Material Religion 


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the pre-battle processions of the first crusade and 
the creation of militant christian communitas 


m. cecilia gaposchkin 
To cite this article: m. cecilia gaposchkin (2019): the pre-battle processions of the 
first crusade and the creation of militant christian communitas, Material Religion, DOI: 
10.1080/17432200.2018.1539572 


To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2018.1539572 



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the pre-battle processions 
of the first crusade and 
the creation of militant 
christian communitas 


m. cecilia gaposchkin 
dartmouth college, hanover, usa 


Cecilia Gaposchkin is Professor of History 
at Dartmouth College. She is a medieval 
religious and cultural historian with particular 
interests in France, kingship, saints and 
sanctity, liturgy, art and ideology, and the 
crusades. She is the author of The Making of 
Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade 
in the Later Middle Ages (2008) and Invisible 
Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade 
Ideology (2017), along with several other 
co-edited or authored books and collections. 

m.cecilia.gaposchkin@dartmouth.edu 

ABSTRACT 

During the First Crusade warriors and retainers participated with 
clergy in a series of liturgically prescribed penitential processions 
to demonstrate worthiness to God and achieve military victory. 
This embodied participation in liturgical supplication, usually 
reserved for clergy, bound the crusaders together in a sacred 
community predicated on fighting God’s war against God’s 
enemies, who were, in this liturgical framework, defined as 
non-Christians. Further, participation in these rituals – routine in 
the West – necessarily took on new meaning when enacted in 
the Holy Land, thus endowing participation in the procession, 
and in the crusade, with greater devotional meaning. These 
ritualized processions thus materialized the ideological premises 
of crusade as a form of devotion melding penance and sacred 
violence. 

Keywords: first crusade, processions, liturgy, Rogations, ritual, 
holy war, embodiment 

Material Religion volume 0, issue 0, pp. 1–10 
DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2018.1539572 


© 2018 The Author(s) 


In June 1098 a host of Frankish warriors who had come from 
the West processed barefoot through the streets of the ancient 
and venerable city of Antioch in a penitential procession to ask 
God for aid against a looming enemy. This was one of the critical 
moments in the history of the First Crusade, that extraordinary 
venture provoked by the call of Pope Urban II (d. 1099) for the 
western military class to travel to the land of Christ to rescue 
Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulcher from Muslim dominion. The 
crusade was a military venture, certainly, but it was also a deeply 
religious one, fueled largely by the warrior piety of western 
Christianity in the last decade of the first century of the second 
millennium (Purkis 2008; Riley-Smith 1986; Rubenstein 2011). It 
was an extraordinary campaign, one that took almost four years 
and ended with the crusaders capturing, on July 15, 1099, the 
holy city and establishing the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. 

The ultimate success of the First Crusade was astounding 
because the venture, ambitious to begin with, had throughout 
been threatened by difficulties, illness, shortages, and above all, 
the Muslim inhabitants and armies of the region that the crusaders 
were invading. A year before taking Jerusalem, the crusaders 
had captured Antioch, after a grueling eight-month siege, only 
to find themselves locked within the city walls with little food, 
low morale, and the knowledge that a Turkish relief army was on 
its way. This was the point at which the ecclesiastical authorities 
called upon the army to perform a penitential procession. A 
priest named Stephen of Valence told the secular and ecclesiastical 
leaders of the army that Christ was mightily displeased. The 
crusaders had sinned, and Christ was dismayed at the “numerous 
evils” for which “a great stench arises to heaven.” Christ had supposedly 
explained, through the medium of this visionary priest, 
that “Christians should undertake penance,” and had instructed 
the crusaders “in bare feet [to] make processions through the 
church [of St. Peter, presumably] and give alms to the poor. 
Priests shall chant mass and perform communion with the body 
and blood of Christ. And then they shall begin battle, and I [that 
is, Christ] shall give them the help” (Peter Tudebode 1974, 75). 
The Franks, within the city walls, thus performed three days of 
litanic processions on June 25, 26, and 27 respectively. On June 
28, they marched out to face the Turkish emir, Kerbogha, in 
battle and won an unexpected victory over his superior force 
(France 1994, 245-246). 

