The very first narrative accounts of the crusades were composed by participants on the First Crusade itself. They were contained in letters sent to the west in 1097–99, culminating in the carefully edited and pointed version prepared for the pope by the crusade leadership in September 1099, the first surviving history.1 Although composed by eyewitnesses, these letters were formal exercises designed to construct didactic stories to explain to their audience the providential significance of the events experienced. They certainly did not contain simple or unadorned still less objective accounts of ‘what really happened’. The military campaign was insistently rendered as a divinely instigated and directed mission that operated in the double contexts of history and scripture, this world and the next. Setting the tone for much subsequent historicising, from the start the First Crusade was a literary construct.
Medieval writers knew from the classical past that history differed from annals or chronicles on the one side, and satire, drama or other literary genres on the other. History was deliberately stylish, interpretive and didactic. Specifically Christian historiography, a legacy of the late Roman Empire and writers such as Augustine of Hippo, concerned itself with the significance of terrestrial events in relation to divine providence, sin and the march of the world to the Day of Judgement. Individuals could become merely patterns of conduct and free will. The narrative of events contained a moral purpose, presented rhetorically, in order to persuade. The Biblical tradition differed in that it purported to present a divinely inspired account of God’s relations with his Creation, especially Man, culminating in the revelation of the Crucifixion and Resurrection and the prophecy of Christ’s return at the end of time. Its truth was many-layered, including literal, allegorical, metaphorical and mystical, but it was Revealed Truth, testament of Faith itself.
The drama of the First Crusade provoked a uniquely heavy literary response in the immediate production of histories trying to make sense of it. These shared some distinctive features. Whether conceived as Gesta (i.e. deeds, of an individual, such as Ralph of Caen’s Gesta Tancredi, or a people, the Gesta Francorum or Gesta Dei Per Francos) or Historia, the earliest written histories of the First Crusade are essays in interpretation, not mere recitation of events, not Annals or Chronicles. Despite often romantic wishful thinking of later readers, they are all compilations of memories of participants and other written accounts; there are no single-author memoirs. Each account is shot through with precise biblical allusions aimed at establishing specific interpretive parallels between the crusaders and the Israelites of Exodus or the Maccabees. Urban II’s call to arms evoked Christ’s own injunction to believers to take up their crosses and follow him. Events attracted biblical language; the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 could be recalled in words from the Book of Revelation. The great significance of the success of the first Jerusalem journey was unmistakable. In the words of the most popular history of the First Crusade, written within a decade of its conclusion, ‘since the creation of the world what more miraculous undertaking has there been (other than the mystery of the redeeming Cross) than what was achieved in our own time by the journey of our own people to Jerusalem?’2 Just as the First Crusade was depicted as a sign of God’s immanence, so its story was crafted as if it were a continuation of holy scripture defining a new chapter in God’s revelation to man. From the start, the historiography of crusading was conceived as a branch of theology.
Although the First Crusade remained central to all later understanding of what crusading meant, its interpretation seemingly rested on a very narrow tradition. The dominant Latin version of the events of 1095–99 derived from a sequence of related texts, the most influential and possibly earliest of which was the anonymous Gesta Francorum (before 1104, possibly as early as 1099/1100, perhaps derived from a previous compilation in circulation). Although composed as if by a participant as a linear narrative, in an apparently artless style, the Gesta shows signs of careful construction. Embracing a number of simultaneous perspectives, evidently from different sources, its clear didactic intent reveals itself in albeit mangled scriptural references and, not least, in placing the most direct interpretation of this form of holy war in the mouth of the mother of the Muslim ruler of Mosul: ‘the Christians alone cannot fight with you … but their god fights for them every day’. The scene is close to vernacular epic.3 The Gesta provided or shared material used by three other veterans of the campaign, Raymond of Aguilers, canon of Le Puy (pre-1105), Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to Baldwin I of Jerusalem (first redaction pre-1105), and, most closely related, the Poitevin Peter Tudebode (before 1111).4 Although Raymond’s and Fulcher’s accounts were used by other writers, the primacy of the Gesta version was assured through its reworking, in particular by Robert of Rheims (c. 1106/7). The Gesta survives in seven medieval manuscripts; Raymond in at least ten; Fulcher in sixteen; Tudebode in four; Robert in ninety-four, thirty-seven from the twelfth century alone. Of the works of Robert’s two sophisticated Benedictine colleagues who also decided to improve the Gesta’s relatively unadorned account, Baldric of Bourgueil’s (c. 1107) and Guibert of Nogent’s (1109) survive respectively in seven and eight medieval manuscripts. The contrasting Rhineland Historia of Albert of Aachen (first six books possibly soon after 1102) survives in thirteen manuscripts, but is genuinely independent of both the Gesta tradition and its propagation by the northern French Benedictine mafia, although like them reliant on participants’ testimony. Among the Latin histories, Albert provided the only substantial challenge to the papalist, northern French tradition and only came into his own via the mediation of the cosmopolitan Jerusalemite historian, William of Tyre (c. 1130–86). The other Latin literary accounts and the scattered monastic and urban chronicles scarcely competed.5
At least for the twelfth century, Robert of Rheims was pervasive. Apart from the French version of William of Tyre’s Historia, Robert’s was the only medieval prose crusade history known to have been directly translated into a vernacular language (German) during the middle ages. With his embellishments, Robert’s use of the Gesta confirmed a specific narrative scheme: the fulfilment of God’s direct will; Urban II and papal authority; and the unity of crusaders as ‘Franks’, the new Chosen People. Others said much the same. Fulcher of Chartres has a Turk warn Kerboga of Mosul before the battle of Antioch in 1098: ‘Behold the Franks are coming; flee now or fight bravely for I see the banner of the mighty Pope advancing.’ Robert’s view was cemented by wide dissemination of manuscripts. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany received a copy before he embarked on the Third Crusade in 1189. It was put into Latin verse in Alsace, also in the 1180s. Many twelfth-century chroniclers and poets across Latin Christendom relied on Robert.6
The need for such an establishment view became clear, as the details of what had happened on the First Crusade were contested from the start. Writing in the very first years of the twelfth century, Raymond of Aguilers, possibly disingenuously, claimed to have been prompted to compose his account of the eastern expedition by the lies being spread by deserters.7 The weight of enthusiastic commentary suggests a desire to reconcile this new form of holy war with traditional ecclesiastical views on the sinfulness of violence, a task lent topicality by the contemporary controversies surrounding papally approved war against its opponents in western Europe. The earliest accounts of the First Crusade therefore adopted a tone of advocacy, a register that never entirely left medieval, and some modern, descriptions of crusading. Success needed to be justified with reference to God’s will; so too, and increasingly frequently, did failure. While both its sources and influence reached deep into lay society, the creation of a recognisable and generally accepted crusade myth rested with these clerical authors, most of whom circled a strongly self-referential core. They set the pattern of understanding of the events that subsequently defined the whole.
Their academic justification for this warfare covered a wide swathe of intellectual terrain that included more overtly secular interpretations of crusading to match the theological, legal and evangelical. The English monk William of Malmesbury, whose extensive account (c. 1125) was based on Fulcher of Chartres, chose classical virtues against which to assess the heroic crusaders. He avoided the language of penance and pilgrimage almost entirely and stressed secular motives. The First Crusade was ascribed to a deal between Urban II and Bohemund of Taranto designed to use the ensuing commotion to secure Rome for one and a Balkan principality for the other.8 Material incentives were recognised in some of the earliest reworkings of the eyewitness compilations, such as Robert of Rheims.9 The values and aspirations of the godly warrior appeared not just in vernacular poems, epics and romances, stories first sketched around the camp-fires of the First Crusade itself. Elite Latin writers as much as the authors of chansons balanced the will of God and the agency of man, terrestrial glamour, honour, bravery, profit and excitement, the worth of man, being set against a fairly two-dimensional backcloth of religious virtue; theology was dressed up as adventure – and vice versa.
