The Knight, the Cross, and the Song. Stefan Vander Elst
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makes it contiguous with the chivalric campaigns of the chansons de geste. William of Orange, Roland, Oliver, and the douzepeers are knights above all, their fight against the Saracens waged on horseback, with lance and sword. The Crusaders, the Gesta states from the very beginning, tread in the footsteps of Charlemagne: “Isti potentissimi milites et alii plures quos ignoro uenerunt per uiam quam iamdudum Karolus Magnus mirificus rex Franciae aptari fecit usque Constantinopolim” [GF 2: “These most valiant knights and many others (whose names I do not know) travelled by the road which Charlemagne, the heroic king of the Franks, had formerly caused to be built to Constantinople”].46 They do this literally as well as figuratively—they too are Christian knights on their way to fight the pagans. The battlefields of Roncesvalles and Antioch are separate in time and place, but those who walked upon them are very much alike.
The similarity between the heroes of the chansons and the First Crusaders is highlighted by a further act of identification. Not only are the Crusaders Christians who loyally serve God as well as knights who rule the battlefield, they are also Franks.47 As much as the Anonymous pluralizes the enemy, adding Azymites, Paulicians, Agulani, Kurds, and Persians to the ranks of the Turks and Arabs, so he reduces the Christians to a single ethnic denomination. The Anonymous hardly ever acknowledges the remarkable internationalism of the First Crusade, which brought together Flemings, Provençals, Normans, French, Germans, and Italians under common purpose.48 He acknowledges this multiethnicity only at the very beginning of the Gesta, in the context of the failed Popular Crusade, when “Petrus uero supradictus primus uenit Constantinopolim in kalendis Augusti et cum eo maxima gens Alamannorum. Illic inuenit Lombardos et Longobardos et alios plures congregatos” [GF 2: “The aforesaid Peter [the Hermit] was the first to reach Constantinople on 1 August, and many Germans came with him. There they found men from northern and southern Italy and many others gathered together”]. These Germans and Italians choose their own leaders at Nicomedia and march into Asia Minor; there they are decimated at Xerigordon and disappear from the pages of the Gesta and of history. These diverse commoners done away with, the chivalric armies that cross the Bosporus shortly afterward are referred to almost exclusively as Franci and, less frequently, Francigenae [lit. “of Frankish origin”].49 The use of this terminology to describe the ethnically very diverse second wave of Crusaders is remarkable. The Anonymous certainly knew in great detail the backgrounds of many of those he saw around him and must have known that most were not Franks or even had Frankish origins.50 He does not, as does Raymond of Aguilers, explain his use of nomenclature.51 The Anonymous most likely was not a Frank, and as far as we know he never allied himself to any lord who could justifiably be called Frankish, having served the Italian Norman Bohemond and the Provençal Raymond of Toulouse.
To call the Crusaders Franks was not a simple act of reducing the multitudes gathered under the banner of the cross to the dominant ethnic group, for the sake of convenience, to highlight their prominence among the Crusaders, or to hide discord between the many groups who were party to the Crusade enterprise.52 That the Anonymous abandoned the use of the more geographically definite term “Galli” by the beginning of book 2, where he also abandoned “Alemanni” and “Longobardi,” indicates that he was not interested in the primacy of the French as such. Rather, it was an act of identification of the Crusaders with the very Franks of whom the chansons de geste spoke. If Charlemagne’s Franks had built the road to Constantinople, the Anonymous’s Franks once again trod upon it on their way east. Like the Franks of the chansons, the Crusaders were Christian knights dedicated to and united in service, fighting their lord’s disparate pagan enemies to avenge the wrongs done to him and in defense of his earthly possessions. They were therefore the true heirs to these earlier Franks, and their story truly Gesta Francorum.53 Indeed, this identification of the Crusaders with Charlemagne’s Franks may be the true purpose of the work’s use of the conventions of the chansons de geste.
