. While it was in the interests of these noblemen to defend their lands, the deeply strained relationships between the lords had been fractured beyond immediate repair, resulting in a political landscape similar to the one they had left behind in France; isolated nobles pursuing their own personal goals. This lack of cohesive unity led to the goal of the Crusades, capturing Jerusalem and establishing a clear route for pilgrims to reach the Holy sites, being somewhat forgotten. In order to provide a greater degree of protection for the pilgrims the Crusaders would need to establish soldiers who would dedicate themselves to the selfless cause of the protection for objective motivations.
It is therefore prudent to examine the origins and functions of the Knights Templar. The Templars began rather humbly with 9 knights, under the first Grand Master Hugh of Payns, taking vows before the Patriarch of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1119 and calling themselves Pauperes Commilitiones Christi. Their primary objective was to defend the pilgrims travelling the dangerous roads of the Holy Land, a role that was sorely needed at a time when the disunity of the surrounding Muslim forces was giving way to a more concentrated effort to remove the Latin Christians for their former lands. With the defeat of the Crusade of 1101 it was made crystal clear that despite nominal control of the Holy Land the Latin Christians were far from mastering the entire region and were still very much at a disadvantage from a military point of view. The Hospitallers, whose origins were even more humble than that of the Templars (the details of which were largely lost even to contemporaries) but may trace their roots merchants from Amalfi around the late eleventh century. Their goal was protection of the pilgrims by providing medical care, a prospect that drew tepid response from people in Europe but whose exploits drew a great deal of respect for those living in Outremer. Both of these orders served to provide the solution to the problem of disinterested private warlords looking to their own problems rather than serving the overall goal of protecting the faithful. By having independent institutions dedicate themselves purely to the cause of protection the Church could recruit people directly for that very specific cause and provided a way to bypass much of the internal struggling for power in the Holy Land that served to merely distract from their original goals. Towards the late 1130s and early 1140s the Church was beginning to take more and more interest in the military role that these orders could potentially take in the Holy Land. St Bernard may have even intervened to try and convince the Hospitallers, an order initially created for medical aid, to militarise even further in order to take a more active role in protecting the Crusader States. There is some evidence that the Hospitallers were increasingly militarised throughout the early 1130s, but intervention from the Church indicates that a great deal of interest was growing among the clergy for using the orders as a much more substantial portion of their recruitment strategy.
Protection was, after all, at the heart of the recruitment campaign for the Second Crusade. The First Crusade was not in response to any immediate threat to Christendom, but the creation of the Kingdom of Outremer had effectively expanded the borders of the Latin Christian world to include regions that were unstable and surrounded by hostile forces. The catalyst for the Second Crusade was the capture of Edessa, and it was therefore telling that this new campaign would be heavily assisted by the Templars who had been charged with the protection of the region for a considerable amount of time by that point. This is best seen when on April 27th 1147 King Louis VII and Pope Eugenius III gathered at the Paris Temple, along with 130 Templar knights, where it was agreed that the Templars would accompany the French forces to the East where they would prove themselves invaluable to the Crusader effort. Recruitment was no longer focused on the idea of conquest, instead the protection of the newly acquired territories was the primary reason for the church to try and recruit new soldiers. Edessa may have fallen and therefore needed recapture, but the fallen state was considered a lost part of Christendom rather than a new region to be conquered. To that end, it was the military orders who were used to help facilitate their new recruitment strategy in France, intertwining them directly with the French monarchy in order to maximise their symbolic, as well as literal, importance to the entire campaign.
Public Image
Redemption was a powerful motivation for those around the time of the First Crusade. The remission of sin didn’t merely attract the righteous, but also those who had lived unrighteous lives and wished for a path to acceptance in society. While modern understandings have shown the opposite to be true, the People’s Crusade was thought to be almost exclusively filled with the sinners. Writing in the mid twelfth century Crusade Albert of Aachen’s account provides a great deal of information as to the public perception of the People’s Crusade as it had evolved over time. He characterised the entire campaign as being filled with thieves, adulterers, murderers, and thousands of sinners. It was very unlikely that Urban II intended for these people to join in what was clearly meant to be a military expedition, but his recruitment strategy had nonetheless brought tens of thousands together in the name of redeeming themselves through service to their faith. The reality seems to be that plenty of knights did accompany the People’s Crusade and that especially among the commanders there was some sense of professionalism, but this campaign was still seen as less legitimate than the contingents led by the Latin Princes from Europe. With the narrative being presented that every villain and religiously charged zealot banded together with lesser knights and aristocrats, it seemed only natural that this poorly planned administrative nightmare ended in total failure and the almost complete annihilation of the entire contingent outside Nicaea.
