Download PDF | (Crusading in Context_ 5) Andrew D. Buck (editor), James H. Kane (editor), Stephen J. Spencer (editor) - Crusade, Settlement and Historical Writing in the Latin East and Latin West, c. 1100-c.1300-THE BOYDELL PRESS, 2024.
313 Pages
Notes on Contributors
Andrew D. Buck is a Lecturer in Medieval History at Cardiff University and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin from 2019-22 and has published widely on the principality of Antioch and the political and cultural history of the crusader states, including a monograph, The Principality of Antioch and its Frontiers in the Twelfth Century (2017), three edited volumes, and some two-dozen articles and book chapters. His current research focuses on history creation in and about the crusader states, with recent and forthcoming publications on the account of the First Crusade found in William of Tyre’s Chronicon, an anonymous Jerusalemite Historia of the Latin kingdom, as well as wider conceptions of Outremer in medieval Latin Christian historical writing.
Edward J. Caddy is a Ph.D. candidate at Queen Mary University of London and Secretary of the London Society for Medieval Studies. His research interests include canon law, crusader studies, medieval historical writing and pilgrimage. His thesis sets out to explore the place of the crusade vow within the development and formalisation of crusading from c. 1050 through to c. 1200.
Peter W. Edbury is Professor Emeritus at Cardiff University. He has written widely on the history of Cyprus and the Latin East, including The Kingdom of Cyprus and the Crusades 1191-1374 (1991) and (with the late John G. Rowe) William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East (1988). He has provided critical editions of John of Ibelin’s Le Livre des Assises (2003) and Philip of Novara’s Le Livre de Forme de Plait (2009). Together with Massimiliano Gaggero of the Universita degli Studi di Milano, he is to publish imminently a new edition of the Chronicle of Ernoul and the Old French Continuation of William of Tyre (2023).
Susan B. Edgington is an honorary senior research fellow at Queen Mary University of London. She works on textual and literary aspects of writings on the earlier crusades, including, currently, an edition and translation of the Gesta Francorum Ierusalem expugnantium of ‘Bartolf of Nangis’ in collaboration with Thomas W. Smith.
Katrine Funding Hojgaard is an information specialist at University College Copenhagen and has taught courses in medieval history, the crusades and animals and monsters at University of Copenhagen. She studied medieval history at Aalborg University and Fordham University and obtained her Ph.D. in January 2021 at the University of Copenhagen. Her dissertation, ‘Narrating the Defeat: The Loss of Jerusalem in Western Historical Writing, 1187-1229’, examined the reactions to and memory of the 1187 loss of Jerusalem in Western historical writing, with a special focus on the role of emotions in the creation of a new memory tradition. Her research interests include the crusades, the history of Emotions, memory studies, manuscript studies, historiography and medieval animal studies. She has presented papers at Danish and international conferences, including Leeds IMC, and was co-organiser of the 2021 conference “The Loss of Jerusalem — Reactions, Memory and Afterlife in the West, 1187-1500’.
James H. Kane is Lecturer in Medieval History at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. He teaches widely across the ancient, medieval and early modern periods, with a particular focus on the history of the central Middle Ages. Together with Keagan Brewer, he has published The Conquest of the Holy Land by Salah al-Din: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum (2019) and is preparing a new edition and translation of the ‘Latin Continuation of William of Tyre’. He is currently writing a monograph on the crusading cross.
Katherine J. Lewis is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Huddersfield. Her research focuses on medieval gender history, as well as religious and cultural history. She has published on female saints, especially St Katherine of Alexandria and other virgin martyr saints, as well as on Margery Kempe and the cult of Henry VI. She is the author of Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England (2013) and co-editor of Crusading and Masculinities (2019).
Mark McCabe is an independent scholar and Secondary School Humanities teacher. He was awarded his Ph.D. at the University of Huddersfield in 2020 for a thesis entitled ““Opus Virile”: Masculinity and Crusade Narratives 1200-1309’. His research interests include twelfth- and thirteenth-century historical narratives and their construction of gender, identity and the experience of warfare.
Katy Mortimer is Lecturer in Medieval Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. She completed her Ph.D., entitled ‘Understanding Representations of Crusader-Muslim Diplomacy in Western Christian Texts, c. 1095—c. 1202’, at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2023. Her research interests include interfaith contact, narrative theory, and medieval historical writing. Her publications include an article in the inaugural volume of Medieval People entitled ‘Networks of Crusading: An Introductory Overview of Digital Resources for Research into People, Place, and Space’ (2022), and a chapter on crusader cannibalism in the festschrift for Susan Edgington, Chronicle, Crusade, and the Latin East (2022).
Helen J. Nicholson has recently retired as Professor in Medieval History at Cardiff University. She has published extensively on the Templars and Hospitallers, the crusades, medieval warfare and various related subjects. She has recently published Sybil, Queen of Jerusalem, 1186—90 (2022) and Women and the Crusades (2023).
Thomas W. Smith is Keeper of the Scholars and Head of Oxbridge (Arts and Humanities) at Rugby School, where he teaches history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society. His first monograph, Curia and Crusade: Pope Honorius III and the Recovery of the Holy Land, 1216-1227 (2017), was Highly Commended in the British Records Association’s Janette Harley Prize 2018. He is currently completing a second monograph on The Epistolary Culture of the First Crusade, and, with Susan B. Edgington, an edition and translation of the Gesta Francorum Ierusalem expugnantium traditionally attributed to ‘Bartolf of Nangis’.
Beth C. Spacey is a Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Queensland. She is a historian of medieval European religious cultures specialising in the crusades, and has published on ideas about the miraculous, masculinities and landscapes in the medieval Latin Christian historiography of the crusades. Her first book, The Miraculous and the Writing of Crusade Narrative, was published in March 2020.
Stephen J. Spencer is an Assistant Professor in Medieval History at Northeastern University London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His first book, Emotions in a Crusading Context, 1095-1291, appeared in 2019 and was awarded the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East’s Ronnie Ellenblum Best First Book Award in 2022 and the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean’s Second Prize for the Dionisius A. Agius Prize in 2021. His recent and forthcoming publications focus on the Third Crusade, especially its source base and memorialisation in western Europe. These include a forthcoming monograph entitled Rewriting the Third Crusade: Information Dissemination, Memory Formation, and the Writing of History in Medieval England, based on research conducted during a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at King’s College London (2019-23); a forthcoming article in The English Historical Review that argues for a redating of the [tinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi; and a survey of scholarship on the Third Crusade for History Compass (2022).
Connor C. Wilson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests include the crusades, monasticism and monastic writing, particularly on the subject of war. His current research examines reactions to spoils and spoil-taking in medieval warfare. His Ph.D. thesis was completed in 2018 at Royal Holloway, University of London and he has also lectured in History at Lancaster University. He has published articles and book chapters on ideas of holy war and the military orders. His first book was published as The Battle Rhetoric of Crusade and Holy War, c. 1099-c. 1222 (2023).
Ivo Wolsing is a postdoctoral researcher in Medieval History at the Institute for History, Leiden University. In April 2022, he successfully defended his dissertation at the Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen. His research focuses on the interaction between Latin literature and literature in other languages (Old French, Arabic) during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as well as cross-cultural interactions in the crusader states and Norman Sicily. He has published articles on these topics in the journals al-Masag (2019), Viator (2020) and Medieval Encounters (2022).
