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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 devout, a great number of those who had enthusiastically followed Urban II’s call considered their vows fulfilled and returned home.²

To those who remained in the East, however, the following years were almost as challenging as the previous ones had been. Some, like Raymond of Saint-Gilles, the count of Toulouse who had led the Provençal contingent, had been left without territorial holdings of their own and sought to remedy this by aggressively expanding Christian dominion to the nearby regions that had as of yet avoided conquest.³ The three established principalities of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Edessa had to stabilize their frontiers against repeated attacks from their Turkish and Arab neighbors,⁴ as well as build up the machinery of a functioning state: fiefs had to be divided, obligations formalized, and systems of administration and collection established.⁵ A clerical hierarchy had also to be put in place; in the kingdom of Jerusalem, first under the rule of Godfrey of Bouillon (1099–1100) and then under that of his brother Baldwin I (1100–1118), this proved especially problematic, as the successive appointments to patriarch of Arnulf of Chocques in 1099 and of Daimbert of Pisa later that same year were disputed⁶ and led to conflict both within the clergy and between the clergy and the monarchy. Finally, disparate groups of Norman, Flemish, Italian, French, and Provençal settlers had to find common cause, and common identity, as subjects of new rulers who were often alien to them.⁷

The demands of state formation were made all the more difficult by a chronic shortage of settlers in the new principalities. The need for more men to cross the sea to help with the tasks of settlement, fight the battles, man the ramparts, work the land, and trade its products was a concern to the leaders of the Crusade army even before the final victory at Ascalon. Raymond of Aguilers, a priest of Provençe who traveled to the East in the retinue of Raymond of Toulouse, and who chronicled the Crusaders’ slow advance toward Jerusalem, described how the need for additional manpower affected the thinking of the army’s leaders. When discussing how to progress after the fall of Antioch in 1098, they wondered: “Will Christians from the West come if they hear of the fall of Antioch, Gibellum, and other Islamic towns? No, but let us march to Jerusalem, the city of our quest, and surely God will deliver it to us; and only then will cities on our route, Gibellum, Tripoli, Tyre, and Acre be evacuated by their inhabitants out of fear of the new wave of crusaders from Christendom.”⁸ The return home of much of the army after the conquest of the Holy Places furthermore removed the cutting edge that had carved out the principalities. The almost constant conflict of the ensuing years, coupled with high mortality among the Latins adapting to their new surroundings,⁹ compounded the demographic pressure on the nascent states. If they were to survive and flourish, the flow of motivated men, money, and material from West to East had to continue.¹⁰

In the West, the desire to sustain the Crusade enterprise was equally resilient. Popular interest was understandably strong—returning Crusaders, coming home with news of their spectacular victories, fired the imagination. Large new groups of Crusaders, joined by men who had not yet fulfilled the Crusade vows they had made in 1096, set out for the East, where, in the late summer of 1101, at Mersivan and Heraclea, they were defeated and scattered by Seljuq and Danishmend Turks.¹¹ The extent to which the Western clergy, with the papacy at its heart, supported continued military expeditions to the lands beyond the sea is instanced by the vigor with which it encouraged—pursued, even—the Crusaders of 1101. Even though the liberation of the Holy Places, the professed goal of the Crusade as Urban II had presented it at Clermont and beyond, had been achieved, some of the underlying motives for his call to arms were rather more open ended. The spiritual revival of the Latin West, the moral reform of Latin chivalry, and the clerical control of lay violence—all of which the Crusade was intended to advance—were hardly completed when the Crusaders scaled the ladders at Jerusalem.¹² Although the Crusaders had come to the aid of the Eastern Christians, there were now even more Christians in the Levant that needed protection against the threat of Islam; and if Urban had ever been concerned about the overpopulation of Western Europe, as Robert the Monk claims, that problem was not likely to be solved by the events of 1096–1099.¹³ There was still much work to be done, and church authorities were steadfast in their encouragement of the expeditions to the lands beyond the sea.

The First Crusade, however, had resulted from a more or less impromptu outpouring of popular enthusiasm, strongly tied up with the indelible image of a threatened Jerusalem. To guide the spiritual and martial energies that had driven the First Crusaders to the East into something enduring and continuing, now that the city was under Christian control, required some intellectual reorientation. Even though the campaign itself had on the whole been extremely successful, the status of the Crusader, or even the very meaning of Crusade, had been remarkably undefined.¹⁴ Although many considered participation a form of pilgrimage,¹⁵ there was no one notion of what it meant to go on Crusade, what should motivate those taking the cross, how it might benefit them, or what place Crusading occupied within the greater framework of Christian history. The job of convincing others to tread on the path laid by the First Crusaders therefore apparently depended, to a significant extent, on clarifying and interpreting what those First Crusaders had actually achieved.

