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355 Pages
The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century
The county of Tripoli in what is now North Lebanon is arguably the most neglected of the so-called ‘crusader states’ established in the Middle East at the beginning of the twelfth century. The present work is the first monograph on the county to be published in English, and the first in any western language since 1945. What little has been written on the subject previously has focused upon the European ancestry of the counts of Tripoli: a specifically Southern French heritage inherited from the famous crusader Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles. Kevin Lewis argues that past historians have at once exaggerated the political importance of the counts’ French descent and ignored the more compelling signs of its cultural impact, highlighting poetry composed by troubadours in Occitan at Tripoli’s court. For Lewis, however, even this belies a deeper understanding of the processes that shaped the county.
What emerges is an intriguing portrait of the county in which its rulers struggled to exert their power over Lebanon in the face of this region’s insurmountable geographical forces and its sometimes bewildering, always beguiling diversity of religions, languages and cultures. The counts of Tripoli and contemporary Muslim onlookers certainly viewed the dynasty as sons of Saint-Gilles, but the county’s administration relied upon Arabic, its stability upon the mixed loyalties of its local inhabitants, and its very existence upon the rugged mountains that cradled it. This book challenges prevailing knowledge of this little-known crusader state and by extension the medieval Middle East as a whole.
Kevin James Lewis completed a doctorate in History at the University of Oxford, where he produced a thesis on aspects of the ‘crusader’ county of Tripoli during the twelfth century, under the supervision of Professor Christopher Tyerman. Previously he studied at Cardiff University’s Centre for the Crusades, taught by Professors Helen Nicholson, Peter Edbury and Denys Pringle. More recently he held a Past & Present Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Rulers of the Latin East
Series editors Nicholas Morton, Nottingham Trent University, UK Jonathan Phillips, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Academics concerned with the history of the Crusades and the Latin East will be familiar with the various survey histories that have been produced for this fascinating topic. Many historians have published wideranging texts that either seek to make sense of the strange phenomenon that was the Crusades or shed light upon the Christian territories of the Latin East. Such panoramic works have helped to generate enormous interest in this subject, but they can only take their readers so far. Works addressing the lives of individual rulers - whether kings, queens, counts, princes or patriarchs - are less common and yet are needed if we are to achieve a more detailed understanding of this period.
This series seeks to address this need by stimulating a collection of political biographies of the men and women who ruled the Latin East between 1098 and 1291 and the kingdom of Cyprus up to 1571. These focus in detail upon the evolving political and diplomatic events of this period, whilst shedding light upon more thematic issues such as: gender and marriage, intellectual life, kingship and governance, military history and inter-faith relations.
Preface
It has been more than seventy years since the publication of the last full monograph on the county of Tripoli, despite the intervening decades witnessing a huge upsurge in publications on the crusades and the Latin East. This book is intended to go some way towards redressing this imbalance, shedding light upon the most neglected of crusader states while also contributing to Syrian and Lebanese history more broadly. The present work is based loosely upon my doctoral thesis completed at the University of Oxford in 2014, which was entitled Rule and Identity in a Diverse Mediterranean Society: Aspects of the County of Tripoli during the Twelfth Century. The structure, focus and much of the content of the earlier piece is radically different from that of The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century. Whereas the thesis was structured thematically and comprised a handful of focused case studies, the present work has been arranged chronologically and takes a much more holistic approach to the subject. The book therefore is hopefully more accessible to those who have not spent a good few years contemplating what took place in the shadow of Mount Lebanon some nine centuries ago.
Kevin James Lewis London, July 2016
Acknowledgements
In the course of researching and writing both a thesis and a book on the county of Tripoli, I have incurred debts of gratitude to many individuals and organisations. I am grateful to the staff and students of Cardiff University (2005-9), Merton College, Oxford (2010-12), and Hertford College, Oxford (2012-14), for providing stimulating intellectual environments during my time first as an undergraduate and eventually as a doctoral student. Particular thanks are owed to Hertford and the Drapers’ Company, for awarding me a Senior Scholarship (2012-14); the Arts and Humanities Research Council, for awarding a doctoral research grant (2012-13); the Institute of Historical Research and Past and Present, for awarding a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2014-15); and the Council for British Research in the Levant, for providing a scholarship to study Arabic in Jordan (2012). Although the thesis and the book are very much different beasts, my debt of gratitude to these sources of support throughout my years of doctoral research endures.