The legacy of the Crusades included a wealth of literature detailing the exploits of the various key members. For many, such as Bohemond who went to great lengths to make sure he was portrayed as the central protagonist of the campaign, the public image of their actions left them with a great sense of importance back in Europe as civilians read about the great deeds of the Crusaders. But not everyone who swore an oath to reach Jerusalem fulfilled their obligation to the Crusade. Crusaders were returning home as early as late 1096. Notably, Hugh of Vermandois never returned to his army after being despatched to Constantinople in July of 1098, and Stephen of Blois (son in-law to King William I of England) abandoned the siege of Antioch, exchanging honour for public ridicule. Stephen of Blois was a particular target of ridicule in the public imagination due to his return home without having even been properly defeated in the Holy Land first. To be fair to Stephen, the physical and mental toll that the expedition must have taken on not just himself but his entire contingent would have more than justified his decision to choose life over honour, with the realisation that Antioch would be no easy feat to conquer acting as the catalyst for his departure. Stephen’s letters home betray a great deal of ignorance about their situation in the Holy Land. He wrote that after the capture of Nicaea that he believed that the Crusaders would be able to reach Jerusalem in fewer than five weeks, with Antioch serving as only a hindrance. It is clear that Stephen, and many others in his situation, genuinely did mean to fulfil their obligations to reach Jerusalem, but intention wasn’t enough to the Latin Christians. The ridicule and humiliation they faced back home empty handed culminated in Pope Paschal II threatening to excommunicate anyone who had failed to live up to their oaths, and in this regard the concept of redemption was being used as a powerful tool to recruit further soldiers for the Crusader effort. In a strange twist of Crusader ideology, spirituality was being used as a potential punishment rather than a reward. The threat of lifelong excommunication from the Church was the final push to very publically force people to make the journey to the Holy Land. This was a thoroughly unsustainable strategy, however, since threatening soldiers with the antithesis of the very reward they were initially promised hardly left the Crusaders with a sense of righteousness to guide them to victory. The poor organisation, hasty assembly and demoralised spirit within the ranks of Crusaders travelling to Jerusalem in 1101 were all likely factors contributing to their ultimate defeat before even reaching the Holy Land, and thus never being able to properly fulfil their vows.
Redemption was not a subject of major concern for subsequent crusader recruitment. Both incentive to seek it out and disincentive to refuse had been explored and had yielded deeply unsatisfactory results. This reflected the general trend in the recruitment strategy; that taking the cross for personal reasons rather than for the overall goal of furthering the Crusader goals were increasingly falling outside the realm of acceptable practices at this time.
The public image created in the aftermath of the First Crusade was vital to the continued fame of many of the Latin Princes. Most of these men had accounts of their actions written from within their own entourage to ensure that the best possible version of themselves was being recorded and presented to witnesses back home. Since literacy wasn’t very widespread at the period, it was important for those who could read and write, namely the Church, to read accounts that presented the Crusaders in a spiritual sense as well as likening them to the fantastical warriors of old. Robert of Rheims placed a particular degree of emphasis on the legacy of the Franks from the foundation of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne in order to entice soldiers to live up to the actions of their forbears. In many ways this invocation of past glory went deeper than the superficial motivation to call soldiers to arms, but a direct reference to the establishment of the relationship between the Frankish military and the Papacy back in the late eighth century. With the withdrawal of support for the Pope by the Byzantines, Pope Leo III was forced to seek protection from another powerful faction, culminating in the crowning of Charlemagne on Christmas day in 800 AD. There is some indication that Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor somewhat spontaneously, and may have actually caused some friction with the Emperor as it possibly indicated that his office was somehow secondary to the Pope. Irrespective of Leo III’s intentions he had cemented a relationship between the highest secular and religious offices in Catholic Europe, and this relationship was apparently used by Urban II close to three hundred years later as a primary factor in his call to arms for the First Crusade. The powerful image of reciprocated gift giving between those two men was hugely influential to many and likely helped to motivate many noblemen to take the cross so that they might live up to the legacy of their famous ancestors, but it may have also established a sense of obligation for the Christian knights that they would have been able to recognise as similar to their own feudal bonds of vassalage.