This is unsurprising. Raymond of Aguilers’s original coauthor of his account of the First Crusade was a knight, Pons of Balazun, killed at the siege of Arqah in 1099.10 Many of the tales incorporated in the earliest accounts derived from participants in the fighting. The language and images of epic and romance are rarely far from the elbows of the clerical authors; histories and chansons shared common sources and common milieux. Baldric of Dol had Urban II urge his audience at Clermont to cast aside the ‘belt of knighthood’ (militiae cingulum) to become knights of Christ (milites Christi).11 The qualities of the two knighthoods were clearly the same. The fusion of the sacred and profane is evident in the earliest histories: Raymond of Aguilers’s excited pride in describing battles; the breathless immediacy of the Gesta Francorum’s account of the daring night-time escalade that delivered Antioch to the crusaders in June 1098; or Albert of Aachen’s penchant for the exotic anecdote, such as Godfrey de Bouillon’s encounter with a bear in Anatolia or the heroic deaths of Sven of Denmark and his intended, Florina of Burgundy. Praise of battle was intrinsic to the whole concept of crusading; the letters of Stephen of Blois and Anselm of Ribemont from the crusader camps in 1097–98 make this very clear. So, too, did Urban II when writing to monks at Vallombrosa in October 1097: ‘we were stimulating the minds of knights to go on this expedition, since they might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms’. Ralph of Caen’s biography of one of the stars of the First Crusade, Tancred of Lecce (before 1118), contained the classic account of how the crusade released the young, violent Tancred from the burden of sin through the offer of penitential warfare. No longer need Tancred choose ‘the Gospels or the world? His experience in arms recalled him to the service of Christ.’12 The martial flavour was picked up in all the earliest reconstructions of the pope’s Clermont speech and remained unavoidably prominent in all clerically composed Latin histories and chronicles of subsequent crusades, supported by substantial theological underpinning in works such as Bernard of Clairvaux’s famous 1130s apologia for the military order of the Templars, De Laude Novae Militiae.13
The same traits coursed through the increasingly sophisticated and varied vernacular crusade literature in the twelfth century, particularly in Francophone regions, from Norman England to Languedoc. They were also vividly caught in a German text, the Millstätter Exodus, which drew parallels between the biblical Israelites’ invasion of Canaan and the First Crusade.14 In French, cycles of often closely related crusade poems, surviving from the later twelfth century, were almost certainly based on much earlier works. These included an epic account concentrating on the siege of Antioch in 1097–98, the Chanson d’Antioche, that purported to be based on eyewitness testimony, a poem by a veteran; it certainly incorporated material derived from Latin descriptions of the events. Of the even more fanciful poems, Les Chetifs, about the 1101 crusade, was perhaps written at Antioch c. 1149, and the Chanson or Conquête de Jérusalem, composed by the mid-1130s, concentrated on the capture of the Holy City. By 1200, verse chivalric epic was used in Ambroise’s history of the deeds of Richard I and the Third Crusade, the Estoire de la guerre sainte.15
Within a generation of Ambroise, vernacular prose genres, both epic and romance, not only incorporated crusading motifs but were also applied to describing contemproary crusades, such as the early thirteenth-century French vernacular accounts of the Fourth Crusade by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari or, later, Jean of Joinville’s famous late thirteenth-century life of Louis IX. Like the Latin authors a century before, Villehardouin and Clari appeared to be deliberately using a form – prose – that was connected with truth, whose content was similarly geared to inspire confidence: the identity of author/narrator with participant/witness; the careful use of the third-person narration. It had been suggested that each were in some ways composing apologia, Villehardouin for the controversial turn the Fourth Crusade took in attacking and conquering Constantinople rather than Egypt; Clari to validate his own and his compatriots’ exploits and the looted relics he had brought back to Picardy.16 Like verse epics and romances, they were highly crafted for effect. Similarly, Joinville’s life of Louis IX is part hagiography, part adventure, part mirror of princes, the narrative in this case being, where the author is a witness, carefully in the first person. This bears some similarity to the device of first-person narrative that characterised some of the earliest accounts of the First Crusade, lending the text fabricated authenticity. Joinville was trying to make Louis a saint.17 Joinville’s first person was paralleled by Odo of Deuil, whose story of the Second Crusade, De Profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem, also praised the religious example set by his hero, Louis VII.18 The use of the vernacular by Villehardouin, Clari or Joinville, or in the thirteenth-century translation and continuations of William of Tyre’s Jerusalem Historia (c. 1170–84), may have been designed to make their texts more widely accessible, but was far from demotic. It enabled authors to borrow motifs and techniques from secular literature appropriate to tales of martial glory, confirming the combination of religious conviction with admiration for martial virtue in order to justify the ways of God to man.
Vernacular histories possessed a long pedigree. The relationship between vernacular poems and songs and the more formal media of prose histories and chronicles is well attested. Behind many passages of the Chanson d’Antioche lies Robert of Rheims. The exchange of ideas and images was reciprocal not antithetical. The mingling of legend and supposed historical fact, a modern not medieval conceptual distinction, could present problems. The great Jerusalem historian William of Tyre (c. 1130–86) rejected the story of Godfrey of Bouillon’s descent from a swan knight, the ‘cigni fabulam’ as he dismissively called it, which was contained in the popular epic cycle of the Chevalier au Cygne. A generation earlier, Geoffrey Gaimar, writing in French verse, displayed no such fastidiousness. He suggested that Duke Robert of Normandy had been offered the crown of Jerusalem (which he had not) in 1099 because of his prowess in killing the sultan of Mosul (which he did not), exploits illustrating Robert’s performance of ‘much good chivalry’ (mainte bele chevalerie). Yet Gaimar could have derived these fancies from the hugely scholarly historian William of Malmesbury, writing as early as 1125, when Robert was still alive.19 Throughout the process of retelling the story of the First Crusade, Latin/clerical invention and interpretive tropes readily cross-pollinated with vernacular literature.
