to God, resulting either from the Crusader’s past behavior or from God’s agency on his behalf. It is redemptory at the level of the individual—each after all will carry his own cross. In the Historia suffering, much reduced, looks forward resolutely. It does not redeem but admonishes, serves not as penance for the individual but as an indication for the Crusader army to correct its behavior as it continues toward Jerusalem.30
Robert therefore moves away from the narrative arc that the Anonymous had included in his work, which led through penitential suffering toward redemption and salvation with the conquest of Jerusalem. Robert’s Crusaders thunder on to their unavoidable, divinely ordained destiny, occasionally reminded not to indulge in problematic behavior by the pangs of hunger or the dearth of horses. To a certain degree Robert therefore also moves away from the Anonymous’s rudimentary approach to the Crusade as imitatio Christi.31 It is noteworthy that in a work so earnestly concerned with finding scriptural parallels Robert should choose to minimize the elementary typological parallel his source had identified. This process of negotiation, foregrounding some parallels while letting others fade into the distance, shows Robert’s very different conceptualization of the Crusade. As a cleric confronted by successful but violent Christian expansion into the East, he chose to find precedents not in the New Testament but in the Old, not with the meritorious suffering on Calvary but with the travails and territorial appropriations of the biblical people of Israel.32
Robert’s work therefore emphasizes that the Crusade is the long-foretold work of God and that the Franks are his chosen people and instruments of agency—after all, “quis regum aut principum posset subigere tot civitates et castella, natura, arte, seu humano ingenio premunita, nisi Francorum beata gens, cuius est Dominus Deus eius, populus quem elegit in hereditatem sibi?” [HI 4; HFC 77: “what king or prince could subjugate so many towns and castles, fortified by nature, design or human ingenuity, if not the blessed nation of the Franks whose God is the LORD; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance?”].33 The Crusade of the Historia is not as much a story of Christ-like suffering as it is one of the fulfillment of destiny, less a pilgrimage for the redemption of individual sin than a campaign of acquisition of what God had decided should belong to the Franks. It is here that the effect (and the purpose) of Robert’s interpretation of the Crusade becomes clear. The justification of Frankish conquest is the fact that they are singled out by God to do his will, and the proof that they are so singled out is conquest. Accordingly, conquest becomes its own justification. On a practical level, this divine mandate confers upon the Franks an a priori license to attack and conquer anyone with the full knowledge that they are doing the Lord’s bidding.
MACCABEES OF THE WEST
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