Among the collections of the Bibliothèques d’Amiens metropole is a single parchment leaf which measures approximately 288 x 249 mm. Across the leaf, in two columns, is inscribed the Latin text of a letter from the First Crusade. The document is addressed to the pope and the people of the West and relates the events of the expedition up to the capture of Jerusalem and the Battle of Ascalon in 1099. An original crusade letter from the end of the eleventh century, that is, the parchment sheet written by the named authors (or, rather, a scribe on their behalf) that changed hands between them and the addressees would be an artefact of the utmost rarity. But the Amiens manuscript is not one of those. It bears the textual accretions of two postscripts added by audiences in Europe who began to rewrite the epistolary corpus very soon after the crusade. These additions denote that it belongs to the third recension of the text, having evolved rapidly through two previous versions in the period immediately after 1099. At some point in its history, this twelfth-century copy became detached from the initial context of its creation: the binding of a medieval book. For the epistle preserved in Amiens represents one of many copies of letters from the First Crusade that were produced in Europe during and – on a much larger scale – after the expedition with the aim of sending its news, contextualising its events, and remembering it.

The Amiens leaf is a relic of the epistolary culture of the crusade. It stands witness to the impulse to record, engage with, and rewrite the event, in a similar vein to the longer Latin narratives which have attracted sustained scholarly attention for centuries. The attempt to ascertain exactly how those texts were composed, compiled and transmitted, together with their extremely complex interrelationships, has revolutionized our understanding of the First Crusade itself and the recording of history in the twelfth century. Yet while scholars have lavished attention on the full-scale narratives, the key texts that have yet to be factored properly into this discussion are the epistles.