The fact that the mendicant orders could make available resources of trained preachers almost anywhere in Europe, accounted for the omnipresence of the friars on all levels of the propaganda machinery for the crusade after 1230. Mendicants preaching the cross appeared in various capacities in the thirteenth century: (i) as preachers personally commissioned by the pope, (ii) as propagandists within a province of their order commissioned through their superiors, who had received orders from the Curia, (iii) as members of papal legations, and lastly (iv) as preachers within the dioceses appointed to support the propaganda efforts of local bishops.

GREGORY IX

The first mendicant friar known to have been involved in crusading propaganda was John of Wildeshausen, who later became the fourth master-general of the Dominican order. He seems to have joined the Dominicans some time in the early 1220s. The earliest, firmly datable evidence concerning his life, in fact, shows John as a crusade preacher for Frederick II's crusade to the Holy Land. Several chronicles mentioned a certain Dominican, Brother John, having preached the cross alongside the papal legate, Conrad of Urach, in south-western Germany between 1225 and 1227. Gerard of Fracheto, in his Vitae Fratrum, confirmed his identity as that of the later Dominican master-general. A papal commission has survived from early 1227 in which John of Wildeshausen is mentioned among several other crusade preachers in Germany. Humbert of Romans later described John as ‘a companion of many cardinals and a penitentiary in papal legations’.