Central to our conception of the First Crusade's launch as a carefully stagemanaged papal enterprise are four letters of Pope Urban II written after 1095. These are some of the most important and intensively studied sources for the early gestation of the crusade and scholars have used them to attempt to glean insights into how Urban called for the crusade, how he justified it, and what his ‘intellectual conception’ (‘geistige Konzeption’) of the expedition was. They are vital to the standard interpretation, popularised by Jonathan Riley-Smith, that the papacy launched a carefully controlled campaign of preaching and recruitment and organised a central muster. Arguably, however, traditional approaches push the letters slightly too far as evidence of Urban's crusade conception and in constructing a grand overarching papal plan for the crusade. There are also indications that, in the form in which we now have them, two of the letters have been modified, probably through the excision of material. As a result, scholarly interpretations of the pope's plans for the expedition need to be re-evaluated. This chapter explores the letters afresh in the attempt to provide a more cautious understanding of the launch of the crusade and to set the scholarship on a more secure evidential footing regarding Urban's documents.

Urban II's letter to Bologna

The first of Urban's letters concerning the crusade to have survived down to the present day is that sent to the faithful of Bologna on 19 September 1096. The text is preserved in an early twelfth-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (as well as an eighteenth-century copy). The twelfth-century witness, which has been dated between 1101 and 1125, was made in northern Italy. Its codex contains primarily the sermons of Augustine, to which Urban's constitutions from the Council of Melfi (1089) and two of his letters to Bologna are appended. The other letter to Bologna in the codex, which is dated 17 April 1097 or 1098 and addressed to the bishop, shares with the crusade document the theme of reinforcing ecclesiastical authority there.