After the First Crusade ended the use of imagery to recruit soldiers to further the cause became less about cultural memory and more about the contemporary world and the public image of particular individuals. Furthermore, literature wasn’t the only means of presenting the power and legacy to a wider audience. Jerusalem itself was typically the focal point for a great deal of the artistic imagery following the conquest of the city. Money was a powerful tool of propaganda in the Medieval world due in large part to the fact that while not everyone could read, most people handled money at some point in their lives, even if it was as irregular as only a few times a year to pay rents. The counts of Boulogne were apparently well aware of this fact and began to mint coins that displayed a lion’s head above city walls of Jerusalem. A powerful image that showed all of their people that the Counts had taken part in the almighty capture of the holy city. An image that could be handled on a daily basis for some people, or a more revered piece of precious metal for others. The town of Le Puy, from which Adhemar (Pope Urban II’s representative for the First Crusade) hailed, was an important point from which much of the Crusader centric art was produced and seen. There were many paintings produced showing Jesus arriving at Jerusalem, possibly doing service to Adhemar whose part in the Crusade was great, despite his death during the siege of Antioch. The influence of public image simply cannot be understated. It was used to great effect to gather support and the artistic renditions of the First Crusade was paramount to maintaining the popular support for the ideology throughout the period by characterising both the struggle and the success of the warriors portrayed.
The consequences of the literary sources can be best displayed through the actions Bohemond, a man obsessed with the way in which others saw him, to create a lasting public legacy across the entirety of Christendom. His work serves as a particularly demonstrative case study for this topic. The extent to which he manipulated the narrative of the First Crusade culminated in the creation of the Gesta, whose narrative was replicated in countless other works and has left historians with a skewed version of reality that still persists to this day. The context behind the creation of the Gesta is very important to take into account so it warrants discussion. Having failed to establish himself to his own expectations in Italy Bohemond was almost certainly trying to live up to the legacy of his father by using the Crusade as a pretext to carve out his own territory in the Levant and was prepared to go to any length to ensure that happened. As they crossed through Constantinople into Turkey all of the Latin Princes had been compelled to swear an vows to return all former properties to the Byzantine Empire, the Crusaders were bound by oath to hand over and conquered territory to the Emperor. This caused a great deal of dissension among the Crusaders, particularly after the capture of Nicaea when the Emperor’s troops appeared to make sure the city was immediately handed over the city, causing a great deal of resentment at the lack of compensation for their efforts. The Gesta refrains from directly challenging the authority of the Emperor to seize the city back from the crusaders, but the account goes to great length to glorify the actions of the Crusaders, going so far as to describe those who died in the pursuit of the city as ‘receiv[ing] martyrdom’, while the Emperor’s role is summarised in a single concluding sentence. By the time the Crusaders reached the city of Antioch, relations with the Empire had degraded so significantly, especially among the Southern Italian Normans, that Bohemond was resorting to using subterfuge to take the city for himself despite the oath he had sworn at Constantinople. The version of events presented to us in the Gesta states that Tacitus, the Emperor’s representative who was present at the siege of Antioch, abandoned the Crusaders. The significance of this is that the actions of the Empire (presented through Tacitus) was used as justification of Bohemond seizing the city for himself, stating that the Empire had broken the vow before he had, thus allowing him to act against his vows. The deepening rift between the Latin Christians and the Byzantine Empire was perfectly characterised in this controversy, as many Crusaders