Much of this exotically imagined wedding of piety and thrills circulated orally, without finding written permanence. A monk living on the Franco-Flemish border in the 1130s was sufficiently confident of his audience’s knowledge of the First Crusade through songs and hymns as well as books that he forbore to provide a detailed account of it in his chronicle.20 Even if elements in the Chanson d’Antioche cannot definitively be traced to a participant in the First Crusade, verse accounts did circulate alongside the Latin prose histories, sharing a common pool of information and imagery. Robert of Rheims and perhaps Raymond of Aguilers seem to have used a Latin poem in their histories of the First Crusade. Another such, by Gilo of Paris, based on the Gesta, survives from before 1120. Guibert of Nogent even went so far as to suggest that he would not include ‘anything which was not already being sung publicly’, whether vernacular or Latin is unclear.21 The geographic and social spread of the vernacular interpretations was extensive. Besides the northern French epic, an Occitan version on the siege of Antioch, the Canso d’Antioca, perhaps by an educated Limousin knight, Gregory Bechada, may well have been commissioned within a decade of the siege itself, ‘so that’, a local reader noted later in the century, ‘the populace might fully comprehend it’. The surviving fragment of the Canso is far from artless. It echoes the Song of Roland in glorying in the gaudy accoutrements and bloody combat of war. Riches are regarded as the legitimate reward for victory by ‘due process of law’. The crusading dead return as a celestial regiment to aid their fellows defeat the Turks.22 Songs, sometimes scabrous or slanderous, could pack a clear political or historical message and were clearly not without impact. Gerhoh of Reichersberg, in the mid-twelfth century, even claimed songs by and about crusaders had contributed to an improvement in public morals.23
The interplay of clerical exposition and vernacular adventure stories produced one major historiographical peculiarity. The prevalent northern French, Benedictine Latin version of the First Crusade existed in parallel to a very different tradition embodied in the vernacular verse crusade cycles and the history of the Rhinelander Albert of Aachen. One obvious contrast lay in the treatment of Peter the Hermit and Urban II. Robert of Rheims dismissed Peter as a hypocrite, a covert gourmand who projected an image of sobriety and asceticism. By contrast, Albert of Aachen and the tradition that later formed the Chanson d’Antioche placed him at the centre of the origins of the crusade, the primus auctor in Albert’s phrase, whose bad experiences on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre and a vision of Christ inspired him to rouse western Christendom on his return. This was not the only alternative version doing the rounds. At least two more stories, similar to the account of Peter’s pilgrimage but with different dramatis personae, circulated in southern France and Italy.24 Different accounts had different central characters to gain narrative cohesion and local appeal. Godfrey of Bouillon, central to the Lorraine tradition of Albert, provided an especially convincing focus as he became the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem in 1099. Away from the papalist tradition, a different interpretation of the origins and essence of the crusade was possible, less theologically refined but perhaps more vivid, although Robert of Rheims was no slouch in coining a good story. Contemporaries appeared content with a variety of stories, many giving prominence to favoured locals. In this way, by 1140, in the words of the Franco-English Henry of Huntingdon put into the mouth of the bishop of the Orkneys at the battle of the Standard (1138), the First Crusade had became a manifestation of Norman imperialism: after France, England and Apulia, ‘Jerusalem the celebrated and famous Antioch both submitted to you.’25
More surprising than regional diversity was the way in which Robert’s popular version was rapidly superseded after c. 1200 even in academic circles. This was largely due to the French translations of William of Tyre’s Jerusalem Historia (finished perhaps in 1184). Only nine manuscripts, and a fragment of a tenth of William’s original Latin text, survive, confined to France and England, while at least fifty-nine manuscripts of the thirteenth-century French translation, often with continuations, exist.26 William’s Historia was the first scholarly crusade history to combine research in earlier chronicles and, from the 1170s, contemporary commentary with a considered academic reflection on both. It is also the most impressive, possibly the brightest jewel of the twelfth-century renaissance of historical writing, William himself a product of the best academic training western Europe could offer.27 William’s approach to the crusade became the one most widely circulated, replacing Robert’s almost totally, except perhaps in parts of Germany.
On the seminal First Crusade, unlike the Franco-papal version, William, following an early redaction of Albert of Aachen as his source, afforded Peter the role of chief instigator, with Godfrey of Bouillon and his family presented as a holy line of monarchs, divinely ordained protectors of William’s own holy patria of Jerusalem. William integrated Urban II as responding to Peter’s initiative. The contrast between the morality, discipline and spiritual goodness of the founding crusaders and the travails of their flawed successors established a clear pattern of political development and causation that retained its force both as narrative and as exemplar against which people and events could be judged. Because William provided a history of events in the generations after 1099, for audiences c. 1200 and beyond, his completeness made his history more satisfying than Robert’s, and his coherent analysis more powerful in establishing a coherent vision of the whole enterprise. The legendary First Crusade provided the reference point for the failures of the Second Crusade and the Egyptian campaigns of the 1160s or the internal bickering of the kingdom of Jerusalem in the 1170s and 1180s. The tension between the providential and the human was intrinsic to William’s portrait of Christian Outremer as a warrior state, a garrison to protect the holiest of Christian relics, under the leadership of a blessed dynasty. Pen portraits of successive kings of Jerusalem in the manner of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars pointed the kingdom’s changing fortunes. The grim, disruptive reality of King Baldwin IV’s (1174–85) leprosy was rendered heroic. Acutely aware of material causation, William’s famous account of the growing Muslim unity, Saladin’s power and the encirclement of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem after 1150 (Book 21; c.7) combined masterly historical analysis with potent commentary on human frailty and the consequence of sin.
Both in Latin and French, William’s work lay behind important later histories. The great English chronicler Matthew Paris of St Alban’s (d. 1259) used a Latin copy. Even by the time of the Fifth Crusade (1217–21) William’s Historia was known to Jacques de Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, the former incorporating large sections of William into his influential Historia Orientalis (c. 1220). In his letters from the Fifth Crusade’s camp at Damietta, James even used William’s phrases for the First Crusade to describe circumstances in the later crusaders’ camp.28 Both James and Oliver were practising crusade preachers as well as historians. William’s image of the charismatic Peter the Hermit suited the emphasis on apostolic poverty, evangelism to the laity and moral rearmament characteristic of the polemics of crusading’s second century.
William’s populist account of the First Crusade not only suited the academic agenda of thirteenth-century crusade promoters. It exerted a profound influence on all subsequent interpretations of crusading until the last 150 years or so. Excerpts from William’s history found their way into encyclopaedic compendia, such as Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale (1246–59), another medieval bestseller with 100 surviving manuscripts. By 1300, William’s interpretation had become standard, for example in the widely disseminated crusade history of the Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello (c. 1320), who may have received it via Vincent of Beauvais. The French translation was known by some simply as the Livre dou conqueste. It was translated into Spanish in the later thirteenth century and Italian in the fourteenth. William Caxton put extracts into English a century later. William’s influence persisted through early printed editions of the Latin text (1549, 1564, 1611).29 The humanist Benedetto Accolti’s history of the First Crusade, De Bello a Christianis Contra Paganos (1463/64), made critical use of William (in this case the French translation) regarding him as a reliable if unrefined source. This pre-eminence continued for another four centuries, including the then apparently definitive works of Friedrich Wilken and Joseph-François Michaud in the first third of the nineteenth century.30
As he admitted, William of Tyre’s history relied on strands of oral and literary traditions.31 The gap between Latin or vernacular histories, verse, songs, liturgy or sermons was more of form than content. The ‘affabulation’ or creation of the legend of the crusade perhaps began even before the first contingents of Peter the Hermit’s armies left western Europe in 1096. Central and repeated themes unified ecclesiastical and secular observers and, if they are to be believed, responses: revenge for wrongs committed to Christ; obligation to God and honour amongst men; the direct, inescapable yet beneficent immanence of God in worldly affairs; status, both spiritual and secular; reputation and the fear of temporal shame; the destiny of the eternal soul; the desire for physical expression of faith and contact with the divine through the greatest of relics, the land where Christ trod the earth; the greater responsibilities and hierarchical position of the ordo pugnatorum in a society whose public values were defined by an increasingly self-conscious coalition of clergy and military aristocracy. In its written record, crusading provided a symbolic and actual moral test and example, interlacing secular and religious preoccupations, the transcendent quality of the activity presented in vignettes of temporal heroism and the assurance of rewards, temporal fame and eternal salvation.
Latin crusade histories appear to fall into two categories: one academic, overtly intellectual, showy and didactic; the other seemingly artless, lacking self-conscious inter-textual references. The subsequent embellishment of the Gesta Francorum would appear to demonstrate the point. It is the first of a number of crusade accounts that adopt a linear narrative scheme adorned with only the simplest scriptural lexicon: Odo of Deuil’s description of the French crusade in 1147–48; Raoul’s portrayal of the siege of Lisbon in 1147; the ‘pseudo-Ansbert’ chronicle of the German crusade to the east in 1188–90; or Henry of Livonia’s memoir of the German conquest and conversion of Livonia from the 1190s to the 1220s.32 Yet these ‘simple’ narratives are no such thing. They form as much part of the production of a coherent case for crusading as their more elaborate peers, their very directness a tool of instruction and persuasion. They contain no more and no less ‘authenticity’ or immediacy of record – of facts or feelings – than more clearly refined texts. Any assessment of impact comes with the obvious caveat of the accident of survival. The fragments still being unearthed in modern libraries and archives indicate how much was written and how much has been lost. The two most detailed accounts of the Second Crusade, Odo of Deuil’s De Profectione Ludovici in Orientem and Raoul’s De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi, both, in good classical fashion, composed as if by witnesses to the events they describe, only survive in a single manuscript each. Yet they, in common with the fragmentary chronicles, confirm the coherence of the literary message.
