The Knight, the Cross, and the Song. Stefan Vander Elst
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relentlessly sought to expand his territory, were not very successful. In 1101, Bohemond set out with a small force in support of a local ally threatened by the Danishmend Turks, the Armenian Gabriel of Melitene, and was badly defeated and captured before even reaching Gabriel’s town. Although this left his principality in the capable hands of his nephew Tancred, Bohemond remained a prisoner of the Danishmend emir for three years. His plans were once again foiled shortly after his release, when an eastward advance was checked at the Battle of Harran on 7 May 1104. These defeats put a heavy strain on his already limited resources, and increased pressure from the Byzantines, against whom Bohemond stood in defiance of the oath he had sworn in 1097, convinced him to launch an appeal for aid to the West. In this he was remarkably effective; from his arrival at Bari in 1105 to his return to the East two years later, he was feted at courts throughout Europe and everywhere drew recruits to his cause. Such was his appeal that he was granted the hand in marriage of Constance, the daughter of the French king Philip I, in 1106, and was refused entry into England by Henry I lest too many members of the English nobility join him.
By 1107 Bohemond had a substantial army under his command; nevertheless his invasion of Byzantine Illyria foundered, and in 1108 he was forced to sign the Treaty of Devol, in which he subjected himself and his Eastern territories to the authority of the emperor. Thus Bohemond, during the decade after the First Crusade, experienced a remarkable combination of diplomatic victory and military defeat, of success in rallying the Western nobility to his cause and failure to turn this success into lasting political advantage. Although his fame as one of the First Crusaders undoubtedly contributed to his appeal, it is also clear that he was very careful to address all concerns in his drive to whip up Western support. His acceptance in 1105 of the vexillum Sancti Petri from the hands of Pope Paschal II clothed the upcoming campaign in the guise of holy war if not Crusade. Conversely, Orderic Vitalis also has Bohemond describe to his audience the riches that could be won in the East.1 It is within this approach to recruitment that we must see Bohemond’s introduction of the Gesta Francorum into Western Europe.
Bohemond’s journey to Europe, and the transmission of the Gesta from East to West, also resulted in the production of new histories that drew on the Anonymous’s work in the years after 1105. Robert, a monk of Reims, composed his Historia Iherosolimitana around 1106–1107, a work that was soon followed by the Historia Ierosolimitana of Baldric of Bourgueil, the archbishop of Dol (ca. 1107–1108), and the Gesta Dei per Francos of the abbot Guibert of Nogent-sous-Coucy (ca. 1108–1109).2 The reliance of these works on the Gesta has led many to see them as created to support Bohemond’s recruitment effort.3 The dating of the works roughly between Bohemond’s arrival in France and his humiliation at Devol, their generally sympathetic approach to the prince of Antioch and correspondingly hostile view of his Byzantine adversaries, and the relationship of the authors to the court of France to which Bohemond associated himself through Constance in 1106 add further support for this view.4 A closer look at the most important and certainly the most popular of these, the work of Robert of Reims, or Robert the Monk, shows that not only the purpose of the text but also its use of secular literary material to promote Crusade echo the Gesta.5
Little more is known about the author of the Historia Iherosolimitana than about the anonymous author of its source text. In the sermo apologeticus attached to the work, he indicates that his name was Robert, that he was a monk at the monastery of St. Rémi in the Bishopric of Reims, and that he felt compelled to write his work “per obedientiam” [HI 3; HFC 75: “by my vow of obedience”] to an abbot, Bernard. It has been suggested that he was the Robert who was briefly abbot of St. Rémi at the end of the eleventh century, who was excommunicated in 1097 and only reinstated through the help of Baldric of Bourgueil and Bishop Lambert of Arras in 1100, and who then was prior of Sénuc until his death in 1122. This, however, would render it rather unlikely that he wrote the work because of a vow of obedience to an abbot.6 Beyond this, evidence of the identity of Robert of Reims is scarce.7 Even what little we know, however, suggests that Robert wrote from a position that was almost the polar opposite of that of the Anonymous, and the Historia shows that this informed how he approached his task of reworking the Gesta. If the Anonymous was a southern Italian fighting man who took part in the Crusade with people who intended to settle in the newly conquered territories, Robert was a northern French cleric who most likely never set foot in the East, and whose approach to the holy war was informed by a strong sense of French exceptionalism.
Although Robert uses the Gesta extensively in his own work, he makes it clear that he considered his source defective. Above all he thought it incomplete and artistically clumsy; his abbot, he says, had requested that he rework it because “ei admodum displicebat, partim quia initium suum, quod in Clari Montis concilio constitutum fuit, non habebat, partim quia series tam pulcre materiei inculta iacebat, et litteralium compositio dictionum inculta vacillabat” [HI 3; HFC 75: “he was not happy with it: partly because it did not include the beginning [of the Crusade] which was launched at the Council of Clermont; partly because it did not make the best of the sequence of wonderful events it contained and the composition was uncertain and unsophisticated in its style and expression”].8 To counter the Gesta’s “uncertainness and unsophistication” Robert rewrote the work in an unadorned and heavily paratactic prose that emphasized clarity over erudition, and that he himself admits was likely to irritate the better educated because of its plainness.9 Beyond the form, the content also needed revision, and it is here that Robert’s greatest innovation may be found. He, as well as Baldric of Bourgueil and Guibert of Nogent, the other clerics to rework the Gesta in the decade after the conquest of Jerusalem, introduced a theological framework. Recasting the Crusade in a spiritual light, he identifies scriptural parallels and typological precursors to the events of 1096–1099, placing them within universal Christian history and thereby giving spiritual meaning to the recent past. Thus with the Historia “the crusading idea … passed back into the province of theologians,” a reorientation that has been thought to be the most important aspect of Robert’s work.10 However, for all the attention that this introduction of a theological context to the Gesta has received, what is often forgotten is that Robert increased the use of chanson de geste commonplaces compared with his source text. This has most often been dismissed as a fallacy of the text or its narrator, and where it has been recognized as intentional it has been rejected as meaningless. Robert’s most recent translator, Carol Sweetenham, after describing some of the chanson de geste characteristics of the Historia, argues that these were meant only to bring color to the work, and that “they prove nothing more than that Robert knew and echoed chansons de geste in his work.”11
This dismissive attitude is unwarranted. If we accept that Robert’s introduction of a theological framework was intended to influence his audience’s understanding of the Crusade, then we must do so for his extensive use of the chansons as well. Robert’s status as a clergyman makes it is easy to assume that his use of scripture was important, and his use of other writings spurious, but we must not forget that he was, after all, trying to sell a war to a wide audience, not merely interpreting the events of the previous decade in a way that would appeal to his fellow monks. Rather, both the new theological framework of the Crusade and the use of secular literary conventions are integral to Robert’s message, because both are used to confer upon his audience a special status as divinely and historically chosen, the very basis for his exhortation to Crusade.
One of the reasons Robert says his abbot picked him to rework the Gesta was that he was present at the Council of Clermont, and was therefore able to fill an important lacuna in the Anonymous’s work. Robert is one of a very few chroniclers to have reported on Urban II’s speech, and much of our understanding of the events that set the First Crusade in motion therefore relies on his rendition of the pope’s words. It is, however, unlikely that his recollection, put into words more than ten years after the fact, is entirely accurate, and indeed it differs markedly from versions related by other eyewitnesses, in length as well as detail, which might be fairly termed excessive. It is therefore likely that Robert’s memory of the event was rather creative—especially because in Urban’s great speech Robert already outlines the reasons for and obligation to Crusade that he will expand upon