The Crusades, the Latin East and Medieval History-Writing: An Introduction
ANDREW D. Buck, JAMES H. KANE AND STEPHEN J. SPENCER
The period of the crusades and the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean was an important one for medieval historical writing. Indeed, it has been recently suggested that the chroniclers of the First Crusade (1095-99), faced with the need to couch events in a more overtly exegetical register, ‘pioneered a new way of writing about the recent past’.! Whether or not one accepts the notion that such writers adopted a fundamentally new mode of composition, there can be little doubt that this initial expedition left a significant imprint on medieval literary cultures. For a start, the vast number of extant narratives is unusual by medieval standards. More than this, though, the enterprise is renowned for popularising the medieval monograph format, with many writers electing to compose standalone histories characterised by a narrow focus on the crusade. As the crusading movement progressed, some embedded crusade accounts into works with wider chronological and geographical scopes, but the free-standing ‘crusade’ history was an outcome of nearly all subsequent expeditions (or at least the major ‘numbered’ ones).” It is perhaps a by-product of this textual tradition — among other factors, such as modern historians’ propensity to compartmentalise evidence to facilitate historical analysis and the hangover of nineteenth-century scholarly conventions — that crusading expeditions are often treated in isolation: a discrete series of holy wars related to, but somehow distinct from, the Latin Christian settlements established in the wake of the First Crusade, known collectively as the crusader states, the Latin East or, when viewed from the West, Outremer (‘the land across the sea’). One need only cast an eye over the many modern general histories of the crusades to appreciate that most devote comparatively little space to the crusader states. Instead, the history of those polities on the fringes of Latin Christendom has usually been detailed separately, so much so that even the validity of the long-standing descriptor ‘crusader states’ has been disputed.*
Consequently, the historiography of the crusades and the crusader states has developed along slightly different contours. For the purposes of this volume, the most significant difference, to be discussed in greater detail below, is that whereas texts — especially historical narratives — pertaining to the crusades have been subjected to an unparalleled degree of literary scrutiny in recent years, the textual evidence for the Latin East has less frequently been examined through the same interpretative lens. Certainly, the study of the crusader states has enjoyed a revival over the last decade, but such valuable work has primarily been geared towards reconstructing events and the lives of individual rulers, as well as the political and religious institutions of the Latin East and the nature of intercultural contact.>
This historiographical distinction, practical though it might be for modern historians, is nevertheless surprising from a medieval perspective. The boundaries between crusade and settlement are far from clear-cut in twelfth- and thirteenthcentury texts. Only the first book of Fulcher of Chartres’ Historia Hierosolymitana is concerned with the First Crusade; books 2 and 3 focus on the formation of the Latin East down to 1127. The value of Albert of Aachen’s narrative of the First Crusade in books I-6 of his Historia Ierosolimitana is now widely recognised, although his account of the first two decades of Latin settlement in books 7-12 remains relatively understudied. In fact, these neat transitions between crusade and settlement are misleading. Book 6 of Albert’s work ends not with the battle of Ascalon (commonly interpreted by modern historians as the expedition’s endpoint), but with Bohemond of Taranto’s attempt to expand his power base in the East by besieging Latakia in summer 1099 and his eventual reconciliation with other prominent figures who remained in the Holy Land.° Similarly, book | of Fulcher’s Historia, at least in the form it survives, continues all the way to summer 1100 and concludes with two blows to the fledging crusader states: the capture of Bohemond by the Danishmendid ruler Malik Ghazi and the death of Jerusalem’s first ruler, Godfrey of Bouillon.’ William, archbishop of Tyre, is renowned as a crucial authority on events in the Latin East, especially for the period 1127-84, but the first eight (of twenty-three) books of his Chronicon comprise a narrative of the First Crusade that few historians have taken seriously.* Oliver of Paderborn preached and participated in the Fifth Crusade and wrote a key narrative of the expedition, the Historia Damiatina.° Yet he also composed a history of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem — the Historia regum terre sancte — which starts with the First Crusade and ends with preparations for the Fifth Crusade.’ These examples alone suggest that, for medieval authors, writing the history of the crusades and writing the history of the Latin East were closely related, perhaps even indistinguishable. One of the main aims of this volume, therefore, is to place them in dialogue as part of a collective historiographical tradition, or at least a complimentary and interconnected series of traditions.
Another aim is to recognise that the boundaries between historical writing produced in the Latin West and Latin East were so porous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that one wonders whether the similarities and synergies outweigh the differences between Latinate texts regularly labelled ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ in origin or character. The letters written by or for crusaders were sent back to western Europe, where they were copied (and sometimes confected) by monastic scribes who played a key role in their transmission. William of Tyre was a native of Jerusalem but received nearly twenty years of training in the West before returning to his homeland, and he utilised sources that originated from both regions." In the early thirteenth century, his Chronicon was translated into Old French and several continuations were fashioned in both the Latin East and Latin West, at times in dialogue with each other.'* The Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum is principally an anonymous account of the fall of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem to Salah al-Din in 1187, probably originally composed by a churchman who witnessed the sultan’s investment of the Holy City in October that year. However, as Keagan Brewer and James Kane have shown, it was later extended using a narrative of the Third Crusade (1187-92) compiled in London — the /tinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi (IP2) — and disseminated by the monks of Coggeshall Abbey, Essex.'? Likewise, the Historia orientalis (History of the East) of Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre (1216-27), was written in the East but intended primarily for audiences in the West, where it was copied extensively. It was even envisaged as the second of three books in a larger historiographical project, with another of Jacques’ extant works, the Historia occidentalis (History of the West), intended as book 1."
The present volume thus cuts across these artificial divides to bring together fifteen chapters that consider historical writing about the crusades and the crusader states, produced in both the Latin West and the Latin East. The aims of this introductory chapter are twofold: first, to frame the chapters that follow by situating them in their wider historiographical context; and second, to provide an entry-point into the topic of history-writing about the crusades and Latin East for uninitiated readers by synthesising key interventions and trends, especially since the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Writing the Crusades
The study of literature pertaining to the crusades and the Latin East is less a new avenue of enquiry than a very old one that has enjoyed a rejuvenation and reconceptualisation in recent years. The study of textual sources has always been fundamental to the crusade historian’s craft, but nineteenth- and twentieth-century investigations were usually vested in seeking to determine a text’s reliability and usefulness for reconstructing ‘what happened’. This tradition dates back to Leopold von Ranke, whose pioneering method of critically evaluating primary sources (Quellenkritik) was applied to the evidence for the First Crusade by his student Heinrich von Sybel.' In his Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges (1841), the latter cautioned that the expedition’s vast corpus of sources ‘requires judgement in selection and arrangement’, and that it was necessary to guard against the ‘distortion of facts’ stemming from personal bias and the infusion of legendary material.'° Accordingly, von Sybel prioritised ‘the true, primitive sources, the narratives of eye-witnesses’, chief among which was the anonymous account of the First Crusade known as the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum." However, it does not follow that von Sybel was incapable of appreciating the literary qualities of later, non-participant works. For instance, he found much to admire in William of Tyre’s style: ‘His pictures are remarkable for detail, without being overcharged; his language is to the purpose and dignified; his thoughts are thoroughly well expressed. The same treatment is maintained throughout with no apparent effort’.'®
Quellenkritik has exerted, and continues to exert, a powerful hold over crusades historiography. That is why, for example, the relationship between two of our most detailed accounts of the Third Crusade — Ambroise’s Estoire de la guerre sainte and the aforementioned /P2 — has elicited so much scholarly attention. Most historians follow Gaston Paris’ interpretation that the Estoire is the earlier work, which was translated into Latin by the compiler of /P2, although some have reversed the relationship and others have attempted to resolve the debate by proposing that the two chroniclers were comrades who discussed the venture and shared material.!? More revealing still is the seemingly endless historiographical fixation with determining the primacy of the narratives of the First Crusade, centring on the Gesta Francorum’s relationship with several other early accounts, even when a radical reinterpretation of this relationship has threatened to render the whole exercise impossible.” Regardless of whether these debates are ever definitively resolved, they are clear indicators that the ‘earliest is best’ mentality has proved difficult to dislodge.