were expressing their despair at the fact that they had been abandoned by the Empire and left to fend for themselves. But this is simply the narrative we are told by the very man who had designs to capture the city for himself, an account which was only written down after he had secured the Principality. The following events, however, were the most influential to the legacy of Bohemond. In 1100 he was captured and imprisoned by the Turks, where stayed in captivity until 1103. During this time, the Gesta was being written by an anonymous author from within his entourage and was completed by the time he was released back to Antioch. At this point, Bohemond had resolved to return to Europe and spread his propaganda in a direct attempt to galvanise the European knights to embark on a personal campaign against the Byzantines, using the Gesta as the primary tool of recruitment. His propaganda was apparently so successful that according to the Historia Belli Sacri, an anonymous chronicle written around the 1130s, Bohemond’s image had grown to such an extent that upon his return to Italy he was already so famous people were flocking to him to see the many relics he had brought with him, including Kerbogha’s (the warlord who attempted to defeat the Crusader army outside of Antioch) own personal tent. The overwhelming support for Bohemond’s recruitment campaign was unprecedented at the time, with king Henry I of England going so far as to ban him from setting foot in his kingdom out of fear that he would attract too many knights away since Henry needed warriors for his own war with his brother, Duke Robert of Normandy (himself a major participant in the First Crusade). Even a conservative estimate put forward by William of Tyre claimed that as many as five thousand horsemen and forty thousand foot soldiers flocked to Bohemond’s banners for his campaign against the Byzantines. But the influence of Bohemond’s public image went far beyond the immediate consequences of his own lifetime. It has been noted that King Louis VII was reading a great deal of literature around his coronation, and would then go on to fully embrace Crusader ideals by leading a contingent of Franks to Jerusalem. Given that the majority of Crusader narratives not only drew inspiration from the Gesta but took direct sections from it to produce their own, heavily skewed version of events, it would not be inaccurate to state that Bohemond’s legacy directly influenced the recruitment of the Frankish king to the Second Crusade.
Affinity
Western society in this period relied heavily on the capitalisation of tangible relationships between those with power and influence, particularly with regards to recruiting soldiers. Lordship entailed military prowess, inherited wealth and position, personal honour and charisma and the relationships between peers and subordinates. Getting all of these aspects to work together was a chronic problem for many Barons in this period. The outcome of these centralised units of power was frequently instances of seigneurial violence, manifesting in almost constant feuding in certain regions of France. Violence existed in a peculiar double state in the medieval world. On the one hand society denounced the excess of violence, particularly with regards to violence against the innocent non-combatants, but on the other violence was used to legitimise the purpose of knights. Violence was the manifestation of noble prowess with weapons and the financial power to afford the best equipment to conduct war. It was, in a sense, the state of ultimate masculine power in the medieval period. It was previously believed that this form of violence represented a period of anarchy as Western Europe transitioned from the strength of the monarchy under the Carolingian dynasty devolved into the smaller, more private, power bases that acted in their own interests rather than for the good of wider society. This perception has largely been founded on the understanding of Feudalism being integrated into society on in an almost revolutionary manner, but this has been thoroughly refuted over time. Feudalism was more of an evolution of the status quo, rather than a revolution. What remains true, however, was the fact that the influence of baronial powers extended towards an entire affinity that remained loyal to the centre and therefore in order to muster soldiers one needed to in some way extend their affinity by forming new familial ties.
