Smoke from the fires that ravaged Constantinople in mid-July 1203 probably still hung in the air when Count Hugh IV of St. Pol decided to write a newsletter to his friends in western Europe informing them of the dramatic events of the Fourth Crusade, still unfolding around him. Although the crusade had gone wildly off course, attacking the ancient capital of the Byzantine empire rather than the coastal cities of Ayyubid Egypt, Hugh wanted to reaffirm the crusaders’ intention that, in the following spring, they would indeed carry their crusade toward its original target.Footnote 1 One version of Hugh’s letter, directed to Hugh’s “very dear friend, the noble man” (cordiali amico, viro nobili) Henry I, duke of Brabant and count of Louvain, concluded with a striking envoi:
You should also know that we have accepted a tournament against the Sultan of Babylon in front of Alexandria. If, therefore, anyone wishes to serve God (to serve Him is to rule) and wishes to bear the distinguished and shining title of “knight,” let him take up the cross and follow the Lord, and let him come to the Lord’s tournament, to which he is invited by the Lord himself.Footnote 2
With its bold statement that only crusaders can truly be knights and its image of a divine overlord (dominus) directing proceedings, Hugh’s vivid envoi echoes much other crusading rhetoric in asking his friend to forsake the lesser knighthood he knows at home for the greater merit to be earned in pursuit of holy war.Footnote 3 But by his choice of metaphor for the encounter that was to take place before “Babylon” (Egypt, or specifically Cairo), Hugh promoted the crusade through explicit comparison with the pre-eminent stage for the performance of aristocratic identity and the enhancement of noble status: the tournament.
Hugh’s metaphor of crusade-as-tournament has not escaped the attention of crusade historians, and most recently it was the starting point for an important article by Natasha Hodgson on the role of honor and shame as a regulating force in the actions of crusading knights.Footnote 4 In general, however, the metaphor and the “chivalric” culture to which it is said to point is used as an ending point of discussion, rather than as a beginning. As Jay Rubenstein has put it: “[c]rusade and chivalry, despite their obvious historical and cultural resonances, have not always sat easily with one another.”Footnote 5 Since the burgeoning of crusade scholarship in the late 1970s, intersections between the devotional practice known as crusading and what might be called (although not unproblematically) “secular” culture and imperatives have generally been less central to scholarship than have theological and spiritual concerns.Footnote 6 The last scholar to address the crusading movement as a whole through the lens of aristocratic culture was Adolf Waas, who in 1956 argued for the existence of a distinct and native “knightly piety” (Ritterfrommigkeit), a concept that has continued to play a role in works dedicated to knighthood and crusading.Footnote 7
Piety, however, was only one part of the larger complex of European aristocratic culture and can therefore only tell part of the story. Taking its cue from Hugh of St. Pol’s comparison between crusading and tournaments, this study suggests a new approach to the value and significance of crusading for the European nobility rooted in aristocratic performance culture. Hugh’s letter suggests that he and his contemporaries had come to see the eastern crusading frontier as a kind of stage upon which performances of noble identity could be enacted. This article will argue that the crusading frontier of the Latin East indeed provided a type of controlled environment for the exhibition of knightly prowess and other performances defining and enhancing noble status. Some elements of these performances are analogous to what we find in western Europe: giving and receiving gifts, enjoying and proffering hospitality, participating in courtly pursuits, demonstrating elite devotional patterns, killing and collecting high-prestige animals, and participating in socially-sanctioned, and usually quite restricted, violence. On the crusading frontier, however, these acts were immeasurably enhanced by the political circumstances of the frontier, by the devotional power of the sacred topography of the Holy Land, and by a proto-Orientalist exoticism associated with the peoples, landscape, flora, and fauna of the eastern Mediterranean. It was in this role as a stage for political and social theater –and not just a theater of war – that the eastern crusading frontier came to be seen as an unmatched source of cultural capital for western lay arms-bearers from relatively modest knights and castle lords through the highest levels of European aristocracy.
In order to comprehend properly the crusading frontier as a site of aristocratic performance and the acquisition of cultural capital, it is necessary to make three significant departures from the typical methodologies and concerns of crusade historiography. First, it requires a shift in emphasis away from the large-scale military expeditions that we canonically number as “the crusades.” The decentering of these large expeditions helps us to move away from a false narrative of military expediency and immediate political utility, and closer to the lived experience of crusading, which was continuous, fluid, and often unanchored from strategic thinking and military urgency. Second, to capture this continuous experience, it is necessary to consider a range of new sources, including genres of vernacular literary works, small regional accounts (some of which remain unedited and even unknown), and many texts produced on the frontier itself both by Latin and non-Latins that are not usually exploited for information about visiting crusaders. Third, following from what these sources suggest, we must realize the full range of activities that were associated with Latin European journeys to the East and properly contextualize those activities between both Latin European and Near Eastern elite cultural practices. This article will demonstrate the advantages of these three modifications of historical perspective, having first set them in the context of modern scholarship.
