Urban’s own preaching seems to have been highly effective. From the admittedly partial and limited evidence of charters between recruits and monasteries, it has been observed that a ‘high proportion’ of noble recruits came from areas Urban visited or within a couple of days’ ride from his itinerary. His preaching impressed eyewitnesses, and he had an advantage that Gregory VII lacked, in that he himself came from precisely the arms-bearing aristocratic milieu of the French nobility that he sought to exploit, as did his chosen legate, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, a nobleman reputed as an excellent horseman.40 Like many contemporary bishops, Adhemar was evidently almost as at home on a battlefield as in a cathedral, some of his colleagues even donning armour (like Odo, bishop of Bayeux at the battle of Hastings as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry) and wielding maces in deference to the canon law prohibition on clergy spilling blood, a ban that apparently did not include crushing and bruising.
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.
The rapidity of the spread of news of the Jerusalem campaign is attested not only in the literary accounts but in the rate of recruitment itself. Within twelve months of Clermont perhaps as many as 70–80,000 people had already left their homes for the east. The geographical spread was wide but uneven, the bulk of known crusaders coming from a shallow crescent stretching from the Dordogne in the south-west to Flanders in the north-east, covering the Limousin, Poitou, the Loire valley, Maine, the Chartrain, Ile de France and Champagne; there were also significant groupings in Languedoc, Provence, Burgundy, parts of western Germany and in Italy. Enthusiasm for the expedition was not universal. Although support crossed the ideological and political divide between papalists and imperialists, even Henry IV’s constable joining up as well as important imperial vassals such as Godfrey of Bouillon, only a minority even in areas of greatest enthusiasm took the cross. Contemporary chroniclers emphasized the magnitude of the response, which they attributed to the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit or to the potency of rumour. Although reconstruction of the details of how information spread through a semi-literate society is difficult, certain features stand out. The focal points of recruitment were lay courts and households, especially those with close links to monasteries (although this may be a distorted impression caused by the nature of charter evidence); networks of interlaced aristocratic families and, crucially, their dependants – humbler relatives, tenants, household knights and clergy, servants; and towns. Crusading was as much an urban as a rural phenomenon. In both, wealth and status provided necessities and incentives. Just as the castellan, seigneur or count were pivotal in raising the countryside, so the ‘better sort’ (meliores), as a Genoese observer of 1096 put it, gave the lead in towns and cities.43 The expedition inspired by Urban’s preaching was not assembled at random, but followed the contours of a society dominated by wealthy lords, connected by bonds of family, obedience, locality, obligation, employment and commerce. A rural/urban divide is misleading. Many influential monasteries were situated within or just outside major urban centres; lords had rights over markets and, in areas of developed urban life, such as north Italy or Flanders, town and country were mutually bound together socially and economically as well as politically. Although managing to sell or pledge most of his properties to raise money, Godfrey of Bouillon also extorted 1,000 silver pieces from the Jewish communities of Cologne and Mainz to fund his campaign. Gossip and rumours thrive when people are in close contact; ceremonies exert maximum effect if witnessed. The success of recruitment in 1095–6 relied on wealth, social order and mobility, attributes of an underlying prosperity, as well as on skilful manipulation of cultural habits of violence and spiritual fears of damnation.