This story is familiar to historians as one of the iconic 
moments of the First Crusade that demonstrates the ways in 
which the military and religious vectors of crusading came 
clearly together, each reinforcing the overall proposition that 
the First Crusade was an essentially sacramental act (Lobrichon 
1998; Riley-Smith 1986). In fact, crusade leaders called for general 
supplicatory processions at least four times during the First 
Crusade: on December 30, 1097; in June 1098; most famously, a 
week before their final victorious assault on Jerusalem, outside 
the walls of the city on July 8, 1099; and a month later, in August, 


before the battle of Ascalon (Gaposchkin 2017, 110-121). Furthermore, 
once the crusader states had been established, and 
the Latin rite instituted in the redeemed and purified churches 
of the Holy Land, the Franks continued to make communal 
processions, frequently walking through and, as the Psalms said, 
adoring Christ in the very place “where his feet stood” (Ps. 131.7) 

(e.g. Asbridge & Edgington 1999, 147-148). 
In keeping with the theme of this special issue, this paper 
focuses on crusaders’ bodily movement as a material factor in 
the experience and meaning of religious practice, and on the 
ways in which participation in these processions – the material 
and physical, movement of bodies through space – structured 
the meaning of that religious experience during the crusade. 
The materiality with which we are concerned here is that of the 
individual, interacting with a deeply religious topography, both 
performing piety and, in so doing, creating meaning. There are 
three points that I wish to stress in particular. The first relates to 
the participatory aspect of ritual. Because, as explained below, 
these types of processions involved both clergy and laity, they 
were mechanisms by which medieval laymen and women 
were invited into the liturgical world, and were thus lent some 
of the liturgical, sacramental magic usually preserved for the 
clergy themselves. More important here, this participation was 
precisely that of embodied action, in unity (created, ritualized 
unity), in space. My second point, which is informed by the 
work of Victor Turner and Robert Schechtner, is that supplicatory 
processions of this type were meant to be individually and 
collectively transformative; that is to say, they shifted those who 
processed from a state of sin to a state of grace (Schechner 1988; 
Turner & Turner 1978). And finally, if performance theory teaches 
us that the audience for ritual performance was above all the 
participant himself (or herself), then these ritualized processions 
should be understood as significant for connecting individuals 
in concrete ways to the larger, superstructural theological propositions 
that underpinned the crusade. Through the medium of 
the procession, the crusader’s connection to both the Christian 
communitas (on whose behalf the crusade was being fought), 
and to the salvific assumptions about the relationship between 
individual and communal penance on the one hand and warfare 
and victory on the other, was made concrete. Analysis of the 
ritual processions associated with crusading – and, in particular, 
their materiality – thus presents significant opportunities to 
consider the lived devotional experience and the sacralized construction 
of the ideological “truths” of those medieval Christians 
who engaged with the practice of holy war. 

Penitential Rituals in the West 

The participants in the processions of 1097–1099 were crusaders, 
and also, by definition, penitents. The crusaders’ penitential 
status and goals were a principal element of the religious meaning 
of the First Crusade in general. Scattered evidence, much of 
it gathered by Jonathan Riley-Smith, survives which indicates 


that crusaders (at least some of them) took the scrip and staff as 
they left for the Holy Land (Gaposchkin 2017, 67-72; Riley-Smith 
1997, 69-70, 81-83). The ceremonial taking of the scrip (that is, 
a small wallet or purse) and staff was a liturgical ceremony presided 
over by a priest or bishop that marked the beginning of a 
penitential pilgrimage (see Figures 1–3). The monastic chronicler 

5 
FIG 1 

Belval Priory, twelfth-century statue of a crusader, wearing a cross and bearing the scrip (pilgrim’s purse) and staff, 
with his wife. 