We have seen how writers on the First Crusade cannibalised each other’s work. Odo of Deuil admitted to reading an account of the First Crusade in preparation for his own. The sole manuscript of De Profectione was at some point in the library of Clairvaux, the abbey run by the major preacher of the Second Crusade, Bernard. The De Expugnatione contains formal sermons that echo with some accuracy the theological arguments that Bernard used in his preaching in 1147. Similar literary and theological cohesion has been argued for Baltic crusade texts at the end of the twelfth century.33 Certain networks of transmission are obvious, such as the northern French Benedictine abbeys that produced the major histories of the First Crusade. The chain of Cistercian houses provided similar likely channels of transmission as members of the order led successive preaching campaigns from the Second to the Fifth Crusade, a role that passed to the friars in the thirteenth century. The Cistercians were also heavily involved in promoting the crusade to the eastern Baltic lands, the context of Henry of Livonia’s chronicle.
Some histories, such as Oliver of Paderborn’s description of the Fifth Crusade, the Historia Damiatina, seemed to have begun life as letters, which again could be circulated though existing channels of communication. Letters of members of the First Crusade, for instance, were published by bishops back in western Europe.34 The increasing centralisation of crusade organisation under the direction of the papacy provided another focus, as did the increasingly extensive exchange of scholars between universities and cathedral schools, such as the super-educated William of Tyre. One, possibly most, important motor for creating, copying and circulation of crusade histories seems to have been secular patronage: the courts of nobles, princes and kings, crusaders in fact or imagination. The circulation of histories itself formed an active part of crusading, from providing material for sermons to exciting courtly armchair enthusiasm. This almost holistic quality of received memory across many media and social contexts suggests that, although much has been lost, at least the general shape of crusade historiography may be traced with some confidence.
Yet, despite – or perhaps because of – becoming a cultural norm of almost uncontested moral worth, debate over the practice of crusading was rarely stilled. A Wurzburg monk could describe the preachers of the disastrous eastern Mediterranean campaigns of 1147–48 as ‘pseudo-prophets, sons of Belial and witnesses of anti-Christ’ who managed to recruit tourists, adventurers, mercenaries, debtors, criminals, escaped convicts and defaulters on tenancy obligations.35 A few, such as Ralph Niger at the time of the Third Crusade, launched more root and branch criticisms, based on a traditional anxiety that spiritual struggles should first be won within individual souls rather than on distant battlefields.36 The expansion of crusading targets in the thirteenth century witnessed lively if inevitably partisan discussions on the value or legitimacy of the various campaigns and their leaders. Arguments beyond those of the elites, which may have been rather different, fell largely beyond the chronicler’s vision or purpose. However, the literary topos of mass enthusiasm and cross-taking consistently concealed an intricate web of prosaic and not always supportive reactions in the context of normal patterns of social control and community. The outbreaks of nonelite crusade enthusiasm, such as the Children’s Crusade of 1212 or the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320 or the popular crusade of 1309, threw up further evidence of a contested acceptance of official propaganda. While displaying deep-seated acceptance of the crusade myth, they represented a public critique of the crusader credentials of their rulers. In wishing to recreate a heroic, pristine unencumbered form of crusading, they seemed more influenced by the myths of crusade literature and revivalist rhetoric than some of those involved in developing actual crusade strategy.37
Complete rejection of crusading, like overt pacifism, was rare. The Cistercians, one of the more austere of the new closed monastic orders, were in the forefront of crusade preaching between the 1140s and 1220s. They were succeeded by the mendicant orders of Friars whose official abandonment of materialism did not extend to the wars of the cross, which they mostly regarded as acceptable adjuncts to their missionary strategies towards non-Christians.38 Even on the exotic fringes of orthodoxy, the prophetic mystic Joachim of Fiore once regarded the Third Crusade as part of the divine scheme for the end of time, although, after its failure, he and later followers turned decisively against the crusade in their scheme of the predicted Apocalypse. While eschatological imaginings may have helped excite support for the First and even the Second Crusades, here one strand of thirteenth-century apocalyptic prophecy and exegesis turned decisively against crusading.39 The only consistent anti-crusade pacifists were to be found amongst those decisively outside official Roman Catholic orthodoxy. The Waldensian heretics appear to have maintained an absolute abhorrence and condemnation of homicide. While amongst the Dualist Cathars possibly only the perfecti shared this absolutist position, their tradition of antimaterialist thought as much as their experiences at the hands of crusaders in Languedoc (1209–29) encouraged visceral opposition.40
One of the odder fallacies of later historiography assumed crusading possessed theoretical consistency. While conceived by some as a new phenomenon, the crusade was simultaneously associated with real or imagined precedent. In secular and vernacular literature, heroes remote in time, such as Charlemagne or Arthur, were decked out in unmistakably crusading clothing. Together with the holy warriors of the Old Testament, they created an impression that crusading had always existed. Underpinning crusade language and the popularity of Holy Land expeditions lay a form of collective religio-historical nostalgia that made biblical Palestine as familiar (and malleable) as Arthur’s Britain, Charlemagne’s Francia or even Frankish Jerusalem. Yet this link with an imagined past failed to conceal what witnesses such as Guibert of Nogent saw as startlingly new.41 In response to their degree of novelty, Urban II’s ideas came in for interpretation and, in a sense, dilution. Within months of the Clermont speech, although Urban continued to emphasise the warlike aspects of the mission, clergy across western Europe began unsystematically to interpret the call as one for an armed pilgrimage. The objective, Jerusalem, and the promise of remission of the penalties of confessed sin made the association straightforward, confining the crusade within a traditional religious exercise, even though Urban had distanced his war from other religious actions by the institution of the new liturgical rite of taking the cross.42 However closely crusading became related to pilgrimage, the two rites remained free-standing, crusaders (e.g. the French monarchs Louis VII, Philip II and Louis IX) taking the cross and receiving the scrip and staff of pilgrimage separately.
The contrast between pilgrimage and Urban’s penitential war was recognised. Robert of Rheims invented an exchange between Egyptian ambassadors and the crusader leaders during the siege of Antioch early in 1098. The Egyptians declared themselves ‘amazed’ that the Christians ‘should seek the Sepulchre of your Lord as armed men, exterminating their people from long-held lands – indeed butchering them at sword point, something pilgrims should not do’. The ambassadors then offered access to Jerusalem provided the Christians advanced as pilgrims only, ‘carrying staff and scrip’. This allowed Robert to put into the mouths of the crusade leaders a formal justification for the holy war itself: ‘Nobody with any sense should be surprised at us coming to the Sepulchre of Our Lord as armed men.’ The justice of their cause is based on the mistreatment of unarmed pilgrims, the prior Christian ownership of Palestine – both traditional Augustinian just war defences – and the direct agency of God: ‘Since God has granted us Jerusalem, who can resist?’43 Such apologia, which became standard fare, indicates that there may have been something that needed justification.
The fusion of crusade and pilgrimage was rapid. Although some monastic communities who accepted property in return for subsidising First Crusaders ignored pilgrimage, stressing the object of the campaign ‘to fight and to kill’, and the crusaders’ own letters of 1096–99 contained very few references to their being pilgrims, impetus came from monks as well as chroniclers such as the author of the Gesta or Fulcher of Chartres, trying to make sense of these remarkable events. The extent to which they echoed the immediate opinions of crusaders remains unclear; the crusade leaders’ report to Paschal II of the capture of Jerusalem that described the previous two years’ campaign made no mention of pilgrimage.44 Soon, however, holy wars and pilgrimage became almost inseparable, militia and peregrinatio tightly braided together. The association was confirmed in the preaching of the Second and Third Crusades. By the thirteenth century, crusaders marching to fight Frenchmen in Languedoc or pagans in the Baltic could be described as pilgrims.45 Rituals of crusaders’ departures often revolved around visits to pilgrim shrines.46 The most sought-after crusade booty was relics. Although the legal distinction remained firm, whatever Urban II’s intentions, the analogy of crusade and pilgrimage had proved too tempting and powerful.