Crusading and Aristocratic Culture in Modern Scholarship
What factors drove the Christian holy war first preached by Pope Urban II in 1095, what motivated participants to ritually “take up” or “accept” the cross as crusaders, and how to characterize the territories that they conquered, are questions that have received considerable historical attention since the middle of the twentieth century.Footnote 8 In general, older materialist notions of crusaders as landless younger sons seeking their fortunes were supplanted in a marked devotional turn. More recent research has effectively contextualized crusading within the larger pattern of Latin Christian lived religion, showing its affinities with penitential pilgrimage, devotion shown to saints’ shrines and holy places, and ascetic reformed monastic spirituality as well as eschatological conceptions of history.Footnote 9 Although the devotional interpretation is now ascendant, material arguments are still influential, for instance in the emphasis on “rational” calculation in Christopher Tyerman’s 2015 book How to Plan a Crusade: Reason and Religious War in the High Middle Ages. Footnote 10
Historical research concerning the Levantine and Mediterranean territories conquered by the crusaders, their politics, culture, and significance for the wider history of the Near East, similarly underwent significant revision. From the time of the First Crusade (1096–1099), Latin European crusaders carved out a network of their own polities consisting of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the County of Edessa, the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch — all on the eastern Mediterranean littoral — together with the Kingdom of Cyprus (established in 1192) and the Latin Empire of Constantinople and its satellites in Greece (after 1204). The strength and geographical bounds of these principalities ebbed and flowed. Dealt a serious blow by Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (Saladin) in 1187, the kingdom of Jerusalem survived on the mainland until 1291 and then for more than a century in Cyprus and Greece. These lands, which contemporaries knew collectively as la terre d’Outremer (“the land beyond the sea”) and which modern scholars call alternately the “Crusader States,” the “Frankish Levant”, or the “Latin East,” were ruled by a French-speaking aristocracy who were known in Europe (perhaps derisively) as the pullani or poulains. Footnote 11 The poulains forged strong links of marriage and religious and military co-operation with the Christian princes of Cilician Armenia and alliances with the kingdom of Georgia and the Mongol Ilkhanate. They were, at various times, also allied with their Muslim neighbors.Footnote 12
With the most extensive early archaeological and philological work corresponding precisely with the period of direct European colonial rule over North Africa and the Middle East, scholarship on the Latin East has found itself enmeshed in larger debates about European colonialism and empire.Footnote 13 By the early 1990s, most historians of the crusades and the Latin East had rejected explicit comparison with European overseas colonial ventures.Footnote 14 Among other objections, no obvious material advantage existed in the tremendously expensive enterprise to maintain control of the eastern frontier. While the Italian republics like Venice, Genoa, and Pisa benefited from the establishment of a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, the Latin East did not serve as an economic resource for those who invested the most in blood and treasure in its defense: the European aristocracy. For most of its history, the Latin East was also not subject to the rule or control of any European power, rendering it a colony without a clear metropole.Footnote 15 In an enormously influential study, however, Robert Bartlett demonstrated the clear consonance between the Frankish conquests in the eastern Mediterranean and much larger processes of colonization within the European continent itself, from Ireland to Poland.Footnote 16 More recently, Sharon Kinoshita, Suzanne Akbari, Geraldine Heng, George Demacopoulos, and William Purkis have all advocated for the adoption of new frameworks, from postcolonial literary theory to the notion of a spiritual extractive colonialism, in order to understand crusading narrative and the causes and consequences of crusading conquests.Footnote 17
Throughout these debates — about the relative influence of God and Mammon on crusaders and about the nature and purpose of the medieval European occupation and settlement of Syria, Palestine, Greece, and Cyprus — the advent of radical new social distinctions among European elites has not occupied a central place in historical analysis. This is true despite an increasing focus on social change in the study of crusade literature. Sharon Kinoshita, for instance, seeking to place the rising tides of difference in Old French and Occitan literatures of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, foregrounds in her work on crusading narratives “the feudal nobility’s emerging self-consciousness in tension with the hegemony of Latin church culture.”Footnote 18 By contrast, historical scholarship, which is overwhelmingly dedicated to the prerogatives of European military elites, has strangely been little interested in how crusading lords like Hugh of St. Pol performed their social status as among the first generation of self-conscious chivalric nobility. This is underlined by Tyerman’s How to Plan a Crusade, which quotes Hugh’s letter twice: first for the tournament metaphor, which is cited among many examples of “secular propaganda” (related to recruitment) and then for what it says about the payment of soldiers, a more serious and sober topic bearing on the “real” motivations of crusaders.Footnote 19
There is much we have lost in our understanding of the phenomenon of crusade, conquest, and settlement by not engaging with men like Hugh of St. Pol on (or in) their own terms. Thanks to the work of Maurice Keen, Jean Flori, David Crouch, and others, we know that Hugh was writing at a critical moment in the emergence of an exclusive and self-conscious noble social class and in the key period (between 1180 and 1220) for the codification of chivalric knighthood.Footnote 20 This “social transformation” or “chivalric turn” (to adopt Crouch’s terminology) entailed the continuous and meticulous cultivation of reputation, the demonstration of prowess, and the embodiment of elite status through manners, clothing, speech, food, devotional patterns, and material culture. It was for this purpose that the seigneurial nobility of this period was ceaselessly itinerant within and beyond their domains, that they developed exclusive rites of passage (dubbing), and that they articulated their identity through new visual markers of identity (heraldry).
It was also, not coincidentally, a key period in the history of the tournament. It meant a great deal for a man like Hugh, whose continental lordships were near the epicenter of tournament activity and who had himself once fought with the famous champion William Marshal, to invoke the tournament in a letter to his noble peers.Footnote 21 Recent scholarship has emphasized that the high medieval tournament around 1200 was a complex affair, composed of several stages, taking place over multiple days in liminal zones between and beyond existing power structures, and involving a large number of people.Footnote 22 Essentially it was an elaborately-staged spectacle; for competitors it was a site for the enactment not only of martial prowess but no less for them and for their audiences and patrons a place for the display of courtly manners increasingly associated with imaginary settings and filled with striking visual markers of identity. It was, as Matthew Strickland has written, “an increasingly artificial and controlled environment, the context of which was as much social as martial.”Footnote 23 The tournament was not simply a war-game, but a stage on which many games — some military, others political, diplomatic, devotional, and economic — would be played out. The enormous popularity of tournaments, resisting repeated ecclesiastical attempts to ban them, was due to their critical utility to the culture of nobility. As places where alliances, reputations, and careers were made, tournaments in various forms continued to grow and evolve precisely because they represented invaluable moments for the articulation and enhancement of status that was demanded if the regime of lordship was to be maintained.
The relationship between tournaments and crusading is traditionally imagined to be one of opposition. As Juliet Barker shows, popes banned tournaments and threatened participants and sponsors with excommunication because they believed that they were distractions from the crusading cause and endangered the funds, equipment, animals, and bodies of potential crusaders.Footnote 24 Knights did not share this perspective. In their experience, tournaments were places to publicly take the cross and raise monies for crusading. As Barker writes (and Hugh of St. Pol clearly agreed), “this dichotomy was only obvious to the church. To the knights who went on crusade, there was no inconsistency apparent.”Footnote 25 In fact, tournaments were only one kind of space of noble performance that frequently gestured at, and even pointed the way to, another greater stage. This stage has been obscured to us, and may have been to medieval popes as well, because of another dichotomy. This is the dichotomy between crusading as it was seen from a centralizing papal and royal perspective –– the perspective largely adopted by modern scholarship –– and crusading as it was actually experienced by the lay aristocracy.