FIG 2 

A bishop blessing a departing pilgrim. The pilgrim carries a scrip (pilgrim’s purse) and bears a staff. From Bibliothèque 
municipale de Besançon, ms 138, f. 156v. 

Robert of Reims, who some believe may have been present 
at Clermont in 1095 to hear Urban II preach the First Crusade, 
claimed that the pope had said that people should not leave 
for the East without receiving the “sacerdotal benediction,” that 
is, the blessing given in the departure ceremony which turned 
pilgrims into penitents, and which therefore obliged them to 
follow higher standards of quasi-monastic conduct (Brundage 
1969). These ceremonies of departure had emerged throughout 
Europe during the course of the eleventh century and were 
particularly significant for the way they allowed pilgrims to 
perform their penitence in public rather than in private (at least 
for thirteenth-century scholastic thinkers, Vogel 1963). One 
eleventh-century example from Catalonia has the departing 
pilgrims lying prostrate on the pavement before the altar for the 
entirety of the rite, remaining in a posture of supplication for the 
duration while the bishop recites the seven penitential psalms 
and other prayers over them (Planas 1975). The rite began and 
defined a period of Turnerian liminality in which the pilgrim (or 
group of pilgrims in a communitas) participated in a religiosity 
that took them outside of the confines of their normal devotions 
and social existence (Turner 1969). The audience for this 
ritual was in part God; but, crucially, it was also the penitents 
themselves. 

It is precisely the heightened standard of conduct to which, 

as penitents, the crusaders were obligated that required the 

papal legate, Adhémar of Le Puy, and the other crusade leaders, 


FIG 3 

The blessing of the crusader’s cross. From Bibliothèque municipale de Besançon, ms 138, f. 157v. 

to call on penitential processions outside Antioch at the end 
of 1097 and again in 1098 in a bid to regain the expedition’s 
penitential equilibrium. It is clear that the crusaders were not 
behaving well. Three clerical participants in the expedition – 
Fulcher of Chartres, Peter Tudebode, and Raymond of Aguilers 

– all suggest that at least some of the crusaders’ sins were sexual 
in nature. From biblical times, these were sins that could cause 
the downfall of the faith community, and that certainly needed 
to be communally, and publicly, atoned for. The contrition and 
communal reform required to regain God’s favor needed to be 
performative and transformative. As Durkheim explained it, 
processions could function as one of the piacular (expiatory) 
rites, by which a group expressed its “angry sorrow.” In moments 
of crisis or pressure, the group might impose on itself “crying, 
lamenting, and wounding oneself and others as a matter of duty. 
It does so because those collective demonstrations, as well as 
the moral communion they simultaneously bear witness to and 
reinforce, restore to the group the energy that the events threatened 
to take away, and thus enables it to recover its equilibrium” 
(Durkheim 1995, 415-416. Durkheim called these the “piacular” 
rites; for “angry sorrow” see 412). This return to equilibrium is 
precisely what the evidence suggests those who instituted the 
processions of 1097–9 were seeking to achieve. 
To achieve this, crusaders routinely made recourse to the 
established and venerable form of communal petition of God’s 
favor that was the litanic procession. This was particularly true of 
the First Crusade, the processional devotions for which we have 


uncommonly abundant evidence (for the practice during other 
crusades, see Gaposchkin 2017, 122-127). Litanic processions 
were both a regular and an irregular part of the Latin liturgy in 
the West. The penitential procession did, of course, predate the 
early Christian period (Nathan 1998), but the recognized models 
for the medieval litanic processions were provided by Marmetus 
of Vienne’s supplicatory procession in the mid-fifth century 
(when, in 450, Bishop Marmetus called a procession to ward off 
multiple catastrophes in Vienne) and Gregory the Great’s at the 
end of the sixth (when Gregory called a public penitential in 
Rome to stave off plague) (Nathan 1998, 276-303). These were 
the foundation stories of the successful petitions that were 
then re-enacted every year during the Major Rogations (following 
Gregory’s procession) and the Minor Rogations (following 
Marmetus’). They came to be called litanic processions, or Leta-
nia, because of the litany – the long series of supplicatory invocations 
made to a series of individual saints – that was chanted 
during each procession. 