Relationships
By far the most effective way to extend one’s affinity was through the use of marriages. This created new familial ties that could be used to further influence potentially powerful baronial powers. For the First Crusade, this was a fairly underutilised manner of recruiting people since the narrative appealed to the more general sense of fidelity to their faith. As the period progressed familial ties and relationships between the powerful members of society became a much more frequently sought after method of bringing new forces into the Crusader movement. The sheer scope of the effects to which these ties could be used is best seen in the case of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem’s attempt to find a match for his daughter. Without a son, Baldwin was forced to appeal to the nobility of Western Europe in order to secure his dynasty as monarchs of the Holy city in the 1120s. At this time the Templars, who had already established themselves in the Levant, were seeking further support in Europe as well, and so it was to Hugh of Payns, the Grand Master of the Templars, that Baldwin II charged with helping to spread awareness of the situation in the Levant in order to ease the mediating of the marriage negotiations with Count Fulk V of Anjou’s eldest son. The reason for appealing to the Templars went even further than convenience, however, since Fulk was one of the first major noblemen to grant a great deal of money to serve as an annual income to the Templars, so the two groups already had an established relationship based on the exchange of gifts, a vital aspect of Feudal ties. Concerned with the success of establishing the Templars in Europe, Baldwin helped facilitate their arrival by writing to the Abbot of Clairvaux, St Bernard. Bernard would of course become the central spokesperson for the recruitment of the Second Crusade, styling himself after Urban II to a greater degree than Pope Eugenius III. It was also around this time that Bernard was beginning to form an interest in the concept of holy warriors with a particular focus on the military orders. Bernard always had a fascination with the Templars, perhaps because his mother’s brother was Andre of Montbard, one of the original 9 knights who formed the Templars. Also of important note at this time were the actions of Hugh, the Count of Champagne and whose vassal was Hugh the Grand Master of the Templars. The Count travelled to the Holy Land three times in his life, and on the third time he in 1125 he renounced his properties and joined the Templars, one of the first high profile recruitments from Europe. The relevancy of the Count in this instance is that the Abbey of Clairvaux, Bernard’s own seat, was on lands granted by the Counts of Champagne, and when Hugh of Payns arrived in France Bernard greeted him by hosting a great council in Troyes along with Theobold, the new Count, in which he praised the concept of the Templars very publically and spread awareness for their cause. In one instance of the King of Jerusalem trying to extend his own family and secure his legacy Baldwin had solidified the strongest ties available to the Feudal powers between the Templars and the nobility of Western Europe and created a relationship with the senior clergy that would result in the inspiration for the Second Crusade.
Despite the significantly increased focus on the use of affinity to the feudal lords to recruit soldiers, the Second Crusade was still a disaster. Historians have been cautious to suggest any sense of inevitability to the failure of the Crusade since interpretations of the campaign are often mired by the knowledge of its ultimate fate, yet what cannot be denied is that much of the recruitment campaign was still plagued by many of the problems present in the First Crusade. As with the early Crusaders the Second Crusade was severely limited by the presence of a mob of pilgrims without the equipment, training or even intention of being able to fight, and thus rendering the combat effectiveness of the army to a much lower level than it should have been. This mob of non-combatants was apparently causing so much trouble for the French contingent that king Louis VII tried to compel those who couldn’t fight to leave and instead go to the ships that were following the army along Asia Minor. Even with the greater emphasis on using familial ties to recruit soldiers, the fact that the vast numbers of non-combatants were still accompanying the main body of the Crusade betrays a lack of understanding about the fatal flaws of the First Crusade; namely that allowing large numbers of unarmed pilgrims to hinder the army caused intense problems for the progress of the army. Though King Louis tried to remove many of these non-combatants, the problem persisted right up to the upper authority of the Crusaders. Many of the leaders brought their wives and entire families with them, including a large number of clerks and other officials from the French court which served little purpose other than to maintain King Louis’ sense of feudal authority. This issue persisted through much of the affinities of the commanders present on the Second Crusade, showing that even those in authority were willing to ignore the obvious problems with previous Crusades. No genuinely concerted effort was made to prevent these pilgrims from joining the Crusade, an ultimately damaging flaw that continued to plague the campaigns until after the disaster of the Second Crusade. Within the Gesta Henrici Secundi we are told that England began to charge people with serious legal repercussions for joining future Crusades without expressed permission from those churchmen who were in command of recruitment. This is stated as being a direct consequence of the failure of the Second Crusade.