Crusading as a Continuous Phenomenon
It is a pernicious aspect of the scholarly and popular understanding of “crusade” that the word is held to be synonymous with large-scale, canonically-numbered military campaigns. These military expeditions were relatively infrequent and, like the one on which Hugh of St. Pol found himself in 1203, frequently disastrous. Expensive, slow, and with high rates of death, disease, and capture, the large expeditions that departed in 1147 (“Second”), 1189 (“Third”), 1202 (“Fourth”), 1248 (“Seventh”), 1270 (“Eighth”), and 1396 (“Nicopolis Crusade”) required the arms-bearers who joined them to subject themselves to command structures involving higher lords or even crowned heads who might be alien to the feudal structures from which the crusaders came. Unsurprisingly, they were constantly bedeviled by political tensions and personal rivalries, like those that led to the failure of the Second Crusade at Damascus or the vengeful imprisonment of Richard I by his rival the duke of Austria following the Third Crusade.Footnote 26 We also hear of the departures from the large-scale expeditions – most notoriously on the Fourth but also notably on the Seventh Crusade – by individuals or small groups seeking to pursue their own private journeys.Footnote 27
The course of the Fourth Crusade, of which Hugh of St. Pol was a part when he wrote his letter, presents perhaps the most famous example of aristocrats resisting the call to join such an expedition. Instead of meeting in Venice, the agreed-upon rallying spot for the army, many who had committed to join the crusade instead conducted themselves privately or in small groups to the ports of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, where they fulfilled their vows independently. Voting with their feet, Hugh’s contemporaries showed that these large expeditions had unstable and perhaps unappealing associations. There is no question that the opportunities for distinction on these expeditions were great, but the stakes were also high. They were less like tournaments and other types of limited and symbolic violence, and more like that disastrous occurrence, rare and most often avoided in the Middle Ages: all-out war.
The larger-scale canonical expeditions lie at the center of all modern attempts to understand what we commonly called “the crusades,” but they cannot have represented the most common experience of crusading. As the work of James Doherty and Fordham University’s Independent Crusaders Project has shown, in the decades separating the major crusades we find nobility of every rank setting out for Jerusalem.Footnote 28 Although no comprehensive study has yet been made of such small-scale expeditions from 1099–1291 or beyond, just those undertaken by territorial princes before 1187 give a sense of the frequency of these journeys (Table 1). Counting only those individuals whose lordships extended across whole regions, we find forty-four individuals participating in thirty-seven expeditions. The list includes princes from across Latin Europe from the March of Lusatia to Galicia. Among them are five women, only two of whom were accompanied by husbands (and one of those, Countess Sibylla of Flanders, abandoned her husband Thierry of Alsace in Jerusalem). In the cases of Sigurd of Norway (1108), Fulk V of Anjou (1120 and 1129), Rognvald V of Orkney (1153), Henry I of Champagne (1179), and Godfrey III of Louvain (1183), we have quite detailed lists of the members of the princely expeditions, showing the participation of vassals, relatives, and household officers and administrators. Throughout the twelfth century we find examples of princes traveling together. Sometimes, in the case of the counts of Angoulême, La Marche, and Limoges in 1178 or in the case of Henry the Liberal of Champagne, Henry of Grandpré, and Philip of Dreux in 1180, there is a strong sense of regional collaboration. In other cases, as when Philip of Alsace joined William de Mandeville in 1177, it was apparently informed by long-standing friendship.Footnote 29 A notice written by the monks of Marmoutier in 1128 describing the scene before the departure of Count Fulk V of Anjou for his second journey to Jerusalem reveals how such an expedition could also help to forge new bonds or restore peace as it apparently did between Fulk and the lord of Amboise Hugh of Chaumont-sur-Loire.Footnote 30 The list also reveals that it was not uncommon for lords to make multiple journeys in their lifetimes, suggesting that compared with the larger-scale expeditions, these journeys seem on the whole to have been much safer for their participants than canonically numbered crusades.
Table 1. Independent Crusade Expeditions by Territorial Princes before 1187
While some of these expeditions are well known, that they have not been understood as a larger pattern is due to the fact that they are so often identified with distinct initiatives: an act of penitence, a marriage embassy, a political overture. Even where different imperatives may sometimes have existed alongside a particular journey, separating them has obscured how much they and their participants had in common. Each involved a sojourn of months or even years, and during their sojourns in the Levant, participants engaged in a wide range of activities not captured by a single objective. Most importantly, these individuals were nobles, and nobility was something that had to be continuously reaffirmed and restructured through public performance of that status in speech, dress, gestures, and engagement in elite activities. What brought them to Jerusalem, be it pilgrimage or politics, paled in significance next to the need to maintain their status, which was of existential significance to them, their families, and their communities at home.
The noble sojourn was an experience open to all ranks of the aristocracy, from princes to local castle lords, knights, and landholders. Sometimes, as in the case of several knights who joined Fulk V of Anjou in 1120 or Godfrey III of Louvain in 1183, more humble participants were part of the retinue of greater lords, but in other cases such as the very minor lord Manasses of Hierges (1142) or the tournament champion William Marshal (1184), they may have effectively traveled alone. Here the happenstance of narrative reportage and documentary survival (and modern discovery) exercises an even greater warping effect on our attempt to grasp numbers or geographical distribution. Remarkably, however, and perhaps because so much more was at stake, sources survive which describe the expeditions of more minor figures in the greatest detail.
As is the case with the study of all crusaders, many of the participants in independent journeys can only be identified either through documents witnessing their departure or by brief references to their travels in local and regional narrative sources. William of Tyre, a primary chronicler of the crusader kingdom who wrote in the early 1180s, noted the arrival of many aristocrats from princes (“Henry, the illustrious count of Troyes”) down to more minor barons like Ralph de Mauléon (“a warrior of great renown from Aquitaine”). Some of the visitors appear in documents produced in Palestine, and at least four produced their own written instruments while on crusade which have survived as originals.Footnote 31 An important complement to the documentary sources can be found, however, in lengthy narrative accounts of particular journeys. Eyewitness accounts of journeys classified as “pilgrimages” and composed by clerics have been known for some time, mined mainly for their testimony about conditions in the Near East at the time of the journey.Footnote 32 For instance, the bishop of Paderborn Wilbrand of Oldenbourg’s account of 1211 is often cited for its description of the Ibelin palace in Beirut.Footnote 33 Wilbrand’s journey is usually classified as a diplomatic mission from the Welf emperor, Otto IV, to prepare for an imperial crusade expedition.Footnote 34 But his attention to courtly settings, as well as his visit to his uncle’s tomb in Antioch, reveal that, like so many of the expeditions before it, his journey was also greatly concerned with self-conscious aristocratic display.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the existence of troubadour lyrics referring to life in the Latin East in times of peace (as opposed to the more well-known and often generic “crusade song”). What details we can glean from these texts points to frequent movement between the courts of Occitania and the Latin East, with men like Peire Vidal and Pere Bremon lo Tort moving in and out of the service of eastern lords.Footnote 35 The success of their songs, which survived to be recorded in the Occitan songbooks many decades later, suggest that the opportunities available in the Frankish courts were a popular topic across the Mediterranean.
