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