The other problem with attempting to recruit people down the traditional bonds of family and affinity was the fact that while the French nobility had plenty of ties to the Kingdom of Outremer, the German aristocrats had little in the way of familial connections to the East. There has even been some suggestion that the inclusion of the German contingents under King Conrad III was a rather surprising turn of events that wasn’t initially planned for. Perhaps one might consider this as some evidence that there was further focus on feudal ties as a manner of recruiting, but the understanding that the German contingent was recruited against the initial wishes of the Pope are based on a somewhat spurious argument presented by an Austrian named Harold Cosak in 1914 and isn’t considered a prevailing view among historians (despite Jonathan Phillips’ insistent assertions to the contrary). German nobility did not have established connection to the Holy Land to the same extent as the French nobility. This tradition of the somewhat apathetic reception to the Crusades by the Germans went back to the Council of Clermont where as few as three German Bishops were present and remained loyal to the Pope. Despite a lack of ties with Outremer, the Germans did have a long history of taking part in various pilgrimages to the Holy Land (and incidentally were represented in the 1101 Crusade by Duke Welf of Bavaria), the largest of which took place in 1064. Some seven to twelve thousand Germans took part in a pilgrimage over 1064/5, an influential event that no doubt set a precedent of the mass movement of pilgrims across Europe, as opposed to the traditional style of pilgrimages that were a more private or personal affair. This strong tradition of pilgrimage from the German nobility continued after the First Crusade, with even Conrad III travelling to the Holy Land in 1124. As a veteran battle commander with experience in the Holy Land, Conrad III was clearly an extremely influential figure to be recruited for the Second Crusade, and yet he was brought into the fold without exploiting the feudal ties of Western Europe. This is significant since the contingent led by Conrad is often said to have been larger than that of the forces led by Louis VII. So much so that in some Eastern sources Conrad is regarded as being the principal leader of the Western forces for the duration of the Second Crusade. The significance of this is that the greater part of the military forces, and if believed the principle commander, consisted of Germans rather than the French and therefore the majority of the warriors recruited were done so by means other than the capitalisation of noble affinities. If Cosak’s argument is correct then King Conrad III joined the Crusade against Pope Eugenius III’s wishes then he certainly wasn’t compelled by the church, and if not then it is still abundantly clear that the recruitment of the Germans had nothing to do with traditional military recruitment at this time and seemed to be more about finally including a significant German presence in the legacy of the Crusades.
Sponsorships
As has been mentioned previously, the prolonged military campaigns that were required of the Crusades demanded vast sums of money that far outweighed the average annual income of a typical knight several times over. Stephen Morillo described how ‘Medieval Europe has rightly been called a society organised for war’, yet this was brought with it additional complications for organising larger armies. This problem explains the small scale and somewhat private nature of a lot of the conflicts at this time. States often struggled to muster and maintain large enough armies to engage in campaigns of long term conquest, and therefore only the smaller scale ambitions of local lords could be effectively sought after. Andrew Cowell characterised the ultimate goal of the medieval aristocrat was to increase his own standing in the reciprocal nature of exchange that governed social standing. The aristocrat effectively had three main methods of doing this; increase one’s own financial security through the acquisition of further resources (typically landed estates). Two; increase the productivity of existing resources, perhaps making the estates more efficient in their production. Three; the destruction of rival aristocrats’ resources in order to lower their ability to reciprocate gifts and thus leave them in a position of dependence on others for financial security. Since the knights were to be away from their lands for such a long time the second option clearly wasn’t viable, and as to the third the Crusade united many neighbours against a foreign enemy, thus rendering any destruction of property irrelevant to social standing back home except for pursuing personal glory through conquest. Financing these Crusades was therefore paramount to maintaining effectiveness throughout the entire campaign; an extremely difficult task given that the primary means of generating cash for the landed gentry was by extracting rents from demesne lands rather than being paid wages for their military service. Foraging and looting could only go so far to maintain an army and proved to be extremely dangerous for anyone who left the main body of the army in search of resources. The total failure of the People’s Crusade prior to the First Crusade is often attributed to the fact that the army descended into plundering the countryside of Asia Minor almost immediately. Albert of Aachen suggested that they were plundering the countryside outside of the relative safety of their military camps and even in spite of the fact that they were plentifully supplied at the time, provoking a reaction from the local forces prematurely. This problem persisted for quite a long time after the First Crusade. Within the Gesta, a stylised piece of pro crusader propaganda, mentions that many pilgrims died of starvation as early as the siege of Nicaea due to a lack of resources! It is mentioned in several contemporary sources that the Crusaders arriving in Asia Minor in 1101 completely failed to take into account that the countryside had been devastated by previous campaigns and thus almost immediately ran out of food, forcing them to overextend themselves and led to their destruction outside of Ereghli. Clearly, financing future Crusades would need to be more carefully calculated, and therefore there was a greater emphasis on those with the greater means sponsoring Crusaders, typically by granting gifts in the form of cash and estates to those who had vowed to take the cross. As in many other cases, examining the reception of the military orders reveals a great deal of insight into this particular issue.