THE CHANSONS DE GESTE AND THE GESTA FRANCORUM
The Anonymous’s use of chanson de geste commonplaces in the Gesta Francorum is unremitting. Full of lexical, syntactic, and thematic echoes, the work recasts the Crusaders as the successors to the heroes of the chansons, fighting similar enemies, in a similar way, and for similar reasons. This, of course, immediately raises the question why the author of the Gesta would go to such lengths to bring to mind the West’s mostly imaginary ancestors when describing the deeds of the Crusaders in the East. The Anonymous may have had several reasons for this. To imagine the new Crusade enterprise as an extension of the wars of the chansons associated it with a fashionable genre increasingly popular with Western chivalry. On the most elementary level, this could make the Anonymous’s story of the Crusade more appealing; by putting it in line with contemporary narrative trends, the luster of the jongleurs’ works would be reflected on it. More important, however, was that it could undoubtedly also help boost the appeal of the still-novel concept of Crusade to a Western audience, and this at a crucial time. The conquest of Jerusalem did not mean the end of the need for Christian manpower in the Levant; rather, it increased it, as Crusaders returning home left the newly conquered areas dangerously exposed. It did, however, rob the Crusade movement of an important teleology. If God had wanted the liberation of the Holy Places, what could serve as a rallying cry now that it had been accomplished? To describe, as the Anonymous did, the First Crusaders as new Franks, and the Crusade as a continuation of the (supposed) earlier wars of the Franks against their Saracen opponents, was to imagine this new movement as part of a long list of confrontations within a far older, ongoing conflict between Christians and the non-Christian others on their borders. If the First Crusade had as its goal Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, this war of “Frank” against “Saracen” was essentially unending.
The continuing wars in the new Crusader states therefore gave the audience of the chansons a chance to take their place in (imagined) history and emulate Charlemagne, the douzepeers, or William of Orange on the shores of Palestine. Morris has suggested that the Anonymous aimed his work especially at an Italian audience, for whom it would have been easy to understand Latin.54 However, the fact that the Anonymous chose to write the work in Latin may indicate that he imagined a wider audience for the work—wherever Latin was understood, wherever the tale of the First Crusade could be told, and wherever new Crusaders could be recruited. That Bohemond of Taranto chose to distribute copies of the Gesta far and wide during his European recruitment campaign of 1104–1106 shows that he considered it useful far outside Italy.
Turning the First Crusade into a chanson de geste of new Franks, however, did more than offer Western chivalry a reason to continue the war against the Saracen beyond the conquest of Jerusalem. Perhaps more important, it allowed the Western Christians to explain and justify their ownership of the newly subjugated lands, especially of those tracts that were not traditionally understood to be part of the inheritance of Christ. The Gesta intriguingly discusses the ownership of the land the Christians conquer on their way to Jerusalem. From the moment of their arrival at Constantinople, the First Crusaders were famously compelled to sign an oath of fealty to the Byzantine emperor, in which they swore to surrender any lands conquered to his control. Some echoes of this oath—emphatically decried in the Gesta55—are found in the beginning of the work, such as when the knight Peter of Aups swears to hold a city “in fidelitate Dei et Sancti Sepulchri, et seniorum atque imperatoris” [GF 26: “in fealty to God and the Holy Sepulchre, and to our leaders and the emperor”].56 However, the primacy of others here, to whom the emperor is but an after-thought, already heralds a significant shift to come. At Antioch, the Crusaders themselves are firmly established as the rightful owners of the newly occupied regions. This is done in perhaps the most chansonlike passage of the Gesta—the remarkable speech Kerbogha’s mother addresses to her son. Having arrived at his camp before Antioch, his mother admonishes Kerbogha regarding the folly of attempting battle with the Christians trapped within its walls. Speaking of the Crusaders, she says:
Hoc autem, karissime, in rei ueritate scias, quoniam isti Christiani filii Christi uocati sunt; et prophetarum ore filii adoptionis et promissionis, et secundum apostolum heredes Christi sunt, quibus Christus hereditates repromissas iam donauit, dicendo per prophetas: “A solis ortu usque ad occasum erunt termini uestri, et nemo stabit contra uos.” Et quis potest