The Knight, the Cross, and the Song. Stefan Vander Elst
survival. To do this they had to appeal broadly, and to emphasize the justice of their cause as well as the personal connection of the West to the newly conquered lands and their populations.
Some of the early histories therefore accommodate approaches to the Crusade that range beyond the religious, and speak of them as more than divinely inspired journeys toward individual spiritual salvation. Sometimes they called upon less lofty emotions, and these were often quite incongruous. Ironically, the priest Albert of Aachen played upon a deep-rooted desire for retribution. Vengeance in his writings is not the Lord’s but the force that drives much of the Crusade forward—each outrage perpetrated upon the Christians, sometimes by other Christians, must be answered in kind.25 Robert, the monk of Reims, gleefully narrates how those who conquered Jerusalem “per vicos et plateas discurrentes, quicquid invenerunt rapuerunt, et quod quisque rapuit suum fuit. Erat autem Ierusalem tunc referta temporalibus bonis.… Tunc quippe filios suos de longe ad se venientes ita ditavit, quia nullus in ea pauper remansit” [HI 100; HFC 201: “ran through streets and squares, plundering whatever they found; and each kept what he plundered. Jerusalem was full of earthly good things.… She made her sons, come from afar, so rich that none remained poor in her”].26 Undoubtedly some of the First Crusaders had had less elevated motives27—Baldwin of Boulogne and Bohemond of Taranto had even abandoned the Crusader army to take up temporal lordship—and the door had to be kept open even for these. Beyond these straightforward appeals to the darker side of human nature, however, another very useful way to appeal to the tastes and enthusiasm of the Western laity were the popular songs of war and conquest known as the chansons de geste. The early writers on the Crusade took to them immediately, infusing their works with the themes, commonplaces, and style of the chansons, and even casting them into chanson form.
THE CHANSONS DE GESTE
By the time the First Crusaders set out for the East in 1096, the chansons de geste, vernacular songs about the heroic acts of the ancestors, had existed for several decades. Although the earliest manuscript versions of the chansons date from the twelfth century, the genre had originated in France in the middle of the eleventh.28 Its exact beginnings have been the subject of intense debate. A “traditionalist” approach follows Gaston Paris in seeing the chansons as the result of a collective process of composition and oral transmission connecting them to the events they purport to describe; according to this interpretation, they were cast into the shape in which they have come down to us by the itinerant performers known as jongleurs, who expanded upon a tradition of oral poetry decades or even centuries old.29 A second approach, first voiced by Joseph Bédier, has been termed “individualist” and considers the chansons not as the end point in a long sequence of oral performance, transmission, and development but as original creations of talented poets who may have drawn on older legends.30 Recent scholarship has further developed this individualist interpretation of the chansons de geste: Simon Gaunt has argued that the stylistic characteristics suggesting an oral antecedent to extant works such as the Chanson de Roland may have been poetic artifice aimed at producing a “fiction of orality,” and that these may therefore not have had oral precursors at all,31 whereas Paula Leverage has applied the principles of cognitive science to the chansons and has concluded that their “oral style” is “a sophisticated aesthetic, which manipulates active, creative audience engagement” rather than an indicator of their origin.32
Whether the result of oral transmission or auctorial strategy, the form of the chansons was suited to sung or spoken performance, with a stanzaic structure that was easily expandable, a regular rhythm, frequent use of direct speech, and much repetition of phrases, formulae, and sounds. They were constructed of sequences of stanzas or laisses of irregular length, which could range from a handful to hundreds or thousands of verses each.33 Although eventually rhyme also became common to the form, chanson de geste verses were originally united within the laisse through assonance, each verse ending with the same sound, either in “masculine” assonance with stressed final syllables (e.g., CR ll. 244–45: “Seignurs baruns, qui i enveieruns, / En Sarraguce, al rei Marsiliuns?” [“My lord barons, whom shall we send / To King Marsile in Saragossa?”]); or in “feminine” assonance with stressed syllables followed by unstressed ones (e.g., CR ll. 22–23: “N’i ad paien ki un sul mot respundet, / Fors Blancandrins de Castel de Valfunde” [“There is no pagan who utters a single word in reply, / Except for Blancandrin from Castel de Valfunde”]).34 The verses themselves were usually decasyllabic, although occasionally octosyllabic and, from the thirteenth century onward, alexandrine verses were also used.35
The chansons de geste narrated the deeds of the Franks, mostly during the reigns of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious, occasionally during those of Clovis and Charles Martel.36 They spoke of their struggle with the pagan forces threatening them from outside (e.g., the Chanson de Roland and the Chanson de Guillaume), and of the dynastic, generational, and personal conflicts pitting them against each other (e.g., Raoul de Cambrai and Les Quatre Fils Aymon). Some of these chansons drew on the memory of historical events: the destruction of Charlemagne’s rear guard at Roncesvalles in 778 inspired the Chanson de Roland, and the murder of the son of Raoul de Gouy by the sons of Herbert of Vermandois in 943 provided the foundation for Raoul de Cambrai.37 Others, such as Huon de Bordeaux and La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche, have no clear historical basis and may have drawn mostly on folklore. As they composed, performed, and reworked these songs about historical or pseudo-historical conflicts, the jongleurs included within them many ideas about and interactions between the Christian and Islamic worlds. They spoke of the ideal Christian warrior, of the ties of family, friendship, and love that connected him to others, and of the responsibilities upon which the relationship between lord and vassal was built. They expanded upon what they knew and thought of the character and religion of the Muslim adversary38 and imagined contacts between Frank and Saracen through words and warfare.
These ideas, replete with ideal and prejudice, found their way into a number of themes, commonplaces, and stereotypes that became characteristic of the chansons de geste. The Frankish heroes of the chansons are usually strong adherents to the Christian faith.39 Their relationship with God is one of mutual support: they serve God loyally and defend his people against the physical and religious threat of the unbeliever, while God in return helps them when needed, and welcomes them into heaven upon the completion of their labor.40 As Turpin says before the Battle of Roncesvalles:
“Crestientet aidez a sustenir!
Bataille avrez, vos en estes tuz fiz,
Kar a voz oilz veez les Sarrazins.
Clamez voz culpes, si preiez Deu mercit;
Asoldrai vos pur vos anmes guarir.
Se vos murez, esterez seinz martirs,
Sieges avrez el greignor pareïs.”
Franceis descendent, a tere se sunt mis,
E l’arcevesque de Deu les beneïst:
Par penitence les cumandet a ferir.
[CR ll. 1129–35: “Help us now to sustain the Christian faith. / You will have to engage in battle, as you well know; / For you see the Saracens with your own eyes. / Confess your sins, pray for the grace of God; / To save your souls I shall absolve you all. / If you die, you will be blessed martyrs / And take your place in paradise on high.” / The Franks dismount and kneel upon the ground; / In God’s name the archbishop blessed them. / As penance he orders them to strike.]
Reciprocal bonds that are very similar to those that tie the Christian to his God tie the vassal to his secular lord. Here too there must be a relationship of mutual loyalty and benefit. It is the vassal’s duty to fight his lord’s wars and to uphold or expand the latter’s dominion. He must redress the wrongs done to his lord and be willing to suffer and die for him: “Pur sun seignor deit hom susfrir destreiz / E endurer e granz chalz e grans freiz, / Sin deit hom perdre e del quir e del peil” [CR ll. 1010–12: “For his lord a vassal must suffer hardships / And endure great heat and great cold; / And he must lose both hair and hide”]. The vassal