The first great test was whether men who owed loyalty to different rulers, spoke different languages, and had long been accustomed to fighting one another could remain in the field together long enough to reach a common goal.
They almost did not. The armies that left in 1096 traveled as separate forces. Raymond of Saint-Gilles, count of Toulouse, brought the southern French and Provençals—the largest single contingent—and traveled with Adhemar. Godfrey of Bouillon led the Lotharingians and many from the Empire. Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders, and Stephen of Blois commanded the northern French and Flemish. Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred brought the Normans of southern Italy, hardened by years of war against Byzantines and Muslims in the Mediterranean. Hugh of Vermandois, brother of the French king, represented the Capetian house. Each contingent had its own interests, its own pay chest, and its own sense of honor. The leaders’ backgrounds already contained the seeds of conflict. Godfrey had served the emperor Henry IV in the wars of the Investiture Controversy, including the Italian campaigns of the early 1080s against Gregory VII; later legend sometimes placed him among the first into Rome, but the service under Henry is the solid fact. Raymond traveled with the papal legate and had long been a fidelis of St Peter, a man whose piety and attachment to the reform papacy were well known. Bohemond had fought the Byzantine emperor and had every reason to view Alexios with suspicion; others had sworn oaths to the emperor at Constantinople and felt bound by them. Rivalries flared at every stage over precedence, supplies, the interpretation of oaths, and the spoils of captured cities.
What held them together was not personal friendship or a single secular command. It was the shared obligation they had accepted at the moment of taking the cross, reinforced by the presence of Adhemar as papal legate and by the common destination that none of them could reach alone. Adhemar was never overall military commander. Contemporary accounts treat him as one among the princes in councils of war, yet also as a coordinator whose house could serve as the meeting place for the leadership and whose spiritual authority the clerical sources regarded as unique. He worked to keep relations with the Byzantine Church as open as circumstances allowed, restoring the Orthodox patriarch at Antioch and corresponding with the patriarch of Jerusalem. He imposed fasts, organized processions, and attempted to restrain the worst excesses of the army. When the crusaders, trapped inside Antioch after its capture and facing Kerbogha’s relieving army in June 1098, needed a symbol of common purpose, the discovery of the Holy Lance—whatever the skepticism of Adhemar and Bohemond about its authenticity—gave the southern French and many of the rank and file a shared object of devotion around which morale could crystallize. Modern historians differ on how decisive the Lance was in the decision to fight; some stress careful military planning by the leaders as much as popular enthusiasm. On 28 June the host marched out of the city in ordered contingents and routed Kerbogha’s coalition. The victory was real. So was the fragility of the cooperation that had made it possible.
When Adhemar died of plague at Antioch on 1 August 1098, the spiritual center of the expedition was shaken. No one remaining possessed comparable recognized authority across the contingents. The crisis that followed nearly destroyed the enterprise. Bohemond claimed Antioch for himself, arguing that the emperor had failed to bring the aid he had promised and that the city was therefore forfeit. Raymond insisted it be returned to the emperor in accordance with the oaths taken at Constantinople. The two almost came to blows. Unable to agree, they refused for months to march on Jerusalem. The expedition stalled through the autumn and winter of 1098–99. Baldwin of Boulogne remained in Edessa, which he had secured for himself and which would become the first of the crusader states. Stephen of Blois had already left the army during the earlier stages of the siege of Antioch, believing the situation hopeless, and carried that report to the Byzantine emperor. Alexios, weighing Stephen’s news along with other information about Turkish movements in Asia Minor, turned back rather than risk his forces. The desertion and the imperial retreat were not a single neat sequence, but both weakened the sense that the expedition still had external support.
What broke the deadlock in early 1099 was not princely consensus. The lesser knights and infantry threatened to tear down the walls of Antioch and to march south without their leaders. Survival, the hope of reaching the sacred goal, the difficulty of returning home empty-handed after years on the road, and the residual force of the vow all pressed in the same direction. No single motive can be isolated with certainty. In January 1099 the army finally moved, with Raymond at its head, barefoot in the manner of a pilgrim as he left Ma’arrat an-Numan. Godfrey, Robert of Normandy, and others followed. Bohemond stayed behind to consolidate his hold on Antioch. The host that reached the walls of Jerusalem in June still retained its separate identities, still quarreled over leadership and supply, and still lacked a single commander. At Arqa the siege dragged on without result; the ordeal by fire that left Peter Bartholomew mortally burned, and of which he died days later, discredited the Holy Lance and weakened Raymond’s standing among those who had never trusted the relic. Yet the host remained a host. In July 1099, after a siege conducted by forces that had never fully fused into a single army, Jerusalem fell.
