There is much about medieval histories that most modern historians cannot bring themselves to admire. Partly this reflects an understandable desire to discover what is probably, or at least possibly, true, and thus of obvious historical value in our sources, a desire that leads us, in turn, to disregard much that we consciously or unconsciously judge extraneous to the reconstruction of the past. In the words of Nancy Partner, “We have simply lost contact … with everything that could allow us to approach medieval histories naturally and directly.” Noting that “modern historians have failed to appreciate much of what medieval readers admired in these works,” she suggests that “All medieval histories contain more that is valuable to us than scraps of verifiable information, although what that ‘more’ is, exactly, varies from book to book and is difficult to describe.” In histories written in the Latin West before c. 1150 – that is, histories written in Latin by clerics – a great deal of this elusive “more” consists of biblical allusions and exegetical commentary, material which learned medieval readers would have noticed and appreciated but which most modern readers overlook. Nowhere is this truer than in the unprecedented outpouring of historical writing related to the endeavor we call the First Crusade, which inspired over a dozen substantial chronicles and numerous shorter texts in the period between the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 and the preaching of the Second Crusade in 1146 alone. Considered as a group, these histories contain a staggering amount of biblical material: 1,408 identifiable scriptural references across some 1,300 modern printed pages. The Bible appears at every turn, its imagery encroaching on the landscape of the East and adorning epic battle scenes, its words peppering the victory speeches of the crusade's leaders and forcing their Muslim adversaries to predict their own defeat. These works are a powerful reminder of the omnipresence of biblical imagery and language in the Latin West, and of how readily medieval Christians connected their own experiences and concerns to the Scriptures. They are also suggestive of how the First Crusade forced a rethinking of the traditional relationship between the biblical then and the medieval now, between the promised land of the Scriptures and the crusading home front.