When Pope Urban II preached the crusade at Clermont in 1095, he had good reasons to hope that Normans would volunteer for the mission. They were formidable fighters, a fine match against the Seljuq Turks, who had taken Jerusalem, overrun Syria, and swept through ‘Romania’ (the Byzantine heartland of Asia Minor) following the debacle at Manzikert in 1071. Surely Norman warriors could restore Jerusalem to the Christian world. Their journeys to Jerusalem would bring another benefit to Christendom, too: the disappearance of those fractious Normans from the west.

Urban must have been pleased, then, with the list of Norman knights and lords who took the cross. Normans arguably dominated the First Crusade. Of course, sizable contingents of others, notably Flemings and Lotharingians and Provençals, also joined the expedition that has been considered ‘largely a French enterprise’. But the Investiture Conflict, the excommunication of Philip I, and the anti-clerical stance of William Rufus kept the German, French, and English rulers from heeding the pope's call. Normans filled this vacuum. By one reckoning, six of the nine principal leaders were Norman by blood or allegiance. Among these was the duke of Normandy, Robert Curthose, who mortgaged the duchy to his brother, William Rufus, to raise his expenses. It was the southern Normans, though, who went with the keenest secular purpose. They inherited their ambitions as the legacy of Robert Guiscard, who had died in 1085 on campaign against Byzantium, still dreaming of eastern domination.