Genre

It is not easy to define what exactly constitutes a ‘chronicle’. According to a narrow definition, a chronicle is a record of events arranged in chronological order. Chronicles are found halfway between annals (which offer a list of dates and events) and historia (that tell a story about the past). To quote Gervase of Canterbury, who wrote around 1200, ‘the historian proceeds diffusely and elegantly, whereas the chronicler proceeds simply, gradually and briefly’.⁶ However, these two genres merge into each other. At times, they even coexist within a single work: Albert of Aachen’s Historia Ierosolimitana begins as a historia, but ends as a chronicle.⁷ The genre of gesta – dedicated to the deeds of a person, a people or, in the case of Guibert of Nogent’s Dei Gesta per Francos, God – is closely related.

Jean de Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis is revealing of the difficulties of categorisation. Although ostensibly a hagiographical account of the life of King Louis IX, the work allots 550 out of 769 paragraphs to just six years of Louis’s life, corresponding to his first crusade. It also covers extensively the author’s experience on the crusade. One possible explanation of this hybrid work is that Jean first intended it to be an account of the crusade, but later transformed it into a hagiography.⁸ Another example of the fluidity of genres, Odo of Deuil’s De Profectione Ludivici VII in Orientem is an account of the Second Crusade that is, at the same time, a 35,000-word letter to Abbot Suger of St-Denis.⁹

The relationships between epic poems and chronicles present an especially thorny problem.¹⁰ By the end of the twelfth century, many grew to believe that poetic works were less truthful than prose ones.¹¹ Already La Mort Aymeri de Narbonne (c. 1190) expresses the idea that poems are not reliable: ‘No one is able to compose a chanson de geste / Without telling fibs where the verse determines / That the words be ordered and cut to fit the rhyme’.¹² However, this conviction did not necessarily translate into tangible differences. While most prose works tend to contain fewer epic characteristics than poetic ones, this is not always the case. Both prosaic and poetic works can celebrate martial deeds. Both can exaggerate the number of participants of military encounters. Both can find room for anecdotes. Both can include direct speech that the authors reconstructed or invented from scratch (for example, 26 per cent of the text of Baldric of Bourgueil’s prose Historia Ierosolimitana is direct speech).¹³

To complicate matters, many chroniclers are prosimetric, combining prose and verse. The ratio between poetry and prose and the place allotted to poetry varies from text to text. In many cases, poetry is found throughout the chronicle. Robert the Monk’s Historia Iherosolimitana, for example, contains about thirty sequences of lines of verse, ranging from one line to thirteen lines for the total of ninety.¹⁴ As much as a quarter of Ralph of Caen’s Gesta Tancredi is written in verse.¹⁵ In contrast, the so-called ‘Templar of Tyre’ inserted just one long poem, composed at an earlier date, into his chronicle, so that the poem ‘may always be preserved and remembered’.¹⁶

The decision of which parts of the narrative to compose in verse and which in prose is potentially meaningful. Marcus Bull has explained the presence of lines in verse in Robert the Monk’s Historia Iherosolimitana as ‘epic mood’; lines in verse frequently occur when the chronicle deals with military action.¹⁷ In Ralph of Caen’s Gesta Tancredi, only a minority of verse chapters have anything to do with Tancred, the primary subject of the entire work. One hypothesis is that the author wanted to signal to the reader that what he wrote about Tancred was truthful, but that he could not vouchsafe for the entirety of his narrative.¹⁸

Language

Poetic works on the history of crusades were composed in a variety of languages. Gilo’s Historia vie Heirosolimitane, probably written in the first decade of the twelfth century, is in Latin. The Crusade Cycle and the Canso d’Antioca, both of which originated in the late twelfth century, are, respectively, in Old French and Occitan. The Livonian Rhymed Chronicle, written in the thirteenth century, is in Middle High German.