Though Quellenkritik remained the dominant methodology, several early forays were made into the literary aspects of crusade texts in the twentieth century, when studies of the idea of crusading became popular. One was Paul Rousset’s Les origines et les caracteres de la premiere croisade (1945). Rousset’s flawed methodology of seeking to emphasise and explain the religious origins and character of the First Crusade, including the pious convictions of its participants, through recourse to sources that were primarily composed by churchmen after the expedition made his book easy prey for critics.”! Yet in some ways Rousset was ahead of his time. If one ignores his central argument, much of the book is in fact an analysis of the vocabulary of crusade texts. The rhetoric of pilgrimage, crusader spirituality, martyrdom, the miraculous and vengeance permeates Rousset’s book, and he made important forward strides in acknowledging (like Paul Alphandéry before him) the presence of biblically-infused language in the sources and bringing chansons de geste into conversation with Latin chronicles.” In a similar vein, Jonathan Riley-Smith’s widely (and rightly) celebrated The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1986) is primarily a critical examination of the ideas espoused by Pope Urban II and the ways in which they were distorted and reconfigured by the crusaders’ experiences during the expedition. The final chapter, however, considered how three northern French Benedictine monks, Baldric of Bourgueil, Guibert of Nogent and Robert the Monk, imposed coherence and theological sophistication on the inchoate ideas found in their foundation text, the Gesta Francorum. This process of ‘theological refinement’, as Riley-Smith famously characterised it, transformed the crusade into a quasi-monastic, primarily French venture that would more easily appeal to ecclesiastical audiences. Though Jay Rubenstein has expressed dissatisfaction with the concept of ‘theological refinement’, and few today adhere to the strict separation of the ‘crude’ participant narratives and ‘refined’ non-participant ones, Riley-Smith demonstrated the value of considering audience expectations, while his technique of tracing the evolution of ideas by comparing the early chronicles remains influential.” The emergence of literary approaches to crusade texts also resonates with twentieth-century scholarship exploring European attitudes towards the crusading movement, such as Elizabeth Siberry’s Criticism of Crusading, 1095-1274 (1985) and David Trotter’s Medieval French Literature and the Crusades (1100-1300) (1988). The latter warned against both using Old French literature to access ‘public opinion’ and imposing rigid genre classifications, although his conclusion that the crusades were ‘neither as ubiquitous nor as influential as has generally been assumed’ in medieval French literature has been challenged by a spate of recent work in this field.~4 Meanwhile, in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars in the broader field of medieval studies responded in a meaningful way to what is now known as the ‘linguistic turn’. Often perceived as commencing with Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), this ‘turn’ recognised the centrality of emplotment and narrativity as vehicles for creating meaning in historical texts, effectively demonstrating that the analytical principles usually reserved for ‘fiction’ or ‘literature’ could be profitably applied to historians’ ‘sources’.?> Ground-breaking research was soon conducted on the features of medieval historiography and the contexts in which it was produced, with Nancy Partner’s Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in TwelfthCentury England (1977) and Gabrielle Spiegel’s The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey (1978) just two important examples.”° Crusade historians were slower to the plate. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, there has been a marked intensification of scholarship that critically analyses the literary characteristics of sources for the crusades. To give just three representative examples: in 2006, Caroline Smith examined the framework of ideas associated with crusading in thirteenth-century texts written by or for the laity; Jean Flori’s Chroniqueurs et propagandistes: Introduction critique aux sources de la premiére croisade appeared in 2010 and remains the best survey of the stylistic features of First Crusade chronicles composed before 1110; and in 2017, Stefan Vander Elst analysed a selection of Latin chronicles, chansons de geste and romances as excitationes, designed to whip up enthusiasm for crusading.*’ In one way or another, all three of these books explored the possibility that crusades-related literature acted as ‘propaganda’ to buoy crusade recruitment, although it should be noted that this function, and the suitability of the term ‘propaganda’, have been disputed.”®
Central to this historiographical shift has been the work of Marcus Bull. The seeds of Bull’s approach, which would later germinate into a full-scale monograph study, can be traced in his contribution to a 2003 Festschrift for his former Ph.D. supervisor, Jonathan Riley-Smith. The primary purpose was to incorporate collections of miracle stories into the study of crusader motivation, but Bull used the opening pages of that chapter to reflect on the First Crusade’s source base, especially the narrative accounts. He raised doubts about the category of ‘eyewitness’, memorably declaring that the term was ‘so embedded in the crusade historian’s lexicon that it tends to obscure how problematic it is on the basic level of what in fact is the nature of “witness”, before noting that: perhaps too little scholarly attention has been paid to the narrative sources as cultural artefacts above and beyond their value as repositories of information contributing to the bigger macronarrative of the recreated crusade — the quantum that itself functions as the primary analytical object. One should ask how far some of our very deep-rooted assumptions about what made a crusade what it was are simply reinscriptions of the frames of reference developed by contemporary historiography. More fundamentally still, how far is the story that we make of crusading a reflection not of the experience itself — in so far as this was indeed something more than a formless mass of countless human actions — but of the narrativizing strategies that contemporaries themselves chose to apply?”
Bull expanded upon these observations in a 2010 article that emphasised the ambiguities, tensions and inconsistencies of the participant narratives of the First Crusade, as well as the importance they attached to collective action, to demonstrate that these texts failed to anticipate the formation of the Latin East.*° The article ended by inviting scholars to explore ‘the constructed quality of these cultural artefacts’, an invitation that was effectively taken up by a host of scholars who contributed to the 2014 collection Writing the Early Crusades: Text, Transmission and Memory, edited by Bull and Damien Kempf.*! Two further studies by Bull should also be read in this connection: a 2016 essay in which he properly introduced the field of crusade studies to narratology and his 2018 monograph, Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative: Perception and Narration in Accounts of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades.** The latter, an important step away from the sources for the First Crusade, challenged historians to ‘go the long way round’ when reconstructing events: to avoid the shortcut of assessing texts exclusively on the basis of the author’s proximity to events, and instead to consider the ways in which an eyewitness, or ‘autoptic’, quality manifests itself. In other words, eyewitness is less a quality intrinsically tied to notions of ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘reliability’ and more a feature of the texts that appears in various guises and performs multiple functions. Three main theoretical concepts, borrowed from narratology, informed Bull’s analysis here: the narrator (which prevents us from connecting everything back to the author’s circumstances); focalisation (the perspective through which the story is narrated); and the storyworld (‘the global ecology inhabited by the actors within a narrative’).*+ Ultimately, Bull concluded that historians should proceed with greater caution — ‘on amber’ — when mobilising textual expressions of historical experiences and memories to reconstruct the distant past.*>
Bull’s methodology has not received universal approval. It carries ‘grave risks’, wrote John France, according to whom ‘History is about events, and texts are primarily valuable for what they tell us about them and those involved’.*° Others have complained of its rhetorical quirks, with Colin Morris lamenting in 2004 that ““micronarrative”, “narrativity”, “narrativizing” and “emplotment” are among words not recognised by my usually adequate spell-check’.*” Yet many of these terms and others are seeping into the crusade historian’s lexicon, as the benefits of engaging with these concepts to think differently about our sources and subject them to more rigorous literary probing become ever clearer.
Not all studies of crusade texts deploy the sort of narratological readings advocated by Bull; indeed, while some chapters in the present volume utilise technical terms borrowed from Bull, others do not. More broadly, much more work has been undertaken to understand the influences that informed the writing of crusade narratives, the intellectual milieus and traditions in which chroniclers worked and how medieval audiences may have responded. Owing to the efforts of Elizabeth Lapina, Nicholas Morton and Katherine Allen Smith, among others, who have built on the foundations laid by Alphandéry and Rousset, we now have a much better grasp of the degree to which the Bible and scriptural exegesis provided reference-points that crusade commentators exploited and that their medieval audiences almost certainly recognised more readily than their modern counterparts.** Thus, those who wrote about the crusades frequently evoked the memory of the Maccabees, whose status as Old Testament warriors and martyrs made them natural exemplars of proto-crusaders, although some commentators, like Guibert of Nogent, evidently felt uneasy about ‘Judaising’ Latin Christians through this comparison.*® Two studies are particularly innovative. Collectively, the nineteen essays in The Uses of the Bible in Crusader Sources (2017), edited by Lapina and Morton, illuminate the role of biblical imagery in justifying acts of violence, the challenges of distinguishing between deliberate and unintentional biblical citation (a topic previously discussed by Alan Murray) and the value of contextualising individual works within specific regional settings.*° Significantly, the volume also addressed several texts created in the Latin East.*! Katherine Allen Smith’s The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century (2020) is the first monograph study on the topic and offers a methodological blueprint for future work. It demonstrated the spectrum of biblical themes, citations and allusions utilised by chroniclers of the First Crusade to describe not only the crusaders, who were frequently cast as the new Israelites, but also their enemies and the sacred geographies they encountered.*? Smith made a compelling case for treating the chroniclers as ‘whole people’, who were not only or even primarily ‘crusade historians’, and for taking seriously the training in scriptural exegesis that they received in monastic and cathedral schools and then brought to bear on narrating and explaining the seemingly unprecedented events of 1095—99.*3 Going further still, she argued (perhaps controversially) that a close reading of scriptural framing and allegory ‘brings us closer to understanding what our authors were thinking, that is, what words and chains of association were in their minds, as they wrote’, even giving us a flavour of the experiences of twelfth-century readers, who were primed to ruminate over such scriptural citations. Offering an important corrective to Riley-Smith, she concluded that ‘the First Crusade’s chronicle tradition seems to be characterized not so much by progressive “theological refinement” ... as by a consistently high level of theological engagement and creativity’ .*
Smith’s work captures the refreshing willingness of crusade historians both to look outside the immediate environs of ‘crusade studies’ for inspiration and to question traditional categorisations of sources into discrete genres. In this regard, the pathfinding work of Simon Parsons and Thomas Smith on the epistolary evidence for the First Crusade is exemplary. Both have returned to the medieval manuscripts to produce new editions of several letters, replacing those published by Heinrich Hagenmeyer in 1901, and reassess their position within (and relationship to) the wider corpus of extant sources.*° In 2018, Parsons demonstrated that two letters attributed to Stephen of Blois — conventionally accepted as first-rate eyewitness evidence for reconstructing the First Crusade — are structurally, stylistically and textually connected to the earliest narrative histories of the enterprise.*”7 Smith has likewise warned that other letters in the corpus are of problematic authenticity, while his identification and analysis of new manuscript witnesses has developed considerably our knowledge of the letters’ transmission and reception. The act of copying letters, Smith posited, represents a form of monastic engagement with, even participation in, the crusades that he characterised as ‘scribal crusading’ — a concept that we suspect is applicable to a wide range of textual evidence for the crusades beyond epistles.*®
Another manifestation of this desire to break down traditional genre boundaries is the expansion of scholarship on what might loosely be called ‘poetic sources’ for the crusades. Once treated as inherently deficient and suspect by historians, owing to their ‘fictional’ quality, chansons de geste and lyrics have stimulated some of the most exciting and original research in crusade studies since around 2010. This process has been aided by the appearance of English translations of the central trilogy or ‘cycle rudimentaire’ of the Old French Crusade Cycle (the Chanson d’Antioche, Chanson des Chétifs and Chanson de Jérusalem), in addition to over 200 Old French and Occitan lyrics as part of Linda Paterson’s project, Lyric Responses to the Crusades in Medieval France and Occitania.”