I would like to thank the staff at the following libraries, archives and museums: numerous institutions in Oxford, particularly the Bodleian, the History Faculty Library, the Oriental Institute Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the college libraries of Merton, Magdalen and St Hugh’s; the British Library; Cardiff University’s Arts and Social Studies Library; the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; the National Library of Malta, Valletta; and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
I have been fortunate to meet countless experts in my chosen field and it would be impractical to list all those who have provided advice, support and constructive criticism. Particular thanks must be addressed to the following: Michael Athanson, Betty Binysh, Paul Brand, Andrew Buck, Damien Carraz, Anna Chrysostomides, Peter Edbury, Ian Forrest, Huw Grange, Bernard Hamilton, Catherine Holmes, Michael Jeffreys, Hugh Kennedy, Max Lau, Gregory Lippiatt, Nicholas Morton, Helen Nicholson, André Penafiel, Jonathan Phillips, Denys Pringle, John Pryor, Yousif Qasmiyeh, Hugh Reid, Theresa Vann and Mark Whittow.
Liz Mincin deserves a special mention, for help with Greek and for providing huge quantities of encouragement over the past few years. My doctoral supervisor, Dr Christopher Tyerman, was and is an inexhaustible source of knowledge, wisdom and advice. Without his unfailing patience and clarity of thought, this book would be much the poorer. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, to whom The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century is dedicated. Without them and their constant support, it is safe to say that the book would not have existed. Needless to say, I alone am to blame for the errors within.
Introduction Sons of Saint-Gilles
The Frankish county of Tripoli was not historically important, at least in the traditional sense. Its counts won no particularly great military victories beyond the conquest of the county itself and commissioned no great works of literature. The county’s archives were sacked in an epoch long past and their contents erased from history. Only paint flaking off forgotten church walls, once-mighty fortresses gutted by the fires of modern wars, and crumbling manuscripts in distant libraries stand testament to the fact that the county and its inhabitants existed at all. Yet the study of the county and its rulers is important in that it raises a number of hitherto unasked and unanswered questions regarding the development both of the so-called ‘crusader states’ and of Lebanon and Syria more generally. Though small, the county’s history encapsulates the principal forces that shook and shaped the Latin East as a whole.
The county was not simply the product of European crusaders, but grew amid the verdant valleys of Lebanon, the forbidding heights of the Alawite mountains and the fertile plains that lay between. It was in this Syro-Lebanese context that the counts of Tripoli sought to establish their rule. In many ways, the manifold pressures on the counts were greater than those faced by other Frankish rulers. True, the threat of invasion seems to have been slighter because hostile forces preferred crossing the Jordan into the southern kingdom of Jerusalem, or the Orontes into the northern principality of Antioch, rather than over the mountains that cradled the county. However, the kings of Jerusalem and princes of Antioch did not face the same cultural complexity as in the Lebanon region, which made it all the harder for the counts to negotiate and enforce the terms of their power.
The demographic complexity of the county was unmatched anywhere else in the crusader states. Within the county could be found the spiritual descendants of the Byzantine Empire and the Fatimid Caliphate, two empires that had shared the region a generation before, leaving behind the Christian Orthodox Melkites who pledged allegiance to the Byzantine emperor and the Shi'a Muslims who remembered the Fatimid caliphs in their Friday prayers. Other religious groups were unique to Lebanon specifically. There were the Maronite Christians, many of whom supported the Roman Catholic crusaders on the basis of a somewhat mythologised shared history. These lived alongside Ethiopian, Nestorian and ‘Jacobite’ Syrian Orthodox Christians. Nearby were the Druze, who worshipped the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (r. 996-1021) as divine.
Two further radical Shia groups that had split from the Fatimid caliphate during caliphal succession crises were the Nusayris or Alawites, who gave their sect’s name to the mountain where they lived north of the Frankish county, and the notorious Nizaris, who sought refuge in the same region and came to be known as the ‘Assassins’. Even the counts themselves, who never forgot that they were descended in the male line from European crusaders, had Armenian blood coursing through their veins by the middle of the twelfth century. The counts thus faced a bewildering array of identities in this contested space, not least within themselves.