In addition to these first-person reflections, detailed narratives also survive describing the sojourns of lay aristocrats in the Latin East. These have received far less attention, but they are critically important for several reasons. First, accounts survive that detail the experiences of travelers from the highest to the lowest ranks of noble society. Second, as works emanating from the home communities of the travelers, they tend to reflect not only on the events of the journey, but also upon the value of the journey for the individual with reference to their rank and reputation. We hear, for instance, of the fame associated with the deeds of the minor lords Manasses of Hierges (d. 1176) and Gobert of Apremont (d. 1263), and how this enhanced their status after their return.Footnote 36 Finally, although there are not many of these narratives, they can be usefully supplemented with another type of material, critically important for our understanding of this phenomenon: vernacular literature.
Perhaps the strongest argument for considering the journeys to the crusading frontier collectively, and for privileging them as a type of aristocratic display, comes from imaginative literature. David Trotter showed years ago that Old French vernacular literature, which often invokes the theme of war against Muslim or pagan enemies, only rarely employs the language, rituals, historical geography, and political history of crusading.Footnote 37 Most common, however, among the group of works that he identified as exceptional are narratives that deal with the phenomenon of the independent crusade expedition. These include the romance Gilles de Chin, composed by Gautier de Tournai in around 1230, Jean Renart’s Escoufle and the Fille du comte de Ponthieu (both from around 1200), the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic (early thirteenth century) and the thirteenth-century prose romance Floire et Jehane. Footnote 38 To these might be added examples from the corpus of Middle High German courtly and bridal-quest epics, particularly the fragmentary Graf Rudolf (composed around 1200).Footnote 39 Finally, worth including here are the biographical vidas and explicatory razos associated with the troubadour songs of the Occitan crusaders Peire Vidal, Jaufré Rudel, Raimbaut de Vaiqeras, and Giraut de Borneil. All these works point to independent or private expeditions as the normative model for crusading.Footnote 40
European Latin and vernacular narratives and documents are not the only materials that must be consulted to reconstruct the elite experience in the East; critical also are the sources produced in and around the Latin East either by the Francophone aristocracy of the frontier lands or by their neighbors writing in Arabic, Syriac, Armenian, and Greek. What the European texts do grant us, however, is a clear sense of a shared experience, and perhaps more importantly, a shared set of expectations, related to the phenomenon of the noble sojourn. Importantly, although they described the kingdom at its zenith, most were composed in the period after 1187 when Jerusalem itself and the southernmost section of the Kingdom of Jerusalem had been conquered by Saladin. In preserving an image of the kingdom before what was simply called “the defeat” (la desconfiture), they also kept alive a memory of the Latin East that could once again be reconstituted and suggested the value of that space for the nobility of the future.Footnote 41
The Lord’s Tournament Ground: The Latin East as Stage
What made the eastern theater such an ideal stage for the western elite traveler was precisely the way that it introduced novel, foreign, and powerfully charged elements into a familiar framework of feudal lordship and European aristocratic culture. In the Latin East, the French language, the Latin liturgy, and recognizable patterns of feudal obligation and noble status were all on display, but with differences that ranged from subtle to profound. A visitor from Europe in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries arrived from a world of increasing centralization and bureaucratization of royal power which, as Gabrielle Spiegel and others have argued, led to an increasing anxiety among the landed aristocracy about their loss of independence and rights.Footnote 42 In the Latin East, the presence of central royal and princely courts had fundamentally different implications. A visitor, of course, could experience these courts as an outsider, free to choose with whom and to what degree to associate themselves in bonds of friendship and service. In this land where fiefs were overwhelmingly in cash, visitors were rewarded with precious items associated principally with the region, most often silk and relics. But beyond this — and even assuming a maximalist interpretation of the evidence — feudal relationships in the East tended on the whole to be more balanced in favor of the entire seigneurial community, which by the later twelfth century counted all knights as co-equal members of the “High Court” of the kingdom.
By about 1200, the customs of that court as an aristocratic community were the subject of sustained treatises. In these lengthy commentaries, we find that western visitors like Count Stephen of Sancerre in 1171 might be asked for their advice, which was then recorded with honor among the assises of the kingdom.Footnote 43 The legal treatises themselves, most important among them the Livre de Forme de Plait of Philip of Novara (composed in the early 1250s) and the monumental Livre des assises of John of Ibelin (of about a decade later), offer complete scripts for the proper performance of noble conduct in court settings. This includes extensive coverage of cases of judicial combat, including how the challenge is made, appropriate forms of response, rules on types and sizes of weapons, the status of combatants, and the injunction that it is one of the supreme responsibilities of the chef seigneur that he always maintained a champs de champions (“field for champions”).Footnote 44
The Latin East has long been treated as a far-flung outpost of medieval Latin Europe, a “fragment society” always looking to France, and particularly in the thirteenth century to Paris, for inspiration and guidance.Footnote 45 The evidence, however, stubbornly points to the Latin East not as an imitator but as a cultural innovator, or at least as a partner in innovation, with regard to some of the most central forms of European elite culture.Footnote 46 It has long been known that the earliest Round Table tournament, the style that came to dominate the European circuit in the thirteenth century, was staged on Cyprus in 1223.Footnote 47 Tournaments had been held on the mainland since at least 1159, when the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos took part in one. The emperor became an enthusiast himself, bringing the tournament from Outremer to Byzantium. An anonymous contemporary document records the lavish clothing that he later wore in jousts, affirming that he understood their importance as a courtly political performance as much as a military sport.Footnote 48 A range of later medieval texts, some composed in the East and some by western visitors, confirm the vibrant tournament culture both on the mainland and in Cyprus.Footnote 49 The reputation of the poulains for their knowledge of nobility and manners may explain the success of the Cypriot knight Philip of Novara’s conduct treatise iiii tenz d’ aages de l’home, which circulated widely in the Francophone west.Footnote 50 The Ordene de chevalerie, the very earliest work to define knighthood as a social order regulated by a set of given conventions, has as its protagonist a poulain, Hugues de Tabarie, who dictates the knighting ritual.Footnote 51 John, the lord of Joinville and seneschal of Champagne, who found himself on a sojourn in the Latin East after the failure of the Seventh Crusade, offered a staunch defense of the poulains, siding with them and even acquiescing to being called a poulain himself.Footnote 52