Comparatively less work has been conducted on Middle High German lyrics, which remain ripe for further research.*° Of immediate relevance to the present volume, however, is the fact that bringing these vernacular sources into the fold has simultaneously cast new light on the composition of well-known narrative accounts. Simon Parsons and Carol Sweetenham have shown that there exists a complex relationship between extant chansons de geste and the Latin narratives of the First Crusade, with the former (or at least the traditions underpinning them) seemingly informing the latter.°! Linked to this, the oral traditions that fed the narratives are also coming into sharper focus.*?
The blurring of the distinction between ‘history’ and ‘fiction’ in recent historiography is almost inseparable from another significant development: the growth of work on the memorialisation of the crusades in the Middle Ages. Literature (as well as other forms of material culture, such as art and architecture) played an essential role in the creation of crusading heroes, such as Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard I of England and Louis IX of France.*? Thus, as Cecilia Gaposchkin has demonstrated, Louis [X’s crusading career was a central feature of hagiographical literature written in support of his canonisation.*+ Louis was canonised as a confessor in 1297, yet John of Joinville, author of the most detailed participant narrative of the Seventh Crusade (1248-54), insisted that the hardships he had endured during two crusades warranted the designation of a martyr.> Given the centrality of crusading to Louis’ posthumous reputation, it might be assumed that this was the culmination of a long-standing association between the French monarchy and the crusades. James Naus, however, has unpicked this teleological narrative to reveal a more complex reality, whereby the fusion of crusading ideals with older ideas of sacral kingship spawned a new Capetian royal identity during the twelfth century.*° Western Europeans even turned to the crusaders’ adversaries for inspirational figures. Famously, Salah al-Din was transformed from the principal opponent of the Third Crusade — denounced as a usurper and a pimp by some chroniclers — into a paragon of chivalric values.
Some even claimed that he was knighted, while others had him secretly convert to Christianity. As Margaret Jubb put it, in the case of Salah al-Din ‘disentangling fact from fiction becomes extremely difficult’.*7 Research on crusade chroniclers’ representations of Muslims more broadly also continues apace. Kristin Skottki’s Christen, Muslime und der Erste Kreuzzug: Die Macht der Beschreibung in der mittelalterlichen und modernen Historiographie (2015), which emphasises the complex and multivalent functions of ‘othering’ in First Crusade narratives, is a particularly valuable contribution to the field.**
Other studies have explored the memorialisation and narrativisation of key events. Benjamin Kedar’s 2004 longitudinal examination of the 1099 massacre at Jerusalem has served as a methodological model that scholars have started to replicate. Kedar charted how western writers approached this event, from the earliest chroniclers to modern historians, revealing the degree of variance between the Latin sources, the modification of earlier accounts by later writers and the long-standing influence of the non-participant accounts by Robert the Monk and William of Tyre.*? As ever, historians of crusading memory have gravitated to the proliferation of First Crusade narratives, yet Megan Cassidy-Welch has been instrumental in redressing this imbalance through her own scholarship and her editing of two key essay collections.® In a 2017 article, Cassidy-Welch took the novel step of engaging with trauma theory to suggest that the loss of a relic of the True Cross at the battle of Hattin in July 1187 was an example of ‘collective trauma’ for western Christians, while her 2019 monograph, War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade, applied two concepts from memory studies (“war memory’ and ‘communicative memory’) to explore how contemporary writers navigated the potentially problematic Fifth Crusade (1217-21) — an expedition marked by a combination of success and failure.“ In addition, Lee Manion has examined the development and legacy of medieval crusading romance, demonstrating that crusading discourse held a persistent and malleable place in the English imagination, and left an indelible mark on English literature between c. 1300 and 1604. Gary Dickson’s The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory (2008) should also be mentioned. Though its strict distinction between ‘history’ and ‘mythistory’ is unhelpful — one could contend that the process of mythologising the so-called Children’s Crusade (1212) began with the earliest commentators — the book provides an exemplary analysis of how thirteenth-century chroniclers like Alberic of Trios-Fontaines, Matthew Paris and Vincent of Beauvais embroidered and reimagined the story, as well as a wideranging survey of how it was remembered down to the twentieth century.®
One consequence of such work is that previously marginalised sources are gradually receiving the attention they deserve as literary and cultural artefacts, and as evidence for the ways in which medieval people and societies engaged with the crusading past (as we saw above with chansons de geste and lyrics). In 2012, Nicholas Paul’s landmark investigation into the construction of aristocratic family memories of crusading introduced scholars to an untapped corpus of dynastic histories.“ Likewise, narratives that were known, but passed over on the grounds that they were of little value for empirical reconstruction, are now being rehabilitated. For example, the Gesta Francorum lerusalem expugnantium of ‘Bartolf of Nangis’, once dismissed as ‘in no way important’, has been shown by Susan Edgington to offer a valuable, if potentially distorted, window onto the lost 1106 recension of Fulcher of Chartres’ Historia. Moreover, in one of few works to contextualise the composition of crusade history in the wider tradition of western history-writing, Michael Staunton has enunciated how chroniclers engaged with the subject of crusading in late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century England, especially the setbacks of 1187 and the resultant Third Crusade.
The emergence of literary approaches to crusade texts has also acted as a springboard for an array of thematic investigations. Indeed, crusade studies is in constant dialogue with other fields, including gender studies, the history of emotions and the environmental humanities. Consider, for example, the topic of gender and the crusades. Early work in this area was primarily (albeit not exclusively) concerned with assessing women’s contributions to crusading and the roles imputed to them in crusade texts, with Gendering the Crusades (2001), edited by Susan Edington and Sarah Lambert, and Natasha Hodgson’s Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative (2007) making important advances.” Increasingly, however, scholars have explored the depiction of masculine ideals and identities in crusades-related literature, exemplified by the 2019 collection Crusading and Masculinities.*° Joanna Phillips’ contribution to that volume typifies the aforementioned thematic diversification. It considers the little-studied topic of conceptions of sickness and health in a crusading context, demonstrating that accusations of illness and bodily infirmity were readily deployed by chroniclers to critique the masculine identities of crusade leaders. Others have examined the emotional rhetoric of crusading. Susanna Throop has charted the emergence and growth of the idea that crusading was an act of vengeance between 1095 and 1216, simultaneously exposing the significance of the related emotion word ze/us, whereas Stephen Spencer has explored the spiritual, political and social representations and functions of fear, anger and weeping in western crusade narratives.” Portrayals of miraculous occurrences on crusade have likewise been scrutinised by Elizabeth Lapina and Beth Spacey.” The latter, in particular, has shown that miracles, visions and signs were malleable and effective rhetorical tools that the authors of crusade narrative employed to communicate divine sponsorship of crusading campaigns, to set them in the tradition of sacred history, to legitimise relics and to defend the actions of individual crusaders. As Spacey convincingly argued, how, and the extent to which, the miraculous was utilised in crusade narrative evolved with crusading’s changing fortunes between 1095 and 1204. Through a special issue of the Journal of Medieval History, co-edited with Cassidy-Welch, Spacey has also helped to open up another vein of research on representations of landscapes and nature in crusade texts — a topic that has hitherto primarily been explored in connection to the Baltic crusades.”