The task of retelling the events of the First Crusade, and of placing them in an interpretative matrix that would encourage continued lay enthusiasm, fell to a number of writers who wrote about their experiences or adapted those of others in the years following the conquest of Jerusalem. Several of the earliest chroniclers, such as the anonymous author of the work known as the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum,¹⁶ Peter Tudebode,¹⁷ Raymond of Aguilers, and Fulcher of Chartres, had themselves participated in the Crusade. Others, such as Albert of Aachen and Ralph of Caen, relied on the eyewitness testimony of those who had.¹⁸ A third group of writers with less direct access, such as Robert of Reims, Guibert of Nogent, and Baldric of Bourgueil, reworked earlier writings to suit their purposes.¹⁹ Their writings looked forward as well as back; they narrated the remarkable successes as well as the setbacks of the First Crusade, highlighting their moral or historical justice and their value as indications of God’s approval or disapproval while encouraging their audience to emulate the work so promisingly begun. It is, however, important to realize that there were multiple pressures at work on them. On the one hand, members of the clergy understandably were most interested in interpreting the events spiritually, seeking to read them morally or typologically so as to clearly show the path God laid out for the righteous. To them, the Crusade had been a pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem as well as to the earthly place, a journey during which sins could be shed and the West purified under the auspices of the church.²⁰ Indeed, far from their families and under constant duress from the elements, starvation, and enemy attack, the First Crusaders had sought salvation, in life or death, almost as if they had been monks. As most of these writers, with the possible exception of the author of the Gesta Francorum, were churchmen of varying degrees of importance, it is not surprising to see these concerns weigh heavily in how they represent the events of 1096–1099. Ranging from Raymond of Aguilers’s enthusiastic recognition of miracles throughout the campaign²¹ and Robert of Reims’s comparison of the Crusaders to the Israelites of the book of Exodus,²² to Guibert of Nogent’s description of Crusade as a divine answer to the internecine wars of the West,²³ they expanded upon the place of the Crusade and the Crusader within providential history and church reform.

The writers of the early histories were, however, often also aware that the First Crusade had resulted in three (later four) incipient and very isolated Christian states, and that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the priorities of these were not always identical to those of the Latin Church. Pilgrims from the West could help conquer a city or keep the enemy tide at bay, but they would eventually return home just as so many of the First Crusaders had done. The settlements in these early years needed a continuous stream of financial and human reinforcement—the money to build up their structures and defenses, and the people to populate the newly Christian territories—that exceeded what a periodic expiation of individual sins could provide. The nascent Crusader states had, furthermore, to compete for such resources with other areas that saw Latin Christian expansion at the time, such as Spain and the lands east of the Elbe, a struggle in which their location on the far end of the Mediterranean put them at a disadvantage.²⁴ They therefore required as many as possible of their Western coreligionists—including those who, for some reason or other, had led perfectly saintly lives—to be engaged in their 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 serves his lord in all, and to a large extent his lord’s success rests upon his shoulders.⁴¹ The lord, whose very word is the law by which his vassal lives, in turn must respect his rights, support him militarily and financially, and avenge him if necessary.⁴² The importance of the vassal–lord relationship to the chansons de geste is further demonstrated by the fact that some chansons, such as Gormond et Isembart and Les Quatre Fils Aymon, speak of the disastrous consequences of its breakdown. Treason is the worst possible transgression: the sociopolitical order of the chansons de geste stands and falls with the adherence of both parties to their respective sides of the arrangement.⁴³

These two relations of mutual loyalty, based on an elaborate system of gift and obligation most often thought to reflect the organizational principles of feudal society,⁴⁴ are proven in battle. Here the hero displays his prowess, which wins him glory and demonstrates his value to his earthly and heavenly lords. The battlefield therefore takes a central place in the chansons de geste. The authors of the chansons typically go to great lengths to provide their audience with detailed accounts of the sights and sounds of battle, to make them experience warfare as directly as possible, seeing the sun glint off the weaponry and hearing the shattering of the trumpets in their minds:⁴⁵

Clers fut li jurz e bels fut li soleilz:

N’unt guarnement que tut ne reflambeit.