Among the most noteworthy features of Latin feudal society in the East is the dominant political role played by women.Footnote 53 The legal treatises themselves are a testament to this fact: the Livre au roi (composed around 1200) restates each point of custom in the masculine and the feminine to be clear that it applies to both men and women.Footnote 54 It did not escape the attention of male aristocratic visitors, nor the audiences of their stories at home, that for significant periods of time, the Latin East was a world in which women ruled. The fascination with the eastern ruling dominae appears both in the narrative accounts of visitors like Manasses of Hierges and in the romance accounts like Gilles de Chin and Graf Rudolf, but is nowhere clearer than in the famous vida of the Occitan troubadour Jaufre Rudel “Prince” of Blaye, who “fell in love with the countess of Tripoli, without seeing her, for the good that he heard of her from the pilgrims who came from Antioch.”Footnote 55 The story builds upon the premise that tales about eastern Frankish women (in this case, Hodierna of Tripoli) circulated throughout the west and motivated men to travel to the frontier as crusaders. While it is unclear whether female lordship, as an element of eastern Frankish society, had origins or associations with similar structures in Occitania, we do find a prevalence of Occitan-style codenames (senhals) for aristocratic women such as “Sweet” (Dulcia), “Pleasant” (Plaisantia), “Limpid” (Clarentsa), “Haughty” (Orgellosa), and the ubiquitous “Shy” — or possibly “Curvy” — (Eschiva).Footnote 56 The vitality of this practice in the East has not heretofore been explained or even examined, but it cannot have but helped to mark the women of Outremer as potential participants in the culture of courtly love and to enhance the power of the frontier as a courtly space. “Here,” ran a letter dispatched by the prince of Antioch to the French royal court in 1155, “there are two daughters of Prince Raymond with the most beautiful faces and bodies who have reached marriageable age.”Footnote 57 The effect of such appeals upon the imagination of western noblemen must have been considerable.
Our narratives describe women as among the most prominent judges of prowess and nobility in the audience of the eastern theater of crusading. In the work devoted to the career of Manasses of Hierges and the romances Gilles de Chin and Graf Rudolf, for example, the elite women of the Latin East are those who summon western knights to the frontier, praise and reward their prowess, and lament their departures. Accompanying the women in this role as arbiter and audience are the members of the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital and the priestly order of Canons of the Holy Sepulcher, who all judge the masculinity and virtue of the western knights. We know that these groups played a crucial role in the logistics of knightly journeys to the frontier. In our texts, they act as a kind of Greek chorus to shower approbation on the visiting knight. The Life of Gobert of Apremont, for example, claims that the Templars invited the knight to take the cross and come to their aid in Jerusalem. The Master of the Hospital himself celebrates upon Gobert’s arrival, whereupon the Templars (like tournament heralds) help Gobert as “he raised his banner and his arms high over the boundary walls (cancellos) and made to fix them there.”Footnote 58 A reputation earned with the military orders stretched internationally from the frontier to their myriad communities in Europe. As Jochen Schenk has shown, the friendships forged between the Templars and crusaders in the East were remembered long after the expedition was over and were indeed often invoked as a nobleman lay dying years after their crusade.Footnote 59
Among the audience of the noble performance in Outremer, together with Templars, canons of the Holy Sepulchre, and Frankish aristocracy, were the crusaders’ non-Latin aristocratic peers. These included members of the Byzantine court, the lords of Cilician Armenia, and the Turkish and Arab lords of the Islamicate lands that bordered the Latin East. These aristocrats participated in strikingly similar cultures of military prowess, courtly display, and even literary form as the European visitors. As revealed by the Kitāb al-I’tibar (Book of Contemplation) composed around 1183 by Usama ibn Munqidh, there was considerable appetite within the courts of Muslim Syria for stories of the prowess of Frankish knights. Usama described fighting with Franks, including their lance thrusts and parries, with a herald’s eye for detail. He recorded the heraldic colors of their tunics and learned the names of their greatest knights, like a certain “Pedro” who lived at Apamea and fought in the army of the prince of Antioch.Footnote 60 Usama discussed the status of knights with no less figure than King Fulk of Jerusalem (known to Usama in a more Angevin princely fashion as Fulk ibn Fulk).Footnote 61 He devoted a chapter of the Kitāb al-I’tibar to his discussion of the training of young men for knighthood with a European knight, whom he explicitly described as a short-term visitor to the Latin East with whom he had developed a bond of intimate friendship.Footnote 62 By the thirteenth century, Uri Shachar has argued, the Frankish and Syrian aristocracies were so close that their societies can be said to have been “co-produced” by their engagements, military or otherwise, with one another.Footnote 63
Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Franks of Outremer invested heavily in the architecture and elite landscapes that would provide the stage for the western visitors. The new royal palace in Jerusalem, constructed before 1169 and adjoining the Tower of David, featured an enlarged reception hall (solarium) and an open gallery (loggia), both apparently intended to enhance the experience of royal receptions.Footnote 64 Like so much in the Latin East, the built environment offered a combination of the exotic and distinctive mixed with the familiar, if still impressive European style. In 1211, the noble ambassador Wilbrand of Oldenburg described the new Ibelin palace in Beirut as possessing a “delicate marble pavement simulating water agitated by a light breeze,” walls covered in marble panels, a vault the color of the sky, and a pool with a fountain shaped like a dragon, that provided air conditioning and a relaxing sound. Wilbrand wrote that the water “lulls to sleep by agreeable murmurings its lords who sit nearby. I would willingly sit by it for all my days.”Footnote 65 Traces of polychromy at Margat and Crac des Chevaliers suggest that paintings like the monumental images discovered at the royal abbey of Jehosaphat and which are known to have existed at Thebes may have been common in the major fortresses. The two-tiered vaulted palace at Tortosa and the recently-uncovered Great Hall and large “ceremonial” Gothic Hall of the Teutonic Knights castle at Montfort (around 1229), with its stained glass “in the French tradition,” underscore the rich visual settings that were the backdrop to diplomacy and hospitality.Footnote 66
In Europe, the built environment of gardens, parks, and water features were all critical components of the aristocratic landscape. European travelers to the Latin East, whose mental images of the Holy Land were already replete with references to paradise, the lush valleys of the Song of Songs, and the gardens of the New Testament, described seeing gardens, pools, and other features in and around Jerusalem. But the elite sites also had their own special landscapes: Wilbrand noted that the windows of the Ibelin palace looked out on “meadows, orchards, and most delightful places,” and the treatise on the construction of the castle of Safad (in the 1260s) remarks that the region possessed game “to provide for the nobility.”Footnote 67 There seems no reason to doubt that the Latin lords were indeed participants in what Scott Redford has called a “shared chivalric garden culture in the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds.”Footnote 68 Beyond the principality of Antioch and the short-lived county of Edessa, non-Latin princes were not regularly welcomed as guests within the palaces of the crusader states; if all this building and decoration was intended to impress any visitor, it would seem to have been the visitor from the West they had in mind. The stage for the noble performance was carefully set.
