Download PDF | (Crusading in Context_ 6) Dr Thomas W. Smith - Rewriting the First Crusade_ Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages-Boydell Press (2024).
319 Pages
Introduction
Among the collections of the Bibliothéques d’ Amiens metropole is a single parchment leaf which measures approximately 288 x 249 mm.! Across the leaf, in two columns, is inscribed the Latin text of a letter from the First Crusade. The document is addressed to the pope and the people of the West and relates the events of the expedition up to the capture of Jerusalem and the Battle of Ascalon in 1099.2 An original crusade letter from the end of the eleventh century, that is, the parchment sheet written by the named authors (or, rather, a scribe on their behalf) that changed hands between them and the addressees would be an artefact of the utmost rarity. But the Amiens manuscript is not one of those. It bears the textual accretions of two postscripts added by audiences in Europe who began to rewrite the epistolary corpus very soon after the crusade. These additions denote that it belongs to the third recension of the text, having evolved rapidly through two previous versions in the period immediately after 1099.3 At some point in its history, this twelfth-century copy became detached from the initial context of its creation: the binding of a medieval book. For the epistle preserved in Amiens represents one of many copies of letters from the First Crusade that were produced in Europe during and — on a much larger scale — after the expedition with the aim of sending its news, contextualising its events, and remembering it.
The Amiens leaf is a relic of the epistolary culture of the crusade. It stands witness to the impulse to record, engage with, and rewrite the event, in a similar vein to the longer Latin narratives which have attracted sustained scholarly attention for centuries.4 The attempt to ascertain exactly how those texts were composed, compiled and transmitted, together with their extremely complex interrelationships, has revolutionized our understanding of the First Crusade itself and the recording of history in the twelfth century.° Yet while scholars have lavished attention on the full-scale narratives, the key texts that have yet to be factored properly into this discussion are the epistles.
The relative neglect of the letters is hard to explain given that the corpus is impressive for its period.’ Twenty-two letters survive from the collective leadership of the crusade host, individual crusaders, prelates, popes, and — purportedly — the emperor of Byzantium.® They are premier sources for the ways in which contemporaries and participants recorded and responded to the crusade. But scholars have not researched the letters intensively as a corpus since Heinrich Hagenmeyer edited and commented upon them at length in his pioneering edition and study in 1901. Partly, this is because of Hagenmeyer’s formidable reputation for thoroughness, but also, one suspects, because of the equally formidable extent of his German commentary. Instead, the letters are often dipped into in order to cherrypick material not found in the longer narratives.9 Since 1901, as Simon Parsons has observed of the letters of Stephen of Blois, ‘commentary on the letters has continued, while detailed textual and para-textual analysis has not’, creating a disjunction between our use of the letters to advance historical analysis and our understanding of exactly how, when, where and why the documents were created.!° Until recently, the greatest perceived value of the letters was as immediate eyewitness accounts that were not subjected to revision and re-interpretation in the early twelfth century in the fashion of the longer crusade texts.11
Hitherto, scholars generally believed most of the letters to be genuine (with the exception of the epistle of Alexios I Komnenos to Robert I of Flanders). As a result, these documents perform the roles of keystones, supporting the vaulting of central aspects of our understanding of the crusade. But in a forensic case study of the letters of Stephen of Blois to his wife Adela, Parsons turns this comfortable conceit on its head by demonstrating that it is problematic to read two of the most famous documents as what they purport to be.12 We must confront the reality that some of the ‘crusader letters’ are in fact twelfth-century concoctions which might have functioned, he writes, as ‘fictitious framing devices for the transmission of the crusading narrative’.15 Although they often preserve unique and valuable information about the crusade, we can no longer afford to take the letters at face value as honest sources written without literary agenda.!4 The reassessment in the present book of more letters from the corpus as ‘pseudepigriphal’ texts forces us to reconsider how we should engage with the epistles and how we use them to study the First Crusade.!5