Writing the Latin East
When it comes to scholarship on literary sources produced in, or about, the Latin settlements of the East, the extent of published work is much smaller. Much of the earlier scholarship focused on the authors and their lives, with a near total focus on William of Tyre.”> Over time, smaller studies began to consider the texts themselves, albeit still with an emphasis on William. As such, D. W. T. C. Vessey, R. H. C. Davis and Wolfgang Giese (who also offered insightful comments on the work of Fulcher of Chartres) sought to tease out elements of William’s authorial agendas and literary influences.” It was with three monographs, though, that the historiographical landscape changed in earnest.
The first of these was Rainer Schwinges’ 1977 work, Kreuzzugsideologie und Toleranz: Studien zu Wilhelm von Tyrus.” In this, Schwinges set out to compare William’s approach to Islam and Muslims with contemporaneous chroniclers, situating the author’s ideas in the wider context of crusade ideology and the twelfth-century renaissance. Though it would be an oversimplification — one often made — to say that Schwinges sought to portray William as actually tolerant of Islam, at least in the modern sense, it is nevertheless the case that he saw in the Chronicon a surprisingly complicated view of the crusaders’ Muslim enemies. It is worth noting, however, that the validity of this approach, as well as William’s novelty in this regard, can be challenged in light of modern scholarly discussions of Latin Christian views of Islam.”
In the second monograph dedicated solely to William of Tyre, Peter Edbury and John Rowe took a more holistic approach, seeking to draw out several of the key themes of William’s text, albeit only really from those books covering the years after the First Crusade (9—23).” In William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East, therefore, Edbury and Rowe not only traced the wider literary — especially classical and biblical — influences on the Chronicon, they also discussed the author’s views of the Jerusalemite monarchy, the nature of legitimate power, the balance between kingdom and Church, the role of the papacy in Outremer, the Latins’ relations with Byzantium and, like Schwinges, the war against Islamic forces. In doing so, the authors challenged the prevailing historiographical approach of regarding the Chronicon as ‘a mine of information’, arguing, much like von Sybel, that it should instead be appreciated as ‘a treasure of historical literature’.
The third book-length study of a Latin East text in this period, and the only one not dedicated to William of Tyre, is Verena Epp’s Fulcher von Chartres: Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung des ersten Kreuzzuges (1990). In a wide-ranging, albeit somewhat broad-brush, work, Epp considered how Fulcher’s perspective and work evolved during the twelfth century as a result of his experiences as participant in the First Crusade and inhabitant of the Latin East. Thus, Epp traced changes or continuities in approach across an array of thematic aspects, including Fulcher’s views of theology, piety, women, nature and power, both religious and secular.
The book is valuable equally for the light it sheds on the Historia’s composition and ‘linguistic design’ (sprachlichen Gestaltung), including the author’s intentions and the influence of biblical, ancient and medieval authorities, as well as the text’s vocabulary, syntax and prosimetric character.”
However, whereas the literary turn has reenvisaged the nature of crusade studies in relation to expeditionary texts, it cannot be said that the literary cultures of, or texts about, the Latin East have been properly incorporated into this historiographical charge. That is not to say, though, that there has been no scholarship devoted to deepening our knowledge of both the authors and texts known to us. By far the most prolific avenue for research, still, is William of Tyre, with several studies having considered, among other themes, his use of biblical language and models, his knowledge of law and class, the political nature of his narrative, his views of non-Latins and his attitudes towards gender.®° For the most part, such analyses have focused on sections of the Chronicon that detail the decades after Jerusalem’s capture in 1099, or even just the years that follow Fulcher’s endpoint (1127) — a trend predicated on the belief that the archbishop’s borrowing of other texts for the earlier portions makes those sections of limited value for assessing his authorial processes. Yet, more recently there have been efforts to rectify this and to actively chart William’s authorial skill through his account of the First Crusade.*!
Studies on other texts have been few and far between. Regarding Fulcher, only a handful of works have sought to build upon Epp’s foundations, and, though important, those that have examined the non-crusade portions of the Historia have largely focused on specific aspects of the author or his text, such as furthering the debate on Fulcher’s attitude to the crusading project or examining his views of Turkish communities and pilgrims.*? Alongside this, some recent work has sought to trace how the reception and adaptation of Fulcher’s Historia by authors in the Latin West might offer a window onto how events in the Latin East were being filtered into wider literary developments.** A few shorter studies have also been produced on the Antiochene author Walter the Chancellor, largely centring on his views of warfare and Muslims (especially vis-a-vis his captivity following the battle of the Field of Blood in 1119).*4 Similarly, we have only a few focused works on Jacques de Vitry and his Historia orientalis, and these have predominantly examined his views of non-Latins and the political structures of the Latin East.
The picture is largely the same regarding the wider corpus of texts from or about the Latin East, with scattered analyses of various narratives or literary cultures.*°
More recently, however, several publications have suggested a growing desire to better understand the literary cultures relating to the Latin East. Peter Edbury has done much to clarify the development of the Old French Continuations of William of Tyre — a textual tradition that, together with the closely-associated Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier, is fundamental for studying the history of the Latin East between 1184 and 1277.*’ Furthermore, one edited and one co-authored volume, Laura Morreale and Nicholas Paul’s The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean (2018) and Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt and William Burgwinkle’s Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad (2020), have investigated aspects of vernacular literary and historical production in the Frankish East.** To these can also be added Jonathan Rubin’s exemplary Learning in a Crusader City: Intellectual Activity and Intercultural Exchanges in Acre, 1191-1291 (2018), which considers the learned communities of crusader Acre in the last century of its existence.®?
More overtly important to this volume are two further monographs. The first of these is Timo Kirschberger’s Erster Kreuzzug und Ethnogenese: In novam formam commutatus — Ethnogenetische Prozesse im Fitirstentum Antiochia und im Konigreich Jerusalem (2015), which used the texts produced in Outremer, albeit primarily those that deal with the First Crusade and the very early years of settlement, to trace processes of ethnogenesis within the settler communities.” While Kirschberger’s approach is not without its faults, particularly its reliance on the stability of ever-fluid discussions on the provenance of early crusade narratives, the very act of treating such texts as collective cultural artefacts of the Frankish East is an important step and one that offers new insights into how Latin settlers constructed new identities formed from the act of crusading. Most recently, Julian Yolles’ Making the East Latin: The Latin Literature of the Levant in the Era of the Crusades (2022) has appeared.?' Though this book was published too late for its findings to be incorporated into the chapters included in this volume, some preliminary comments are possible here. First, the author’s detailed literary survey of the Latin cultures of the Levant offers fresh routes of travel for historians traversing the historiographical pathways relating not only to the more widely known works of Fulcher of Chartres, Ralph of Caen, Walter the Chancellor and William of Tyre, but also an array of lesser-known historical texts and poems. In doing so, Yolles argues that we should elevate the status of the Frankish Levant’s latinity, the products of which are of a skill and adaptability that pay testament to a vibrant written culture, one demonstrably seeking to express the new identities of the settler communities, both secular and religious.*? Yolles’ book thus aims, like several of the chapters offered below, to better establish the place that the Latin East should be afforded in understanding the cultural and literary responses to the crusading movement across medieval Christendom.