Varieties of Performance
According to the European Latin and vernacular accounts, visitors to the Latin East could expect to participate in a range of activities, each of which was emphatically public, taking place before a series of different audiences whose approbation and praise for the visitor our accounts dutifully record. The visitor’s first obligation was the fulfillment of pilgrimage vows. In none of our narratives does pilgrimage or devotion occupy the most central position, but none omit to mention the opportunities the Latin East provided for displays of piety, with effusions of tears, prayers, and sumptuous gifts. In 1172, for instance, Henry the Lion of Saxony traveled to the valley of Jehosaphat, the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and the Jordan River, before ascending Quarentana.Footnote 69 Seven years later, Henry the Liberal visited Jerusalem, Hebron, Sebastia, and Nazareth “making suitable benefactions at each.”Footnote 70 In narrative and literary sources, our visitors weep, pray, fast, and express exhaustion after their penitential journey, all under the appreciative gaze of the chief custodians of sacred places, the canons of the Holy Sepulcher. Both the chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck and the romance Escoufle also describe sumptuous gifts to the church of the Holy Sepulcher as both Duke Henry the Lion and the fictional Richard of Montvilliers place golden cups upon the altar.Footnote 71 Theodore Evergates notes the spectacular eschatacol of the charter of Henry the Liberal enacted at Hebron: “He ended by proclaiming himself ‘I, Henry, count palatine of France.’ Virtually the entire court of Champagne witnessed.”Footnote 72
With the formal requirements of pilgrimage complete, the noble voyagers can truly arrive. Lavish receptions were associated with the Kingdom of Jerusalem since shortly after its inception. In 1101, for example, a group of crusaders from Poitou were shocked when King Baldwin I (r. 1100–1118) invited them to feast with him before they had even recovered from the hardships of their journey.Footnote 73 A prominent visitor like Henry the Lion was received magnificently, first by an honor guard of the Military Orders of the Templars and Hospitallers. Then, in Jerusalem he was greeted by clergy singing hymns and praising him. The king of Jerusalem lodged him “in his own house” (in domo propria) and feasted with him for three days.Footnote 74 A humbler but well-connected knight like Manassses of Hierges was received at the royal court by his cousin Queen Melisende (r. 1131–1153). A monk at the abbey of Brogne in Namur where he died thirty-six years later imagined the queen exclaiming to him upon his arrival: “Oh, for how long you have been expected through the dangers and travails of so much traveling!”Footnote 75 Manasses was received again in Antioch by the widowed princess Constance and his stay in Antioch was marked by feasting and leisure, culminating with the offer of gold, silver, and precious relics. Travelers received hospitality not only from Latins within the kingdom, but also from the princes of neighboring territories. Henry the Lion was reported to have been received in spectacular fashion by the Seljuq Sultan of Rum, Kilij Arslan II, and also, like many other princes, as a guest of the emperor of Constantinople.Footnote 76 Western knights also entered the service of the rulers of Cilician Armenia, close allies of the eastern Franks whose court must have been at least partly Francophone for much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Footnote 77 As in Europe, time spent in princely courts inevitably implied courtly leisure pursuits. Elizabeth Lapina has gathered many references to board games played by Latins in the crusader states, giving life to archaeological discoveries like the dice found at Chateau Pèlerin and the Nine Men’s Morris board found more recently in the excavations at Montfort.Footnote 78
While it is unclear whether the practice or significance of these games was very different in the Latin East than in the West, another elite activity, hunting, was very different indeed. The establishment of a Latin zone of control and diplomatic relationships with the aristocracies of the Christian and Muslims Near East made possible the use of hunting as a diplomatic tool and opened the lands in their dominions for exploitation by visiting European elites. The pre-occupation with hunting as a sign of status and a form of elite socialization was a feature shared among the aristocracies of Latin Europe and the eastern Christian and Muslim Near East. Indeed, in establishing their feudal principalities in the Levant, the Franks came to occupy a land whence their own royal hunting practices had first emerged millennia earlier, and where hunting remained a critical component of political culture. In the kingdom of Jerusalem, a royal hunt, in which the king was joined by his court (including prominent visitors), was underway by at least 1131, when King Fulk died while hunting hares during his royal itinerary. In 1159, Fulk’s son, Baldwin III, participated in hunts together with the Byzantine emperor Manuel Komnenos.Footnote 79 But the fact of royal hunting was ultimately less significant to western visitors than the methods of hunting and the objects of the chase.