Sunent mil grailles por ço que plus bel seit:

Granz est la noise, si l’oïrent Franceis.

[CR ll. 1002–5: The day was fine and the sun bright; / They have no equipment which does not gleam in the light. / They sound a thousand trumpets to enhance the effect. / The noise is great and the Franks heard it.]

Luisent cil elme as perres d’or gemmees,

E cil escuz e cez bronies sasfrees;

.VII. milie graisles i sunent la menee:

Grant est la noise par tute la contree.

[CR ll. 1452–55: Their helmets, studded with gold and gems, shine bright, / And so do their shields and their saffron byrnies. / Seven thousand bugles sound the charge; / Great is the noise for miles around.]

Within the sensory maelstrom of the battlefield, the hero proves his worth. Uniquely skilled at warfare, he fights as a knight—heavily armored, on horseback, with lance and sword.⁴⁶ The nature of combat in the chansons, of horseman against horseman, frequently turns the description of battle into a sequence of individual duels, a catalogue of notable Franks falling upon Saracen counterparts and killing them, or—rather less frequently—vice versa.⁴⁷ This formulaic display of skill at arms is interspersed with vivid description of the ultimate show of prowess—the “epic strike” by which the enemy is split in half:

La bataille est merveilluse e cumune.

Li quens Rollant mie ne s’asoüret,

Fiert de l’espiet tant cume hanste li duret;

A .XV. cols l’ad fraite e perdue;

Trait Durendal, sa bone espee, nue,

Sun cheval brochet, si va ferir Chernuble.

L’elme li freint u li carbuncle luisent,

Trenchet le cors e la cheveleüre,

Si li trenchat les oilz e la faiture,

Le blanc osberc, dunt la maile est menue,

E tut le cors tresqu’en la furcheüre.

Enz en la sele, ki est a or batue,

El cheval est l’espee aresteüe.

[CR ll. 1320–32: The battle is terrible and now joined by all. / Count Roland is no laggard; / He strikes with his spear, while the shaft still lasts. / With fifteen blows he has broken and destroyed it; / He draws forth Durendal, his fine, naked sword, / And spurs on his horse to strike at Chernubles. / He breaks his helmet with its gleaming carbuncles, / Slices off his coif and his scalp, / As well as slicing through his eyes and his face, / His shining hauberk with its close-meshed mail / And right into his saddle which is of beaten gold; / His sword came to rest in the horse itself.]

Opposing the Franks, on the battlefield and within the wider universe of the chansons de geste, are the Saracens. To a large extent the Saracen, or the non-Christian in general, is constructed as a mirror image of the Frank. At the heart of the Saracen world as well lies a relationship of mutual obligation between lord and vassal as an organizing principle. The Saracen too is wise in counsel and brave in war, a consummate fighter who fights very much as the Frank does. Indeed, it is rather a platitude of the chansons to say that had they only been Christians there would have been no better knights:

Uns amurafles i ad de Balaguez;

Cors ad mult gent e le vis fier et cler;

Puis que il est sur sun cheval muntet,

Mult se fait fiers de ses armes porter;

De vasselage est il ben alosez;

Fust chrestiens, asez oüst barnet.

[CR ll. 894–99: An emir is there from Balaguer. / His body is very handsome and his face fierce and fair. / When he is mounted on his horse, / He bears his arms with great ferocity. / He is well known for his courage; / Had he been a Christian, he would have been a worthy baron.]

De vasselage est suvent esprovet;

Deus! quel baron, s’oüst chrestientet!

[CR ll. 3163–64: His courage has often been tested in battle. / O God, what a noble baron, if only he were a Christian!]⁴⁸

Despite the apparent similarity between them, the Franks and Saracens are separated in the chansons by many qualities. Compared with the ascetic and virtuous Frank, the Saracen lives in wealth and abundance and is morally permissive to the point of debauchery.⁴⁹ Whereas the Frankish world is one of simplicity, the Saracen’s is one of opulence and multiplicity. While the Franks constitute a single political entity, are subjects of a single hegemonic empire composed of several dependencies, such as Flanders, Maine, and Anjou, the Saracens are a vastly diverse group of people, united only by their perceived non-Christian religion and their geographic origin beyond the Frankish borders. The ethnic makeup of the Saracens in the chansons is therefore wildly imaginative. Included among them are wholly fantastical peoples, as well as ones that were not historically Muslim: opposed to Charlemagne at Roncesvalles are Armenians, Moors, Pechenegs, Persians, Turks, Huns, Hungarians, and a whole host of others, such as the “Micenes as chefs gros; / Sur les eschines qu’il unt en mi les dos / Cil sunt seiet ensement cume porc” [CR ll. 3221–23: “large-headed Milceni; / On their spines, along the middle of their backs, / They are as bristly as pigs”].⁵⁰

