Plenary Indulgence for the Personal Participation in Crusades to the Holy Land as Presented by Crusade Preachers

This article discusses one of the main phenomena of the crusading movement: how preachers of the crusades to the Holy Land made the crusade indulgence attractive to would‐be crusaders. Since a plenary indulgence for the participants of the crusades is likely to have been introduced by the papacy at the beginning of the crusading movement in the eleventh century, this was used in crusade preaching throughout the whole period of crusading to the Holy Land. Given that the plenary indulgence is omnipresent in almost all sources related to crusade preaching, it is highly likely to have been deemed a useful argument to attract people to the crusading movement. Drawing on a large body of scholarship concerning the motivations of crusaders to the Holy Land, this article focuses on the ways in which preachers invented a number of ways to make the indulgence very attractive for sermon listeners.