powers.42
Like the knights of the chansons, the Crusaders serve one divinity, who rewards them with heaven, and one monarch, who provides them with earthly goods: the Christian God is both of these in the Gesta. They serve him on battlefields that echo those of the jongleurs. Even though the Anonymous might often have found himself in the heat of battle, he nevertheless evokes the sights and sounds of warfare with a number of stock phrases, reminiscent of those of the chansons, rather than relying on his own experience: “Iunctis igitur prospere nostris, unus comminus percutiebat alium. Clamor uero resonabat ad celum. Omnes preliabantur insimul. Imbres telorum obnubilabant aerem” [GF 36: “Our army joined battle successfully and fought hand-to-hand; the din arose to heaven, for all were fighting at once and the storm of missiles darkened the sky”]; “Rumor quoque et clamor nostrorum et illorum resonabat ad caelum. Pluuiae telorum et sagittarum tegebant polum, et claritatem diei” [GF 41: “The din and the shouts of our men and the enemy echoed to heaven, and the shower of missiles and arrows covered the sky and hid the daylight”]. Upon these loud and dark places, where one can hear the Saracens “stridere et garrire ac clamare uehementissimo clamore” [GF 40: “gnash their teeth and gabble and howl with very loud cries”], knights roam looking for their prey. As Conor Kostick has pointed out, “The attention of the author of the Gesta Francorum was almost entirely fixed on the activities of those he terms seniores and milites.”43 This is especially so in describing battles: the Anonymous portrays the Crusade almost completely as a sequence of confrontations between mounted warriors, even when horses had become scarce and many knights were reduced to fighting on foot. At Antioch, when hunger and disease had already taken a dreadful toll, and “In tota namque hoste non ualebat aliquis inuenire mille milites, qui equos haberent optimos” [GF 34: “In the whole camp you could not find a thousand knights who had managed to keep their horses in really good condition”], the Christians counter the Turkish assaults with cavalry charge upon cavalry charge:
Fuit itaque ille, undique signo crucis munitus, qualiter leo perpessus famem per tres aut quatuor dies, qui exiens a suis cauernis, rugiens ac sitiens sanguinem pecudum sicut improuide ruit inter agmina gregum, dilanians oues fugientes huc et illuc; ita agebat iste inter agmina Turcorum. Tam uehementer instabat illis, ut linguae uexilli uolitarent super Turcorum capita.
[GF 37: So Bohemond, protected on all sides by the sign of the Cross, charged the Turkish forces, like a lion which has been starving for three or four days, which comes roaring out of its cave thirsting for the blood of cattle, and falls upon the flocks careless of its own safety, tearing the sheep as they flee hither and thither. His attack was so fierce that the points of his banner were flying right over the heads of the Turks.]
This relentless focus on chivalric combat continues throughout the work. Knights drive all before them: “Egregius itaque comes Flandrensis … occurrit illis una cum Boamundo. Irrueruntque nostri unanimiter super illos. Qui statim arripuerunt fugam, et festinanter uerterunt retro scapulas, ac mortui sunt ex illis plurimi” [GF 31: “But the noble count of Flanders … made straight for the enemy with Bohemond at his side, and our men charged them in one line. The enemy straightaway took to flight, turning tail in a hurry; many of them were killed”]. Even within the melee they are shown victorious in individual combat: “Paganorum uero gens uidens Christi milites, diuisit se; et fecerunt duo agmina. Nostri autem inuocato Christi nomine, tam acriter inuaserunt illos incredulos, ut quisque miles prosterneret suum” [GF 89: “When the pagans saw the Christian knights they split up into two bands, but our men called upon the Name of Christ and charged these misbelievers so fiercely that every knight overthrew his opponent”]. The Crusade is presented as fought above all by knights in the manner familiar to them; the achievements of nonaristocratic infantry is minimalized if not ignored, and we usually hear of them only when they perish.44 More than indicating the Anonymous’s social rank,45 the primacy of chivalric warfare in the Gesta shows him eager to present the Crusade from the very beginning of the movement as a uniquely chivalric affair. The Christians on their way to Jerusalem, at least the ones that matter, are knights, and they wage war against the Saracens in the fashion to which they are accustomed. By reducing the complex military history of the First Crusade to a war of knights against Saracens, the Anonymous makes it contiguous with the chivalric campaigns of the chansons de geste. William of Orange, Roland, Oliver, and the douzepeers are knights above all, their fight against the Saracens waged on horseback, with lance and sword. The Crusaders, the Gesta states from the very beginning, tread in the footsteps of Charlemagne: “Isti potentissimi milites et alii plures quos ignoro uenerunt per uiam quam iamdudum Karolus Magnus mirificus rex Franciae aptari fecit usque Constantinopolim” [GF 2: “These most valiant knights and many others (whose names I do not know) travelled by the road which Charlemagne, the heroic king of the Franks, had formerly caused to be built to Constantinople”].46 They do this literally as well as figuratively—they too are Christian knights on their way to fight the pagans. The battlefields of Roncesvalles and Antioch are separate in time and place, but those who walked upon them are very much alike.