The Major and Minor Litanies (or Rogations) were the two 
regular occasions during the year in which medieval laymen 
and women participated with the clergy in asking God for 
aid (“rogation” comes from the Latin verb rogare – to ask). In 
addition to these scheduled penitential exercises, ecclesiastical 
authorities could also call Rogations during times of crisis or 
special need. Later commentators would explain that because 
everyone sinned, everyone had to pray for forgiveness, and thus 
everyone had to participate in the show of ritual humility of the 
procession (William Durandus 1995–2000; Sicard of Cremona 
2008, 574, 2:503-504). In the normal course of things the clergy 
(in Gregory Dix’s famous formulation) did the liturgy for and in 
view of, and on behalf of, the laity. In such times the laity watched 
(“seeing and hearing”), sponsored, and hopefully benefited from 
the clerical and monastic performance of the liturgy, but they 
themselves did not perform it (Dix 1945, 35, 598-600, discussing 
the Eucharistic liturgy). They were witnesses to the salvific 
rite rather than its enactors. But in these litanic processions the 
laity not only could, but were expected to – needed to – participate 
in the ritual supplication that was the heart of the liturgy. 
Without the laity, the communal ritual was without meaning, 
because it was precisely the whole Christian communitas that 
was the object and subject of the prayers to God. 

In the West, litanic (or Rogation) processions occurred 
regularly twice a year, in April on the feast of Saint Mark’s (April 
25), and in the three days preceding Ascension. Practice varied 
according to place, and was specific to the local topography, 
occurring both in the city and in the countryside. The entire 
community would gather at the main church and then process 
from station to station (that is, from church to church, or 
sometimes other sacred sites) reciting prayers of supplication. 
The procession would move throughout the city and even out 
into the country, singing antiphons and beseeching the saints 


to intercede on their behalf to God. Liturgical books instructed 
everyone to wear simple clothes and walk barefoot. Such processional 
traditions provided the First Crusade’s ecclesiastical 
elites with a blueprint from which to work in response to the 
various moments of crisis experienced on the long march to 
Jerusalem. 

Performing Penance in Antioch 

In Antioch, in 1098, the crusade authorities organized three days 
of processions: June 25, 26, 27. To do so, the ecclesiastical leaders 
would have simply lifted the practice of the Minor Rogations, 
either from memory (the rite was not that complicated) or from 
books they had presumably brought with them from the West. 
The litany itself – the long list of petitions to saints asking for 
aid – was what the clergy and participants (if they were able) 
recited as they processed from station to station. The recitation 
of the litany was always preceded by the seven penitential 
psalms, and followed by a series of “asks” – ora pro nobis; deus 
adiuva. These supplications could, at any time, be augmented by 
special prayers taken from a votive mass or other votive supplications 
written for this purpose; liturgical books, for example, 
often included special rites and prayers for rain, drought, plague, 
and in times of war. The function of these processions, through 
ritual shows of humility and contrition, was clear: God was being 
asked for some kind of worldly aid – and, specifically, worldly 
aid for the community of penitents. This was about communal 
earthly success rather than individual and eternal salvation. 

In this respect, the processions dovetailed with the aims of 
the crusade, since victory in war was only possible when the 
community was deemed to be worthy of success. The models 
for this were many, mostly from the Old Testament: the story 
of Joshua before the Battle of Ai, and his procession around 
the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6.8-9); of the Israelites who were 
only granted victory against the Benjaminites after fasting and 
making offerings (Judges 20); of the Maccabees, who offered up 
prayers to show penance and were granted victory thereafter (1 
Macc. 3-4; 2 Macc. 1); and, above all, of the Ninevites, who wore 
sack cloths and repented in order to stave off God’s wrath (Jonah 
3). These examples all confirmed that the community could 
show worthiness through prayer and communal action. Here, 
the example of the Ninevites was especially crucial, and was 
repeatedly evoked in relation to the litanic processions. 