Wider changes in the field of manuscript studies since Hagenmeyer edited the letters more than a century ago also make the corpus ripe for reevaluation. In crusading studies, Hagenmeyer was one of the leading and most prolific exponents of the German scholarly tradition of Quellenkritik, or ‘source criticism’ — a forensic approach to the content and authenticity of sources spearheaded for the study of the First Crusade by Leopold von Ranke and Heinrich von Sybel in the middle of the nineteenth century, and for medieval studies more broadly by the editors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series.16 The pursuit of Quellenkritik as a methodological approach set new standards for the edition of historical texts, to which the longevity of nineteenth-century editions such as Hagenmeyer’s impressive Kreuzzugsbriefe attest. But while Hagenmeyer devoted energy to identifying what he believed to be the best manuscripts and establishing the best texts (some of which he got wrong, as we will see in subsequent chapters), in keeping with contemporary scholarly tradition, he was comparatively uninterested in the provenance of the manuscripts or their regional transmission and reception. Such research interests, which can yield precious information on how audiences consumed and engaged with texts, are now mainstays of modem approaches to medieval manuscripts, and recent studies have demonstrated the new insights that they can offer into research on the crusades, but they have yet to be pursued for the whole epistolary corpus.17
Another reason to return to the manuscripts is that Hagenmeyer did not actually see many of those he used to make his editions. Some of his letter texts derive from copies acquired through his impressive web of contacts spun across Europe, others he reprinted with only minor corrections from the editions made by Paul Riant in 1880 — debts Hagenmeyer acknowledged in his foreword and elsewhere in his study.18 Hagenmeyer’s dependence upon others was unavoidable given the limitations of nineteenth-century communication and manuscript reproduction, but it meant that he relied for some of his editions and knowledge of the manuscripts on second-hand information, which created some weaknesses in his edition. These are illustrated most vividly by the identification of new witnesses of letters, of which he was unaware, in the very codices used to make his edition, but also by errors of citation when the edition is compared with the original manuscripts.19 The modern scholar now has access to digital resources that have revolutionised manuscript studies and made possible the identification of numerous new manuscripts (Appendix). As the following chapters draw out, these new manuscript witnesses not only alter our understanding of some of the texts and their transmission but also call into question the accuracy of some of Hagenmeyer’s editions.
Drawing these strands together, it is apparent that a new exploration of the epistolary culture of the First Crusade is long overdue. The corpus presents two pressing questions for historians. First, which parts of which letters are ‘authentic’? ‘The reader of medieval letters’, Giles Constable wrote, ‘should try to distinguish the various versions of the text’.2° To employ a phrase of Damien Kempf, this requires the excavation of the different layers of epistolary composition in a form of textual
archaeology.2! As we will see throughout this study, concocted epistolary texts tend to be fairly monotone in theme, that is to say, they concern the expedition only. They tend to promote an obvious agenda — often the liturgical celebration of the crusade and its dead, or to forge a close link with the heroes of the campaign, or to make interventions in contemporary ecclesiastical politics. They tend to transmit narratives that lack internal cohesion and jump between the topics of interest to their authors. And, not least, they often break the rules of contemporary diplomatic or epistolary style (possibly intentionally).
The methodological tools adopted in this book are primarily a combination of diplomatic, Quellenkritik, and codicological, palaeographical, and textual study of the original manuscripts with a particular focus on their reception and transmission.22 The first five chapters of this book are grouped both thematically and in a rough chronological order: the purported letters from the Byzantine Empire to Western recipients supposedly sent between c. 1088 and 1098 (Chapter 1); the papal letters used to prepare the launch of the crusade in 1095-6 (Chapter 2); the narrative missives sent between 1097 and 1098 by authors from within the crusader host (Stephen of Blois, Anselm of Ribemont, and the Lucca letter) (Chapter 3); the general letters written by the collective leadership dated between 1097 and 1098 (Chapter 4); and the letters sent in the aftermath of the capture of Jerusalem to spread the news and celebrate the event between 1099 and 1100 (Chapter 5). The reconsideration of some of these epistles as later confections, and sections of many of them as later rewriting by third parties, has significant ramifications, which in turn rewrite parts of the history of the First Crusade.
Having established which letters (and parts of letters) are authentic and which are confected, I then consider the second question that the material poses: if a section of the corpus is fictitious, how can we use these sources in a way that illuminates new aspects of medieval engagement with the crusading movement, regardless of the fact that they do not stem directly from the original actors of the crusade in the East?23 The invented letters should not be dismissed as simple forgeries and thrown onto the spoil heap of this textual excavation. While exposing the different layers of composition is essential to understanding the creation, transmission and reception of the epistles, the value of these documents is not constrained by modern standards of reality.
