When Pope Urban II first preached the crusade in 1095 among the spiritual privileges granted to the crusaders was the promise that papal protection would be extended over their families and possessions. The First Crusade was not a bolt from the blue; it was built on the existing foundations of holy war and pilgrimage, as were many of the privileges associated with the new crusade movement. An assessment of pilgrimage protection is of value to any investigation of the origins of the crusade-specific protection over crusaders’ families and possessions, especially since Brundage has shown that the rudiments of protection for devotional travellers were present in the Old Testament admonition against harming either the person or possessions of a pilgrim. Within the medieval context it is clear that other factors must be considered. Contemporaries of the First Crusade such as Abbot Guibert of Nogent (c.1064–1125) and Bishop Ivo of Chartres (c.1040–1116) perceived the crusades, and by implication the protection privilege that emerged from that movement, as fundamentally new. This novelty probably explains the omission of the crusade privileges from canon law; essentially the canonists were confused by the ambiguity of these new provisions hence they did not record them.

This study is not the first to recognise the significance of the crusade protection privilege. For Brundage, that protection was marked by a strong influence from the existing pilgrimage privileges. Likewise Tyerman stated that the Council of Clermont established that ‘the crusader, like the pilgrim, was withdrawn from a purely secular condition and was placed under the protection and authority of the Church, as if he had taken the holy orders’. While these views have considerable merit, too great an emphasis on pilgrimage is detrimental to our understanding of the profound distinctions between pilgrims’ privileges and crusade-specific protection. We will see that the evidence from canon law does not seem to support this blurring of the protection privileges. This chapter focuses on how Urban II expressed and explained his novel privileges to demonstrate both continuity from pilgrimage privileges and innovation in the papal protection that encompassed the crusaders’ families and possessions. It will reassess how far the crusade-specific protection was an extension of pilgrimage protection by examining the origins of the papal legislation of the crusades and considering pilgrim-specific protection.