in its composition. Since Richard and Philip travelled by sea, they were able to exclude many of the popular elements, while Frederick Barbarossa imposed strict regulations to ensure that participants were adequately financed and well equipped. This all meant that, compared to the masses who had left the West a century before, the Third Crusade contained a higher proportion of lords, knights and other fighting men and their ancillaries, such as grooms. This factor undoubtedly contributed to the phenomenon that national and regional differences during the campaign in Palestine found expression not in terms of language, but of allegiance to the royal commanders. Most of the German expedition returned home after the death of Barbarossa, and the minority who remained in the East were left leaderless after his son Frederick of Swabia succumbed to disease; these Germans played a fairly modest role, as did the small contingents of Danes and Frisians.53 Richard’s followers originated from all of the Angevin domains and satellites: England, Normandy, Anjou, Poitou and Brittany; in the sources they tend to be described as ‘English and Normans’ or simply ‘Normans’, and are thus distinguished from the ‘French’ ( Franci), who were subjects of King Philip.54 So while the great majority of crusaders spoke French, the main loyalty of most of them was to one or other of the two kings.
Had he survived to reach the Holy Land, the status of Frederick Barbarossa as Holy Roman Emperor might well have given him a pre-eminent position in the direction of the crusade, but as events turned out the entire campaign was bedevilled by opposition between the kings of France and England, heirs to a long-standing rivalry over control of the Angevin domains on the continent.
Philip arrived in Palestine before Richard, and for some time was accorded considerable authority by the Franks of Outremer and crusaders alike, but his pretensions to leadership were soon eclipsed by the dynamism and superior financial resources of the Lionheart.55 The fault lines between the Angevin and the Capetian monarchies rapidly extended to take in the Italian maritime states as well as the two rival claimants to the throne of Jerusalem, with Richard and the crusaders from Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, England and Pisa supporting the Poitevin king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, and Philip, the French and Genoa supporting Guy’s Lombard rival, Conrad of Montferrat. This binary division hampered a combined effort, and even led to open warfare between members of the two factions at Acre in 1192.56
The return of Philip to France in mid-campaign, leaving the French crusaders under the command of Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, meant that Richard exercised undisputed leadership. Yet even though he was careful to try to associate Hugh and other French leaders in decision-making, and provided them with considerable financial support after most of their own funds ran out, the rivalries persisted, exacerbated by the continuing machinations of Conrad and his attempt 121
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to bolster his ambitions by marrying Isabella, the heiress to the kingdom of Jerusalem. The withdrawal of the French from the crusade forces at Jaffa and Ascalon during the advance south led to understandable resentment on the part of Richard’s forces, who took the French to task for giving themselves up to excess in taverns and brothels while more sober and upright crusaders attended to their duties. The murder of Conrad of Montferrat eventually allowed a resolution of the conflict over the throne of Jerusalem by the election of Henry, Count of Champagne, who as a nephew of both Richard and Philip was acceptable to both sides and thus regarded suitable as a husband for Isabella of Jerusalem.
Nevertheless, the fractious nature of the entire campaign had done little for the papal idea that the kings of the West should set aside their differences and fight together for the common good of Christendom. The English author of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi criticised the Franci (French) for their laziness, fickleness and arrogance, contrasting them unfavourably with the Franci (Franks) of Charlemagne, who had won victories over Saracens and pagans in Spain, Saxony and Calabria.57
Epilogue: the First Crusade and national histories
The failure of the Third Crusade to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control did nothing to dampen enthusiasm for crusading; if anything, it spurred Christendom on to greater efforts, and the thirteenth century would see just as many crusades as the twelfth. Failure also concentrated the minds of contemporaries.