While medieval writers distinguished between fabula (fictional occurrences) and historia (things which actually took place)24 and receivers of letters were concerned about forgeries,2° crusade narratives existed in an overarching story-telling culture that blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, where writers were more concerned ‘with transcendent truths ... than surface reality.’26 To cite the subtitle of a recent collection of essays, medieval letters occupy a space ‘between fiction and document’.2”7 The story-world of the crusade was not divided by an impermeable boundary between the real and the fictitious, nor were the textual narratives divorced from the oral story-worlds of the Chansons de geste.28 “The medieval approach to epistolarity’, Kathleen Neal reminds us, ‘understood letters as explicitly rhetorical speech acts’.29 We should perceive our letters, then, as more firmly rooted in oral culture, with more points of potential transfer with lost oral traditions about the crusade than we might first imagine. This speaks to the work of Kempf, who urges scholars to move away from ‘a static conception of texts as data’ and to attempt to approach them on their own terms.?° It is a banal point, but the authors of the letters from the crusade did not compose them for the use of future historians, and we should be wary of treating them as unproblematic eyewitness ‘history’. In an important problematisation of the modern concept of the eyewitness in medieval texts, Marcus Bull encourages historians to access the world that the authors of our sources ‘saw’ and experienced, and which is reflected in the meaning-making present in the textual remnants of that world.3!
These concerns all go back to Nancy Partner’s perceptive statement that: ‘We have simply lost contact ... with everything that could allow us to approach medieval histories naturally and directly’ .32 In attempting to incorporate these observations in the present book, I have elected not to label most letters devised by authors other than their purported ones as forgeries or fraudulent.33 Instead, I prefer terminology that reflects more sensitively — albeit imperfectly — the assembly and creation of their imagined texts, such as confection and invention. It may seem paradoxical, then, to distinguish between authentic letters (historia) and confections (fabula) in Chapters 1—5, but it is a prerequisite of being able to understand them on their own terms. We cannot begin to approach the letters from a standpoint closer to that of medieval audiences if we do not know what we are dealing with in the first place.
If we successfully flatten the distinction of epistolary reality, it allows us to use the documents in a new way: as markers of engagement with, and enthusiasm and support for, the crusading movement among the monastic clergy who copied and consumed them as a form of scribal crusading.34 The final chapter of this book (Chapter 6) advances this approach to the material through the study of the manuscript cultures in which the letters were transmitted, as well as the ways in which they were received and reworked by audiences from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.
This study seeks to point the way in finding new means of using both invented and authentic letters and asking different questions of them as sources. What can their manuscript traditions tell us about monastic enthusiasm and support for the crusading movement after 1099? Why were they fabricated in the first place and to what purposes were they put? Why did some texts enjoy wider circulation than others? How did audiences receive and interact with them? These are some of the key questions that we need to address for as broad a range of texts as possible, as part of the continuing effort to drive crusading studies forward in the twenty-first century. On a broader level, this study contributes to the field of medieval epistolography by offering an extended guide to interpreting crusade letters and their manuscript traditions.° It also expands the source base for the First Crusade by identifying numerous new manuscript witnesses of the Latin letter texts (Appendix). There is still so much more left to discover in the original manuscripts, and we can advance our understanding of the crusades by exploring this archival material afresh, an endeavour mostly dormant since the great scholarly enterprises of the late nineteenth century to discover and edit crusade sources.
The insights gleaned from this reassessment of the epistolary corpus reveal how medieval audiences were engaged in a culture of rewriting the First Crusade. Beginning at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and continuing into the fifteenth century, generations of scribe—readers visited the textual memorial sites of the crusade, rewriting the content of the letters to add liturgical requests, supply new information about the expedition, and to interpolate their own voices into the epistolary discourse under the assumed identities of the letters’ original authors. This new appreciation of medieval epistolary culture invites us to approach the documents in a different way, and, in turn, to rewrite some of the central elements of the history of the First Crusade.
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