Prose narratives of crusades were written exclusively in Latin during the first century of crusading. In the early thirteenth century, however, three authors broke away from this convention: they composed chronicles that were both in prose and in the vernacular (Old French). Two of the authors, Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari, were knights; the third, Henri de Valenciennes, was a cleric. They wrote about the Fourth Crusade and the early years of the Latin empire. Their chronicles are among the earliest prose works of history written in the vernacular on any subject.¹⁹

Within a couple of decades of the Fourth Crusade, William of Tyre’s chronicle dedicated to the history of the Latin states was translated for the first time from Latin into Old French. It was one of the earliest works of history to be translated from Latin into the vernacular.²⁰ It is worth noting that, in the Middle Ages, translation tended to imply transformation and appropriation of the text in question. This is apparent from the fact that translators of William’s work changed the first person into the third person (for example, in the case when William talks about his tutoring of the future King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem). William’s translators often took more important liberties with the original as well, in particular by abridging it and by including continuations to various dates. Some abridgements were more meaningful than others; for instance, translators sometimes omitted theological digressions that they thought would be of little interest to a lay audience.²¹ The earliest translation of William of Tyre into Castilian was executed only slightly later than the one into Old French; it was commissioned by King Alphonso X of Castile (1252–84). Other languages, however, trailed behind. The earliest partial English translation of William of Tyre’s work, made by William Caxton from the Old French, appeared only in 1481.²²

Few other crusader chronicles were translated before the modern era. Peter of Duisburg’s Chronicon terre Prussie, written around 1326 and dedicated to the Teutonic Order, is a notable exception; Nicholas von Jeroschin translated it into Middle High German verse almost immediately after the work’s completion.²³ The earliest translations (into German and Dutch) of the most popular work dealing with the First Crusade, Robert the Monk’s Historia Iherosolimitana, date only from the fifteenth century.²⁴

Manuscripts and Editions

A comprehensive understanding of relationships between related chronicles or between different manuscripts of the same chronicle is a difficult task. Autograph copies of chronicles of crusades have hardly ever survived; we are always a step or two removed from the original. It is almost certain that a number of chronicles have disappeared without any – or almost any – trace. In many cases, in order either to explain where an author got his information or to account for similarities between sources, modern scholars propose that authors of extant chronicles have drawn upon now-lost texts.

Some chroniclers made little use of their predecessors’ accounts; others drew extensively upon earlier works. Both independent chroniclers who relied on other narratives and copyists (it is, incidentally, sometimes difficult to distinguish between the two) took creative liberties with the text or texts at hand. Some abridged or expanded their source. Some updated the earlier work by adding a continuation. One copyist was interested in only one part of a chronicle.²⁵ Another copyist combined two chronicles into one narrative.²⁶ As mentioned above, some authors inserted a reworking of other chronicles into their works dedicated to a different subject. Titles, including some that are firmly established in modern historiography, such as William of Tyre’s Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, were also often added at a later date.²⁷

Finally, it was common for authors to return to the subject, sometimes once, sometimes on a number of occasions. In some cases, this was a matter of small additions and corrections. In others, two distinct versions were produced. The existence of two or more accounts of crusades by the same author sometimes makes it possible to trace the evolution of his thought on the subject, often in response to changing circumstances. This is the case of Roger of Howden’s Gesta Regis and Chronica. The two works cover much of the same ground, but they are different enough for some scholars to have suspected, erroneously, that they were written by two different people.²⁸

When it comes to chroniclers who reworked their predecessors’ narratives, most of the time they either did not explain what they were doing at all or did so in such a manner that the explanation raises more questions than it answers. The situation is perhaps particularly complex when it comes to the Gesta Francorum, an anonymous chronicle of the First Crusade. A series of authors appear to have relied on the Gesta; their works together form what is known as the ‘Gesta family’. This group of texts did not only include ‘secondary’, but also ‘tertiary’ chronicles. One example of a tertiary chronicler is Orderic Vitalis, who based his account of the First Crusade on Baldric of Bourgueil’s chronicle that is, in turn, based on the Gesta. The reasons for the desire to re-write the Gesta among so many people at the same time are not immediately clear. Jonathan Riley-Smith has proposed a process of ‘theological refinement’, the perceived need to explain the First Crusade in more sophisticated terms.²⁹