The Near East was home to a wide variety of megafauna unfamiliar to Europeans. Some of these animals, such as lions, leopards, oryxes, gazelle, and the large numbers of bird species that crossed through the region in migration, were prey.Footnote 80 Others, such as cheetah and caracal, were caught and trained as hunting animals in the same way that Europeans traditionally used hunting dogs. A richly illustrated copy of the second-century author Oppian of Apamea’s Cynegetica made in Constantinople in 1054 reveals the wealth of opportunities in the form of animals and different hunting practices available to hunters in the regions of Syria and eastern Anatolia.Footnote 81
The most important eyewitness observer of the hunting culture of the crusader states was the Syrian aristocrat and avid hunter Usama ibn Munqidh. Looking back on his life from later in the twelfth century, Usama recalled numerous interactions with Franks, both the local aristocracy and visitors from the west, in contexts related to hunting. Usama’s stories point to a thriving market in hunting birds and mammals — and to a strong desire on the part of Europeans to hunt large and (in their eyes) exotic megafauna. He recalled the story of the unfortunate Frankish lord Adam of Hunak who asked the help of local peasants in locating a leopard; the animal ultimately killed him.Footnote 82
Big cats occupy an outsized place in the narratives relating to western visitors to the frontier. Henry the Lion, upon his meeting with Sultan Kilij Arslan II (who was also his namesake, “Arslan” meaning “the lion” in Turkish), was given two big cats as a gift to bring back to Saxony. Arnold of Lübeck, who recorded Henry’s journey, called them “leopards” (leopardos), but given that he says that they were “trained to sit on the backs of horses” (docti enim erant sedere in equis), it is more likely that they were hunting cheetahs.Footnote 83 There is a remarkable correspondence between what Arnold says about the Sultan’s gift and Usama’s characterizations of the trade in animals, and the Franks’ (sometimes naïve) desires. Even Arnold’s mistake in calling the animals “leopards” seems to prove Usama’s point that the Franks (to their peril) were often unable to tell the difference between the two types of cats.Footnote 84 This confusion between friendly and deadly felidae may in part explain the motif of the “friendly lion” of the Latin East, which is indebted to a knight who rescues it from a dragon or serpent. This motif appears associated with crusaders in the romances Gilles de Chin and Gui de Warewic was so widespread that it was included as a “type” of lion behavior in a fourteenth-century Italian bestiary, again associated with a supposedly historical French crusader in the Latin East.Footnote 85
A rich body of evidence survives testifying to a widespread belief that the hunt and capture of lions was an experience available to visitors in Outremer. The English chronicler Matthew Paris included a detailed and illustrated anecdote in the Chronica Maiora describing how “among other marks of the virtue and boldness of [the English knight Hugh de Neville], he killed a lion in the Holy Land. Having first been shot in the chest with an arrow and then afterwards transfixed in the chest with a sword, the lion died with blood pouring forth.”Footnote 86 The map that Matthew drew around 1240 (the only surviving political map of the crusading frontier) actually marks a forest outside of Caesarea with the words “where [there are] lions” (ubi leones).Footnote 87 It was in precisely this area near Caesarea where in 1251 John of Joinville encountered Elnart of Selninghem, who had arrived as part of a small expedition apparently separate from the Seventh Crusade. Joinville described Elnart’s hunting practices as follows:
He [Elnart of Selninghem] and his men took up hunting lions and caught a number of them at great risk to themselves. They would shoot at the lions as they were spurring their horses on as hard as they could. After they had fired their arrows, the lion would pounce at them and would have caught them and eaten them had they not dropped an old piece of clothing, which the lion leapt upon, tore to shreds and devoured, thinking he had trapped a man….Footnote 88
Hunting lions and encounters with lions and other exotic beasts is also, unsurprisingly, a component of the romance tradition dedicated to the aristocratic sojourn in the East.
While lions may have represented the most spectacular creatures the crusaders encountered, they were far from the only component of the eastern hunting experience enjoyed by European visitors. Falconry, a pastime that receives extensive reporting in Usama’s Book of Contemplation, was considered the highest form of hunting by European aristocrats. Bans on hawks and dogs in the official call for the Second Crusade Quantum praedecessores show that crusaders were prepared to bring their hunting animals with them, and Usama himself bought a European goshawk from a Genoese trader.Footnote 89 If in Usama’s account, a hunting bird might be imported from Europe for sale in the ports of the Levant, it is important to note that European hunting treatises depicted the Latin East as the mythic origin point for all hunting birds. According to the twelfth-century treatise of William the Falconer, falcons originated at Mount Gilboa, and this point was once again underscored on Matthew Paris’s map of Outremer, which places a falcon in precisely this location.Footnote 90
For Gauthier de Tournai, the author of the romance Gilles de Chin, the crusading hero’s lion hunts in the Jordan valley were articulated as a demonstration of prowess, directly connected to his subsequent victory in battle, an important reminder that amid all of feasting, hunting, gift giving, and devotional display, crusading also sometimes involved fighting. Combat, especially in the period of concern for the survival of the Latin kingdom after 1170, is so often assumed to be the primary purpose of noble journeys to the East that we find modern historians condemning with harsh words the “ineffectual” visits of small expeditions of one or two lords. While victories were always celebrated and missing out on a great battle, as Philip of Flanders managed to do in 1177, could carry with it disappointment, it is not very clear that contemporaries expected the private expeditions to accomplish major strategic feats.Footnote 91 Henry the Liberal seems to have been expected to engage in combat against Saladin at the Templar fortress of Le Chastellet in 1179, but missed his chance.Footnote 92 Henry the Lion, who was definitely armed and fought a skirmish in the Balkans, did not engage in any fighting in 1172. He did, however, tour the battlefields of earlier crusade expeditions and seems to have returned with a variety of stories he had heard about earlier engagements, which Arnold of Lübeck dutifully recorded in his account of the duke’s journey.Footnote 93 Others, like the father and son Counts Thierry and Philip of Flanders, did fight, each prosecuting campaigns on the frontiers of the principality of Antioch during their respective independent sojourns in 1157 and 1177.Footnote 94
There are many reasons why the fighting to be had in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was special, distinct from either combat or the tournament mêlée that were the only possible avenues for the demonstration of prowess in the West. This fighting was not only socially but also clerically sanctioned, and it was probably relatively safe, consisting of small-scale raids (chévauchées) when the kingdom was not threatened by a major exterior foe. The aspect that most interested our sources, however, was the presence of a frontier. Both the Gilles de Chin of romance and the historical Manasses of Hierges fought defensive border skirmishes, the latter at Antioch where his “efficacy of virtue turns back the tide of the Turks.”Footnote 95 The texts dedicated to Manasses also notably claim that he would ride across the borders, making raids into enemy territory: “[he] marched to the lands of Egypt, Damascus, and Antioch beyond the boundaries of the kingdom of Jerusalem.”Footnote 96 “Frequently,” another text relates, “he unfurled the banners against the Babylonians and the Damascenes, bared the sword, and carried on his return the delightful stain of enemy blood.”Footnote 97 Although this bloody scene is unmistakably from the crusading frontier, we might remember that tournaments, too, were fixed at liminal spaces, usually halfway between two towns or fortifications. In both contexts, chivalry shows itself at the edge.