In 1098 it was specifically the communal nature of penitence 
that needed to be (re-)established, and this performance in turn 
underscored the very proposition of the crusade itself, since 
the crusade army – God’s army – was understood to represent 
Christian society as a whole. This is where the material nature 
of communal participation in the ritual helped create meaning 
for the crusade, in that it encoded unity and community against 
the enemy and defined the Christian community as that which 
was seeking vengeance upon the pagan “other” (Strickland 2003; 


Tolan 2002). Relevant to the corporate identity that the crusaders 
were fostering at Antioch (and subsequently at Jerusalem) 
may have been a series of common refrains found in liturgical 
books in the West: “Save thy servants, trusting in thee, O my 
God”; “Let not the enemy prevail against us at all”; “Crush the 
enemies of the holy church of God”; and “Defend us, O Christ, 
from all of our enemies” (Lapidge 1991, 101, 119, 147, 151). 
These were fairly standard petitions, probably first promulgated 
during the Carolingian wars against the Saxons (“pagans”), 
and they were transmitted, with a few additions, to the earliest 
sacramentaries we have for the Latin East, where Saxon 
pagans could easily be exchanged for their Muslim counterparts 
(Gaposchkin 2017, 119, 135-137). The petitions were specifically 
penitential, but they were also explicitly communal, beseeching 
God on behalf of “us” or “the Christian people” (populum Chris-
tianum). The rite can be distinguished, then, from ordinary rites 
of penance, which sought redress for individual sins in order to 
gain eternal salvation (Hamilton 2001; Meens 2014; Vogel 1969). 
This was instead a broadly social exercise, asking specifically for 
communal and worldly aid – in this case, victory in the upcoming 
battle of Antioch. 

Jerusalem, July 8, 1099 

This social exercise was then deployed by the crusaders almost 
exactly one year later, by which time they were moving through 
an even more meaningful space. After the victory at Antioch in 
1098 and a period of retrenchment, the crusaders had pushed 
on to Jerusalem, the very object of the crusade and a place that 
was uniquely imbued with biblical, penitential and eschatological 
significance. The crusaders arrived in mid-June 1099 and 
established their siege. They were encamped on two sides of the 
city, at the west outside David’s gate, and to the north, outside St. 
Stephen’s gate (France 1994, 325-366; Figure 4). On Friday July 8, 
1099, a week before the final assault, the authorities organized a 
three-day fast (following the practice of Rogations) and a litanic 
procession extra muros ( for the fast, Albert of Aachen 2007, 
414-415; and for the procession, Gesta Francorum 1962, 90; Peter 
Tudebode 1974, 115; Raymond 1968, 121-123). The Poitevin 
priest Peter Tudebode, who tells us he participated in the procession 
and witnessed it “with his worldly eyes,” explained that: 

When our lords saw these atrocities [being performed by the 
Saracens against the crusaders during the siege], they were greatly 
angered and held a council in which the bishops and priests 
recommended that the crusaders hold a procession around the city. 
So the bishops and priests, barefooted, clad in sacred vestments, and 
bearing crosses in their hands, came from the church of the Blessed 
Mary, which is on Mount Zion [i.e., the church of the Dormition], to 
the church of Saint Stephen, the Protomartyr, singing and praying 
that the Lord Jesus Christ deliver his holy city and the Holy Sepulcher 
from the pagan people and place it in Christian hands for His holy 
service. The clerks, so clad, along with armed knights and their 
retainers, marched side by side. (Peter Tudebode 1974, 115-116) 


FIG 4 

The procession of July 8, 1099, around the walls of Jerusalem. (Map by author, based on Bahat 2011). 