In order to raise capital for the First Crusade it has been well documented that many knights mortgaged their lands to the church. The liquidation of landed assets on a large scale may have provided some financial support in the short run, but with Crusading fervour quickly spreading the market for land plummeted and the price of the necessary equipment rapidly increased. This of course seriously limited the financial power of the poorer soldiers within the army, and thus forced many to look out for their own financial interests during a lengthy campaign. By sponsoring many of the military orders it was possible for the nobility to directly aid the gathering of resources in preparation for later Crusades without forcing prospective recruits to desperately seek out capital in a flooded market that was stacked against their interests. Of course, many knights still continued to sell their properties to raise money for the campaign; Theoderic of Flanders ended up selling a portion of his property to the monks of Clairvaux in order to finance the expedition. Interestingly he specifically mentions that he is essentially buying the opportunity to seek the remission of his sins by going on the Crusade. Sponsorship by the senior nobility was in a certain sense an evolution of this concept and took the idea of relationships based on the exchange of gifts into a more abstract and less personal concept. Gifts were given in exchange for military service, but instead of a traditional liege and vassal relationship whereby a vassal might be given a fief for service to their liege, the recipients would instead be fighting for the Crusader cause. Stephen Morillo explained that the nature of a feudal society carried with it some expectation, at least on a basic social level, military service in exchange for a fief, and this new development was thus an extension of that idea.
The Counts of Champagne had always been close to the Templars from an early stage, granting gifts of gold and properties from their lands to the order so that they might continue to operate in both the East and the West. It has been noted that Hugh de Payns was a vassal to the Counts of Champagne, but gifts to the order went far beyond the immediate affinity of the Templars. Perhaps the most dramatic gifts given to the order was King Alfonso I of Aragon leaving his entire kingdom to be split between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Templars and the Hospitallers, no doubt much to the chagrin of the many other claimants and subjects. The particular interest of the Spanish nobility for the military orders may have stemmed from the fact that Spain was still fairly loosely controlled at that point and required a great deal of military strength to fight off constant attacks from the Muslim forces of the Moors. Other monarchs also gifted large properties to the Templars. King Stephen and Empress Matilda also granted substantial gifts to the Templars (despite being engaged in a brutal civil war in England at the time), and the eventual successor Henry I even granted the Templars a chapter house on Chancery Lane. The significance of being granted such gifts by monarchs went far beyond the immediate financial benefits that being able to exploit landed estates allowed for. Royal patronage of this kind either implicitly, or in some cases explicitly, carried with it the official and very public endorsement of those monarchs. Sponsorship from the highest levels of secular authority in this manner was therefore not simply funding the Crusader movement but was also spreading the influence throughout the nobility; after all once the king has endorsed something his followers would be quick to follow suit. The donations of lands also helped to spread the influence of the military orders on a more local basis since many of the labourers in the agricultural sector would now be directly working for these orders. These lands provided not just a financial incentive to keep fighting for their core ideals but allowed them to project a sense of traditional feudal power in Europe, giving them legitimisation and attracting further followers.
In real terms, however, sponsoring the military orders, or any other Crusaders, didn’t really amount to much of an increase in the effectiveness of the recruitment strategy. Relying on the military orders to distribute funds appropriately in order to maintain the financial security of an entire campaign was rather inefficient, and tended to focus more on the individual needs rather than a wider recruitment strategy that was becoming more of a focus towards the beginning of the Second Crusade. Simply gifting money to a military order didn’t immediately serve the overall goals of the Crusade since it relied on the goodwill of an independent body of warriors to choose to serve those very same goals. By removing the immediate requirement of military service to the donor, a great degree of direction was taken out of the relationship. It is true that the majority of the Templars’ work in Western Europe was by providing financial services that would indeed prove extremely useful by establishing an international banking system to allow noblemen to deposit money at home and withdraw it later on the campaign, but to the majority of Christian warriors on the Second Crusade such an institution was beyond their own financial interests. After all, what use did the poor pilgrims that swamped the main body of the Crusaders have of an international banking system? Without a centralised body taking charge for the distribution of resources for the entire army than all of the donations from Europe meant very little to the average soldier in either the French or German contingents. Without dealing with the lack of infrastructure to constantly supply such a large force then the Crusaders armies were still left with the significant problem of how to maintain discipline and order within the army, let alone simply feed the soldiers for long enough to actually reach their destination and fight. This problem traces back to the very simple issue that persisted and was not dealt with in this period; a lack of central authority to properly maintain a large medieval army.