A similar opposition between unity and diversity also applies to the religion and religious attitudes of the adversaries. The Franks worship one God; the Saracens are polytheist and worship a number of gods, usually Tervagant, Apollion, and Mahomet, whose images they venerate in “mahomeries.”⁵¹ Whereas the Franks are stalwart in their faith even in—especially in—the direst of circumstances, the bond between pagan and pagan gods is far more fragile. The Saracen relationship with the divine, too, is a reciprocal one—they worship their gods in return for support. But of course here one party cannot deliver on its promise: in the crucible of battle, Tervagant, Apollion, and Mahomet cannot bring victory; this is where the God of the Franks proves them right and the pagans wrong. Consequently the Saracens often turn on their gods violently:⁵²

Ad Apolin en curent en un crute,

Tencent a lui, laidement le despersunent:

“E! malvais deus, por quei nus fais tel hunte?

Cest nostre rei por quei lessas cunfundre?

Ki mult te sert, malvais luer l’en dunes!”

Puis si li tolent sun sceptre e sa curune,

Par les mains le pendent sur une culumbe,

Entre lur piez a tere le tresturnent,

A granz bastuns le batent e defruisent;

E Tervagan tolent sun escarbuncle

E Mahumet enz en un fosset butent

E porc et chen le mordent e defulent.

[CR ll. 2580–91: They rush off to Apollo in a crypt, / Rail against him and hurl abuse at him: / “O, wretched god, why do you cause us such shame? / Why did you permit our king to be destroyed? / Anyone who serves you well receives a poor reward.” / Then they grab his scepter and his crown / And hang him by his hands from a pillar; / Then they send him flying to the ground at their feet / And beat him and smash him to pieces with huge sticks. / They seize Tervagant’s carbuncle / And fling Muhammad into a ditch / Where pigs and dogs bite and trample on him.]

The Christians are therefore constant in their faith, the pagans erratic. Both habitually attempt to draw the other toward their own religion, offering unimaginable riches if Frank would take on the worship of the pagan gods or if Saracen would become Christian; however, the inconstancy of the pagans makes them far more likely to switch sides.⁵³

The opposition between Frank and Saracen, between Christian and non-Christian, as we find it in the chansons de geste is to a large extent based on the way the jongleurs and their audiences imagined alterity. On a human level Franks and Saracens are remarkably similar—both can be brave, wise, treacherous, or cowardly, and the epic epithets used to describe them as such are the same. Beyond that, the difference is one between unity against multiplicity, order against licentiousness. The Franks are one people obeying one king, obeying one law, worshipping one God; the Saracens, on the other hand, are disunited, serving many kings and many gods to whom their loyalty is suspect, reveling in opulence and dissipation.

In the years before the First Crusade, the chansons therefore spoke of the heroic deeds of the ancestors in a time awash with conflict between Christian Franks and pagan Saracens. The earliest extant representatives of the genre characteristically describe a world in which the Christian frontier, political as well as psychological, is threatened by a religious outsider and is eventually enlarged at his expense. The chansons de geste were popular and reached a wide audience;⁵⁴ this popularity quickly extended beyond the French-speaking areas, and within a century of their origins chansons had been composed in, or translated into, Provençal and Middle High German.⁵⁵ The chansons’ particular representation of the opposition between Christian and non-Christian reached far and wide. The chroniclers of the First Crusade therefore wrote for an audience well aware of the form, themes, and socioreligious prejudices of the chansons, and they relied upon these to present the Crusades in a way that suited their purposes. As I will show below, writers used the conventions of the chansons de geste in a variety of ways, depending to a large extent on the circumstances in which they wrote their works. However, they turned to the chansons in the first place for a shared purpose: to instruct, motivate, and control the forces needed to maintain and support the Christian presence in the Holy Land.