Throughout the Middle Ages, different works were often bound together. The combinations indicate what texts the copyists (and/or their patrons) saw as thematically complementary and can, thereby, reveal contemporaries’ interpretations of events. Not surprisingly, three chronicles concerned with the First Crusade and the early years of the existence of the Latin states are frequently found in a single manuscript.³⁰ A more original textual combination brought together Robert the Monk’s Historia Iherosolimitana and Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne. The very fact of binding these two works together made a strong statement regarding the continuity, discussed in further detail below by Anne Latowsky, between Carolingian and crusading eras.³¹

In the twelfth century, it was highly unusual to illustrate historical narratives.³² In the thirteenth century, however, manuscripts of crusade chronicles began to contain figurative representations. One example is a manuscript of Albert of Aachen’s Historia Ierosolimitana (BNF MS Lat. 5128) which features representations of main characters.³³ Numerous illuminations are found in manuscripts of vernacular translations of William of Tyre’s chronicle, some of them produced in western Europe and others in the Latin states.³⁴ It is also possible to find representations of crusades in manuscripts of chronicles dedicated to other subjects, such as royal or universal chronicles.

Earliest editions of crusader chronicles and of their translations appeared not so long after the invention of the printing press. The earliest edition of Robert the Monk’s Historia Iherosolimitana, for example, came out in Cologne around 1470; scholarly editions of crusader chronicles trace their lineage to an anthology entitled Gesta Dei per Francos and published by Jacques Bongars in 1611 and to the sixteen volumes of sources known as Recueil des Historiens des Croisades that were published by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in Paris between 1841 and 1906.³⁵

Sources

For many chroniclers who were not participants (and for some who were), earlier chronicles were the main source of information. In addition, many chroniclers acknowledge their debt to oral accounts of participants. Perhaps surprisingly, vernacular chansons de geste were also a type of oral source on which chroniclers relied.³⁶ Official records and legal documents, such as papal bulls, charters, deeds, treaties, and agreements, as well as letters, were also important and, at times, chroniclers actually copied them into the text. On one occasion, a chronicler relied on a diary written by a participant.³⁷ On another occasion, a participant’s memoirs served as a key source.³⁸

Many chronicles abound in quotations from or allusions to biblical passages. In some cases, authors acknowledged the fact that they are quoting the Bible. In most cases, however, they inserted quotations or allusions (the two are often indistinguishable) without any attribution; often, they just wove a few words into their own sentences. Most authors were quoting the Bible from memory, so references can be inexact. Some references are clearly either unintentional, a by-product of the authors’ education or background, or merely there for stylistic purposes. In many cases, however, there is little doubt that chroniclers employed biblical references to make a point about the crusading enterprise. In those cases, they often assumed that the reader would be familiar with the context, within which this or that passage is found in the Bible. For instance, according to Baldric of Bourgueil, Urban II, when preaching the First Crusade, lamented the state of Jerusalem with the following words: ‘the house of prayer has been turned into a den of thieves’. This refers the reader/listener of the chronicle to the passage in Matthew 2:13, in which Christ cleanses the Temple. Thus, Urban II, as quoted by Baldric, implicitly urges crusaders to imitate Christ in ‘purifying’ the holy sites of the Holy Land.³⁹

In some cases, the use of biblical quotations follows a pattern. This appears to be the case of Robert the Monk’s chronicle of the First Crusade. Biblical references found in the first part of the chronicle tend to be from the Old Testament; their goal seems to be to establish that crusaders were successors of the Israelites. As the narrative continues and crusaders penetrate the Holy Land, however, there is a shift towards references borrowed from the New Testament, emphasising the theme of imitatio Christi. The description of the conquest of Jerusalem close to the end contains two references to the Book of Revelation.⁴⁰

Many chroniclers drew upon classical sources, both poets and historians. There are some instances of extensive quotations, but, much of the time, the authors merely borrowed a short expression. For instance, Robert the Monk describes Emperor Alexius as ‘inops animi’ (‘powerless in mind’), an expression used by Virgil in the Aeneid to characterise Dido; in some cases, it seems that the matter is not of ‘lexical echoes’, but of ‘scenic analogue’, an invitation to the reader to recall a comparable episode found in this or that work of an ancient author.⁴¹

Authors, Patrons, and Readers

We know the names of some chroniclers with certainty; some sources are anonymous. In the remaining cases, the names and/or identities of chroniclers remain hypothetical. Some of the authors were participants in the events that they described. Although it is common to refer to them as ‘eyewitnesses’, the term is problematic.⁴² On many occasions, authors were witnesses of some events, but not of others. Robert the Monk attended the Council of Clermont that launched the First Crusade, but his involvement in the enterprise ended there. Fulcher of Chartres, another chronicler of the First Crusade, got as far as Edessa and was absent from such key events as the siege and battle of Antioch and the siege of Jerusalem.