Much previous scholarship on the Latin East has focused upon its institutions, drawing upon such texts as John of Ibelin’s Livre des Assises, William of Tyre’s Historia Ierosolimitana and various surviving pieces of cartulary evidence. Throughout the present work, many such traditional sources are challenged and shown to be unreliable at best. At the highest level, the very concept of the crusader states as independent and clearly demarcated polities is cast into doubt, with these polities depicted as having been subject to much greater constitutional change than previously thought. It is not simply the conclusions of previous historians that are contested, but also the methodological assumptions underpinning them. The present monograph also engages with a much broader range of sources and themes than has been attempted in previous historiography, primarily by incorporating a greater quantity of evidence drawn from both Arabic sources and under-utilised western sources such as Occitan poetry.' In so doing, many obscure issues relating to how the counts ruled over and lived within this unique society are illuminated.
The present work is arranged chronologically and divided into five chapters. Chapter | focuses on two rulers: William Jordan of Cerdanya and Bertrand of Toulouse, rival claimants to what would become the county of Tripoli after the death of the crusader Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles and Toulouse in 1105. Chapters 2 and 3 concern the reigns of Count Pons and his son Raymond II respectively. Chapters 4 and 5 both deal with a single count: Raymond III, whose reign was by far the longest, arguably the most complex and easily the best documented — not to mention most debated. Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles himself, the first self-professed ‘count of Tripoli’, does not receive his own chapter or indeed much special attention at all beyond what is absolutely necessary for the purpose of setting the scene.
It has been deemed wise to omit him from the present work since most of his life was spent in the west or else participating in the First Crusade at a time when the very existence of the county of Tripoli had yet to be imagined. As such, the structure of this present work questions Jean Richard’s influential belief that the county of Tripoli was primarily the product of Raymond IV’s ‘action personnelle’.* More than one person determined the county’s existence and fate.
Historiography
Few historians have produced works that deal with the Latin East as a whole. A notable and recent exception is Malcolm Barber, whose accomplished synthesis of existing literature on the crusader states has quickly established itself as a principal reference work.? Another example is Bernard Hamilton’s study of one aspect of the entire Latin East: its ecclesiastical structure.* Most historians have studied one crusader state to the exclusion of the others, with the majority of these focusing their efforts upon the kingdom of Jerusalem. There are three main reasons for this overriding fascination with the kingdom: the greater abundance of sources for the kingdom compared to the other crusader states; the special fascination of contemporary narrators and modern historians with Jerusalem and the Holy Land, of which Tripoli was not truly part;° and the considerable efforts made by scholars such as Prawer and Kedar, working in the modern state of Israel, which lies entirely within the boundaries of the former kingdom.’ No other state occupying what was once the Latin East — the kingdom of Jordan and the republics of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Turkey — enjoys such a prolific indigenous ‘school’ of crusade historians.
The principality of Antioch has been neglected when compared to Jerusalem, but has enjoyed some historiographical attention nonetheless. The first and most comprehensive study of the principality itself was Claude Cahen’s La Syrie du Nord, in which the author stressed the need to place the principality within its local Syrian context, challenging the prevailing tendency of historians to treat the Latin East as if merely an offshoot of contemporary French society.® Although Cahen later rejected calls for his thesis to be republished because he had come to disagree with many of its arguments, it remains the uncontested authority on the principality of Antioch.’ Cahen’s is still one of the most capable demonstrations of the use of Arabic alongside western languages in a crusades-related study, even after the emergence of two further monographs and numerous articles in more recent years."”
The county of Edessa, which fell after fewer than fifty years, has received a somewhat disproportionate amount of historiographical attention. The Armenian historian Ter-Gregorian Iskenderian produced a lengthy study as early as 1915, followed four decades later by Robert Nicholson’s biographical study of Count Joscelin I.'' More recently, Monique Amouroux-Mourad produced a brief monograph on the county’s history and society, while MacEvitt’s study of interactions between Latin and eastern Christians has at its core an analysis of the county’s foundation.”
