Quote Originally Posted by Dayve
I saw a Spanish crusade march through my lands and it was full of these guys armed with clubs who had excellent morale!
Those would be religious fanatics. Basically, they're peasants with an attitude.

Mine only had peasants and 1 unit of depleted archers.
It's a good idea to "seed" a Crusade with a core army made up of your own units--and preferably led by a reasonably good general if you can spare one. That way you know your Crusade will have at least a few halfway decent troops, in case it picks up nothing but rabble (like yours did) as it passes through Europe to its destination.

As much as I'm able to--dictated by both cost and what I can strip away from my defenses--I try and stock my Crusades with at least a full stack of my better units. I do avoid, however, including a lot of knights and heavy infantry, as they tire out fairly easily in the hot climates of North Africa and the Middle East.

You may already know this, but another nice thing about Crusades is that you don't pay the upkeep costs on units you've dropped into a Crusade. For this reason, I often will hire mercenaries (which cost only half as much to hire as regular units) and immediately dump them into a Crusade. Be careful you don't include too many mercs, though, as you have to start paying them again once the Crusade is over!