Conclusion
The propaganda of the Crusades may well have irreparably destroyed much of the factual record of the holy wars, but they have left us with a clear image of the manner in which people were convinced to leave their homes and their families to fight a lengthy campaign in a foreign land. Many of these written accounts present a romanticised view of the wars, particularly those associated with the First Crusade. Urban II’s call to arms has been recorded as a significant moment in the very identity of the Franks and solidified their place as the true heirs to Christ’s kingdom in the eyes of the contemporaries. This was done initially by presenting the many opportunities that a soldiers could strive for by leaving their own lands and pursuing a goal that could serve the entirety of their faith. This message promised the potential Crusaders all of the material wealth they could wish for and the ultimate reward for a Christian warrior, the absolution of their souls by fighting for the church. This appealed to the individual wants of the knights of Europe. A universal goal might be achieved by their combined efforts, but overall this narrative served to entice people based on what they wanted, rather than presenting a universal doctrine that served the wants of the Crusader ideology, and therein lay the ultimate short sightedness of the narrative. Without structure, centralised command and a singular goal that went beyond the initial capture of Jerusalem the First Crusade may have conquered significant portions of the Holy Land but it ultimately failed to create a solid foundation that could be sustainably managed by the few Crusaders who remained. A narrative of reward and redemption for anyone who took the cross caused a rush of those who wished to join a pilgrimage, directly contrary to the desires of Emperor Alexios and to any realistic notion of a disciplined force of warriors to conduct a lengthy campaign of conquest. The People’s Crusade was the perfect example of why this narrative was so flawed. This campaign has been remembered as being filled with common criminals, an idea that was stressed in many of the contemporary sources. The campaign was regarded as somehow less legitimate than the official forces within the main body of the campaign, yet in real terms the ideology that drove both armies was more or less the same. These pilgrims were recruited because they were introduced to the idea of a mass armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land and wished to take advantage of the wave of Crusader fervour spreading throughout the continent. The People’s Crusade perfectly encapsulated the problems with the initial message; that it appealed to the individuals, presented what could be gained for the participants and lacked effective and experienced leadership. Subsequent recruitment strategies would take steps to amend these issues, but none would be overly successful. The more popular method of recruitment came to capitalise on the legacy of the Crusaders, showing how their success proved that further success was possible and that all mistakes could be corrected with further campaigns to defend and protect the new Latin Christian possessions in the East. This too, however, failed to properly organise an army for the Crusader cause. What should have been the ultimate focus of those recruiting soldiers for the Crusaders was through the traditional channels of recruitment in Europe; the bonds of vassalage that established the basic foundation of a feudalistic society, yet such a focus was seen as less important than the spiritual justification of their actions. Such a concern for justification prevented them from adequately managing who could join the Crusades, since a pilgrimage with a sense of exclusivity is almost a contradiction in terms; after all this might suggest that spirituality was somehow reserved for only the chosen few, directly challenging the messages of the Bible.
Establishing the Military Orders did go some way to addressing these problems. These independent bodies of soldiers allowed for people to focus their interests and donate directly to an overall Crusader cause, rather than appealing to the wants of the individual. The senior clergy in particular found these orders to be of great use when recruiting soldiers for the Second Crusade. Yet even these orders had their problems. The immense power and wealth granted to these orders left many to question their legitimacy. Their independence from secular authority and wealth made them tools of the church, and they were unable to influence the secular powers in organising their own recruitment strategies, leaving the Kings Louis VII and Conrad as separate powers. The Military Orders may have, to some at least, have represented the ultimate evolution in Christian knighthood, encompassing both the martial power of the European warrior classes and the complex spirituality of the clergy, but they were not the authority for the Crusades. In fact, it is difficult to find a single figure to represent the head of the campaigns, and that was the ultimate flaw. The Crusades lacked sufficient leadership to manage such a complicated ideology, and that was their ultimate undoing so many times over.
Bibliography – Secondary Sources
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The Money Trail 