Contemplating the stalemate in Palestine in 1192, our English author mused about how his contemporaries compared with those who had brought the First Crusade to a successful conclusion:
These were not like the pilgrims who were once on the expedition to
Antioch, which our people powerfully captured in a famous victory
which is still related in the deeds of Bohemund and Tancred and Godfrey de Bouillon and the other most outstanding crusading chiefs, who
triumphed in so many glorious victories, whose feats even now are like food in the mouth of the narrator.58
The undoubted triumph of the First Crusade, set against the failures of subsequent ages, meant that it gained the greatest attention in both Latin and vernacular history writing on the crusades throughout the Middle Ages. It also provided a vehicle for interpretations which sought to glorify particular nationalities or regions at the expense of others.
This had already begun to happen within a decade or two of the capture of Jerusalem. We have already seen how Ralph of Caen denigrates the Provençals, even singling some of them out for criticism for apostacy.59 His main concern, however, is to glorify the Norman race, above all his heroes Tancred and Bohemund, both of whom he associates with Normandy, rather than with 122
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southern Italy.60 He even ascribes the victory of Baldwin of Boulogne over Tancred at Tarsus to the former’s use of Norman troops!61
By contrast, the hero of the German writer Albert of Aachen was Godfrey of Bouillon. In many ways his task was easier than Ralph’s. Godfrey had a reputation for courage and piety, and the fact that it was his troops who made the breach into Jerusalem, coupled with his election as the city’s ruler, made him the hero of the crusade par excellence for later generations. However, as Lord of Bouillon and Count of Verdun, Godfrey belonged to the western, French-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire, and so Albert of Aachen tries to give him a more unambiguously German identity by stressing his status as Duke of Lower Lotharingia and employing rhetorical formulations to give the impression of a substantial German participation in the crusade. Thus, while Albert names few prominent individual Germans (despite his liking for muster-rolls), he tends to associate Godfrey with lists of the different German tribes, as, for example, at Antioch, where he describes Godfrey being accompanied by ‘countless thousands of Lotharingians, Saxons, Swabians and Bavarians’, or later characterises him as ‘Duke Godfrey with the Swabians, Bavarians, Saxons, Lotharingians, Germans and Romans’.62 It is perhaps no coincidence that Albert and Ralph show such a great national bias in their writing, in that they were trying to glorify peoples who formed minorities within the hosts of the First Crusade. The semantic ambiguities of the word Franci as applied to the crusaders in general meant that most audiences and readerships would understand it as a French enterprise.
Yet it was not in the form of such primary Latin narratives that most people heard or read about the First Crusade in subsequent centuries, and sources beloved by modern historians for their unadorned immediacy, like the Gesta Francorum, or for the extent of their detail, like the history of Albert of Aachen, had a relatively poor circulation in comparison with other works and genres. The most popular forms were secondary in the sense that they comprised reworkings, continuations or translations of the primary accounts. Two of them stand out above all others. The first was the chronicle of William of Tyre. However, this was far less popular in its original, Latin form than in its Old French translation, usually with a continuation taking its narrative into the thirteenth century. The other was the Historia Iherosolymitana of Robert of Rheims, which the monk explicitly wrote in order
to provide a more elegant and detailed account than that of the anonymous Gesta Francorum. The narratives of William and Robert were also significant sources for what we might describe as tertiary accounts: that is, cases where information on the crusades was incorporated into other universal histories, family chronicles or other compilations. The translations of William of Tyre’s chronicle were naturally popular wherever French was spoken and formed the main source for the crusades in several sumptuous world history rolls commissioned for French courts in the fifteenth century.63 Robert the Monk’s history was extremely popular in Germany, having four different German translations, including two printed editions.64
