The Knight, the Cross, and the Song. Stefan Vander Elst
has observed, medieval historiographical writings provide rich soil for the study of techniques of exhortation and propaganda: “Historiography, as the medieval genre par excellence devoted to a ‘realistic’ representation of the social and political world, is at the same time a genre thoroughly saturated with ideological goals. Especially in the Middle Ages, historical writing, precisely to the degree that it claimed to be free of imaginative elaboration, served as a vehicle of ideological elaboration.”15 The ensuing chapters discuss a broad range of historiographical writings, from narrative history to aristocratic biography, chronicle, and what is usually referred to as “popular history”; these date from the twelfth century to the fourteenth, and were written in Latin and the vernacular, by both clergymen and laymen, in places ranging from the Near East to northern France to the Baltic. While they exhibit great variety, the works analyzed in this book are tied together by several factors. First, they all purport to narrate the history of the Crusade or the deeds of individual Crusaders;16 although some, notably the works of the First and Second Old French Crusade Cycles, are very imaginative, even these were considered truthful accounts of events in the Middle Ages.17 Second, they all serve to propagate the holy war and to motivate their audience to aid the cause d’Outremer. Third, they unrelentingly appropriate the conventions of chivalric literature to fulfill that purpose.
The book consists of two parts, the first of which examines the use of the formal and thematic commonplaces of the chansons de geste in Crusade propaganda over roughly the first century after the First Crusade. Chapter 1 describes the continuing need for manpower in the Crusader states in the aftermath of the First Crusade, outlines the origin and genre characteristics of the chansons, and examines their usefulness for Crusade propaganda. The excitatoria I discuss in chapters 2 to 4—the anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (completed by early 1101), Robert of Reims’s Historia Iherosolimitana (ca. 1106–1107), and the three texts of the so-called historical cycle of the First Old French Crusade Cycle (La Chanson d’Antioche, Les Chétifs, and La Chanson de Jérusalem, redacted in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century)—describe similar subjects, all narrating the remarkable events of the First Crusade. Insofar as Robert of Reims drew extensively on the Gesta Francorum when writing his work, and the Old French Crusade Cycle in turn was heavily influenced by the Historia Iherosolimitana, the texts provide excellent ground for comparative study. These works furthermore illustrate the role of the successful First Crusade in later Crusade propaganda and show the importance of Jerusalem in early Crusade ideology.18 I will demonstrate how their authors turned to the chansons to address the requirements of the nascent Crusader states, the expansionist aspirations of Bohemond of Taranto, and the need for manpower after the Battle of Hattin in 1187, respectively.
The second part explores how chivalric romance, which gained in popularity from the last quarter of the twelfth century onward, affected the propagation of the Crusade until the end of the fourteenth century. Chapter 5 demonstrates that romance, with its heavy emphasis on secular and often illicit love, was at first thought antithetical to the goals of Crusade, and that its commonplaces were consequently used sparingly in propaganda. Chapters 6 to 8, however, show how excitatoria increasingly looked toward romance to shore up support for the holy war, especially after the collapse of the Crusader states in 1291. The works examined in these chapters illustrate the expansion of the Crusade beyond the Holy Places: Nicolaus of Jeroschin’s Middle High German Krônike von Prûzinlant (ca. 1331–1344) describes the subjugation of much of the Baltic by the Teutonic or German Order; the works of the Second Old French Crusade Cycle (in particular Le Bâtard de Bouillon and Baudouin de Sébourc, ca. 1350–1370) see Christians ranging as far as Baghdad and assaulting Mecca; while La Prise d’Alixandre, written by Guillaume de Machaut in the early 1370s, narrates the conquest of the Egyptian port of Alexandria by Peter I of Cyprus in 1365. Beyond highlighting the spreading reach of the holy war in the centuries following the First Crusade, to include population groups and target areas farther afield, the works I analyze in the second part of the book have in common the virtue of demonstrating a different awareness and interpretation of geographical space. They show remarkable interaction between Christian heartland and non-Christian frontier; as they appropriate the characteristics of chivalric romance to suit their purpose as Crusade excitatoria, they turn this frontier into a world of courtly love and adventure.
A study of the rhetoric and the strategies of persuasion in Crusade excitatoria cannot explain why those who chose to take up arms throughout the many centuries of Crusade did so. Nevertheless, the old dictum that propaganda has a target audience that, it is hoped, will respond positively to it suggests that the authors I discuss expected their approach to have such an effect. Although we cannot know what Crusaders thought when deciding to take the cross, the repeated use by Crusade excitatoria of the tropes of vernacular chivalric literature over the better part of three centuries suggests an audience receptive to the portrayal of the Crusade in terms reminiscent of the chansons de geste and chivalric romance, and perhaps equally willing to think of the Crusade in those terms. Those knights who, under the critical gaze of John Gower, set out on Crusade to win the favor of their ladies did so after many years of the rhetoric of Crusade associating it with the extraneous, chivalric concerns embodied in vernacular literature. If propaganda for the Crusade affected its audience as it intended to, then what horrified Gower may have had deep roots that extended back as early as the First Crusade.
The notion that chivalric literature affected how the Crusade was presented in excitatoria, and so may have influenced how it was understood by an audience of the Western aristocracy, adds a further dimension to an important stream of recent criticism. The past few decades have seen scholars consider imaginative literature such as the chansons de geste and romance not only as entertainments with the power to incite their audience to action but also as a reflection of aristocratic attitudes, including attitudes toward the Crusade.19 Chivalric literature has come to be regarded as a storehouse of arms bearers’ memory of and concern for the holy war to which so much of their effort was devoted. This approach is, however, decidedly unidirectional; in seeing literature as a reflection of historical understandings of and opinions on the Crusade, it mostly ignores how imaginative literature in turn shaped these understandings and opinions. This book therefore argues for a bilateral consideration of the relationship between perceptions of the Crusade and lay literature. Across the three most important centuries of Crusade, those propagating it continually appropriated literature, and reacted to literary developments, in order to mold Western understanding of the nature and purpose of holy war.20 Just as chivalric literature reflected aristocratic attitudes toward the Crusade, it contributed perhaps in equal measure to their formation.
PART I
The Chanson de Geste in Crusade Propaganda
CHAPTER 1
Pilgrims and Settlers
THE AFTERMATH OF THE FIRST CRUSADE
When the dust settled on the battlefield of Ascalon on 12 August 1099, the “will of God” had been fulfilled. Under cries of “Deus lo vult” a disparate Latin army,1 made leaner and more effective by three years of almost continuous struggle, its identity having coalesced into novel but tenuous form as “crucesignati,” “Iherosolimitani,” or “Franci,” had conquered the Holy Places and the city of Jerusalem. In doing so it laid the foundations of a new kingdom that, through increase and decline, would help shape the political landscape for the next two centuries. Furthermore, in its wake it had secured a number of other cities and towns that now formed the nuclei of several Christian principalities: to the north, on the Syrian coast, Bohemond of Taranto ruled over Antioch and the surrounding territories, while to the far northeast Baldwin of Boulogne had made himself master of a county ranging from Edessa to Turbessel. In light of a degree of success that was perhaps undreamed of by any but the very