Despite the fact that there is ample evidence to illustrate that the friars preached the cross, it has not been recorded what they actually said in their sermons. Medieval chroniclers rarely wrote about the preaching in detail, that is the contents of crusade sermons, their audiences and context. This is not to say that there is no information at all, but it exclusively relates to the preaching of prominent secular clerics. From the late twelfth and the early thirteenth century, there are the sermons of Bishop Henry of Strasbourg and Martin of Pairis, preached at Strasbourg in 1188 and Basel in 1201 respectively, which the chroniclers claimed to report more or less verbatim. Then there are the descriptions of Baldwin of Canterbury's tour of Wales in 1188, of Eustace of Flay's preaching in England in 1200–1, and of the activities of Oliver of Cologne in Frisia prior to the Fifth Crusade. All of these contain more or less detailed information about the actual crusade sermons. In addition, there are snippets of information about Pope Innocent Ill's preaching in Italy in 1216. For later in the thirteenth century, when the friars were preaching the crusade, the only substantial surviving evidence also concerns the preaching of two secular crusade preachers, both papal legates in northern Italy, who preached the cross against the Romano brothers in the later 1250s.

There are, of course, a number of preaching aids from the thirteenth century, notably model sermons and exempla, which were concerned with the preaching of the cross. Crusade model sermons first appeared in sermon collections at the beginning of the thirteenth century.