Peter makes three relevant points here. The first is that the 
procession included “armed knights and their retainers” – that 
is, laymen. The second is that the procession was explicitly 
designed as a penitential performance. And the third is that the 
procession was designed to highlight the distinction between 
Christians and “pagans.” He continued: 

The Christians were greatly distressed by this sight [of Muslims 
jeering at them and spitting on crosses from the Eastern Wall], 
but continued with their prayers as they wound their way up in 
the procession to the church of the Mount of Olives, from which 
place Christ ascended to heaven…[Arnulf of Chocques, one of the 
ecclesiastical princes, and the future Latin patriarch here preached a 
sermon]. The Christians continued the procession and came to the 
Monastery of the Blessed Mary in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, from 
which her most holy body was snatched up to heaven. Thence they 
returned to the Mount of Olives, in which place a clerk, wishing to 
enter the church when the procession came to the entrance of the 
monastery, was struck in the middle of his forehead and died on the 
spot. I believe his soul will dwell with Christ through eternity, world 
without end. (Peter Tudebode 1974, 116) 

Peter stops here, but Albert of Aachen, not present at the siege 
but considered to have been well informed by those who were, 
says that “the entire procession of Christians came down from 
the aforesaid place, the Mount of Olives, and assembled on the 
next mountain, Sion, in the church of the holy mother of God” 


(Albert of Aachen 2007, 414-415). Albert’s reference to what 
would have been a third station at the church on Mount Sion 
indicates that the crusaders then – as they would have to in 
order to complete the circuit – headed back around the city 
towards their encampment. One of the siege camps was situated 
between the church and the city walls (Pringle 2007, 3:263). 

It need hardly be said that a litanic procession would have 
meant more in the Holy Land than when performed in Chartres 
or Milan or York – or anywhere else for that matter – in the 
West. Here was the very land in which Christ had walked – had 
processed into, and through; had preached, and had died in the 
uniquely transformative sacrifice undertaken for mankind itself. 
This was hardly lost on the participants. In his description of the 
procession, the millenarian Raymond of Aguilers commented: 

Following this, let us lose our pride in the sight of God, walk around 
the Holy City barefooted, and implore the loving kindness of God 
through the intercession of the saints. Pray, we say, that Almighty 
God, who abdicated His heavenly lordship and became human 
for us, and of us, His servants, and who humbly sitting upon an 
ass entered Jerusalem in a great procession (magno processionis) 
flanked by crowds waving and paying great honors only to suffer 
the Passion of the Cross as a sacrifice for us; pray, we say, that he 
may throw open the gates of Jerusalem and yield it to us in to the 
glory and honor of his name. (Raymond of Aguilers 1968, 122) 

Raymond, a cleric himself, understood well that men approached 
God through the intercession of the saints, which was precisely 
the format of the litany (letania) which gave this type of procession 
its name. For Raymond, the model of the procession was 
Christ’s paradigmatic entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, 
entering the penitential week of suffering that preceded his 
death. A sentence or so later Raymond stated: “We gladly followed 
the Lord to the spot of Ascension” (Raymond of Aguilers 1968, 
123). That is, Raymond and the crusaders sought to imitate Christ’s 
example of perfection by following him in ritualized humility, 
quite literally, to the point of his Ascent to Heaven. 

The processional route that the crusaders took around the 
city on July 8 did not follow any specific path that Jesus was 
believed to have followed during his lifetime – although later 
liturgical itineraries do seem to have been influenced by attempts 
to inscribe liturgical action in this way (Shagrir 2010, 2015). But, 
without access to the Holy Sepulcher, the conquest of which 
was of course the very goal of the crusade, the procession did 
seek to have the army, barefoot, led by the clergy, carrying relics 
and crosses, visit the most holy sites directly outside the walls 
of the holy city, culminating, appropriately, at the church of the 
Ascension (Albert of Aachen 2007, 414-415; Raymond of Aguilers 
1968, 122-123). The destinations they chose were associated with 
the core of Christian – Christ’s own – history. The church of the 
Dormition (on the spot that Mary was supposed to have ascended 
to heaven) and the Mount of Olives (where, as Peter Tudebode 


