ABSTRACT
Crusaders did not fit easily into the accepted patterns of medieval society. They were neither, in accord with the traditional tripartite division, monks, clerics, or laymen, nor were they prayers, fighters, or workers, as in the later division into oratores, pugnatores, and laboratores.1 They came closest to being laymen and fighters, but they shared with monks a consecrated status, though usually for a limited period of time, and theirs was a new type of fighting, in the service of God rather than for worldly ends. They were set off from the laity both by special privileges and obligations, and also, literally, by the mark of the cross that they bore on their clothing or, sometimes, branded on the forehead or elsewhere on the body, though the word crucesignatus – marked with the cross – did not emerge as the primary term for crusaders until the beginning of the thirteenth century, and even then it may also have been used for pilgrims generally.2 The participants in the expeditions known as the first, second, and third crusades were usually referred to in contemporary sources as Christians, pilgrims, bellatores, and milites, which can be translated as knights, soldiers, and fighters, or, by their enemies, simply as Franks. Their expedition was a pilgrimage, journey, or iter. The crusading army was the exercitus, agmen, and militia Dei or Christi, the army of God or Christ, and its members were the bellatores Domini, milites Christi, or sometimes athletae Christi, like the monks and martyrs of the early middle ages.3