OKO
One of the main guiding principles of this volume is to examine how individual crusading campaigns and the Frankish settlements of the eastern Mediterranean were natrativised and remembered across the Latin East and the Latin West. More than that, though, it seeks to bring the historical writing cultures of these two areas, often treated as geographically distinct, into dialogue with each other. By offering such a wide-ranging, geographically and temporally diverse perspective, one that incorporates and considers lesser-studied texts, methodologies, events and regions of textual production, it is hoped that the following essays will help scholars to achieve a more holistic understanding of the impact that both crusading and settlement had on the literary cultures of Latin Christendom. Indeed, what emerges most prominently here is the far-reaching potential that a study of historical writing, crusade and settlement holds for scholars — a fact which speaks to the significant impact that these events had on the people and places involved. When taken as a whole, this volume, and several chapters in particular (Buck, Edbury, Edgington, Funding Hejgaard, Nicholson, Smith, Spacey, Spencer), shine a light on the underlying literary developments and networks of communication and identity that tied the Latin East and Latin West together.
Further to this, it becomes clear that the events related to the crusades and the Latin East offered important opportunities for medieval authors to experiment with form and genre, both of which showed a level of plasticity across the period. The surprising and significant success of the First Crusade in particular inspired authors to find innovative ways to tell its story (Buck, Caddy, Kane, Mortimer, Smith, Wilson) and to afford its landed consequences a level of social meaning (Edgington, Mortimer), while moments of great distress or crisis, like the loss of Jerusalem and the failure of subsequent attempts at its recovery, likewise prompted authorial investigation (Funding Hojgaard, Nicholson, Spacey, Wolsing). Central to this is the fact that the fast-moving, at times highly dramatic and changeable, nature of crusading and settlement stimulated the very act of writing — with the entire period constituting one of intense historical production. Importantly, this fostered the conditions needed for extensive efforts at rewriting and editing. Changing fates and perspectives, especially political and military crises, prompted authors to rethink how past events had been narrated (Buck, Edgington, Mortimer, Nicholson, Spacey, Spencer), while texts and stories forged in one geographical space could find themselves being redacted and reshaped to meet the cultural and commemorative needs of a different region (Buck, Edbury, Edgington, Funding Hojgaard, Smith, Spacey, Spencer). Of importance here, though, is not just what authors said, but also what was left unsaid, as political currents that surrounded texts and authors had to be carefully navigated (Kane, Nicholson).
The chapters in this volume also help to further elucidate that historical writing composed between c. 1100 and c. 1300 was not simply focused on recording what had happened; it also set out to engage with, and shape, contemporary views of idealised behaviours and identities. In addition, therefore, to several chapters’ emphasis on the need to pay closer attention to the individual authorial motives and agendas of historical writers (Buck, Edgington, Lewis, McCabe, Mortimer, Nicholson, Spacey, Wolsing), a stress is similarly placed on situating authors within broader contemporary conversations and ideas. Whether this regards gender (Lewis, McCabe), ideologies of crusading (Caddy, Wilson), responses to disaster (Funding Hgajgaard, Nicholson, Spacey) or the responsibilities and identities of settler powers and communities (Buck, Edbury, Lewis, Mortimer, Spacey, Wolsing), it is evident that texts and their authors, both in the Latin East and the Latin West, must be situated and examined within wider didactic trends that transcended geographical boundaries.
Several analytical tendrils thus intertwine and snake their way throughout the various contributions to this volume. This has manifested certain editorial challenges in deciding how best to order and present the contributions, as any discrete thematic structuring threatens to divide the chapters from each other arbitrarily and artificially. It is our hope, therefore, that readers will approach the chapters offered here not just as single entities, but as a collective discussion, one that can help to open new avenues for debate, prompt fresh evaluation of long-standing historiographical truisms and, most importantly, place the Latin East and the Latin West in dialogue.
Turning to the contributions, the volume begins with Thomas Smith’s wideranging response to historians’ long-standing need to better understand how the epistolary form intersected with, and contributed to, the literary outpouring inspired by the invention of crusading. As Smith notes, the letters sent home by crusaders fighting in the Holy Land have traditionally been interpreted as reliable missives from the front, and thus as less distorted by hindsight and authorial agenda than longer forms of historical writing. Building upon new research that has begun to recognise that the epistles sent from crusader armies often transmitted chunks of crusade narrative, Smith locates letters sent across the period 1095-1291 within the broader context of historical writing about crusading expeditions. In considering the narrative strategies found in such epistles, Smith argues that crusade letters are vital witnesses to the processes of history-writing and remembrance. The epistolary form proved a highly popular genre in medieval Europe, one that attracted widespread audiences and represented an ideal format for writers in the Latin West who sought to confect crusading history for their own purposes or, as was most common, to encourage collective memorialisation around major events or famous crusaders. What is significant here, then, is that crusade missives stand as testament to the genre-fluidity that characterises so much of the historical record for the central Middle Ages.
Following this is James Kane’s consideration of another narrative form: the annal. Focusing on the Old English annals often described under the umbrella term the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and their detailing of the events of the First Crusade, Kane discusses a genre and region of literary production that have been underappreciated in historiographical discussions of the early crusades. While it is well known that English authors showed distinct interest in later expeditions, especially the Third Crusade, it is often assumed that chroniclers directly contemporary to the First Crusade were rather less concerned with this new form of holy war. Starting with the Peterborough Chronicle and a brief Old English annal about the First Crusade scribbled in the margins of an Easter table in British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.XV, Kane analyses the development of early twelfthcentury textual traditions about that initial venture, particularly among the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury. In doing so, he examines points of intersection and divergence in both Latin and vernacular accounts. What Kane’s study reveals is an instantaneous, if short-lived, English interest in the First Crusade that preceded the creation of a basic and largely uniform continental narrative of the venture. Though this chapter does not undermine the sense that the Canterbury monks reflected reservations felt about the venture by their archbishop, St Anselm, and king, William II, as witnessed by the annals’ silences on key crusading events like the capture of Jerusalem, Kane emphasises the value of resisting the gravitational pull of the more famous and decidedly richer narratives of the First Crusade. In short, in widening our sense of the scope of different genres of crusade narrative and mining the many lesser annals that were produced in Europe towards the end of the eleventh century, it is argued that we can find insightful perspectives on Pope Urban’s project that were developing as the crusade itself unfolded.
Staying with the First Crusade, Edward Caddy offers a new perspective on representations of the institutional mechanics of the nascent crusading movement by examining how chroniclers of that initial venture described the taking and fulfilment of the crusade vow. This taps into a historiographical consensus that has seen the vow as an integral component of the crusade idea from the very start of the crusading movement. While Caddy accepts that our earliest written witnesses to Pope Urban II’s own conception of the venture did include the stipulation that participants must take and complete a vow in order to receive the promised spiritual rewards, he demonstrates that this is not borne out in the narrative histories, which allude to the vow sporadically, inconsistently and by means of a diverse linguistic framework. Thus, the Benedictine reworkings of the Gesta Francorum offer contrasting visions of Urban’s conception of the vow at Clermont, while none mention its fulfilment during the capture of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. Likewise, though some of the interrelated family of texts that surround the Gesta Francorum do mention the crusaders discharging their vows, not all do. Caddy suggests that it is only in later reworkings, written in the context of attempts to define the crusade, that we encounter a clearer and more coherent framing of the vow in terms of an initial promise and eventual fulfilment — a trend seen not just in the Latin West, but also in the Latin East through the Chronicon of William of Tyre. As Caddy argues, this perhaps surprising reality requires that historians be mindful of the fact that the development of the crusade as an institution was a dialogic process, one that the narratives of that venture both reflected and contributed to.
Connor Wilson then explores how spoil-taking and material reward were treated by medieval authors in the context of holy war. He considers how accounts of crusaders gaining looted spoils could find a purpose and function in texts designed first and foremost to detail a new form of Christian penitential warfare, one that emphasised the importance of right intent to gaining spiritual reward. Focusing on the First Crusade, Wilson situates this expedition against the backdrop of wider socio-cultural discussions of the role and importance of spoil-taking in war, arguing that authors of crusade texts could hardly ignore the reality of spoilacquisition given that the act was so well recognised and widespread by the time Urban summoned the venture in 1095. Therefore, loot-taking is a significant feature of various texts, as the writers devised creative ways to incorporate and comment upon material gain while still emphasising the religious nature of the venture. Spoils thus served to communicate idealised hierarchical structures, for instance demonstrating the responsibility leaders had for those in their following or who were worse off than them. Similarly, descriptions of spoil-acquisition provided opportunities to comment and reflect on the discipline and morality of the Christian army: crusaders could revel in spoils post-battle, but only once they had entirely routed the enemy and God’s victory had been assured. In sum, spoil-taking, like the vow, both spoke and contributed to wider ideals that crusade chroniclers were developing and articulating in the first half of the twelfth century.
