CHANSONS DE GESTE AND THE GESTA FRANCORUM
The Anonymous’s use of chanson de geste commonplaces in the Gesta Francorum is unremitting. Full of lexical, syntactic, and thematic echoes, the work recasts the Crusaders as the successors to the heroes of the chansons, fighting similar enemies, in a similar way, and for similar reasons. This, of course, immediately raises the question why the author of the Gesta would go to such lengths to bring to mind the West’s mostly imaginary ancestors when describing the deeds of the Crusaders in the East. The Anonymous may have had several reasons for this. To imagine the new Crusade enterprise as an extension of the wars of the chansons associated it with a fashionable genre increasingly popular with Western chivalry. On the most elementary level, this could make the Anonymous’s story of the Crusade more appealing; by putting it in line with contemporary narrative trends, the luster of the jongleurs’ works would be reflected on it. More important, however, was that it could undoubtedly also help boost the appeal of the still-novel concept of Crusade to a Western audience, and this at a crucial time. The conquest of Jerusalem did not mean the end of the need for Christian manpower in the Levant; rather, it increased it, as Crusaders returning home left the newly conquered areas dangerously exposed. It did, however, rob the Crusade movement of an important teleology. If God had wanted the liberation of the Holy Places, what could serve as a rallying cry now that it had been accomplished? To describe, as the Anonymous did, the First Crusaders as new Franks, and the Crusade as a continuation of the (supposed) earlier wars of the Franks against their Saracen opponents, was to imagine this new movement as part of a long list of confrontations within a far older, ongoing conflict between Christians and the non-Christian others on their borders. If the First Crusade had as its goal Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, this war of “Frank” against “Saracen” was essentially unending.
The continuing wars in the new Crusader states therefore gave the audience of the chansons a chance to take their place in (imagined) history and emulate Charlemagne, the douzepeers, or William of Orange on the shores of Palestine. Morris has suggested that the Anonymous aimed his work especially at an Italian audience, for whom it would have been easy to understand Latin.54 However, the fact that the Anonymous chose to write the work in Latin may indicate that he imagined a wider audience for the work—wherever Latin was understood, wherever the tale of the First Crusade could be told, and wherever new Crusaders could be recruited. That Bohemond of Taranto chose to distribute copies of the Gesta far and wide during his European recruitment campaign of 1104–1106 shows that he considered it useful far outside Italy.
Turning the First Crusade into a chanson de geste of new Franks, however, did more than offer Western chivalry a reason to continue the war against the Saracen beyond the conquest of Jerusalem. Perhaps more important, it allowed the Western Christians to explain and justify their ownership of the newly subjugated lands, especially of those tracts that were not traditionally understood to be part of the inheritance of Christ. The Gesta intriguingly discusses the ownership of the land the Christians conquer on their way to Jerusalem. From the moment of their arrival at Constantinople, the First Crusaders were famously compelled to sign an oath of fealty to the Byzantine emperor, in which they swore to surrender any lands conquered to his control. Some echoes of this oath—emphatically decried in the Gesta55—are found in the beginning of the work, such as when the knight Peter of Aups swears to hold a city “in fidelitate Dei et Sancti Sepulchri, et seniorum atque imperatoris” [GF 26: “in fealty to God and the Holy Sepulchre, and to our leaders and the emperor”].56 However, the primacy of others here, to whom the emperor is but an after-thought, already heralds a significant shift to come. At Antioch, the Crusaders themselves are firmly established as the rightful owners of the newly occupied regions. This is done in perhaps the most chansonlike passage of the Gesta—the remarkable speech Kerbogha’s mother addresses to her son. Having arrived at his camp before Antioch, his mother admonishes Kerbogha regarding the folly of attempting battle with the Christians trapped within its walls. Speaking of the Crusaders, she says:
Hoc autem, karissime, in rei ueritate scias, quoniam isti Christiani filii Christi uocati sunt; et prophetarum ore filii adoptionis et promissionis, et secundum apostolum heredes Christi sunt, quibus Christus hereditates repromissas iam donauit, dicendo per prophetas: “A solis ortu usque ad occasum erunt termini uestri, et nemo stabit contra uos.” Et quis potest hic dictis contradicere uel obstare?
[GF 54: Beloved, know also the truth of this, that those Christians are called “sons of Christ” and, by the mouth of the prophets, “sons of adoption and promise” and the apostle says that they are “heirs of Christ,” to whom Christ has even now given the promised inheritance, saying by the prophets, “From the rising of the sun to the going down thereof shall be your bounds, and no man shall stand against you.” Who can contradict these words or resist them?]
The wording of the passage establishes the Crusaders as the rightful and irresistible owners of the land, which Christ himself has given to them to keep as their own. The emperor, whose troops—as the Anonymous is at pains to remind his audience57—abandoned the Crusaders at Antioch, is all but forgotten; the Crusaders will be beholden to nobody in establishing their dominion in the East.58
Intriguingly, the use of the conventions of the chansons de geste and the concomitant identification of the Crusaders with the Franks of legend support this emancipation of the Crusader host from the shadow of the emperor and their claim to the ownership of the land. From the very beginning of the work, which shows the Crusaders on the road to Constantinople that Charlemagne built, the audience is reminded of the extent of the Frankish king’s lands, which, in memory and imagination, came to include most of the known world, as well as Constantinople and the Near East.59 Before the emperor’s oath of fealty is even brought up, the Anonymous calls attention to the fact that the empire and all the lands the Crusaders are about to conquer were once subject to the king of the Franks. The continuous identification of the Crusaders with the Franks that had once supposedly ruled the Levant therefore gives them a right of ownership certainly as valid or even more so than that of the emperor, whose claim to the lands the Crusaders conquered was also based on previous tenure. If the Crusaders are the heirs of Christ, and are given the land by him to rule, they in a more secular legal sense can also claim it as new Franks, the heirs of Charlemagne, its erstwhile overlord. The Eastern emperor’s rights are therefore nullified, superseded by his empire’s ancient subjection to the Franks, and the Byzantines reduced to upstart interlopers at best or traitors at worst; indeed, it is as the latter that they are consistently represented in the Gesta.60 Therefore, when Kerbogha approaches Antioch, the Crusade leaders send out emissaries to him not just to discuss the details of the upcoming battle but also to indignantly ask why he had intruded upon Christian land and had attacked its population:
Porro statuerunt omnes maiores nostri concilium, quatinus nuntium mitterent ad inimicos Christi Turcos, qui per aliquem interpretem interrogaret eos secure eloquio dicens quamobrem superbissime in Christianorum introissent terram, et cur castrametati sint, et quare Christi seruos occidant et conquassent. Cumque iam finis esset dictis, inuenerunt quosdam uiros, Petrum scilicet Heremitam et Herluinum, illisque dixerunt haec omnia: “Ite ad execratum Turcorum exercitum, et diligenter narrate eis haec omnia, interrogantes eos, cur audacter et superbissime introierint terram Christianorum et nostram.”
[GF 65–66: All our leaders forthwith held a council and arranged to send a messenger to Christ’s enemies the Turks, so that he might question them through an interpreter, asking confidently why they had been so vainglorious as to enter into the Christians’ land and encamp there, and why they were killing and bullying the servants of Christ. When they had ended their council they found certain men, Peter the Hermit and Herluin, and said to them, “Go to the accursed army of the Turks and give them this whole message in full, asking them why they have been so rash and vainglorious as to enter the land which belongs to the Christians and to us.”]
There is no dispute about to whom the newly conquered territories truly belong: the Crusaders are not invaders but the rightful owners of the
