Free The First Crusade by Thomas Asbridge Page B

without the agreement of their wives'. At this point, Urban effectively passed the buck. Having lost full, centralised control of the crusade, he began to demand, rather unrealistically, that local bishops intervene to re-establish order. Many of these possessed neither the ability nor the will to exert such authority, but an even more fundamental problem was that as a sub-species of pilgrimage, the crusade was a penitential act, and thus both voluntary and open to all Christians. The very feature that had made Urban's message so palatable - its packaging within an existing framework of devotional practice - meant that the principle of unrestricted participation was imported into, and imposed upon, the precepts of crusading, making it all but impossible to control recruitment.
    The pope also became concerned that the irresistible allure of the crusade was drawing valuable manpower away from Iberia. He wrote to the Christian nobility of northern Spain, advising them that 'if any of you has made up his mind to go to [the East], it is here instead [in Iberia] that he should try to fulfil his vow, because it is no virtue to rescue Christians from the Saracens in one place, only to expose them to the tyranny and oppression of the Saracens in another'. 8
    Even though Urban had anticipated a warm response to his proposed armed pilgrimage, he was still caught off guard by the full passion of Latin Europe's enthusiasm. By the end of 1096, he had to face up to the stark reality that the crusader army' would be an entirely different creature from that which he had hoped for. The pope had set out to attract recruits from a specific demographic sector: the knightly aristocracy. This was the class within which Urban himself had been raised, whose strengths, aspirations and fears he knew only too well, and although he did not specifically target the Champagne region of his youth, he did demonstrate a more general affinity with his homeland by directing the full force of his initial preaching towards the nobility of France before later broadening his appeal to include the arms-bearers of western Germany, the Low Countries and Italy.
     
     
    THE FIRST CRUSADERS
     

    Urban judged that these knights, termed in Latin milites, possessed of martial prowess, financial resources and an active sense of devotional obligation, offered the best hope of transforming his crusading ideal into a living reality. Above all else, he knew that for the expedition to succeed it would need to be powered by a ferocious fighting force, and knights, the elite warriors of eleventh-century Europe, were the obvious choice. Urban himself explained in a letter that we were stimulating the minds of knights to go on this expedition, since they might be able to restrain the savagery of the Muslims by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom'. 9
     
    Knights in the eleventh century
     
    Skilled as they were, knights were not part of a full-time standing army They were soldiers, but they also had other roles, as lords or vassals, landholders and farmers. In any one year they might expect to be engaged in warfare for no more than a few months, and even then not necessarily by fighting in a familiar, established network, group or formation. We should not envisage the knights of the First Crusade as grand, chivalric warriors, riding into battle astride giant warhorses, clad in splendid Gothic plate armour and wielding massive lances. It would be more than a century before advancements in technology and custom combined to bring the concept and practice of medieval knighthood into full flower. But, for all this, the knights of the eleventh century were the best fighters available to Pope Urban.
     
    In 1095, the knightly class was still at an embryonic stage of development. The rising costs associated with functioning as a knight, primarily related to equipment and training, made it increasingly difficult for men of less affluent backgrounds to operate as