Writing chronicles was a prestigious task and high-ranking ecclesiastical figures, such as Bishop Otto of Freising or Archbishop William of Tyre, did not consider it to be beneath their dignity. Several chronicles were written by crusaders’ chaplains. Among the so-called eyewitness chroniclers of the First Crusade, Fulcher of Chartres was chaplain to Baldwin of Boulogne and Raymond of Aguilers to Raymond IV of Toulouse. Odo of Deuil participated in the Second Crusade as chaplain to King Louis VII. Chaplains continued to compose chronicles well into the late Middle Ages. Sébastien Mamerot, who wrote Les Passages d’Outremer between 1472 and 1474, was chaplain to Louis de Laval-Châtillon, a close associate of King Louis XI of France. It is noteworthy that a substantial number of chroniclers were monks. Although monastic writers rarely ventured beyond the immediate vicinities of their monasteries, they had the advantage of being able to procure copies of written sources and to interview what must have been numerous visitors.

Civic pride was behind what is probably the earliest surviving narrative of the First Crusade written by a layman. Caffaro di Rustico was a minor nobleman, who dedicated his life to serving, as an administrator and a diplomat, the city of Genoa. He set out to compose the annals of the city of Genoa as a young man and kept updating them throughout his life. He began the annals with an account of the departure of a Genoese fleet to the East in August 1100 (Caffaro himself was on one of the boats). Caffaro also wrote a separate account of the First Crusade, De liberatione civitatum orientis (The Liberation of the Cities of the East), in which the Genoese play a major role, around 1155.⁴³

For some authors, the impetus to write about crusades came from the outside – or so they would like us to believe. For instance, as he states in the preface to his work, Robert the Monk wrote his chronicle at the bidding of a certain abbot by the name of ‘Bernard’.⁴⁴ In some cases, it seems that participation in Mediterranean politics provided an incentive to learn about the history of the region. In the late fourteenth century, the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, Juan Fernández de Heredia, who was involved in the affairs of the Latin Greece, commissioned a series of translations of historical works dealing with the region into Aragonese.⁴⁵ A century later, Louis de Laval-Châtillon’s stint as a governor of Genoa (a city whose colonies in the Eastern Mediterranean were then threatened by the Ottomans) was possibly behind his decision to commission Sébastien Mamerot’s Les Passages d’Outremer.⁴⁶

In general, Ottoman advances led many people to turn to the study of history. They were probably the cause of an upsurge in popularity, as measured by the number of manuscripts produced, of Robert’s Historia Iherosolimitana.⁴⁷ Robert’s chronicle functioned both to explain the history of the Eastern Mediterranean before the rise of the Ottomans and to reassure the reader that Christians have triumphed before and will, therefore, triumph again.

Some chronicles, especially written in the vernacular, were suitable for a wide audience. Others aimed at a more sophisticated listener/reader, which, at least in the early twelfth century, often meant someone with monastic education. It is worth remembering, however, that the monastic world had numerous ties with that of lay aristocracy. Monastic chroniclers responded to developments outside the cloister; the ideas found in their works, in turn, probably reached (in a more or less roundabout way) the laity.

The number of manuscripts of various chronicles that came down to us is highly uneven. On the one hand, Robert the Monk’s Historia Iherosolimitana was a ‘best-seller’: it survives in eighty-four copies made between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.⁴⁸ Another ‘best-seller’, the so-called L’Estoire de Eracles, a translated version of William of Tyre’s chronicle, exists in fifty-one manuscripts. On the other hand, the Latin original of William of Tyre’s chronicle survives in just nine manuscripts.⁴⁹ Several works were just one fire or flood away from being entirely lost: there is only one extant manuscript of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle (another one was found in Riga in 1849, but later disappeared).⁵⁰ There is also just one manuscript of Caffaro’s De liberatione civitatum Orientis.⁵¹ In the case of each work, the question of why it was copied frequently or seldom deserves a separate explanation.