Eight days later the leaders met to choose a ruler for the city. Clerics argued that a spiritual vicar should be chosen first, before any secular prince. Some voices pressed for Raymond of Toulouse, the most senior and, in the eyes of many clergy, the most pious of the leaders. Raymond refused the title of king in a city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns, though accounts differ on whether humility or calculation drove the refusal. The choice fell on Godfrey of Bouillon, who accepted rule under the more restrained style of Advocate of the Holy Sepulchre rather than king. Raymond, outmaneuvered, clung briefly to the Tower of David before yielding under protest from his own followers, who were unwilling to fight their fellow crusaders for his sake. The election was messy, contested, and incomplete. It was also a decision taken by men from multiple regions who had stayed in the field for three years under a shared obligation and who now had to invent a form of government for a city none of their dynasties had ever ruled.
Chroniclers who wrote in the years immediately afterward registered the outcome as unprecedented. Guibert of Nogent titled his work Gesta Dei per Francos—the deeds of God through the Franks—yet even that Francocentric framing could not conceal the multi-regional character of the host. The men who entered Jerusalem had come from the Auvergne, from Normandy, from Lorraine, from Apulia, and from Flanders. They had quarreled repeatedly. They had also, under the pressure of a shared sacred purpose and the practical impossibility of succeeding alone, subordinated ordinary political loyalties long enough to achieve what no single kingdom had attempted.
To call this a “pan-Christian” achievement is to use a careful shorthand. It does not mean that all of Latin Christendom moved as one, or that local and dynastic interests dissolved. Large parts of the Latin West sent no contingents of any size. Many who took the cross never left home. The cooperation that did occur was intermittent, contested, and repeatedly nearly destroyed by the ambitions of the leaders themselves. What the shorthand means is that a coordinating claim existed which could draw contingents from multiple polities into sustained common action under a shared sacred obligation—something earlier papal and royal summonses had not accomplished at this scale.
The success of 1099 is sometimes attributed almost entirely to Muslim disunity. The claim has force and must be stated without minimization. Seljuk power in the Near East was fragmented after the death of the sultan Malik-Shah in 1092; rival Turkish rulers in Syria and Anatolia fought one another as readily as they fought outsiders. The Fatimids of Egypt were at odds with the Sunni Turks of Syria and had only recently recovered Jerusalem from Turkish control. Individual cities often decided their own fate. Kerbogha’s own coalition at Antioch was undermined by rivalries among its commanders and by ethnic tensions between Turks and Arabs; some of his allies abandoned him before or during the battle of 28 June. Jonathan Phillips has argued that had the crusade arrived a few years earlier, against a more coherent Seljuk structure, it might not have passed its first obstacle in Asia Minor. The point is well taken and underlines contingency rather than inevitability. Contemporary Muslim observers, including the Damascene jurist al-Sulami writing in 1105, recognized that internal division had opened the door and called for a jihad of reunification in response. To treat Christian cooperation as irrelevant, however, is to misread the evidence. The crusaders faced repeated opportunities to dissolve into separate enterprises—after the capture of Nicaea, after the capture of Antioch, after Adhemar’s death, during the long stall of late 1098. Rank-and-file pressure, the common destination, and the residual force of the vow pulled them forward when princely rivalry alone would have stopped them. Muslim fragmentation created an opening. Christian capacity to remain, however imperfectly, a multi-polity force under a shared sacred claim allowed that opening to be used.
The first expression of the new unity was therefore costly, fragile, and real. Rival princes had remained in the field for three years, accepted a measure of shared spiritual leadership while Adhemar lived, and reached a goal that lay far beyond the interest of any single dynasty. That fact became the foundation on which later generations would build.