The volume then moves to the first of three contributions on Fulcher of Chartres’ Historia Hierosolymitana, that being Katy Mortimer’s narratological study of this famous text. Significantly, Mortimer considers the Historia as a whole, examining key aspects of Fulcher’s coverage of the First Crusade and the reigns of Baldwins I and II of Jerusalem to shed new light on the text’s function as a foundation narrative for the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. This is achieved through the adoption of several analytical concepts from narrative theory, such as sceneshifts, story arcs and narrative time, which serve to tease out the underlying strands of Fulcher’s authorial approach and how his agendas may have developed across the three recensions of his work. Mortimer argues that, in his account of the First Crusade, Fulcher’s theological narrative programmes sidestepped individual heroism and instead emphasised group action, with individualism mentioned almost exclusively when it undermined the crusade and thus required a return to collective action. This fed into Fulcher’s coverage of the reigns of the two Baldwins, as the focus on collective action alleviated potential criticism of Baldwin I’s failure to contribute to the siege of Jerusalem in 1099 and, in turn, enabled his reign to serve as the blueprint for ideal rule in the Holy Land. For Baldwin II’s reign, however, we see how Fulcher sought to establish legitimacy by responding to trauma, especially the king’s period of captivity in the early 1120s, through the evocation of themes embedded in his account of the First Crusade, such as unity and the marvellous. Importantly, this formed part of a wider authorial effort to situate the formation of Outremer, like the events of the crusade, in the context of sacred history.
Next, Susan Edgington seeks to better understand the form of the Historia’s now-lost 1106 recension, here called the ‘first’ recension. She does so by comparing Fulcher’s last, or ‘third’, recension (which ends around the time of the author’s death in 1127) with two texts known to have used the earliest version: the Gesta Francorum Ierusalem expugnantium, a product of early twelfth-century Flanders that is commonly (but probably apocryphally) attributed to ‘Bartolf of Nangis’, and the Dei gesta per Francos of Guibert, abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy in northeastern France. Homing in on the period after the battle of Ascalon in August 1099, Edgington carefully and comparatively examines these three texts’ discussions of the accession and coronation of Baldwin I, the designs and actions of Daibert of Pisa (who became patriarch of Jerusalem) and the failed miracle of the Holy Fire at Easter 1101. This analysis provides further important insights into Fulcher’s editorial process and his attempts to first construct, and then protect, the reputation of the burgeoning Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Just as significantly, though, this chapter analyses the reception of the Historia by two contemporary western authors, with “Bartolf’ placing a strong emphasis on preserving Fulcher’s words and Guibert adopting a more eclectic style that focused on incorporating new information as he discovered it, even if it contradicted earlier parts of his work. This demonstrates the real hunger for information on crusade and settlement in the early twelfth-century Latin West, as well as the ways in which authors interpreted and utilised such information for their own authorial agendas. Continuing with the theme of reception, Stephen Spencer’s chapter explores the Liber revelationum of Peter of Cornwall and its selective, but significant, use of Fulcher’s Historia. It does so by examining the numerous variant readings found in the Liber that correspond with a particular version of Fulcher’s text preserved in an unexplored twelfth-century manuscript — one created at the Benedictine abbey of St Augustine, Canterbury — and thus casts light on the reception of the Historia Hierosolymitana c. 1200 at Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, where Peter was prior. Here, Spencer hypothesises that the Canterbury manuscript could reflect a further, previously unrecognised stage in Fulcher’s own editorial process. More concretely, however, he argues that Peter and his scribes incorporated chapters from the Historia dealing with miraculous occurrences, but that this was not a passive process. Rather, the appropriation and repurposing of Fulcher’s crusade chronicle served a specific end: to contribute towards Peter’s wider literary goal of proving the existence of God, angels and life after death. This can be seen through several alterations the Liber makes to its base text, including the addition of unique chapter headings and short contextual sentences, as well as the omission of substantial parts of the corresponding chapters in Fulcher’s Historia. By analysing these editorial processes, this chapter not only exposes new evidence for the reception of Fulcher’s Historia, and by extension the level of medieval English interest in crusading history, but also demonstrates how crusade narratives could be repackaged to perform new purposes, and the advantages to be had in turning to source types that modern historians of the crusades have traditionally bypassed. Following on from these analyses of Fulcher are three chapters on another author situated in the Latin East: William of Tyre. Andrew Buck’s chapter focuses on two largely neglected aspects of William’s Chronicon — his interaction with crusading chansons de geste and use of oral modes of storytelling. Taking as a case study the betrayal of Antioch during the First Crusade by the tower guard Firuz, it is argued that, contrary to previous historiographical consensus, William was not only distinctly aware of the traditions that eventually crystallised into the Chanson d’Antioche, he also deployed the epic mode when relating the crusade’s story in order to emulate the methods of group storytelling — the so-called ‘camp-fire cultures’ — that fed into history creation surrounding that initial venture. Examining both the Chronicon’s content and the author’s use of certain type-scenes, it is argued that William’s text shares clear similarities with the Antioche in how the relationship between Firuz and the crusade leader Bohemond of Taranto developed, the deal that eventually led the former to surrender Antioch to the latter and the events that surrounded the city’s capture. Furthermore, William’s use of direct speech, narratorial interjection, emotion, humour, gesture and ritual all speak to an author who recognised the value of incorporating aural cues that would have allowed for performance. This, in turn, would have served to better transmit, and legitimise, the story of Antioch’s capture to his audiences. As such, Buck situates William’s account of the First Crusade, largely overlooked in modern scholarship, within the wider flourishing of history creation sparked by the First Crusade and the genre-spanning historiographical developments underway in twelfth-century Latin Christendom. This, it is argued, emphasises the need for scholars to better situate the Latin East’s literary-historical traditions outside of its own geographical sphere.
Ivo Wolsing then offers a contribution to recent work on the composition and purpose of William’s text. He contends that William’s creation of a coherent, single narrative, rather than a looser collection of writings, should be dated to the early 1180s, thereby situating the text more firmly in the period when the kingdom of Jerusalem’s political future was on a knife-edge (thanks to disputes over the regency of King Baldwin IV) and the archbishop’s own career was waning. Wolsing thus highlights the need to read the text within the specific context of Jerusalem’s political circumstances at this time, for this casts fresh and significant light on William’s authorial and editorial processes. In particular, Wolsing notes that William sought to divert any sense of blame for the kingdom’s deteriorating fortunes away from his two most important patrons, King Amalric of Jerusalem and Count Raymond III of Tripoli, by instead casting doubt over the behaviour of the military orders and those advisers who unduly influenced the author’s favoured leaders. Wolsing also argues that William’s depiction of the downfall of the Fatimid Caliphate at the hands of Salah al-Din in the 1160s acts as something of a mirror for the text’s Jerusalemite audience. Indeed, its emphasis on the need for a strong regent in times of monarchical crisis, albeit with the caveat that a regent who lacked close dynastic ties to the ruling family should not be given overreaching powers, would have had particular resonance in the kingdom. This chapter thus recognises both the ways in which William’s account was shaped by crisis and changing political circumstances and the imperative for William to offer meaning to audiences in the Latin East and the Latin West. It must, therefore, be read accordingly.
Katherine Lewis further explores the influence of the fraught political climate of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the 1170s and 1180s on William’s work by considering how issues such as King Baldwin IV’s leprosy, and thus his inability to father children, affected the author’s approach to describing the masculinity of the Holy City’s rulers. Situating her methodology against wider advances in the field that emphasise close textual readings of social and cultural markers, as well as considerations of William’s attitudes towards gender, Lewis looks to trace the ways that Jerusalem’s royal men were described acting as men. Lewis takes as a case study the reign of King Baldwin HI, chosen not just because it is one of the longest to be detailed in the Chronicon but also because, due to his power dispute with his mother, Queen Melisende, Baldwin’s masculine attributes were debated by contemporaries, including William. Lewis examines how William charted Baldwin’s rise from inauspicious beginnings, when the young king had to fight for independence from his mother and then establish his adulthood through increased personal continence, through to his presentation as the ideal, masculine ruler. Baldwin did this, moreover, by not only encapsulating the masculine physicality of a king, but also by performing his manhood through his defence of the realm. As Lewis demonstrates, William thus used masculine character traits to trace a dynastic line from Jerusalem’s first ruler, Godfrey of Bouillon, to King Amalric, taking in Queen Melisende along the way. In doing so, William provided a mirror onto, and a lesson for, the kingdom’s ruling elites who, in the 1180s, had left the Holy City facing disaster through their inadequacies. In short, we see once more how history could serve as a vital didactic tool for influencing, or at least attempting to influence, lived behaviour, and how the idealised heroes of crusading and settlement could sit at the very heart of this.