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The various secondary and tertiary accounts offered many opportunities to give a more nationalistic or regional slant to the history of the crusades, especially by being selective or giving emphasis to particular elements that their authors found in their source materials. Even the addition of titles could give a quite different perspective. The earliest German translation of Robert the Monk’s history identifies the work in its opening line as dealing with ‘the expedition of Duke Godfrey of Bouillon’, implying – quite incorrectly – that the history was devoted to the duke.65 The later of the two printed editions goes even further, with a title that sets out how Duke Godfrey ‘fought against the Turks and heathens and won the Holy Sepulchre’.66 The point of this focus on Godfrey is that to a German readership he was clearly regarded as a German hero. Illustrations also offered considerable scope for reinterpretation, especially through the use of heraldic devices to identify individual crusaders. A manuscript of the Middle Dutch Spiegel Historiael by Jacob van Maerlant produced in fourteenth-century Flanders contains three miniatures illustrating key events at the sieges of Antioch and Jerusalem.67 They accord an especially prominent position to Count Robert II of Flanders, who is identified by his heraldic device of or a lion rampant sable (a black lion on a gold field) alongside Godfrey of Bouillon. Even though Robert is recorded as having played a fairly passive role in the crusade by most of the contemporaneous accounts, this manuscript glorifies the Flemish contribution to the crusade by elevating him to a position where he is on a par with Godfrey, by this time universally recognised as the greatest hero of the campaign.68
As accurate historical knowledge of the First Crusade declined and names of crusaders became garbled and corrupted in transmission, some reinterpretations became even more daring. Thus, in the early sixteenth century, the German poet Dietrich von der Werder produced an account of the crusade that was based in turn on the highly literary account in Italian by Torquato Tasso. Dietrich found no problem in claiming the crusader Baldwin of Bourcq, later King of Jerusalem, as a German who had originated in Burg in Westphalia.69 The most breathtaking shift of identities in a national and regional interest, however, occurs in the family chronicle compiled by Count Froben Christoph of Zimmern that was completed in 1566.70 The chronicle contains a long list of numerous German crusaders who supposedly joined the popular crusades of 1096, were defeated by the Seljuks at the massacre of Xerigordo, and whose survivors eventually joined up with Godfrey of Bouillon. These German names were accepted as genuine by numerous historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; since so many of them belonged to noblemen, they were also advanced as proof that the so-called People’s Crusades were less popular in composition than had previously been believed. Almost all of the names, however, were pure invention, the majority of them chosen because they could be claimed as Swabians from Froben Christoph’s homeland in southern Germany. The putative leader of the Germans, one Walther, Duke of Teck, actually derives from the historical figure of Walter Sans-Avoir, who is described by Robert the Monk and other contemporaneous sources as originating from the Paris region and having led one of the popular expeditions.
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The chronicle of Zimmern simply takes this Frenchman and disguises him as a German.71 The reason why the Count of Zimmern and other authors were so determined to glorify their nationalities was that as the advance of Ottoman Turks proceeded through Europe, the successes of the First Crusade seemed more important than ever, and it was vital for their nations to claim their place in it.
The crusades were events that threw together people from all classes of society and all regions of Christendom in a manner which rarely occurred in the lives of the great majority. It would be scarcely surprising if differences of nationality or language should come to the fore, particularly in circumstances of adversity.
Beneath the surface of several of the primary accounts of the First Crusade we can find cases of solidarity and antipathy based on national or linguistic identity, which also fed into loyalties accorded to leaders and to the disputes that in which they became involved. In the course of the twelfth century issues of national identity remained important, although, as the broad mass of the population tended to be increasingly excluded from participation in favour of the military classes, linguistic identity became less significant as a marker of difference than allegiance to particular monarchies, which were also forming the main foci of national identity in later medieval Europe. Growing national sentiments also meant that authors reinterpreted and rewrote older narratives, so that accounts of the early crusades written in the later Middle Ages and the early modern period often show much more nationalistic interpretations than their exemplars.
Notes
1 This chapter was written while I was a guest researcher at Southern Denmark University, Odense. I am grateful to the Nordic Centre for Medieval Studies for financial support and to Dr Kurt Villads Jensen and Karen Fog Rasmussen for facilitating my stay.
2 FC 202–3: ‘Sed quis unquam audivit tot tribus linguae in uno exercitu, cum ibi adessent Franci, Flandri, Frisi, Galli, Allobroges, Lotharingi, Alemanni, Baioarii, Normanni, Angli, Scoti, Aquitani, Itali, Daci, Apuli, Iberi, Britones, Graeci, Armeni?
