Free A History of the Crusades by Jonathan Riley-Smith Page A

population concentrations and the finitenumber of preachers that were available. They went, inevitably, to places where a good turn-out could be expected. In their preaching they were assisted by the secular clergy, who were sent advance notice that the friar intended to preach on a particular day at a specified place. Ecclesiastical censure was threatened to compel both the parish clergy and their flocks to attend. If this was the stick, the carrot took the form of partial indulgence granted to those attending sermons. This was first made available by Innocent III. The number of days of remitted penance had risen to a maximum of one year and forty days by the end of the thirteenth century.
    The drive to intensify the local preaching effort was paralleled by developments in the art of crusade preaching itself. Most of the themes used by popes, bishops, and friars alike remained much the same from Clermont onwards, not surprisingly. But from the later twelfth century preaching evolved quite profoundly, particularly with a new emphasis on popular preaching. This was accompanied by a remarkable growth in the production of aids for preachers regularly addressing popular audiences: collections of model sermons, manuals of themes, collections of exempla, and so forth. Crusade preaching specifically was deeply conditioned by this development, with the production of model crusade sermons, for example, and handbooks designed to help the preacher in his task. The most popular was that compiled
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.1266–8 by the Dominican Humbert of Romans, an exhaustive survey which collected into one compact work those materials and arguments that he considered, as a former crusade preacher himself, to be most useful. Armed with these sorts of materials, thirteenth-century crusade preachers were far better equipped than their predecessors. In this respect, too, crusade promotion had become more professional.
    The result of the various developments outlined above was that by the later thirteenth century the Church had successfully elaborated the means to expose all parts of the West to the crusade call, through systematic publication of crusade bulls and the privileges they contained, and by the deployment on the ground of local preachers better qualified than before. Very fewcould have been ignorant of current crusading policy as a result. It is an achievement that underlines the sophistication reached by the thirteenth-century Church and which reflects the authority and power of papal monarchy. However, even at its height under Innocent III, the papacy never had things all its own way. For example, from 1095 onwards a series of freelance preachers, especially those of the millennial tendency, latched on to the crusade. The result was seen in the bands of poor on the First Crusade, or the so-called Children’s Crusade of 1212, or the Crusade of the Shepherds of 1251. Limitations to papal monarchy in practice can also be seen in the difficulties that popes faced in seeking to establish peace in the West, vital for successful crusade recruitment. For example, from the 1170s a succession of popes persistently sought to establish peace between the warring kings of England and France in the interests of the Latin East, but with little effect. They would crusade only as and when it suited them.
Personnel and Recruitment
     
    According to one account of the Council of Clermont, Urban II actively sought to dissuade the elderly, the infirm, women, clerics, and monks from taking crusade vows, a stance confirmed by his surviving letters. He knew that effective aid for the Christians of the East would not come from non-combatants, whatever their zeal, but from the military classes of society. Warfare was for warriors, holy war was no exception, and other social groups should refrain from it. Besides, such people had prior obligations and responsibilities that disqualified them from crusading. For example, if a priest were to go on the crusade, the cure of his