Functions

Stated intentions of why the author decided to write a chronicle tend to be of general nature, such as the desire to provide exemplars of behaviour for future generations to imitate. However, there were also numerous more or less apparent agendas. Many chronicles strove to inspire the readers/listeners to continue the work of earlier crusaders. William of Tyre, for example, appears to have been addressing two audiences at once. On the one hand, he tried to raise the spirit of the Frankish settlers; on the other hand, he wanted to convince western Europeans that the Latin states ‘not only needed assistance, but deserved it’.⁵² Similarly, the unknown author of the Livonian Rhymed Chronicle seems to have hoped that his work would lead to an increase in the number of German crusaders to Livonia.⁵³

Some manuscripts were clearly intended for future leaders of crusades. One manuscript (BNF, MS Lat. 14378), containing three chronicles concerned with the crusades and the Latin East, opens with a letter from a knight, who had taken part in the First Crusade, to King Louis VII, who was to lead the Second Crusade, urging him to imitate the first crusaders.⁵⁴ Another manuscript (Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, MS Vat. Lat. 2001), a copy of Robert the Monk’s chronicle, contains a frontispiece with the Provost of the Bavarian abbey of Schäftlarn presenting the codex to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, a future leader of the Third Crusade.⁵⁵ There is at least one instance of a chronicle of the First Crusade being carried on a later expedition to the East.⁵⁶

Many chroniclers’ propagandistic agendas had to do with affairs far removed from any theatre of crusading warfare. The memory of the First Crusade became only more popular with time; the success of the crusade became increasingly more astounding when contrasted to the failures of the vast majority of subsequent expeditions. Well into the modern era, it greatly increased a family’s prestige to have an ancestor who distinguished himself during the course of the enterprise.

In his chronicle of the First Crusade, Robert the Monk strove to enhance the lacklustre performance of crusader Hugh of Vermandois, younger brother of King Philip I of France, on the crusade; his goal was to promote Capetian monarchy.⁵⁷ Slightly later, a dynastic history of the lords of Amboise, the Gesta Ambaziensium dominorum, celebrated the steadfastness of a crusading ancestor, Hugh of Chaumot-sur-Loire. The chronicle contrasted Hugh’s courage with the cowardice of Count Stephen of Blois, who deserted during a particularly difficult moment. Although the chronicle was narrating the past, it was primarily addressing the troubling present: it was written when the new Count of Blois held the new lord of Amboise and his sons captive.⁵⁸

No less than individual families, cities (especially Italian ones) outdid each other in making a claim that their citizens were heroes of the First Crusade. Caffaro, for instance, was just the first in the line of chroniclers who celebrated the achievements of their fellow Genoese on the First Crusade. In late thirteenth century, Jacobus da Voragine conflated several factual episodes to claim, erroneously, that the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 was only possible thanks to a Genoese fleet of forty galleys (in fact, there were just two galleys that were dismantled to provide crusaders with timber for siege engines).⁵⁹

It is worth noting that the disproportionate attention that a particular chronicle allotted to particular leaders or contingents is not necessarily due to the desire to celebrate them. A chronicler was almost always best acquainted with crusaders from his home region. Also, he was often under pressure to include stories about local crusaders, since his audience was often local as well. This appears to be the case of Albert of Aachen, whose chronicle of the First Crusade pays a good deal of attention to Godfrey of Bouillon and his followers, but does not go out of the way to celebrate them.⁶⁰

One of the reasons why the present chapter has placed so much emphasis on the chronicles of the First Crusade is not only because they were the most numerous, but also because they have received the most attention in recent scholarship. Although some narratives of other crusading enterprises have also come under close scrutiny, considerable gaps remain. Crusader chronicles are crucial for understanding the meaning and impact of crusades; they are also rich resources for the study of medieval historiography more generally.