Quod si vellet me aliquis Britannus vel Teutonicus interrogare, neutro respondere sapere possem. sed qui linguis diversi eramus, tamquam fratres sub dilectione Dei et proximi unanimes esse videbamur.’ Except in cases where English translations of medieval sources are explicitly referenced, all translations cited in the text are by the author.
3 Sigebert of Gembloux, ‘Chronica’, L.C. Bethmann (ed.), in MGH SS 6, p. 367; Henry of Huntingdon, Henrici archidiaconi Huntendunensis Historia Anglorum, Thomas Arnold (ed.), Rolls Series 74, London: Longman, 1879, p. 220; EA 138. On the idea of divine direction, see especially Antonius Hendrikus van Erp, Gesta Francorum, gesta Dei? Motivering en rechtvaardiging van de eerste kruistochten door tijdgenoten en moslimse reactie, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982.
4 GN II.1: ‘Audivi . . . dum cum archidiacono quodam Magontino super sua ipsorum rebellione congrederer, quod regem nostrum cum populo in tantum vilipenderit, ob hoc solum quia dominum papam Paschalem cum suis principibus grate ubique susceperit, ut eos non modo Francos, sed irrisorie Francones vocaverit. Cui inquam:
“Si ita eos inertes arbitraris et marcidos, ut celeberrimum usque in Oceanum Indicum nomen, foede garriendo detorqueas, dic mihi ad quos papa Urbanus contra Turcos 125
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praesidia contracturus divertit? nonne ad Francos? His nisi praeissent et barbariem undecumque confluentium gentium vivaci industria et impavidis viribus constrinxissent, Teutonicorum vestrorum, quorum ne nomen quidem ibi sonuit, auxilia nulla fuissent”.’
5 William of Malmesbury, De Gestis regum Anglorum libri quinque, William Stubbs (ed.), Rolls Series 90, 2, London: Longman, 1887–9, II.399: ‘Tunc Walensis venationem saltuum, tunc Scotus familiaritatem pulicum, tunc Danus continuationem potuum, tunc Noricus cruditatem reliquit piscium.’
6 Robert-Henri Bawtier, ‘La collection de chartes de croisades dite Collection Courtois’, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres: Comptes rendus des Séances 1956, 382–6; Robert-Henri Bautier, ‘Forgeries et falsificati
ons de documents par une officine généalogique au milieu du XIX siècle’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 132, 1974, 75–93.
7 The range of published literature on this subject is vast. See, in particular, John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982, and, for an especially broad but highly nuanced treatment of ideas of nations and national identity over several historical eras, A.D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1986; The Antiquity of Nations, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004; and ‘National Identities: Modern and Medieval?’, in Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson and A.V. Murray (eds), Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, Leeds: School of English, University of Leeds, 1995, pp. 21–46. Several of the essays in the last volume (especially Smith’s) serve as an important corrective to the ideas of the highly influential work of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2nd edn), London: Verso, 1991
[1986], who has argued that nations as political communities were unthinkable in the Middle Ages (see esp. pp. 9–25).
8 Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (2nd edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997 [1984], pp. 250–6.
9 Regino of Prüm, Chronicon, MGH SS, rer. Germ. in usum scholarum, 50, p. xx: ‘nec non et illud sciendum, quod, sicut diversae nationes populorum inter se discrepatant genere moribus lingua legibus, ita sancta universalis aecclesia toto orbe terrarum diffusa, quamvis in unitate fidei coniungatur, tamen consuetudinibus aecclesiasticis ab invicem differt’.
10 Reinhard Wenskus, Stammesbildung und Verfassung: Das Werden der frühmittelalterlichen Gentes (2nd edn), Köln: Böhlau, 1977 [1961]; Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl (eds), Typen der Ethnogenese unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bayern, 2, Wien: Verl. d. Österr. Akad. d. Wiss., 1990; Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
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