and greatness of Charlemagne, his son Louis and your other kings who destroyed the pagan kingdoms and brought them within the bounds of Christendom.… Oh most valiant soldiers and descendants of victorious ancestors, do not fall short of, but be inspired by, the courage of your forefathers.]60
Finally, the chansons put front and center the ties of loyalty and support between vassal and overlord, as well as the bonds of kinship between knight, peers, and family. These relationships, as recent historical criticism has shown, were of great importance in the recruitment of early Crusaders and motivated many to take the cross.61
The advantages of using the conventions of the chanson de geste—its form, its themes, and its commonplaces—to present the Crusade were therefore many. Writers could connect the events of 1096–1099 to an extensive, popular body of works that presented religious war in a way that knights especially would understand and find attractive. Beyond informing and motivating knights, however, the use of the chansons also perhaps made it possible to control them. To those who saw a central role for the papacy in the Crusade, or believed in the militia Sancti Petri, the chansons’ foregrounding of the relationship between overlord and vassal offered a way to bind knighthood to the church with ties of obedience.62 In a campaign against God’s enemies, fought over Christ’s inheritance, at his request (“Deus lo vult”), God was both spiritual and temporal overlord of the crucesignati; even more than to any prince, the knights’ duty was above all to him, or his representatives on earth. Beyond the individual fight for salvation, Crusade was therefore also armed service owed to God. Conversely, laymen keen to continue the Crusades, such as the settlers of Outremer, could also find benefit from associating these to the works of the jongleurs, for it allowed them to stimulate the influx of desperately needed fighters independently of clerical sanction. Relying on papal proclamation of a Crusade to motivate knights to take the cross left support of the Holy Land beyond the control of its inhabitants; the settlements in their infancy needed help rather more frequently than that. The chansons, by highlighting reasons to fight the Saracen other than the indulgence—to demonstrate prowess, for vengeance, out of loyalty, or to defend and retake Christian land—took the explanation of what constituted Crusade out of the domain of the clergy and allowed laymen too to define and therefore to a certain extent control it.63 After all, if a preudomme could get remission of his sins only on campaigns sanctioned by the church, he could fight the Saracen as duty owed to a divine overlord, or to demonstrate his skills as a knight, whenever he wanted.
CHAPTER 2
The Gesta Francorum
Given the potential advantages the forms and conventions of the chansons offered for propagandizing the Crusade to Western audiences, it is not surprising that they began to be used almost immediately after the conquest of Jerusalem. The first known work to advocate for continued Latin commitment to the Crusade, the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, depends heavily on the stylistic and thematic tropes of the chansons to make its case. Rather than relying on his own experiences or observations, its anonymous author consistently turns to literary commonplaces to describe the Crusaders, their Muslim opponents, and their interactions on and off the battlefield, turning the First Crusade into the continuation of a far older conflict and giving Western Christians additional justification to appropriate much of the Middle East.
Among the first group of narratives of the First Crusade, those written by eyewitnesses and participants, the Gesta Francorum stands out not only as the oldest but also as the most popular and influential.1 Completed no later than the beginning of 1101 by a south Italian Norman who traveled to the East in the contingent of Bohemond of Taranto,2 its ten books tell the story of the Crusade from the crossing of the Balkans by the Crusader armies in 1096 to the conclusion of the campaign three years later. The first nine books, which discuss the Crusaders’ progress until the Battle of Antioch on 28 June 1098, show the author, who is commonly known as “the Anonymous,” to have been strongly partisan toward Bohemond, to whom he repeatedly refers as “dominus” [“lord”]3 and describes with such grandiose epithets as “bellipotens Boamundus” [GF 7: “Bohemond, that great warrior”], “sapiens uir Boamundus” [GF 18: “the valiant Bohemond”], and “uir uenerabilis Boamundus” [GF 61: “the honoured Bohemond”]. The Anonymous clearly supports Bohemond’s ambitions and shares his antagonism toward the Byzantine Empire.4 After the fall of Antioch and Bohemond’s defection from the Crusader army, the Anonymous left his service for that of Raymond of Toulouse, and the relatively short tenth book discusses the march to Jerusalem, its investment and conquest, and the defeat of the Egyptian army at Ascalon.
Very little is known of the Anonymous beyond what he reveals of himself in his writings, and even that has been the subject of some dispute. That he was an Italian Norman with a close association with Bohemond of Taranto is not doubted, but the capacity in which he served Bohemond, and in which he traveled to the East, is unclear. Ever since Hagenmeyer first edited the Gesta Francorum in 1890,5 the Anonymous has been thought to have been a fighter: his extensive descriptions of battle—especially when compared with those of a cleric such as Raymond of Aguilers, for whom a battle is never worth more than an offhand remark6—suggests he was repeatedly in the thick of it.7 Furthermore, his knowledge of Bohemond’s military contingent and his clear interest in the concerns of the milites as opposed to those of the pauperes on Crusade may also indicate that the Anonymous was a knight,8 perhaps one of Bohemond’s Apulian vassals, whose family therefore may have had a longstanding allegiance to the house of Hauteville.9 However, the Anonymous’s learning, the quality of his Latin, and the skill with which he includes alliteration, assonance, and rhyme in his work all suggest that he had a clerical education, and Colin Morris argues that he may even have been a clerk and not a fighter at all.10
Whether written by an educated knight or by a clerk with an overpowering interest in the clash of arms, the Gesta Francorum is a sophisticated work, and the thought the Anonymous put into its composition elevates it above the simple “war diary” that Hagenmeyer saw in it.11 Although the Anonymous most likely died shortly after completing his work, the Gesta had an extraordinarily long afterlife. Its impact on the historiography of the First Crusade was immediate and far-reaching. Within a few years another eyewitness to the Crusade, the Poitevin priest Peter Tudebode, wrote an account of the campaign, Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere, that drew so closely on the Gesta as to render problematic for more than a century the question of which came first.12 Within a decade, copies of the Gesta circulated widely in the West, and writers who had not participated in the Crusade based their own histories on the work of the Anonymous: especially noteworthy here are the three French Benedictines, Baldric of Bourgueil (Historia Ierosolimitana, ca. 1107–1108), Robert of Reims (Historia Iherosolimitana, ca. 1106–1107), and Guibert of Nogent (Gesta Dei per Francos, ca. 1108–1109). The dissemination of the Gesta Francorum into Europe was helped by Bohemond of Taranto himself, who took copies of the work with him when in late 1104 he set out to recruit for his unsuccessful campaign against Byzantium of 1106–1108.13
That Bohemond would like the Gesta, and would use it as a tool to convince fresh forces to side with him, is understandable—the Anonymous was one of his followers, perhaps even a vassal, and the first nine books read very much like a paean extolling the virtues of the prince of Antioch. However, the wide and enduring popularity of the Gesta among those not directly associated with Bohemond is less obvious. That it was an eyewitness report, and an early one, undoubtedly contributed to its appeal, but the relative lack of success of other early eyewitness testimonies, such as that of Raymond of Aguilers, shows that this was hardly enough.14 Its style, which modern critics have grown to appreciate as subtle and sometimes even playful, was vilified by the Anonymous’s contemporaries.15 Furthermore, its virulent partisanship would be counterproductive to those whose political aspirations differed from those of Bohemond, and not many in the twelfth century shared
