1. Naval and military terms
CASTLE: a wooden tower erected on the deck of a ship. Medieval warships had two of these, one fore, one aft, to protect the men and command a better view of the enemy’s deck. The term survives, with a different meaning, in forecastle.
CAT-HOUSE: a movable pent-house on wheels, flanked by wooden towers.
MANGONEL: a military machine constructed on the principle of the catapult, for casting stones, etc., by means of a gigantic sling. Gunpowder as a propelling agent was not in use at the time of the Crusades.
PETRARY: a machine of much the same type and purpose as a mangonel.
QUARREL: a short, heavy, square-headed bolt or arrow.
SERGEANT: a tenant on a nobleman’s estate below the rank of a knight who owed military service to his lord by reason of the land he held from him. Such men, with the knights, made up the main body of the troops. The term soldier, i.e. a man who serves in the army for pay, would not be a proper equivalent.
TURCOPLES: Syrians of mixed parentage (Turco-Greek) employed as auxiliaries in the Christian army.
2. Official titles
ADVOCATE: the chief magistrate of a city or district (e.g. of Béthune).
BAILIFF: an official with administrative authority under the Sheriff. His district was called a bailiwick.
CHAMBERLAIN: steward to a king or a great lord.
CHANCELLOR: official secretary to the king or a great lord.
CHÂTELAIN: governor or constable of a castle. The Châtelain de Coucy had also some reputation as a poet.
CLERK: according to the context: a scholar, an aspirant to the priesthood, or a cleric.
CONSTABLE: chief officer of the royal household, with special military functions, or warden of a royal fortress or castle.
IMAM: the officiating priest of a mohammedan mosque.
MAÎTRE: form of address used in reference to theologians (e.g. Maître Robert de Sorbon). In France today applied to lawyers, especially barristers.
MARSHAL: see introduction, p.10.
PROVOST: chief magistrate and administrator of law and order in a town (as once in Scotland).
SENESCHAL: see Introduction, p.19. for seneschal of a province. The seneschal of a town was in charge of civil affairs as the constable was responsible for the military side.
SERJEANT: an official of the Crown whose main duty was to arrest offenders against the law.
VID AME: an official who held lands from a bishop, and acted as his representative and defender in temporal matters.
3. Towns and localities
The correct form of places mentioned in the chronicles has been checked by reference to Faral, Wailly, and other authorities. Most of these places are marked on the maps at the end of this book. A few comments are necessary.
ES SUR AND SAID A: Arabic names of cities more commonly referred to by historians as Tyre and Sidon. In view, however, of Joinville’s explicit statement that Tyre and Sidon were names given in the Bible to places known in his day as Sur and Sayette, the Arabic form is given in this translation.
HOMS: Arabic name of a town known to the Romans as Emessa. Although Joinville gives his own version of the Latin name, the local one has been adopted as more usual in histories of the Crusades.
Î LE DE FRANCE: a territory in the centre of Northern France which formed the most important part of the royal domains. Paris was its chief city and the seat of government. In distinguishing it from other provinces over which the king had no direct control the chroniclers call this territory France, but apply this name to the whole country when the ‘barons of France’ are united by a common purpose.
KIBOTOS: a town in Asia Minor called Civetot by English Crusaders and Chivetot by the French.
MOREA: a peninsula at the southern extremity of Greece, also called the Peloponnesus.
NEGROPONT: also called the I. of Euboea. No town of the same name is marked on ancient or modern maps of Greece. It was most probably its principal port Chalcis, which lies on the western shores of the island.
NILE: while Joinville gives the two main branches of the Nile correctly, he makes a mistake in placing the scene of operations between the Rosetta, or western arm of the river, and the one that flows far east of it to Damietta. Fighting actually took place on the island between the Damietta branch and the Bagh-as Saghir, a smaller stream that left the main river just below Mansourah and ran past Ashmun-Tannah to Lake Manzaleh, east of Damietta. Joinville’s ignorance of the source of the Nile is natural enough, since this was only discovered in the last century.
STRAITS OF SAINT GEORGE: name given at this time to the whole stretch of water from the Aegean Sea up to the Black Sea, including the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora, and the Bosporus.
UNIDENTIFIED PLACES: these all occur in Villehardouin’s work, and are perforce left as he gives them. They include two castles: La Blanche, near Philippi, and Moniac, in the valley of the Arda; and four towns : Fraim and Rodestuic, both on the Arda, Blisme, on the northern borders of the Empire, a day’s journey from Beroë, and Eului in Wallachia.
WALLACHIA: a country in Eastern Europe, north of the Empire of Constantinople, inhabited by a Latin-speaking race, called Wallachians or Vlachs by the Greeks, but styling themselves Roumans, and claiming descent from Roman colonists. The name Roumania, given at a much later date to the kingdom formed by the fusion of Wallachia with the neighbouring principality of Moldavia, would keep alive this connexion with Rome. In 1186 the Wallachians, led by Johanitza and his two brothers, repudiated their already loose allegiance to the Byzantine Emperor Isaac, and allying themselves with the Bulgarians established a Bulgaro-Wallachian kingdom.
ZARA: On the eastern shores of the Adriatic. The capital city of Dalmatia, which at that time was combined with Croatia and Slavonia. Its possession had been a constant source of dispute between the Venetians and the Hungarians, and it had changed hands frequently since it first sought protection from the Venetians in 1000. Since its conquest in 1202 by the Venetians, who finally bought it from Hungary in 1409, it has been subject to many changes of ownership.
