The Knight, the Cross, and the Song. Stefan Vander Elst
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54: Beloved, know also the truth of this, that those Christians are called “sons of Christ” and, by the mouth of the prophets, “sons of adoption and promise” and the apostle says that they are “heirs of Christ,” to whom Christ has even now given the promised inheritance, saying by the prophets, “From the rising of the sun to the going down thereof shall be your bounds, and no man shall stand against you.” Who can contradict these words or resist them?]
The wording of the passage establishes the Crusaders as the rightful and irresistible owners of the land, which Christ himself has given to them to keep as their own. The emperor, whose troops—as the Anonymous is at pains to remind his audience57—abandoned the Crusaders at Antioch, is all but forgotten; the Crusaders will be beholden to nobody in establishing their dominion in the East.58
Intriguingly, the use of the conventions of the chansons de geste and the concomitant identification of the Crusaders with the Franks of legend support this emancipation of the Crusader host from the shadow of the emperor and their claim to the ownership of the land. From the very beginning of the work, which shows the Crusaders on the road to Constantinople that Charlemagne built, the audience is reminded of the extent of the Frankish king’s lands, which, in memory and imagination, came to include most of the known world, as well as Constantinople and the Near East.59 Before the emperor’s oath of fealty is even brought up, the Anonymous calls attention to the fact that the empire and all the lands the Crusaders are about to conquer were once subject to the king of the Franks. The continuous identification of the Crusaders with the Franks that had once supposedly ruled the Levant therefore gives them a right of ownership certainly as valid or even more so than that of the emperor, whose claim to the lands the Crusaders conquered was also based on previous tenure. If the Crusaders are the heirs of Christ, and are given the land by him to rule, they in a more secular legal sense can also claim it as new Franks, the heirs of Charlemagne, its erstwhile overlord. The Eastern emperor’s rights are therefore nullified, superseded by his empire’s ancient subjection to the Franks, and the Byzantines reduced to upstart interlopers at best or traitors at worst; indeed, it is as the latter that they are consistently represented in the Gesta.60 Therefore, when Kerbogha approaches Antioch, the Crusade leaders send out emissaries to him not just to discuss the details of the upcoming battle but also to indignantly ask why he had intruded upon Christian land and had attacked its population:
Porro statuerunt omnes maiores nostri concilium, quatinus nuntium mitterent ad inimicos Christi Turcos, qui per aliquem interpretem interrogaret eos secure eloquio dicens quamobrem superbissime in Christianorum introissent terram, et cur castrametati sint, et quare Christi seruos occidant et conquassent. Cumque iam finis esset dictis, inuenerunt quosdam uiros, Petrum scilicet Heremitam et Herluinum, illisque dixerunt haec omnia: “Ite ad execratum Turcorum exercitum, et diligenter narrate eis haec omnia, interrogantes eos, cur audacter et superbissime introierint terram Christianorum et nostram.”
[GF 65–66: All our leaders forthwith held a council and arranged to send a messenger to Christ’s enemies the Turks, so that he might question them through an interpreter, asking confidently why they had been so vainglorious as to enter into the Christians’ land and encamp there, and why they were killing and bullying the servants of Christ. When they had ended their council they found certain men, Peter the Hermit and Herluin, and said to them, “Go to the accursed army of the Turks and give them this whole message in full, asking them why they have been so rash and vainglorious as to enter the land which belongs to the Christians and to us.”]
There is no dispute about to whom the newly conquered territories truly belong: the Crusaders are not invaders but the rightful owners of the land, and Kerbogha’s army is not a relief force but reduced to a band of trespassers. The Gesta shows the Crusaders to have a double claim to their conquests: as heirs to Christ, they have a religious and eschatological claim,61 while as heirs to Charlemagne and the Franks they have a secular and historical one.62
Disregarding possible aesthetic benefits, the use of the conventions of the chanson de geste in the Gesta helps to establish the legitimacy of the Crusaders’ possession of the new Crusader states as well as to motivate others to join in their defense. At the heart of this intention, and consequently at the heart of the Gesta, lie nothing less than the needs of emerging frontier communities that, the hard work of conquest done, now need to turn to the harder work of maintaining political and territorial integrity. No mean feat, and the Anonymous clearly thought it required whatever enthusiasm could be mustered. He therefore complements the religious underpinnings of Crusade with a secular rationale: alongside the simple lay devotion that permeates the work, and that finds its culmination in a religious version of the compact of mutual obligation between lord and vassal that sees the Crusaders as God’s warriors, the Anonymous introduces historical concerns and literary representations to motivate the wars in the East. The Crusaders therefore are the heirs of Christ but also heirs of Charlemagne; the Saracens are the enemies of God but also the historical, implacable enemies of the Franks, new or old; and Byzantium is no Christian ally but rather a treacherous Ganelon. Both religious and secular interests are expressed through the chivalric ethos around which the chansons were built: prowess, loyalty, reward, revenge.
Recent study of the Gesta has shown Steven Runciman’s belief that its author was “a simple soldier, honest according to his lights but credulous and prejudiced” to have underestimated him.63 The sophisticated Latin of the Gesta and the learning the Anonymous included in its pages reveal him to have been a refined author who approached his work with thoughtfulness and purpose; his understanding of chanson commonplaces reveals his sensitivity to the particulars of vernacular culture.64 The teleology of the Gesta furthermore shows its author to have been a man who looked forward as well as back. Completing his work after the Battle of Ascalon,65 with the help of material he had written previously, he exhibits a subtle understanding of the need to politically and legally establish—as well as to safeguard militarily—the emerging Crusader states, centrally among which, of course, was that of his erstwhile lord, Bohemond of Taranto. The Gesta never was, nor was meant to be, a simple war diary. Rather, it was an explanation of and tool for nation building designed to appeal to as broad a swath of Western fervor as possible, most especially among knights, written in a language that facilitated wide distribution. In the way it reflects the concerns of the emerging Crusader states, it is perhaps best understood as “settler writing”—in its own way on a par with other great foundational epics.66
It is also within this framework of settler writings, of an appeal from the East to the West for political recognition and military support, that the Gesta’s diffusion and popularity must be seen. Bohemond of Taranto is known to have taken the work with him when he set out on his recruiting tour of Europe in late 1104. This was not simply because the Gesta narrated the remarkable deeds of the Crusaders, Bohemond’s prominent among them—these most likely had already been related by those returning from the East, and were recounted time and again by the man himself.67 Indeed, the Gesta’s great benefit to the cause of Bohemond, as well as to the other states, was that it integrated the details of the campaign and the heroism of the First Crusaders into a narrative framework that drew upon both the secular and the religious concerns of the Western fighting classes. If the Crusade had been at heart a religious affair, the Anonymous realized that the survival of Outremer required any and all support it could get—from those wanting heavenly as well as earthly rewards, settlers, penitents, and culture warriors. In depicting this new Christian frontier as the place where all motivations could and had to exist side by side, the Gesta introduces a pragmatic note at the very beginning of the Crusade enterprise. It was this practical understanding of political and military realities, rather than its recounting of the events of 1096–1099 or its glorification of his actions, that made the Gesta valuable to the prince of Antioch, who by the time of his return to Europe was conscious of the fact that the pursuit of his ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean required more manpower and resources than could be provided by repentant sinners alone.68
CHAPTER 3
Robert of Reims’s Historia Iherosolimitana
Bohemond