style="font-size:15px;"> [GF 1–2: The lord pope said also, “Brothers, you must suffer for the name of Christ many things, wretchedness, poverty, nakedness, persecution, need, sickness, hunger, thirst and other such troubles, for the Lord says to his disciples, ‘You must suffer many things for my name.’”]
The Anonymous’s quotation of Acts 9:16 here (“I will show him how much he must suffer for my name”) is inaccurate, and Hill has found in this yet more evidence that he was a layman, if a devout one.36 What is remarkable here is, however, not the inaccuracy—the Anonymous quoted the rather longer passage from Matthew correctly—but the fact that with this modification the passage echoes the famous words of Roland: “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 Christian duty to take up one’s cross and follow Christ is therefore closely followed by a reference to a very lay notion found in the chansons, that of a contract of mutual obligation between the Crusaders and God. The Christians must suffer for God and fight the “inimici Dei” [GF 40: “God’s enemies”];37 by doing so they become “Christi militia” [GF 14: “Christ’s army”], “fortissimi milites Christi” [GF 18: “most valiant soldiers of Christ”], and “milites … ueri Dei” [GF 40: “knights of the True God”]. In turn, God’s commitment to the Crusaders as defined in the Gesta is three-fold: he will assist them in the struggle against his enemies and will give them earthly as well as heavenly rewards, thereby combining the duties of secular and spiritual lord.
God in the Gesta often helps the Christians, and much agency in the success of the Crusade is ascribed to him. He acts almost as a field commander at Dorylaeum: “Et nisi Dominus fuisset nobiscum in bello, et aliam cito nobis misisset aciem, nullus nostrorum euasisset.… Sed omnipotens Deus pius et misericors qui non permisit suos milites perire, nec in manibus inimicorum incidere, festine nobis adiutorium misit” [GF 20–21: “If God had not been with us in this battle and sent us the other army quickly, none of us would have escaped … but Almighty God, who is gracious and merciful, delivered his knights from death and from falling into the hands of the enemy and sent us help speedily”]. He outflanks the Saracens at Antioch, when “Stabant uero inimici Dei et nostri undique iam stupefacti et uehementer perterriti, putantes nostros se deuincere et occidere.… Sed Deus omnipotens hoc illis non permisit” [GF 40: “God’s enemies and ours were standing about, amazed and terrified, for they thought that they could defeat and kill us … but Almighty God did not allow them to do so”].38 Finally, at Ascalon, he is with the Christians in the front lines: “Bella uero erant immensa; sed uirtus divina comitabatur nobiscum tam magna, tam fortis, quod statim superauimus illos” [GF 96: “The battle was terrible, but the power of God was with us, so mighty and so strong that we gained the victory at once”]. God here is not a distant judge of the moral perfection of his followers but an active participant who aids the Christians in their war against his enemies.
Furthermore, he rewards them for their efforts. This is made clear from the very beginning of the work: the Anonymous follows up on the Christians’ obligation to suffer with “ac deinceps: ‘Persequetur uos larga retributio’” [GF 2: “and afterwards ‘Great will be your reward’”]. This reward, intriguingly, is both spiritual and material. For one, if death meant an eternity with the devil to the Muslim, to die in the service of God gave the Christian access to heaven. This applies even to those who did not die in battle; to die while fulfilling one’s duty to suffer is sufficient. As the Anonymous says about the very first action of the army of the princes, the siege of Nicaea:
Fuimusque in obsidione illa per septem ebdomadas et tres dies, et multi ex nostris illic receperunt martyrium, et letantes gaudentesque reddiderunt felices animas Deo; et ex pauperrima gente multi mortui sunt fame pro Christi nomine. Qui in caelum triumphantes portarunt stolam recepti martyrii, una uoce dicentes: “Vindica Domine sanguinem nostrum, qui pro te effusus est.”
[GF 17: We besieged this city for seven weeks and three days, and many of our men suffered martyrdom there and gave up their blessed souls to God with joy and gladness, and many of the poor starved to death for the Name of Christ. All these entered Heaven in triumph, wearing the robe of martyrdom which they have received, saying with one voice, “Avenge, O Lord, our blood which was shed for thee.”]39
Bypassing the absolution of sin, the Christians’ suffering “in the Name of Christ” means that God will welcome them to heaven. Furthermore, their death serves as a call for God to avenge them upon the Muslims, as it was Charlemagne’s obligation to avenge Roland, Oliver, and the other douzepeers.
God’s obligation to the Christian, however, is not only one of spiritual salvation; importantly, he grants earthly riches as well. That service to the divine will yield possessions is highlighted on the first page of the Gesta: “Si quis animam suam saluam facere uellet, non dubitaret humiliter uiam incipere Domini, ac si denariorum ei deesset copia, diuina ei satis daret misericordia” [GF 1: “If any man wants to save his soul, let him have no hesitation in taking the way of the Lord in humility, and if he lacks money, the divine mercy will give him enough”]. God’s reward for services rendered is given in plunder and conquest. After God has helped the Crusaders overcome the enemy, the reward is there for the taking: “Superati sunt itaque, Deo annuente, in illo die inimici nostri. Satis uero recuperati sunt nostri de equis et de aliis multis quae erant illis ualde necessaria” [GF 37: “Thus, by God’s will, on that day our enemies were overcome. Our men captured plenty of horses and other things of which they were badly in need”]. This remarkable juxtaposition of holy war and earthly reward, of service to the divine and the expectation of profit, is best expressed in the words uttered by the Crusaders before the Battle of Dorylaeum: “Factus est itaque sermo secretus inter nos laudantes et consulentes atque dicentes: ‘Estote omnimodo unanimes in fide Christi et Sanctae Crucis uictoria, quia hodie omnes diuites si Deo placet effecti eritis’” [GF 19–20: “For our part we passed a secret message along our line, praising God and saying, ‘Stand fast all together, trusting in Christ and in the victory of the Holy Cross. Today, please God, you will all gain much booty’”].40
At the heart of the Christian army therefore lie contracts of mutual obligation similar to those upon which the ethical universe of the chansons de geste rests. Such contracts exist between the Christians themselves—for example, between Bohemond and Alexius Comnenus, to whom “si ille fideliter teneret illud sacramentum, iste suum nunquam preteriret” [GF 12: “if Bohemond kept his oath faithfully he would never break his own”]. Failure to uphold one’s side of the bargain is met with extreme censure, and Alexius’s abandonment of the Crusaders at Antioch turns him, in the eyes of the Anonymous, into an “iniquus imperator” [GF 6: “that wretch of an emperor”] or “infelix imperator” [GF 10: “the wretched emperor”], while his general Tatikios No-Nose becomes “ille inimicus … in periurio manet et manebit” [GF 35: “that enemy of ours … he is a liar, and always will be”]. More important, however, is that this “sacramentum” exists between God and the Christians—they will fight his war for him, and suffer in the process; he will reward that suffering both on earth and in heaven. Crucially, even though the beginning of the work invokes the language of pilgrimage, the Gesta conceptualizes Crusade as service owed to the divine: the crucesignatus keeps his part of a bargain that casts God as both his spiritual and his secular overlord. The Crusader, on the one hand, is a Christian fighting a spiritual war for the supremacy of his faith over the unbeliever, and he is rewarded with paradise;41 on the other hand, he confronts his Lord’s earthly enemies, reconquers his earthly possessions, and finds a secular reward of plunder strewn across the battlefield. Essentially, the Crusader’s duty is to God: the secular lords of the First Crusade may spend almost as much time fighting each other as they do the Saracen, or abandon the army altogether, and the spiritual lords such as Adhemar of Le Puy may go the