Turning to the county of Tripoli itself, it quickly becomes clear that it has been the most neglected of the four original crusader states. Marshall Baldwin completed a doctoral thesis at Princeton University in 1934, intended to be a biographical study of Count Raymond III.'° This work was divided into two parts, the first dealing with Raymond’s political career in the kingdom of Jerusalem and the second being an overview of the economic, demographic and ecclesiastical context of the county. Baldwin promptly published the first half with minimal revisions as a book.'* Until the later years of the twentieth century, this was a major influence upon modern historians’ views of the political crises that wracked the kingdom of Jerusalem prior to Saladin’s conquests in the 1180s. Much of the second part of Baldwin’s thesis was reworked as a separate research article." Baldwin’s output as a whole is marked by a frequently naive and uncritical use of Latin and French sources, rendering his thesis and subsequent publications largely descriptive.
The only monograph dedicated solely to the county, rather than to its most famous ruler, remains Richard’s Le comté de Tripoli sous la dynastie toulousaine (1945). As its title suggests, this compact survey deals predominantly with the county from the perspective of the western Europeans who conquered and settled the region, particularly the southern French Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles and his descendants, and explains many of its historical and social phenomena through this ‘Proveng¢al’ lens. Richard owes a personal and intellectual debt to René Grousset, who suggested the topic to Richard, and thus Richard’s work is framed as a complement to Grousset’s expansive Histoire des Croisades et du royaume franc de Jerusalem.'° In Grousset’s grand theory, the Latin East was a microcosm of contemporary ‘France’, with each state defined by the origins of its founders and early rulers. The kingdom of Jerusalem was dominated by Lotharingians under Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I, and the principality of Antioch was Norman due to Bohemond of Taranto and Tancred of Lecce; the short-lived county of Edessa shared the kingdom of Jerusalem’s early Lotharingian identity, whereas the county of Tripoli had a ‘Provencal’ character derived from Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles and his progeny.’
Richard strives to corroborate Grousset’s somewhat neocolonialist theory by using it to explain the county of Tripoli’s independence from its Latin Christian neighbours and by stressing the distinctiveness of its ‘Provencal’ identity. Richard equates the constitutional relationship between the counts of Tripoli and the kings of Jerusalem with the relationship between the rulers of the ‘grands fiefs autonomes de la France’ — including the house of Tripoli’s cousins in Toulouse — and the Capetian kings of France.'* The implication is that a distinct ‘Provencal’ or ‘Toulousan’ distaste for social hierarchies explains why the counts of Tripoli did not accept the king of Jerusalem’s authority in the same way as did, for example, the princes of Galilee or lords of Tiberias in the kingdom of Jerusalem.
Since 1945 the county and its rulers have failed to attract much historical interest. Richard has continued to lead the way with irregular publications on the subject. Initially, these were annexes to his original monograph, such as his article on Raymond of Saint-Gilles’s early attempts to establish his rule in North Syria or his speculative localisation of toponyms mentioned in medieval sources on the basis of modern Lebanese place-names.’’ In 1963, he contributed to a collection of articles on the historical relationship between the south of France and the Islamic world, providing a restatement and abridgement of his previous work insofar as it concerned direct contact between the dynasties of Tripoli and Toulouse.*’ Some two decades later he returned to the county, going beyond the dynastie toulousaine to explain the baronial insurrections against the count-princes of the dynastie antiochénienne in the thirteenth century, blaming the revolts upon the latter’s arbitrary power over the composition of the High Court.”
For some decades, Richard’s research focused mainly on the Latin Christian barons, having devoted only a cursory section of his original monograph to ‘les indigénes’.” One of his studies attempted to address this shortcoming by discussing the place of local Christians in the governance of the county.® More recently he has provided an overview of those aspects of the county’s history that can be termed ‘eastern’, from local intermediaries to religious demographics, although this paper suffers from being more descriptive than analytical.™ Finally, in a volume dedicated to the county of Tripoli as an ‘état multiculturel et multiconfessionnel’, Richard has returned to the Frankish barons, providing a synthesis and elaboration of his long career studying this particular subject.”