4. Peoples and communities
ASSASSINS: the followers of the Old Man of the Mountain, were so-called because they were addicted to the drug ‘hashish’, which kept them in the requisite state of intoxication to perform their atrocious deeds. The modern meaning of the word is derived from their habit of committing violent murders.
BÉGUINES: members of certain lay sisterhoods originating in the Low Countries in the twelfth century. They led a religious life, but took no vows, and were free to leave the order and marry.
COMANS (or CUMANS): a Turkish people established in Moldavia, to the east of Wallachia.
FRANKS: originally the name of the Germanic people who conquered Gaul in the sixth century, it was later applied by Levantines and Moslems to all peoples of Western Europe. Villehardouin uses it to distinguish the French and German Crusaders from the Italians of Venice, but in separate reference to his own people speaks of them as the French.
HOSPITALLERS (the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem): an order of military monks, founded in 1048. Originally keepers of a hospital for the benefit of poor pilgrims to the Holy Land, the Hospitallers expanded to form a military organization for the defence of Christendom in the East.
KHORASMINS (or KHWARISMIAN TURKS): natives of the Persian province of Khorassan. In the first quarter of the thirteenth century one of their kings, Mohammed-Shah, had made himself master of an empire that stretched from Kurdistan to the Aral Sea. According to Wailly, the ‘Emperor of Persia’ mentioned by Joinville in his report on the Tartars was either this king or his son, Jelal ad-Din, both of whom were defeated (1220–1) by the Mongol emperor, the great Jenghiz-Khan. In 1244 another Khorasmian king, whom Joinville calls the Emperor Barbaquan (a possible distortion of his real name) led his army into Syria, and after ravaging the land and sacking Jerusalem advanced, in company with the Egyptian forces, to attack Gaza. Joinville’s description of the disastrous battle that followed is fairly in accordance with the facts, except that he makes it take place before Jaffa. In his account of the subsequent defeat and annihilation of the Khorasmian army all that can be verified is that the Sultan of Horns was one of the leaders on the opposing side.
LATINS: name applied (in opposition to Greeks) to European peoples speaking a language derived from Latin, and more particularly, in Villehardouin’s chronicle, to Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians settled in Eastern Europe or Asia Minor.
TARTARS: a people inhabiting the north-east corner of what we now call China, and some of whose descendants may still be found among the Russian Tartars. Joinville’s report of the mission to their ‘great King’ is often inaccurate. The French envoys, instead of starting from Cyprus in 1248, left Acre in 1253, shortly before King Louis returned to France. Nor in fact did they approach the Tartars, a people who for half a century had been in subjection to their Mongol conquerors, and were consequently not important enough to be sought as allies. What appears to have actually happened was that they first visited the great grandson of Jenghiz-Khan, a Mongol prince who was said to have been converted to Christianity. not finding him powerful enough to conclude an alliance with their king, the envoys travelled on across Asia to the court of the Great Khan Batu, supreme ruler of the Mongol Empire, and the prince’s father. This being understood, it should be said, in fairness to Joinville, that although the mixed horde of tribesmen which swept across Asia and invaded Eastern Europe also included Turks and Mongols, to the men of his day all such Asiatics were known as Tartars. templars: a military and religious order, founded about 1118 for the protection of the Holy Sepulchre and pilgrims to the Holy Land. As may be gathered from Joinville’s chronicle, it became very rich and powerful. In the end, whether through envy or some better motive, accusations of heresy and evil practices were laid against its members, and after many confessions of guilt had been extracted by torture or other means, the order was suppressed by command of the Pope in 1312.
5. Costumes
HAUBERK: a long military tunic, usually of ring or chain mail, with a hood of mail attached to protect the head and neck. No one below the rank of knight was privileged to wear it. Thus, in reporting events at Saumur in 1241, Joinville uses the expression ‘I had never worn a hauberk’ to indicate that he had not at that time been knighted.
MINIVER AND VAIR: two kinds of fur much in use in the Middle Ages for lining and trimming ceremonial costumes. There appears to be some doubt as to the animals from which these furs were taken, but it is more generally supposed that miniver was the skin of a species of grey squirrel, while vair was the skin of a squirrel with a grey back and a white belly.
SURCOAT: a long outer coat or garment, with or without sleeves, which was commonly of rich material and was worn by people of both sexes. A tabard was a short surcoat worn by a knight over his armour and emblazoned with his armorial bearings.
6. Coinage
The value of money depends so much on its purchasing power that it is impossible to give more than a rough estimate of medieval currency, even if one reckons by the gold standard.
BEZANT: a coin first struck at Byzantium (in other words Constantinople). There were gold bezants, varying in value between a sovereign and a half-sovereign, and silver ones worth from a florin to a shilling.
DENIER: a French coin of very small value, roughly equivalent to a penny.
LIVRE: The livre tournois was more or less the equivalent of a sovereign, the livre parisis worth about five shillings more.
MARK: not a coin, but a denomination in weight of gold or silver usually regarded as equal to 8 oz. Wailly estimates the marks payable to the Venetians for providing a fleet as equal in value to 885,000 francs, i.e. about, £44,000 at the rate of exchange current in 1874 (the date of Wailly’s edition of Villehardouin). Such a sum, large as it may have seemed to the Crusaders, illustrates the difficulty of comparing medieval and modern money values.