This question has been at the back of my mind for a long time. Hollywood movies show that they spoke English, which I believe is strictly for convenience. How likely is it to be true?
Christians from all across Europe marched into the Holy Land to retake it from the Muslims. There were speakers of Romance languages (Old/Middle French, Italian, Catalan among others) and also Germanic speakers (Old/Middle English, German, Norse) along with Slavic and Baltic speakers as well.
How did people from such diverse linguistic backgrounds manage to communicate with each other at a time when English wasn't anywhere near as widespread outside of England as it is today?
Did they use Latin, or French (the two widely used languages of the time) or did they invent a pidgin of many languages after years of continuous interaction?
I am asking about no one Crusade in particular, rather about the years between 1095 (first Crusade) to 1272 (ninth and last major Crusade) in general.
n.b.: We're speaking about languages from almost 1,000 years ago. Languages change and evolve a lot. So I'm making simplifications and referring to languages by their modern names, when in fact there was a lot of regional variation.
The lingua-franca would have been some form of medieval French. The English nobility during this period was strongly Norman and may have actually not been from Great Britain, but from Normandy. As you go down the social ladder it's more likely that individuals spoke their regional dialects, but their immediate superiors understood them. Many of the leaders of the early crusades were Norman, so spoken medieval French was probably the language of communication amongst the leadership. Now, the Crusaders usually fought as "national" units, meaning that the French-speaking leadership might have to translate orders to the rank and file into a local language, which might be some form of Italian, German, English, or Catalan, etc.
There were also several elements of the Crusaders' forces that made this possible. First of all, high level Genoan and Venetian representatives were often multilingual and could serve as translators between the Byzantines and the Crusaders. Even if a Genoan or a Venetian didn't speak the local language, usually you could find some local fluent in, say, Greek and Arabic to translate the from a local tongue into something that the Genoan or Venetian understood. And we shouldn't count out the fact that there was a significant number of educated holy men who traveled with the Crusaders, and they could at least communicate in Latin.
So, at the top, language was somewhat mutually intelligible. Where it was not there was still a web of well-educated figures that could serve to bridge the divide.
Geez, I never knew there were nine crusades. I thought there were only four and they stopped after the crusaders sacked Constantinople. History classes (At least the ones I took) also seem to reinforce the idea of only going up to the fourth crusade. What gives?