Alongside Richard, a number of other historians have dealt with aspects of the county’s history. The collection of articles Le comté de Tripoli: Etat multiculturel et multiconfessionnel represents the published proceedings of a conference held in Beirut in 2002 — primarily a collaboration between France’s Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier III and Lebanon’s Université Saint-Esprit de Kaslik.*° Although meagre compared to the huge output of the Israeli school, archaeological and historical research conducted by Lebanese scholars has been fairly continuous since the mid-twentieth century, as a perusal of locally published journals and locally organised conference proceedings demonstrates.?’ The contributors to the Montpellier-Kaslik volume specifically make a few salient points, which have been used accordingly. It must be said that the collection generally focuses only on the Christian groups of the county — particularly the Armenians and the Maronites — to the exclusion of the Muslims, and some of the contributions seem shallow and redundant. Furthermore, it is doubtful whether the collection can be classified as truly independent of Richard, who provides a preface and an article, and to whose work one of the editors explicitly affiliates the volume.”
Other studies relevant to the county include Marie-Bernadette Bruguiére’s comparison of inheritance customs in the counties of Toulouse and Tripoli.”’ As part of a broader exploration of the crusading movement’s impact upon Provencal society, Damien Carraz has discussed the county of Tripoli as ‘un enracinement éphémeére’ of Provencal settlement, although this is based largely on Richard’s conclusions.*” As part of his general study of the fortunes of the Porcelet family of Arles in Provence, Martin Aurell supplies a survey of those members of this family who settled in the county soon after the First Crusade, again heavily reliant upon Richard.*! More firmly independent works include brief papers by Jonathan Riley-Smith on the ecclesiastics in Raymond of SaintGilles’s company at Tripoli, and by Thomas Asbridge on Raymond’s failed attempts to destabilise Bohemond of Taranto’s rule in North Syria during the First Crusade.” Robert Irwin’s brief discussion of the final decades of the county in the thirteenth century as told in Arabic sources should be read alongside Richard’s simultaneously published paper on the dynastie antiochénienne, shedding additional light upon baronial discontent in these final years as well as upon Mamluk grand strategy.** Hans Mayer dedicates two chapters of his Varia Antiochena to subjects of direct relevance to the county, namely the succession to the county after the death of Raymond III in 1187, and Genoese forged documents from both Tripoli and Antioch in the early thirteenth century.** Wolfgang Antweiler’s careful prosopography of Tripoli’s ecclesiastics tends only to confirm the conclusions of previous scholarship relating to the operation of the Latin Church in the crusader states, although it is a helpful reference work.”
Provencal or Occitan?
What should be apparent is that the vast majority of literature on the county of Tripoli has focused upon the western heritage of the counts as the principal driving force behind its history. It is not altogether unreasonable and certainly not surprising that much past scholarship has had an Occidentalist thrust. As this book makes clear — not least in its title — the twelfth-century counts of Tripoli never forgot their European ancestry as direct descendants of the famous crusader Count Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles (= Raymond I of Tripoli). In 1132 Raymond’s grandson, Count Pons of Tripoli, described himself in a charter as ‘Pons, from the counts of Saint-Gilles’.*° As Shagrir has noted, many settlers in the east retained toponymic by-names that evoked places of ancestral or personal origin in Europe, reflecting a strong and enduring attachment to their ancestral homeland.” Pons’s own son Raymond IJ again stressed this western ancestry when he confirmed his father’s charter ten years later as ‘Raymond, son of Count Pons of Saint-Gilles [sic]’.** Later still, the great chronicler-archbishop William of Tyre made a special effort to emphasise Count Raymond III’s direct patrilineal descent from his legendary great-great-grandfather, Raymond of Saint-Gilles.** As Dunbabin has shown, the French [sic] aristocracy of the twelfth century found justification for their particular dynastic identities in the genre of genealogy, incorporating heroic deeds by the crusaders alongside the likes of the Trojans, King Arthur and Charlemagne.*® William’s genealogy of Raymond must be seen in this light.