Following on from this and tying in with several chapters that consider genre, Katrine Funding Hejgaard offers a contribution on literary responses to the fall of Jerusalem to the Sultan Salah al-Din in October 1187. More specifically, she situates literary discussions of the Holy City’s loss within the long history of city laments — a genre that began in ancient Mesopotamia but was then crystallised, influentially so for western Christian writers, through the Old Testament. As a result of this process, the city lament became defined by certain genre tropes and structural techniques, including divine abandonment, contrasting fortunes, assignment of responsibility and the weeping goddess (or mother). By exploring the presence of these and other tropes in the works of German chroniclers like Arnold of Ltibeck and Otto of St Blasien, English historians such as Roger of Howden and William of Newburgh and other narrative accounts, including the Danish Historia de profectione Danorum in Hierosolymam, Funding Hojgaard’s broad-ranging study considers the nature of the response to the events of 1187 in western European historical writing. It is argued that Jerusalem’s fall retrospectively marked a moment of historical discontinuity, but also that it cannot be understood as an isolated event; rather, both the biblical and historical Jerusalem, along with the city lament genre, provided a framework for understanding the Holy City’s loss and a template through which to mourn. The chapter also offers insights into the interplay between emotions and memory, especially the role of language in creating a common narrative that conveys a sense of mutual grief. In short, the city lament genre helped to create an emotional mnemonic community. What is particularly interesting here is that those expressing sadness — those contributing to the formation of the emotional mnemonic community — were themselves geographically distant from the place and events they described.
Staying with responses to the events of 1187, Helen Nicholson discusses the text known as /tinerarium peregrinorum | ([P1), composed within the crusader camp outside Acre as the Latin forces of the Third Crusade awaited the arrival of the kings of England and France in late 1190/early 1191. Considering further the idea of form, Nicholson focuses not so much on what JP1 says, but rather on what it does not say — exploring the ways in which textual silences might be read as evidence for the preoccupations of authors and their audiences. Though /P1 is considered a generally reliable source, it omits several events mentioned by other contemporary commentators, including the coronation of Queen Sybil and King Guy as rulers of Jerusalem, Sybil’s role in the defence of Ascalon and Balian of Ibelin’s contribution to the defence of Jerusalem. The text also alludes to greater contact between Sybil and her brother-in-law, Conrad of Montferrat, who led the defence of Tyre, than other sources admit. Collectively, these features suggest that IP\ is a coherent and carefully-crafted narrative, one composed during a period when political intrigue was at its height. Indeed, the author (or authors) wrote at a critical point in the Third Crusade, with the siege of Acre in progress, the western kings absent and the conflict over the throne of Jerusalem that emerged between King Guy and Conrad of Montferrat reaching its peak. /P1 thus offers a crucial insight into an author working in near-real time — an author who was largely unable to draw upon the benefit of hindsight and instead deployed silence as a narrative device in the hope of projecting an image of future success and hurrying Richard I to the fray.
Returning to the Latin East, Beth Spacey then draws our attention to the Historia orientalis of Jacques de Vitry, composed during the author’s tenure as bishop of Acre in the 1210s and 1220s. This chapter considers how Jacques’ descriptions of the biblical landscapes of the Levant served as touchstones inviting Latin Christians to reflect and act on the recent loss of the physical spaces of the Holy Land. Not only did Jacques provide detailed descriptions of the region’s rivers, lakes, seas, mountains, deserts, flora and fauna, he also situated discussions of them within a continuum of sacred history and as part of a wider commentary on the Frankish settlers’ worthiness to rule. Jacques was desperate to convey the serious implications for Christendom of the loss of the land and waterscapes of ‘the East’, which became symbols of divine retribution against an undeserving people. Yet, these descriptions spoke not just to settler communities, but also to the western audiences Jacques hoped to inspire to crusade, and so his text is imbued with a narrative thread that emphasised the redemptive power of the region: a paradise on earth. In short, Spacey reveals the challenges that the loss of Frankish territories after 1187 posed to historical writers and the innovative methods by which an author as skilled as Jacques de Vitry met those challenges in pursuit of didactic instruction.
Moving further into the thirteenth century, Mark McCabe discusses how masculinity was embodied and enacted on crusade, as seen through the Vie de Saint Louis of John of Joinville. Composed in the years following the Seventh Crusade, a venture led by King Louis IX of France that ended in disaster on the banks of the Nile, Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis was the first crusade narrative in which a participant offered a consistent first-person viewpoint and has long been recognised as a vital repository of information for those seeking to gauge the mindset of a crusader. As McCabe demonstrates, this text cannot be dismissed as a mere hagiographical account of St Louis, for it in fact serves as direct evidence of how a high-status lay crusader perceived himself, or at least how he wished for himself to be perceived. In other words, in refining over many years his stories of military prowess, the horrors of war (especially captivity), the importance of the honour-shame paradigm and the correct nature of homosocial relationships among soldiers, Joinville transmitted his conception of how an elite male crusader should think and behave. In exploring these aspects of Joinville’s work, McCabe demonstrates that the images of masculinity that recur throughout the Vie are valuable not just for the insights they provide into the practice of crusading, but, more importantly in the context of this volume, for further revealing the part played by crusade narrative in constructing and conveying ideals that could guide the lived behaviour of elite men.
In the volume’s final chapter, Peter Edbury delves further into the issue of communication between the Latin East and Latin West, this time through an examination of the literary cultures of Latin-held Acre in the final six decades of its existence. Edbury focuses here on the transmission of the Old French Continuations of William of Tyre, the so-called Annales de Terre Sainte and the wider flourishing of historical writing and manuscript production that occurred in this period. He demonstrates that a local Frankish interest in classical and epic traditions imported from the Latin West, such as the Histoire ancienne jusqu’a César and the Arthurian legends, sat alongside and in dialogue with histories of the crusader states. Thus, the Annales de Terre Sainte, a series of anonymous thirteenth-century compilations produced by clerics in Acre that share similarities up to the 1250s but then diverge according to compilatory interest, preserve much older annalistic traditions found in the Latin East that were tied to specific institutions, such as the Holy Sepulchre. Likewise, Edbury reveals how the Acre-produced versions of the Old French Continuations — the ‘ColbertFontainebleau’ and ‘Lyon’ variants of a text most commonly known as Eracles and another Continuation called the Chronique d’Ernoul — all diverge from recensions produced in France (having been adapted from earlier texts transmitted there from the Latin East). This transferral back from the Latin West, then, was met with a desire to significantly adapt the source material to better suit the needs of a local audience, particularly the local baronial clique. This chapter thus captures the powerful interest that Frankish communities, particularly those in Acre, had in preserving the history of Outremer, but also how easily textual and literary traditions passed between the Latin East and Latin West, even to the very end of the crusader presence in the Levant.
Therefore, the fifteen chapters assembled here all offer new perspectives on the ways in which the crusades and the crusader states were conceptualised, written about and remembered between c. 1100 and c. 1300, while simultaneously bringing into sharper focus the myriad intersections between two geographic areas and settings for the creation of historical writing — the Latin East and Latin West — which are often treated separately. Collectively, the chapters that follow encourage us to question several distinctions and assumptions that have crept into modern scholarship: to recognise that the processes of writing about the crusades and the crusader states in the Middle Ages were analogous, perhaps even indistinguishable; that history-writing connected the Latin West and Latin East, with information, stories and texts flowing from one region to the other (and sometimes back again); and that it is both fruitful and necessary to treat ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ Latinate historiography as part of a single, complex tradition that could exhibit signs of uniformity but also develop differently. It is only by doing so that historians can truly gauge the extent to which the crusading movement and the Frankish settlements of the eastern Mediterranean informed and perhaps even reshaped the literary cultures of Latin Christendom.
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