The legal status of crusading presented more scope for debate. The First Crusade had been envisaged as unique, a flash of divine intervention reordering the world, operating outside existing and developing theories of legitimate violence, a religious duty not a legal category, demanding possibly unrealistic constancy of spiritual purity and devotion. As this form of war was applied to further campaigns in the east, then to wars in Iberia and then the Baltic, the awkwardness of having a religious activity that defied definition except as God’s will became apparent. Crusading continued to disturb ecclesiastical norms. As interest in just war arguments grew amongst twelfth-century canon lawyers, the crusade needed to be tamed. In the great collection of canon law first compiled at Bologna c. 1139–40 known as Gratian’s Decretum, a whole section, Causa 23, was devoted to just war waged against heresy. Despite some modern assumptions to the contrary, no mention was made of crusading holy war.47 Thereafter, lawyers spent some time trying to extrapolate Gratian’s just war texts to suit crusading, with only partially convincing results. Gratian’s authorities for war against heretics were massaged to validate wars against Muslims even though legal nicety was a possibly inappropriate response to ‘God wills it!’ Canonists seemed uncomfortable with such a transcendent command as it bore no mechanism for human validation beyond acceptance of, in this case, the interpretive power of the papacy. Given that papal apologists sought to explain papal authority in terms of law, precedent, scriptural authority and reason, the lack of an equivalent objective apparatus for the crusade might have appeared anomalous despite the clear biblical precedents.
Nonetheless, the corralling of the crusade into just war theory was a logical extension of an original polemic that had included right intent, restitution for the Muslims’ violent occupation of Christian lands and, almost immediately, revenge for infidel atrocities. In the last quarter of the twelfth century the characterisation of crusading as a just war became more apparent, in the work of the Bologna-educated William of Tyre or the canonist Huguccio of Pisa. A generation later, the exchange between holy and just war was most evident, for example in Henry of Livonia’s creation myth for Latin Christian Livonia. By the end of the thirteenth century, crusading was customarily fitted into schemes of canon law, natural justice and the ius gentium or the ‘law of nature’, not just the eleventh-century reliance on the blanket sanction of holiness. Crusade theory began to move towards a rights-based model that later underpinned most European attitudes to warfare in general.48 At the end of the fourteenth century, Honoré Bouvet’s Tree of Battles (1387) illustrated how far views on crusading could go yet remain within the generally approved tradition. Bouvet argued that Christians had no automatic right to make war on infidels, unless the pope acted to remedy offences against the law of nature, which included occupation of Christian lands but also seemed to include persecution of Christian residents in lands that had never been ruled by believers. It was accepted that Muslims possessed rights and that their expulsion from the Holy Land was based on law as much as faith.49 Whatever he said at Clermont, this was not exactly the message of Urban II.
Fitting crusading into a rational frame invited criticism of a kind not possible if all was simply put down to God’s wishes. Repeated failures, culminating in the loss of the Holy Land in 1291, made questioning the crusade, genuine debate, inevitable. Every major crusade after 1099 had attracted some hostile comment. Medieval society was far less deferential than many – then and now – liked to believe. In the later thirteenth century, when Christian holdings in the Holy Land were crumbling, preachers of crusades against Christians, for example, encountered sharp criticism certainly in some hostile literary witnesses, probably on the ground as well. Repeated failure to secure the Holy Land raised doubts about God’s intent and provoked concern at papal efforts being diverted to other theatres of holy war. Crusades to the Holy Land tended to be controversial because of their inadequacies. Crusades elsewhere were more domestically politically partisan, eliciting responses to match. On top of doubts over leadership and strategy, issues surrounding crusade finance – taxation, proceeds from redemptions and, later, indulgence sales – matched the niceties of natural law in provoking scrutiny, qualification, questioning, debate and criticism.50
The greatest incentive to doubt and criticism was failure. Attitudes followed events. The inability to recapture any part of the Holy Land after 1291, the effective abandonment of the Jerusalem crusade after the Cypriot–Egyptian treaty of 1370, the rise of the Ottoman Turks in the Balkans from the 1350s and the simultaneous distraction of ceaseless warfare in Italy and between France and England, forced a reassessment of crusading, not in theory so much as in practice. In all sorts of ways, crusading became more peripheral, its moral image replacing personal experience. To emphasise the slightly other-worldly virtue of his Knight in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicted him as having fought in wars for Christendom, not the more immediate, preoccupying Hundred Years’ War.51 Increasingly, crusade imagery, ideology, scriptural precedents and rhetoric were appropriated by secular national rulers, notably in fourteenth-century France and England, and late fifteenth-century Spain, each intent on casting themselves as monarchs of holy lands, new Israels worthy of protection by God and their subjects. Even in his poem praising the crusader attack on Alexandria in 1365, Guillaume de Machaut, possibly to save Charles V of France’s blushes, pointedly argued for the moral primacy of defending the patria: ‘a man’s truly valiant who defends his own inheritance; no castle stormed, no battle in the field can equal this’.52 Soon, national holy war competed with crusading for more than men or money; it secured the enthusiasm of national churches and provided a new source of glorious chivalric anecdotes. The Arthur of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s was a sort of crusader against pagan Saxons; the Arthur of the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Morte d’Arthur was a sort of an Edward III, hammer of the French.53
The emotions of holy war were divorced from the monogamy of crusading. Although continuing to flourish as a social ideal, religious duty and formal political ambition, in the fourteenth century mass involvement in the crusade was restricted to paying money, chiefly through taxes from church property, and buying indulgences. Crusading troops tended to be professional, some soi-disant experts explicitly arguing against volunteers who had taken the cross being involved in the early stages of any crusade.54 The numerous small campaigns against Mamluks and Turks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with a very few exceptions such as the defence of Belgrade (1456), attracted very little cross-taking or mass recruitment. Crusading ceased to be something the faithful did, merely something they supported, like modern charity donations. Wars of the cross were tailored to confused frontlines, such as the competition for political space between Greeks, Latins, Slavs, Hungarians and Ottomans in the Balkans. The clear imperatives of twelfth – or thirteenth-century Palestine or Egypt were hard to recreate. In any case, while the crusade remained a source of good stories and a moral yardstick, Christendom lacked sufficient cohesion to use it as a weapon.
By 1452, Jean Germain, bishop of Chalons, could refer nostalgically to: ‘the old voyages and passages of Outremer which are called croisiez’.55 The later middle ages offered different historical perspectives. The unredeemed failure of 1291 encouraged acute soul-searching and reassessment of objectives and methods. Although there is little sign of a complete rejection of holy war, at least when aimed at securing the Holy Land, some doubts were expressed at its current efficacy. Those interested in converting Muslims, such as the Franciscan polymath Roger Bacon (Opus Majus, 1266–68) or the Dominican preacher William of Tripoli (De Statu Saracenorum, 1273), claimed that crusading would not, as Innocent IV had argued, assist evangelism and, in an argument reminiscent of the Joachites, suggested that Islam was on the verge of internal collapse.56 Such an approach was not widespread. Most commentators were more pragmatic; that crusades had failed because of sin, inadequate resources and incompetence.
