God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Urban performed only as the hub of the recruiting wheel. The mechanics of spreading the word capitalized on the networks of ecclesiastical affinity and administrative efficiency developed by the reformist papacy over the previous half-century. Urban authorized local diocesans to preach the cross but probably depended more upon a concentric circle of friends, allies and supporters, such as the archbishop of Lyons. Sympathetic abbots not only preached but used their local influence to encourage lay patrons to take the cross and to exchange property for money or war materials (e.g. pack animals). As religious centres possessed of bullion and cash, monasteries were the chief bankers for the First Crusade. The holy warriors desired their prayers and their capital. The necessary financial outlay on the expedition for each landowner was likely to represent many times his annual revenue, especially as the mid-1090s were times of agricultural depression. The price of sin was incalculable. In some cases monks deliberately – and successfully – touted for trade. Elsewhere, the process was indirect, clergy instilling into the faithful over time the sense of sin which provided the spur to many to take the cross.⁴¹

Beside the complementary efforts of the papally directed and local ecclesiastical apparatus, news of the expedition spread though informal contacts and association. The papal legate to the Anglo-Norman provinces, the abbot of St Bénigne, Dijon, in early 1096 negotiated an agreement between William II of England and his brother Duke Robert of Normandy under which Robert pledged his duchy to William for three years in return for 10,000 silver marks, a massive sum equivalent, it has been speculated, to a quarter of royal income, only available through a heavy land tax. If nothing else, this unpopular levy publicized the crusade. More direct contacts eased publicity. In southern Italy, Bohemund of Taranto apparently only learnt of the crusade from a passing band of French (or possibly Catalan) recruits in June 1096. His ignorance of the momentous events north of the Alps is surprising and, on the face of it, unlikely. Bohemund’s half-brother and nominal overlord, Roger Borsa, was married to the sister of the count of Flanders, who had taken the cross. Bohemund had close links with the pope; between 1089 and 1093 he had entertained Urban twice and had met him on at least two other occasions. His half-brother Guy was prominent in the service of Alexius I, whose attempts to recruit Italian Normans may have intensified after the completion of the Sicilian conquest in 1091–2. The anonymous writer of one of the earliest accounts of the expedition, the Gesta Francorum, perhaps a knight or cleric in Bohemund’s army, may have accurately reflected the situation of the summer of 1096 when he wrote of the widespread rumours of Urban’s message sweeping through ‘all the regions and provinces of the Gauls’.⁴² Even if merely relying on what he later heard from companions on the march, the author hit upon three prime recruiting officers: emulation, the courts of lay nobles and princes, and rumour.