himself indicates, Christ Himself ascended), only underscored 
the ultimately salvific goal of the crusade, and of the procession. 
Albert of Aachen reminded his readers that the Mount of Olives 
was “the place where Lord Jesus rose into heaven” and that the 
crusaders stopped at one point “in complete devotion and humility 
in another place where [Jesus] taught his disciples to pray the 
‘Our Father’” (Albert of Aachen 2007, 414-415). In a sense, the Muslims 
who jeered at the crusaders from the walls of Jerusalem and 
assaulted a sign of the cross (Raymond of Aguilers 1968, 123) only 
did the crusaders the favor of reinforcing the meaning of processing 
through Jerusalem as a passion, that would precede ultimate 
triumph. Penance, passion (that is, suffering), and ascension 
were embedded in this geography, and as the crusaders moved 
through this uniquely sacred space they participated in Christ’s 
own passion and ascension. It was not lost on anyone that July 8 
was a Friday, the same day that Christ himself had walked through 
Jerusalem to his crucifixion (Albert of Aachen 2007, 414-415; Raymond 
of Aguilers 1968, 123). 

It is hard to tell how much of the liturgical prayer, recited in 
Latin, would have been understood by the knights and soldiers 
who participated in these rituals. They probably knew a little, 
such as the Kyrie Eleison and the Pater Noster, both of which 
they would have been familiar with from the part they played 
in the liturgy in the West (Gaposchkin 2017, 74-75, 95-97). That 
said, it may have been as much – or more – the embodied, 
performative, and participatory aspects of the liturgy that, for 
men of arms, endowed meaning to the crusade as a devotional 
experience, or at least iteratively reinforced the underlying 
rationale for the expedition. The litanic processions under-
girded the essential truths of the community on the move and 
under increasing stress – in this case, that their project was 
religious in nature, that they were participating in a penitential 
undertaking, and that it required the sanction and help of God. 
For the illiterati, which the bulk of the army probably were, the 
ritual and gestural qualities of the liturgy rather than its literal 
(that is, its strictly textual or verbal) qualities may well have 
conveyed more about its function and meaning and, in turn, 
the sacred quality of the crusade. The rituals of communion, of 
procession, and of prayer that litter the sources enveloped the 
crusaders in the liturgical community and thus the theological 
project of the campaign. Participation in any individual liturgical 
act, and perhaps especially those done in groups, allowed 
crusaders to perform their humility, devotion, penitence, or 
thanksgiving before one another and, above all, before God. 
The rituals were also transformative, literally turning the 
devotee into a penitent, or shifting his or her status from sin to 
grace. And finally, no matter their level of Latinity or liturgical 
literacy, all participants would have (or should have) recognized 
the central rituals of the Catholic faith as devotional acts. 
Processions, which are deliberately communal rites, cemented 
the host specifically as a Christian group, certainly reinforcing 


their allegiance to and defense of the Christian God as the 
defining feature of the campaign. 

In sum, the crisis processions that the clergy called at several 
points during the First Crusade had several effects. First, they 
brought laymen – that is, the army, retainers, and other non-clerical 
participants – into ritual penance before God; second, the 
performative and transformative nature of the ritual made them 
worthy of winning against the Turks and the Fatimids; and, third, 
the litanic processions enveloped them in the sacramental or 
liturgical precept of the Christian community before God that 
was at the heart of the crusade. Above all, the meaning of the 
processions, particularly once they reached Jerusalem, was 
itself inflected by the sacred topography in which they were 
performed. Here, as Peter Tudebode himself explained, it was 
embodied movement in conjunction with space that provided 
meaning and shaped experience. Crusaders, through the actions 
of their bodies processing through the topography surrounding 
the holy city of Jerusalem, became part of the Christian community, 
participating in Christ’s own salvific incarnation, and 
defining that community as specifically inimical to that of the 
“pagan enemy.” 

Funding 

This work was supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the 
Humanities, and by Dartmouth College. 

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