Arabic authors too preserved the Tripolitan counts’ Saint-Gilles title. From the very beginning they called Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles simply ‘Sanjil.*' Ibn al-Qalanisi once referred to Raymond as ‘the son of Saint-Gilles’ (ibn Sanjil).* Raymond’s son Bertrand of Tripoli also bore the Saint-Gilles title in Arabic accounts, even if the authors in question tended to confuse him more than any other, perhaps due to the brevity of his reign (1109-12); Ibn al-Qalanisi named him erroneously ‘Raymond, son of (Raymond of) Saint-Gilles’ (Raymund bin Sanjil).** The emphasis on the name of Saint-Gilles extended into the reign of Bertrand’s son Pons, whom Ibn al-Qalanisi dubbed ‘Pons Talila, son of Bertrand of SaintGilles’.“* It is likely that the perplexing word 7alila is a garbled form of Toulouse (Latin Tolosa).* If so, this would represent a rare reference to Pons’s specifically Toulousan heritage alongside his identification with Saint-Gilles. This is all the more significant, because no western source suggests that the counts of Tripoli retained a claim to Toulouse beyond Bertrand’s death in 1112, with an anomalous exception being a highly dubious, sixteenth-century manuscript of the Lignages d’Outremer, which described Raymond II as ‘count of Tripoli and Toulouse’.*®
The continued presence of the Saint-Gilles title, and perhaps also that of Toulouse, in relation to Pons is arguably more significant than the use of the same in reference to his predecessors, since Pons was the first count of Tripoli never to have been count of Saint-Gilles and Toulouse —William Jordan of Cerdanya (r. 1105-9) excepted. Even after Pons’s death, the Saint-Gilles name did not disappear altogether from Arabic texts. Ibn al-Athir called Raymond II ‘Raymond, son of Raymond, the man of Saint-Gilles’, thus including both him and his father Raymond II under the label Sanjil.*’ It is from this Arabic usage that the present book derives its subtitle Sons of Saint-Gilles. This choice was made deliberately to evoke the main argument pursued here that the counts of Tripoli were westerners in name and self-perception, yet worked within a distinctly Syro-Lebanese framework. By including the vital local context, the aim has been to avoid the restricted approach of some previous historians, who have concentrated on the superficial and distant at the expense of the fundamental and local.
There are other reasons to qualify what earlier historians have written on the county of Tripoli. Richard’s and Grousset’s suggestion that the county’s principal defining quality was its domination by ‘Provencal’ settlers is perhaps too simple a generalisation. Tripoli lacked a monopoly on southern French settlers in Syria,* but equally significant is the fact that the very term ‘Provencal’ is imprecise. Certainly the term ‘provinciales’ and its cognates appear throughout the so-called ‘eyewitness’ chronicles of the First Crusade, including the Historia of the ‘Provencal’ Raymond of Aguilers, when their authors were describing Raymond IV of Saint-Gilles’s contingent.* Nevertheless, this usage can be confusing and should be clarified. The modern definition of Provence is narrow, extending from Arles in the west to Nice in the east, whereas in the medieval context the term provinciales was frequently applied to people living anywhere within the old Roman Provincia, which included the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne and thus Languedoc and even Toulouse.” Raymond of Aguilers himself recognised the potential for confusion, taking the time to inform his readers that ‘everyone from Burgundy, the Auvergne, Gascony and Languedoc are called Provencals’.*!
Raymond of Saint-Gilles was accompanied by numerous crusaders from beyond modern Provence. Albert of Aachen described two distinct ethnolinguistic groups who followed Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Adhémar of Le Puy: Provencals (Prouinciales) and Gascons (Wascones).*? One derivative source referred to Provencaux (Provincels), Gascons (Gascoinz), men of Pierrefort in the Auvergne (ces de Pierrefort) and Aragonese (Arragoncois) .°° Some of Raymond’s followers were named individually in the sources. For example, Gaston IV of Béarn — a lordship on the frontier between Gascony, Languedoc and Aragon — brought his skill in siege warfare to Raymond’s army.”
* Bernard Raymond of Béziers, Languedoc, died in a battle on 29 December 1097.°° Raymond Pilet and Raymond, viscount of Turenne in the Limousin, captured Tortosa on behalf of Count Raymond in 1098.°° It thus seems appropriate to jettison the term ‘Provencal’ in favour of ‘Occitan’, a term that more accurately captures the geographical breadth of Raymond’s main recruitment grounds and also indicates the main source of unity for this expansive region, namely the use of the Romance vernacular of langue d’oc, in contradistinction to the langue d’otl spoken in northern France.®*’ An alternative term, more common in Francophone scholarship but less evocative of the region’s linguistic distinctiveness, is the Midi.
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