Between the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in the late 1330s, a welter of advice and comment flowed to and from the courts of church and state in western Europe. Some works provided information about the east from travellers, merchants, members of military orders or pilgrims. Others were more closely allied to specific projects or plans. Governments sought information and advice from potential carriers of troops such as Venice or Marseilles. There were detailed schemes to repopulate the Near East with Christians (from the French provincial lawyer Pierre Dubois) or to conquer North Africa en route to the Holy Land (from the Catalan mystic and missionary Ramon Lull). Many adopted a possibly spurious air of expertise, such as the Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello whose substantial and widely circulated Secreta Fidelium Crucis (1306–21) gave precise details of shipping, recruitment, strategy, tactics and finance.57
Three elements stood out from this ‘recovery literature’: the assumption that crusading was a redemptive act; a concentration on the mechanics of war and conquest; and a keen sense of the lessons to be drawn from the past. Both the Armenian Hayton of Gorgios’s advice to the pope in 1307 and Sanudo’s proposals came with extensive histories attached.58 All writers sought to explain how old mistakes could be rectified. Many extended the intellectual and conceptual reach of crusade planning. Dubois considered matters of western and eastern demography. Hayton’s historical sections covered geography and ethnography. Sanudo’s plan, that included an initial commercial blockade of Egypt, rested on an appreciation of Mediterranean economics as well as attempting to calculate the financial implications of any campaign. These writers were placing the crusade in a much wider context beyond the religious imperatives of thirteenth-century promoters such as James of Vitry or Humbert of Romans, who had been hidebound by western academic preoccupations and operated within the conventions of crusade preaching. It is notable that, in contrast to most previous crusade analysis, few pieces of ‘recovery’ literature came from preachers or academics, and many from laymen.
However, ‘recovery’ literature proved abortive in the face of European politics, notably the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) and the papal schism (1378–1417). Prospects for a mass crusade – in the 1360s, 1390s, 1450s and 1460s – were hopelessly compromised by divisions, rivalries, self-interest and inadequate finance. The difficulties of planning any such major campaign were now well understood. Within the traditional genre of crusade writing, the theoretical treatises of the early fourteenth century gave way to two contrasting types. On the one hand, in visionary tracts from the eastern Mediterranean veteran utopian Philippe de Mézières (1327–1405) or the poet and courtier Eustace Deschamps (c. 1346–1406), the crusade provided a moral context within which to address domestic issues. For all his apparent awareness of political reality, the prolific Mézières, for instance, was much more interested, especially as he got older, with spiritual redemption and regeneration than with fighting Muslims. Support for the ideals of crusading would produce peace and reform within Christendom. In works such as Le songe du vieil pèlerin (1386) or the Epistre lamentable (1397), Mézières pedalled not crusade advice but a prose form of ‘devotional romance’, full of allegory and personified Virtues and Evils, distanced by form and content from actual crusade planning. Even his scheme for a new military order that would conduct any putative crusade had no very serious substance, its final regulations (1395) even forbidding fighting anywhere except the Holy Land despite the advancing Ottomans on the Danube and before the walls of Constantinople. For Mézières and many other crusade-infected writers of the later middle ages, crusading was essentially a utopian metaphor, at times a fairly whimsical one at that.59
In apparent contrast, a number of factual descriptions of the Levant were produced in the second quarter of the fifteenth century that at first sight seem to point to a more practical approach, notably Emanuele Piloti’s description of Egypt (c. 1439) and the accounts of their Levantine travels by the Burgundian agents Ghillbert de Lannoy (1420) and Bertrandon de la Broquière (c. 1455). Even Jean Germain’s heatedly imaginative Discours du voyage d’Oultremer (1452), addressed to Charles VII of France, purported to be a blueprint for a Christian counter-attack in the eastern Mediterranean.60 In fact none of these presented any serious crusade plans. All were spiced with wishful thinking. The concentration on Egypt was hardly relevant; their use of crusade history as romantic as any versifier’s. The works of Lannoy and Broquière fitted the fashion for travel literature realised in the extraordinary popularity of the fictitious Travels of John Mandeville, one of the most copied and circulated works of the later middle ages which began with a ringing if wholly traditional endorsement of the Holy Land crusade. The stereotype of the exotic and corrupt east is already apparent in Broquière’s description of portly Sultan Murad II.61 However, there was little of practical use. Even one of the most vociferous self-proclaimed crusade enthusiasts, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy (1419–67), despite repeatedly protesting his eagerness to combat the Ottomans, possessed a library full of books concerning the Holy Land but bereft of volumes about the Turks.62
Only where active crusading persisted, at least in name and legal theory, was the crusade actually debated as a material weapon of policy. At the Council of Constance (1414–18), the legitimacy of the Teutonic Knights’ hold on Prussia and their war against the now Christian Lithuanians were challenged and defended on grounds of principle. The Polish advocate Paul Vladimiri argued that only in the Holy Land did Christians have the right to contest the right of non-Christians to rule, thereby undermining the original raison d’être of the Teutonic Knights’ rule in Prussia and Livonia. He quoted Thomas Aquinas in support of the idea that infidels had natural rights to possession just as strong as Christians, the Holy Land excepted, and that forceful conversion was unlawful. He noted that the conversion of the Lithuanians had been achieved (in 1386) peacefully by the Poles not through the violence of the Teutonic Knights. Vladimiri based his case on theories of just war and natural rights. By contrast, the Knights’ case rested on papal plenitude of power, even over infidel lands, and a characteristically sentimental self-seeking version of history in which the blood of Christian warriors had sanctified the holy land of Prussia. The Knights were new Maccabees who had defended Christendom (including Poland) from pagans and against whom the Poles had allied with the infidel Lithuanians. Although Vladimiri was grandstanding, his arguments showed how crusading could be regarded, as Bouvet had a generation earlier, as just one category of war, legal or not, rather than as a unique, transcendent and universal obligation.63
This did not mean that crusading had ceased to find cultural traction or political appeal. Popes went on granting crusading status to wars against the Ottomans, not just in the fifteenth century but far beyond, at least until 1689. Spanish monarchs in the century after Ferdinand (1479–1516) and Isabella (1474–1504) placed the crusade near the rhetorical centre of their expansionist national monarchic messianism. In response to the Ottoman threat, a whole new genre of crusade historiography emerged that, in volume, possibly surpassed what had gone before. From Petrarch in the 1330s, self-consciously classicising humanist commentators concerned themselves with the crusade for two related reasons. They faced the obvious threat posed by the Turks to what they regarded as the civilised – that is, their own – world. Fifteenth-century Italy stood at the centre of Christendom, the focus of humanist interest but also on the front-line against the Turks across the Adriatic. Alone of the countries of western Europe, mainland Italy suffered Ottoman occupation – of Otranto, briefly in 1480–81. Episodes from the crusading past could also be held up as moral exemplars of the classical virtues of selflessness, cooperation, civic responsibility and Christian patriotism, crusaders, as it were, standing in for classical heroes of the Roman Republic. It is sobering to realise that more crusade writing survives from the period 1451–81 than for the whole of the preceding centuries. However, although linked to the anti-Ottoman agenda of Renaissance popes such as Calixtus III (1455–58) and Pius II (1458–64) in the reaction to the fall of Constantinople, it must be wondered whether the works of the likes of Francesco Filelfo, Flavio Biondi, Cardinal Bessarion, Pius II himself, the millenarian George of Trebizond or Benedetto Accolti went very far beyond rhetorical exercises. Humanist rhetoric may have defined both man and his message; however, Filelfo, for example, switched his position from calling for an anti-Turkish crusade to a distinctly philo-Turkish stance, as his Florentine patrons swung against plans for a crusade led by Venice. Even Accolti’s great work on the First Crusade, De Bello a Christianis Contra Paganos (1463/64) may have been composed as much with an eye to establishing his intellectual credentials as chancellor of Florence as in aiding Pius II’s crusade plans. It was hardly pragmatic and an odd descent into unreason for Pius II himself to brand the Ottomans as barbarians and inhuman (immanis); he knew better.64
The trajectory of Pius II’s views on the crusade reveals how far it had became diffused within a whole range of other interests and attitudes. From being an acute and rational observer of the Turkish threat, after his election as pope Pius degenerated into symbolism and polemic. His motives for supporting crusading had always been bound up with asserting humanist principles of civilisation as much as the Turkish threat per se, yet after 1453 he resorted to the old mirage of Jerusalem and the language of demonisation. His crusade scheme of 1463–64, the propaganda for which far exceeded its modest dimensions, was as an assertion of papal authority, a gesture to restore its reputation which, Pius observed, had been damaged by, among other things, its failed crusade policies: ‘we are in a position of insolvent bankers … we have no credit’. However realistic as to the selfish motives of would-be allies, Pius’s view of the crusade and its ideology was solipsistically western, tapping into ubiquitous communal imprints of shared historical myths and legends, sustained by a vigorous liturgical tradition that maintained Jerusalem, the Holy Land and even a demonised Turk in an extended metaphor for godliness and the Christian life.65
The use of the crusade and its history, by humanists and other contemporary writers, occupied a world of polemic, serving parochial religious, cultural and political functions. By affecting to address actual immediate temporal issues, the logistical work of Sanudo, the topographical researches of Lannoy, Piloti or Broquière, the cosmic fantasies of Mézières or Germain, the rhetoric of the humanists, projected an idealised vision of human affairs, comfortingly familiar rather than challengingly fresh. They signally failed to address the politics of the Balkans and the Mediterranean or any other theatre of religious holy war. Of course, that in itself was one of the oldest traditions of crusade histories. Ever since the Gesta Francorum, most crusade commentators, even, it could be argued, William of Tyre, had the obsessions and expectations of a western European audience firmly in mind. Conceptually, the crusade was a creation of western European religious culture not of the frontiers with Islam or paganism. Its histories both reflected and reinforced this. Medieval crusade historiography, like other historical writing of the period, was less concerned to recite information than in illustrating didactic lessons conjured from an invented universe of optimism, virtue, evil, punishment for sin, reward for goodness; a world defined by memories of past glory. For many generations, these images bore simultaneous witness to the crusade as cultural habit and moral exemplar. Its histories created an accessible past while addressing the concerns of the present, a theme at the heart of this book.