If the chansons were popular, they appealed especially to the very people whose political, social, and military concerns and practices they reflected: knights. From the beginning of the Crusades, knights had been vital to their success.⁵⁶ Urban II, in a letter to the monks of Vallombrosa of October 1096, identified them especially as the audience of the sermon at Clermont: “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 and restore the Christians to their former freedom.”⁵⁷ The next few years showed his farsightedness, as the participation of others in the Crusade proved disastrous; the popular campaigns of the early years led only to unrestrained violence and eventual annihilation, from the cities of the Rhineland to Xerigordon and Civetot.⁵⁸ Conversely, the army that conquered Jerusalem was built around knights and their retainers. The experiences of the First Crusade amply demonstrated that only trained and disciplined fighters with the financial wherewithal to maintain themselves on campaign could successfully contribute to Christian progress in the East. Were the Crusades to continue, and the Christian principalities in the Levant to survive, the unrelenting enthusiasm and participation of knights was absolutely necessary.

Crusade appeals therefore had to address and convince knights to join the fray. There were many benefits of using the chansons in excitatoria aimed especially at knights. In the years following the First Crusade, when the theological and legal framework of Crusading was still under development, the chansons approached the holy war with a certain moral clarity, as a conflict between resolute, Christian Frank and dissolute, pagan Saracen, in which the former must eventually be victorious because of the superiority of his deity. They put a religious premium on the display of prowess in chivalric warfare, where the duty owed to God was repaid through blows of the sword.⁵⁹ They played upon their audience’s pride of ancestry, sense of continuity, and desire to emulate; Urban, or Robert, recognized these emotions as important early on:

Moveant vos et incitent animos vestros ad virilitatem gesta predecessorum vestrorum, probitas et magnitudo Karoli Magni regis et Ludovici filii eius aliorumque regum vestrorum, qui regna paganorum destruxerunt, et in eis fines sancte ecclesie dilataverunt.… O fortissimi milites et invictorum propago parentum, nolite degenerari, sed virtutis priorum vestrorum reminiscimini.

[HI 6; HFC 80: May the deeds of your ancestors move you and spur your souls to manly courage—the worth and greatness of Charlemagne, his son Louis and your other kings who destroyed the pagan kingdoms and brought them within the bounds of Christendom.… Oh most valiant soldiers and descendants of victorious ancestors, do not fall short of, but be inspired by, the courage of your forefathers.]⁶⁰

Finally, the chansons put front and center the ties of loyalty and support between vassal and overlord, as well as the bonds of kinship between knight, peers, and family. These relationships, as recent historical criticism has shown, were of great importance in the recruitment of early Crusaders and motivated many to take the cross.⁶¹

The advantages of using the conventions of the chanson de geste—its form, its themes, and its commonplaces—to present the Crusade were therefore many. Writers could connect the events of 1096–1099 to an extensive, popular body of works that presented religious war in a way that knights especially would understand and find attractive. Beyond informing and motivating knights, however, the use of the chansons also perhaps made it possible to control them. To those who saw a central role for the papacy in the Crusade, or believed in the militia Sancti Petri, the chansons’ foregrounding of the relationship between overlord and vassal offered a way to bind knighthood to the church with ties of obedience.⁶² In a campaign against God’s enemies, fought over Christ’s inheritance, at his request (“Deus lo vult”), God was both spiritual and temporal overlord of the crucesignati; even more than to any prince, the knights’ duty was above all to him, or his representatives on earth. Beyond the individual fight for salvation, Crusade was therefore also armed service owed to God. Conversely, laymen keen to continue the Crusades, such as the settlers of Outremer, could also find benefit from associating these to the works of the jongleurs, for it allowed them to stimulate the influx of desperately needed fighters independently of clerical sanction. Relying on papal proclamation of a Crusade to motivate knights to take the cross left support of the Holy Land beyond the control of its inhabitants; the settlements in their infancy needed help rather more frequently than that. The chansons, by highlighting reasons to fight the Saracen other than the indulgence—to demonstrate prowess, for vengeance, out of loyalty, or to defend and retake Christian land—took the explanation of what constituted Crusade out of the domain of the clergy and allowed laymen too to define and therefore to a certain extent control it.⁶³ After all, if a preudomme could get remission of his sins only on campaigns sanctioned by the church, he could fight the Saracen as duty owed to a divine overlord, or to demonstrate his skills as a knight, whenever he wanted.