In many ways, Urban’s plan was brilliantly executed: key individuals willing to join the expedition were targeted so that their participation would act as a catalyst for others. As a result, the Pope inspired a mass movement of knights. Enormous effort went into disseminating the call to arms and making the necessary arrangements to translate the massive response into action. But some aspects of Urban’s plans were still vague. The question of the leadership of the expedition was confused, with several figures under the impression that they were commander-in-chief of the massed Crusader army. To start with at least, Urban regarded the bishop of Le Puy as his representative to lead the expedition.49 Others, though, thought of themselves in this role. Raymond of Toulouse, for one, referred to himself as the leader of the Christian knights setting out to capture Jerusalem.50 Hugh of Vermandois also had a high estimation of his own status and carried with him a papal banner, suggesting that he was Urban’s representative on the expedition.51 Some considered Stephen of Blois to be the ‘head and leader of the council of the whole army’;52 he himself certainly thought this was the case, writing back to his wife Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, that his fellow princes had chosen him to be commander of the entire force.53
In reality, the leadership evolved during the course of the difficult journey east. And while there is something to be said for the idea that Urban hedged his bets, avoiding to disabuse the competing egos of some of Europe’s most powerful men of their belief that they were his representatives, there was another reason why the issue of overall leadership was not addressed decisively by the Pope: the westerners would come under the command of Alexios I Komnenos when they arrived in Byzantium. Urban, for reasons of tact and strategy, may have been chary about making it explicit, but the truth was that the Byzantine emperor was overseeing operations.
Similarly, while the overarching aims of the Crusade were clear enough – defending the Christian Church in the east, driving back the pagan Turks, and finally reaching Jerusalem – the precise military objectives were left obscure. There was no talk of conquering or occupying the Holy City, let alone holding it in the future. There was no clear plan, for example, of what they would do when they reached Jerusalem. Nor were there any details about which towns, regions and provinces were to be targeted in their fight against the Turks. Again, the explanation for this lay in Constantinople. It was Alexios who was to set the strategic goals: Nicaea, Tarsos, Antioch and other important towns that had fallen to the Turks were the Byzantine priorities – and, at least to start with, these targets would be accepted by the Crusaders when they arrived in Constantinople. In the meantime, the military plans were of secondary importance, and limited significance, to the politically minded Pope.
The emperor’s vision was also fundamental in shaping the recruitment process for the Crusade. Alexios needed military support, rather than goodwill. He needed to attract individuals with fighting experience to take on the Turks, and, accordingly, this was relentlessly stressed by the Pope. As one contemporary cleric emphasised: ‘I am in a position to know, as one who heard with his own ears the words of the Lord Pope Urban, when he at once urged laymen to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and at the same time, prohibited monks from doing so.’54 He forbade ‘those unsuited to battle’ to take part in the expedition, says another chronicler, ‘because such pilgrims are more of a hindrance than a help, a burden rather than of any practical use’.55
Amid ‘the popular and great arousal of the Christian people’, as one document refers to it, the Pope had to make strenuous efforts to exclude all whose participation would be obstructive.56 He was explicit about this when he wrote to the monks of the monastery of
Vallombrosa in Tuscany in the autumn of 1096: ‘We have heard that some of you want to set out with the knights who are making for Jerusalem with the good intention of liberating Christianity. This is the right kind of sacrifice, but it is planned by the wrong kind of person. For we were stimulating the minds of the knights to go on this expedition, since they might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens and restore the Christians to their former freedom.’57 He said much the same thing when he wrote to the inhabitants of Bologna shortly before this.58
Senior clergy reinforced the message, although not without difficulty. The bishop of Toulouse had to work hard to dissuade Emerias of Alteias, a woman of considerable wealth, from joining the expedition. She was so determined that she had already ‘raised the cross on her right shoulder’, and taken a vow to reach Jerusalem. Very reluctantly she agreed not to make the journey – but only after the bishop made great efforts to convince her that the establishment of a hospice for the poor would be both a more welcome and appropriate gesture.59
Giving Alexios an effective fighting force was important. So too was forming an idea of its size. Logistical arrangements had to be to put in place in Constantinople to receive large numbers of men in a short period of time, and central planning was required to work out how to welcome, provision and guide the westerners as they arrived in Byzantium. This was presumably one reason why the Pope insisted from the very outset that anyone wishing to join the expedition was required to take an oath. At Piacenza, after listening to the Byzantine envoys, ‘Our Lord Pope called upon many to perform this service, to promise by oaths to journey there by God’s will and to bring the emperor the most faithful assistance against the heathen to the limits of their power.’60 This was restated emphatically at Clermont, where Urban emphasised the requirement to declare formally the intention to participate.61 Conversely, those who thought about changing their minds were threatened with terrible consequences, warned that they were turning their back on God: ‘anyone who seeks to turn back having taken the vow shall place the cross on his back between his shoulders ... and is not worthy of me [cf. Matthew 10:38]’.62
There is no evidence to suggest that a formal record was being kept to note how many individuals were preparing to take the cross, and it is unclear if it would have been possible to keep such a tally anyway. Nevertheless, it quickly became obvious that very substantial numbers indeed were committing themselves to taking part. In this respect, then, it was significant that it was Urban himself who was so central to the recruitment of knights in France. On several occasions, the Pope could be found personally taking the oaths of men who were to join the expedition.63 And each time he met leading magnates or preached the Crusade – in places like Limoges, Angers and Le Mans, and in Tours, Nîmes and elsewhere – he could form an idea that huge numbers were clamouring to take part, even if these were difficult to quantify.
The ambitious and optimistic Pope and the beleaguered emperor in Constantinople both hoped for a substantial response to the calls to arms; but neither can have anticipated its extraordinary scale. The Pope’s efforts to follow developments in Spain in the late 1080s and early 1090s had led him to offer incentives not dissimilar to those given to the would-be Crusaders; but this had not provoked a surge in knights heading into the Iberian peninsula.64 The factors that inflamed Europe and opened the floodgates for the First Crusade, by contrast, were Jerusalem on the one hand, and the recognition that reports of the sudden collapse in the east – principally in Asia Minor – were accurate and a real cause for concern, on the other.