1 H. Hagenmeyer, Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus de Jahren 1088–1100 (Innsbrück, 1901); for the Sept. 1099 letter, Letter XVIII, pp. 102–14, 167–74; trans. E. Peters, ed., The First Crusade (2nd edn Philadelphia PA, 1998), pp. 292–6 (and pp. 283–97 for others); it survives in at least ten twelfth-century manuscripts alone.
2 Trans. C. Sweetenham, Robert the Monk’s History of the First Crusade (Aldershot, 2005), p. 77. In general, J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London, 1986), esp. chaps 4 and 6.
3 Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Hierosolymitanorum, ed. R. Hill (London, 1962), quotation at p. 53; J. Rubinstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum and Who was Peter Tudebode?’, Revue Mabillon, n.s. 16 (2005), 179–204. The literature on the Gesta is considerable, reflecting its apparent chronological immediacy and subsequent influence; for a recent summary, with references to the central articles by C. Morris, J. France and J. B. Wolf, see Y. N. Harari, ‘Eyewitnessing in Accounts of the First Crusade: The Gesta Francorum and Other Contemporary Narratives’, Crusades, 3 (2004), 77–99, esp. notes 43, 47 and 63.
4 Raymond of Aguilers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Jerusalem, trans. J. H. and L. L. Hill (Philadelphia PA, 1968); Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, trans. H. S. Fink and F. R. Ryan (Knoxville TN, 1969); Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere, trans. J. H. and L. L. Hill (Philadelphia PA, 1974).
5 R. Hiestand, ‘Il cronista medieval e il suo pubblico’, Annali della facolta di lettere e filosofia dell’università di Napoli, 27 (n.s. 15), (1984–85), 207–27; J. France, ‘An Unknown Account of the Capture of Jerusalem’, English Historical Review, 87 (1972), 771–83; the versions by Baldric and Guibert are, among other places, in Recueil des historiens des croisades (hereafter RHC): Historiens occidentaux (Paris, 1844–1905), iv, 1–111; 115–263; Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. and trans. S. Edgington (Oxford, 2007); intro. pp. xxi–xxxvii for rel. with William of Tyre.
6 Sweetenham, Robert, passim; intro. esp. p. 9; Fulcher, p. 105.
7 Raymond of Aguilers, p. 15.
8 William of Malmesbury, De Gestis Regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, Rolls Series (London, 1887–89), ii, 390; cf. R. Thomson, ‘William of Malmesbury, Historian of Crusade’, Reading Medieval Studies, 23 (1997), 121–34.
9 Sweetenham, Robert, pp. 80–1.
10 Raymond of Aguilers, p. 15.
11 RHC Occ., iv, 14.
12 Raymond of Aguilers, pp. 32–5, 45–6, 60–4 etc.; Gesta Francorum, pp. 45–7; Albert of Aachen, pp. 142–5, 222–5; Peters, First Crusade, pp. 44–5, 284–91; Ralph of Caen, Gesta Tancredi, trans. B. S. and D. S. Bachrach (Aldershot, 2005), p. 22.
13 In Praise of the New Knighthood, trans. M. Barber and K. Bate, The Templars (Manchester, 2002), pp. 215–27.
14 D. H. Green, The Millstätter Exodus: A Crusading Epic (Cambridge, 1966).
15 S. Duparc-Quioc, Le cycle de la croisade (Paris, 1955); eadem, La chanson d’Antioche (Paris, 1977); but see R. Cook, ‘Chanson d’Antioche, chanson de geste: Le cycle de la croisade est-il épique? (Amsterdam, 1980); cf. Sweetenham, Robert, pp. 35–42 and Albert of Aachen, esp. p. xxvii; Ambroise, The Crusade of Richard the Lion-Heart, trans. M. J. Hubert and J. L. La Monte (New York NY, 1976).
16 Geoffrey of Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. M. R. B. Shaw, Chronicles of the Crusades (London, 1963), pp. 29–160; Robert of Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople, trans. E. H. McNeal (New York NY, 1966).
17 John of Joinville, Life of St Louis, trans. M. R. B. Shaw, Chronicles of the Crusades (London, 1963), pp. 163–353.
18 Odo of Deuil, De Profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem, ed. and trans. V. G. Berry (New York NY, 1948).
19 William of Tyre, Historia, ed. R. B. C. Huygens as Chronicon (Turnhout, 1986), i, p. 427; Geoffrey Gaimar, Lestoire des Engleis, ed. T. Duffus Hardy and C. T. Martin, Rolls Series (London, 1888–89), i, pp. 244–5, l. 5750 for quotation; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, ii, pp. 460–1.
20 C. Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (London, 2006), p. 244 and note 4 and, generally, pp. 244–7.
21 Gilo of Paris, Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, ed. and trans C. W. Grocock and J. E. Siberry (Oxford, 1997); RHC Occ., iv, 121.
22 The Canso d’Antiocha, ed. and trans. L. M. Paterson and C. Sweetenham (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 5–6, 201, 217, 229.
23 C. Morris, ‘Propaganda for War’, Studies in Church History, xx, ed. W. J. Shields (Woodbridge, 1983), 93.
24 Sweetenham, Robert, p. 83; Albert of Aachen, pp. 2–9 (p. 4 for primus auctor), 13–45; the thirteenth-century Spanish Gran Conquesta de Ultramar may preserve one early version; the Genoese Caffaro another, Canso d’Antiocha, p. 41; Annali Genovesi di Caffaro, ed. L. T. Belgrano (Genoa, 1890), i, 99–101.