The similarity between the heroes of the chansons and the First Crusaders is highlighted by a further act of identification. Not only are the Crusaders Christians who loyally serve God as well as knights who rule the battlefield, they are also Franks.47 As much as the Anonymous pluralizes the enemy, adding Azymites, Paulicians, Agulani, Kurds, and Persians to the ranks of the Turks and Arabs, so he reduces the Christians to a single ethnic denomination. The Anonymous hardly ever acknowledges the remarkable internationalism of the First Crusade, which brought together Flemings, Provençals, Normans, French, Germans, and Italians under common purpose.48 He acknowledges this multiethnicity only at the very beginning of the Gesta, in the context of the failed Popular Crusade, when “Petrus uero supradictus primus uenit Constantinopolim in kalendis Augusti et cum eo maxima gens Alamannorum. Illic inuenit Lombardos et Longobardos et alios plures congregatos” [GF 2: “The aforesaid Peter [the Hermit] was the first to reach Constantinople on 1 August, and many Germans came with him. There they found men from northern and southern Italy and many others gathered together”]. These Germans and Italians choose their own leaders at Nicomedia and march into Asia Minor; there they are decimated at Xerigordon and disappear from the pages of the Gesta and of history. These diverse commoners done away with, the chivalric armies that cross the Bosporus shortly afterward are referred to almost exclusively as Franci and, less frequently, Francigenae [lit. “of Frankish origin”].49 The use of this terminology to describe the ethnically very diverse second wave of Crusaders is remarkable. The Anonymous certainly knew in great detail the backgrounds of many of those he saw around him and must have known that most were not Franks or even had Frankish origins.50 He does not, as does Raymond of Aguilers, explain his use of nomenclature.51 The Anonymous most likely was not a Frank, and as far as we know he never allied himself to any lord who could justifiably be called Frankish, having served the Italian Norman Bohemond and the Provençal Raymond of Toulouse.
To call the Crusaders Franks was not a simple act of reducing the multitudes gathered under the banner of the cross to the dominant ethnic group, for the sake of convenience, to highlight their prominence among the Crusaders, or to hide discord between the many groups who were party to the Crusade enterprise.52 That the Anonymous abandoned the use of the more geographically definite term “Galli” by the beginning of book 2, where he also abandoned “Alemanni” and “Longobardi,” indicates that he was not interested in the primacy of the French as such. Rather, it was an act of identification of the Crusaders with the very Franks of whom the chansons de geste spoke. If Charlemagne’s Franks had built the road to Constantinople, the Anonymous’s Franks once again trod upon it on their way east. Like the Franks of the chansons, the Crusaders were Christian knights dedicated to and united in service, fighting their lord’s disparate pagan enemies to avenge the wrongs done to him and in defense of his earthly possessions. They were therefore the true heirs to these earlier Franks, and their story truly Gesta Francorum.53 Indeed, this identification of the Crusaders with Charlemagne’s Franks may be the true purpose of the work’s use of the conventions of the chansons