Towards a New Model: Cultural Capital and the Crusading Frontier
The quest to understand the “value” of crusading for medieval Christians has been a pre-occupation of historians since the very dawn of the study of the crusades. For critics of the Catholic church during the Reformation and the Enlightenment, the crusading project was attacked as having no value whatsoever. The frontispiece to Historie of the Holy Warre published by the English cleric Thomas Fuller in 1640 depicts the church of “Eu-rope” flanked by two sacks, with one rubric reading “We went out full” and the other “But return empty.” The famous entry for “Croisades” in the 1754 volume of the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot similarly condemns the enterprise for “seiz[ing] a rocky outcrop worth not one drop of blood and that they might have venerated in the spirit from afar just as well as nearby and the possession of which was alien to the honor of their religion.”Footnote 98
The recent remedy for these reductive approaches has involved restoring the crusades to a robustly devotional context, rendering it as a conventional aspect of medieval lived religion. While there can be no question as to the value of this shift in perspective – it would be wrong to dismiss the idea that crusaders sought relief from the consequences of sin – it is important to remember that the vast majority of those whom we can find in the act of taking the cross and embarking for the eastern crusading frontier were members of an arms-bearing aristocracy. What sin they felt required expiation had accrued in the course of lives as landowners, warriors, and lords; crusading seems inextricably bound to their social status. And, as Richard Kaeuper has recently shown, over the course of the first two centuries of crusading history, something happened to those arms-bearers.Footnote 99 As they increasingly began to consider themselves to be a distinctive noble class, with fixed rights and privileges established at birth and demonstrated through elaborate rituals, they also became increasingly convinced that their very nobility, their knighthood, made them less prone to sin. As knights, they were an order equivalent to priests, chosen by God, and suffering in their service for mankind. A knight like William Marshal (1146/47–1219) would protest on his deathbed that his life was on the whole not sinful, and that clerics were wrong to insist on his repentance.Footnote 100
If these knights did not require absolution, what good was Diderot’s “rocky outcrop” to them? In the account of the expedition of Manasses of Hierges, the Holy Land was a stage, Jerusalem “a city situated upon a mountain which cannot hide, that new rock virtue, appearing in the mountains of Israel.”Footnote 101 Those who traveled to this land did not return empty-handed. The dream vision of the romance accounts and the fragments of the stories of historical travelers that survive embedded in documents and written out as narratives all attest to what was to be gained from these journeys. They had enacted their nobility in a landscape charged with the power of sacred history and the collective memory of earlier, victorious, holy warriors. They interacted with an elite society widely recognized as master practitioners of nobility and courtliness, whose approbation they sought in devotional, recreational, and military performances. They returned not only with reputations and stories, but also with physical objects in the form of relics and gifts: materials they would preserve, use as ritual objects, and display for visitors.Footnote 102
What was acquired might best be described using a (highly adapted) form of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital.”Footnote 103 The acquisition of this capital required investment of a kind only available to elites and yet yielded a valuable resource which enhanced their status and distinction as elites and among their noble peers. This capital was embodied in the returning crusaders themselves, stored up in accounts of their journey and objectified in their possessions, weapons, and armor. Manasses of Hierges, who had set off for the East as the son of a minor castle functionary, was said to have returned looking “like a count” and was married to the daughter of the count of Chiny.Footnote 104 Early litigants coming to the English court of Chivalry in 1389, Richard Scrope and Robert Grosvenor, defended their claims to their coats of arms by calling witnesses who had seen those devices carried and worn on private, independent expeditions to various crusading frontiers:
The deponent [Nicholas Sebreham] also said, that in the assemblage from all Christian countries at the insistence of the king of Cyprus, when he meditated his expedition to Alexandria in ships and galleys, one Sir Stephen Scrope was present … he further said that he was armed in Prussia, in Hungary, at Constantinople … and at Nesebar.Footnote 105
It is critical to our understanding of crusading in the eastern Mediterranean that we acknowledge the role of the Latin East as a performance space for the western aristocracy. This represented, in the eyes of the military elite who supported the Latin East, a significant reason for holding these territories, and the eastern sojourn was a mechanism that they continued to employ as long as the frontier was available. In 1271, the Lord Edward of England (shortly afterwards Edward I) made his own sojourn in the East. As late as 1287, we find Alice, widowed countess of Blois constructing new defenses in the city of Acre during her own sojourn. When those defenses fell to the Mamluks only four years later in 1291 and the last Latin strongholds on the eastern Mediterranean shore were lost, Cyprus and the Latin principalities in Greece continued to host western visitors, who went there to hunt and attend tournaments and who praised their knights as some of the best in the world.Footnote 106 Still, the need for a fixed frontier meant that the fall of Acre precipitated the rise of Baltic seasonal campaigns or Reisen. Organized by the Teutonic knights, these campaigns offered visiting knights a package holiday. Visitors would be feasted at the table of honor (Ehrentisch) and included in the Order’s heraldic narratives and songs.Footnote 107 By the early fifteenth century, crusading history and imagery had become part of the elaborate pageantry of the Burgundian court and would feature centrally in the public theater carried by Spanish conquerors from Spain to Mexico City.Footnote 108
Re-orienting the study of the frontier and crusade expeditions around the acquisition of cultural capital by elites helps us to place these spaces more confidently within larger historical frameworks. Debates among crusade historians as to the colonial nature of the Levantine crusading enterprise have hinged on precisely the problem of the value and relationship of the economic dependence or value of the Frankish Levant to some nebulous European metropole. Alongside the value of the Holy Places to Christendom more generally, the regular itineraries of an international class of nobles and knights who were adherents of a universal chivalric code gave this space a meaning and function as a site of political and cultural performance: a theater of status within a theater of war.
The knightly metropole exploited the eastern frontier much like participants in the later Grand Tour — already usefully compared to an independent crusade expedition by Joachim Ehlers — cultivated the space to gain culturally important knowledge through a heavily scripted journey to points of shared significance.Footnote 109 Like later colonial elites of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries studied by John MacKenzie, their status and power closely corresponded with their exploitation of the natural world through the killing and collecting animals.Footnote 110
The value in comparing elite practices of the central Middle Ages to later periods, however, is not to help us to join the dots on a flattened historical landscape. Contrary to the desires of modern European colonial elites steeped in medievalism, the crusades were no practice-run for later European empires. The adoption of the frontier space of the Latin East as a stage for aristocratic performances is a testament to the importance of liminal spaces and cultural capital in the unceasing maintenance of status required by aristocracies of different kinds at different times. Here it was status, and not the state, that fueled the drive for conquest and domination in the lands across the sea.