25 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996), pp. 714–15. For one local hero, Raimbold Croton, C. Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (London, 1998), p. 11 and note 16, p. 129.
26 P. W. Edbury and J. G. Rowe, William of Tyre: Historian of the Latin East (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 3–5; P. Edbury, ‘The French Translation of William of Tyre’s Historia’, Crusades, 6 (2007), 69–105.
27 Chronicon, ed. Huygens; A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, trans. E. A. Babcock and A. C. Krey (New York NY, 1941); for William’s own account of his education, R. B. C. Huygens, ‘Guillaume de Tyr étudiant’, Latomus, 21 (1962), 811–29.
28 Tyerman, God’s War, p. 641 and refs note 82.
29 For the transmission of William’s text, Chronicon, ed. Huygens, pp. 3–34, 76–91; Edbury and Rowe, William of Tyre, pp. 3–5; Marino Sanudo Torsello, Secreta Fidelium Crucis, ed. J. Bongars, Gesta Dei Per Francos (Hanau, 1611), ii, 98.
30 R. Black, Benedetto Accolti and the Florentine Renaissance (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 299–315; below, Chapter 4.
31 Babcock and Krey, Deeds, i, p. 56.
32 Odo of Deuil, as in note 18 above; De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. and trans. C. W. David (New York NY, 1976); Historia de Expeditione Friderici Imperatoris, ed. A Chroust (Berlin, 1928); Henry of Livonia, Chronicon Livoniae, ed. L. Arbusow and A. Bauer (Hanover, 1955); trans J. A. Brundage, The Chronicle of Henry of Livonia (New York NY, 2003).
33 K. V. Jensen, ‘Introduction’, in Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150–1500, ed. A. V. Murray (Aldershot, 2001), p. xxi.
34 Oliver of Paderborn, The Capture of Damietta, trans. J. J. Gavigan, in Christian Society and the Crusades 1198–1229, ed. E. Peters (Philadelphia PA, 1971), pp. 48–139; for evidence of compilation, see chap. 34 p. 89; Tyerman, God’s War, p. 172 and note 9 p. 933.
35 Annales Herbipolensis, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, ed. G. H. Pertz et al. (Hanover, 1826–1934), xvi, 5.
36 Ralph Niger, De Re Militari et Triplici Via Peregrinationis Ierosolimitano, ed. L. Schmugge (Berlin, 1977).
37 G. Dickson, The Children’s Crusade (London, 2008); idem, Religious Enthusiasm in the Medieval West: Revivals, Crusades, Saints (Abingdon, 2000); Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 607–11, 802–4, 880–1.
38 On this see B. Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission (Princeton NJ, 1984).
39 E. R. David, ‘Apocalyptic Conversion: The Joachite Alternative to the Crusades’, Traditio, 125 (1969), 127–54; Kedar, Crusade and Mission, pp. 112–16, 219–23.
40 M. Barber, The Cathars (Harlow, 2000); M. Lambert, Medieval Heresy (Oxford, 2002).
41 RHC Occ., iv, 124.
42 J. M. Jensen, ‘War, Penance and the First Crusade’, in Medieval History Writing and Crusading Ideology, ed. T. M. S. Lehtonen and K. V. Jensen (Helsinki, 2005), pp. 51–63; J. Flori, La guerre sainte (Paris, 2001), pp. 316–20; Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 64–74; Urban’s letters, Peters, First Crusade, pp. 42, 44–6.
43 Sweetenham, Robert, pp. 136–8.
44 Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 72–3 and refs.
45 Tyerman, Invention, p. 52; Henry of Livonia, Chronicle, passim.
46 E.g. John of Joinville, Life of St Louis, p. 195.
47 Gratian, Decretum, ed. A. Frieberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici, i (Leipzig, 1879), Causa XXIII; cf. E.-D. Hehl, Kirche und Krieg im 12 Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1980); J. Riley-Smith review, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 33 (1982), 290–1; J. A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison WI, 1969), esp. p. 190; in general, F. H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1975).
48 H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Christianity and the Morality of Warfare during the First Century of Crusading’, in The Experience of Crusading, ed. N. Housley and M. Bull, i (Cambridge, 2003), 175–92; J. Muldoon, Popes, Lawyers and Infidels (Liverpool, 1979); Kedar, Crusade and Mission.
49 Honoré Bonet (recte Bouvet), Tree of Battles, ed. G. W. Coopland (Liverpool, 1949), esp. pp. 126–8.
50 P. Throop, Criticism of the Crusades (Amsterdam, 1940); E. Siberry, Criticism of Crusading (Oxford, 1985); Tyerman, Invention, pp. 3–4, 88–98; H. E. Mayer, The Crusades (Eng. trans. 2nd edn Oxford, 1988), pp. 312–13, 320–1.
51 G. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, ed. W. Skeat (Oxford, 1894–97), General Prologue ll. 43–78; M. H. Keen, ‘Chaucer’s Knight, the English Aristocracy and the Crusade’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherbourne (London, 1983), pp. 45–63; in general N. Housley, The Later Crusades (Oxford, 1992).
52 Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 906–12; Guillaume de Machaut, The Capture of Alexandria, trans. J. Shirley and P. Edbury (Aldershot, 2001), p. 35.
53 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, ed. A. Griscom and R. Ellis Jones (London, 1929), esp. pp. 437–8; Alliterative Morte Arthure, ed. E. Brock, Early English Text Society, o.s. 8 (London, 1871).
54 Sanudo, Secreta, Book II; in general Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 826–915.
55 Jean Germain, Discours du voyage d’oultremer, ed. C. Schefer, Revue de l’Orient Latin, 3 (1895), 339.
56 Kedar, Crusade and Mission, pp. 177–83.
57 In general, A. Leopold, How to Recover the Holy Land (Aldershot, 2000).
58 RHC Documents arméniens (Paris, 1869–1906), ii, 113–363; Sanudo, Secreta, Book III, Gesta Dei Per Francos, ii.
59 N. Iorga, Philippe de Mézières (1327–1405) et la croisade au xive siècle (Paris, 1896); Philippe de Mézières, Songe du vieil pèlerin, ed. G. Coopland (Cambridge, 1969); C. Tyerman, ‘New Wine in Old Skins: The Crusade and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages’, in The Eastern Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages, ed. C. Holmes and J. Harris (Oxford, forthcoming); Housley, Later Crusades, pp. 377–93.
60 Notes 55 and 59 above.
61 Bertrandon de la Broquière, Le voyage d’outremer, ed. C. Schefer, Recueils des voyages (Paris, 1896), pp. 176–7, 181–6.
62 J. Paviot, Les ducs de Bourgogne, la croisade et l’Orient (Paris, 2003), p. 238.
63 For a summary, E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades (2nd edn London, 1997), pp. 231–41.
64 Housley, Later Crusades, pp. 99–100, 384–9; N. Bisaha, Creating East and West (Philadelphia PA, 2004); M. Meserve, ‘Italian Humanists and the Problem of the Crusade’, in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, ed. N. Housley (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 13–38; J. Hankins, ‘Renaissance Crusaders’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995), 111–207, esp. 121–2; Tyerman, ‘New Wine’; Black, Benedetto Accolti.
65 Note 64 above; A. Linder, Raising Arms: Liturgy in the Struggle to Liberate Jerusalem in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2003); N. Bisaha, ‘Pope Pius II and the Crusade’, in Crusading in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 39–52; Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope, trans. F. A. Gragg, ed. L. C. Gabel (London, 1960), pp. 237, 239, 241–59, 327–8, 340–3, 347, 351–2, 354, 357, 358, 369; Pius II, Commentaria, i, ed. M. Meserve and M. Simonetta (Cambridge MA, 2003), 99, 132–5, 160, 210–11, 266–7; Housley, Later Crusades, pp. 105–9; Tyerman, God’s War, pp. 870–1.