The Knight, the Cross, and the Song. Stefan Vander Elst

von Jeroschin. The Chronicle of Prussia by Nicolaus von Jeroschin: A History of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia, 1190–1331. Trans. and ed. Mary Fischer. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. PA Guillaume de Machaut. La Prise d’Alixandre. Trans. and ed. R. Barton Palmer. New York: Routledge, 2002. S Saladin.

      A NOTE ON NAMES

      Throughout this book, I have Anglicized geographical cognomina, except where the original is commonly used in historical and literary criticism. I will therefore refer to, for example, Robert of Reims and Graindor of Douai, but to Chrétien de Troyes and Guillaume de Machaut.

      The Knight, the Cross, and the Song

      Introduction

      Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English polemicist John Gower turned his attention to the Crusade, which was approaching its three-hundredth anniversary. Although he was not altogether opposed to the holy war,¹ Gower argued that in his day the practice of crusading had fallen into disrepute because its supporters and participants no longer had the right motivations. The prelates who urged their flock to take the cross, he said, often merely sought to further their own worldly goals.² Furthermore, those who took up arms against the unbeliever were rarely driven by noble aspirations. In the Mirour de l’Omme of ca. 1376–1379, Gower enumerated the reasons for which his contemporaries set out on Crusade, two of which he found especially reprehensible:

      The first is (so to speak) pride in one’s own prowess—“I will go in order to win praise.” Or also, “It is for my beloved, so that I may have her affection—for this I will work.”… If you will work in pride for worldly vainglory, whereby you may be superior to the others, then you must give your garments and your wealth to the heralds, so that they may proclaim with great clamor your valor and largess.… On the other hand, if it be that you go over the sea because of a woman of whom your heart is enamored, hoping that on your return the girl or lady for whom you have labored may deign to have pity on you, then you are lacking the right medicine.³

      Rather than to serve God, which alone made Crusade worthwhile by Gower’s standards, his contemporaries were fighting out of a desire for worldly renown or to win the favor of women. Although Gower may not have liked it, the first of these motivations is perhaps not surprising. He specifically talks about the chivalric class, the knights who for many years had carried most of the burden of crusading, and as early as the eleventh century chivalry had found common ground between the desire to achieve glory through deeds of prowess and the wish to serve God.⁴ The Crusaders of Gower’s time certainly were not the first to set out hoping to save their souls and win renown in the process, or vice versa. The second of Gower’s concerns, however, was less evident in military history. To brave faraway dangers to win the love of a lady demonstrates another kind of idealism, one whereby service to God is complemented or even replaced by the service to women; it is to be expected from the heroes of chivalric romance—a Lancelot or a Tristan—but not of those risking life, limb, and fortune to fight the pagan on the frontiers of Christendom. If we believe Gower, then some of the Crusaders of the later Middle Ages were guided by motives reminiscent of imaginative literature.⁵

      An important body of Crusade scholarship has examined what motivated those who first left to fight for the cross. Although some have proposed socioeconomic and political motivations,⁶ more recent work has highlighted the role of lay piety in the decision to participate in Crusade.⁷ Scholars such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus Bull have argued that individual devotion, often grounded in local religious practice, was what propelled those who set out for the frontiers of Christianity.⁸ Turning from the motivations of individual participants to the arguments used to convince them to take the cross, Bull has also emphasized the preeminence of piety in the call to Crusade. He has claimed that, although some Crusaders may also have been motivated by other factors, such as patriotic pride, the desire for personal glory, and family honor, these issues were never part of the Crusade appeal itself: “Patriotic and militaristic enthusiasms might have influenced the way in which an arms-bearer interpreted the crusade appeal: they cannot adequately explain why he should have been thinking about it in the first place. At the heart of the crusade message lay an appeal to piety.”⁹ Although individual piety undoubtedly played an important role, the critical preoccupation with religious motivations has obscured crucial aspects of Crusade propaganda, which exhibits far more breadth and complexity. This book examines how, from the very beginning of the Crusade in the last years of the eleventh century, historiographical works that propagated the holy war appropriated the formal and thematic characteristics of chivalric literary genres to appeal specifically to aristocratic interests that ranged beyond religious devotion. These genres—the chanson de geste and chivalric romance—were popular with the fighting class that was most often called upon to participate in the Crusade, and throughout their history they served to bring issues important to this class into public consciousness. By using the commonplaces of chivalric literature to shape their writings, the lay and clerical Crusade propagandists discussed in this book actively sought to associate the holy war with other, more secular matters to which arms bearers were drawn—from the loyalty and mutual obligation between lord and vassal, to family honor, the thirst for adventure, and the desire for women—and to invoke these as parallel or complementary motivations for participating in the Crusade. As the following chapters explore, exactly how they utilized the characteristics of chivalric literature depended on the religious, sociopolitical, and military concerns they addressed with their works, whether the precarious position of the Christian principalities in the Levant, the ambitions of powerful men, or the need for recruits in an era of Christian defeat and disillusionment.

      Ever since Louis Bréhier wrote, more than a century ago, that “dans la Chanson de Roland … apparaît l’idée de la guerre sainte contre l’Islam,”¹⁰ scholars have argued that chivalric literature could propagate interreligious conflict in the Middle Ages. As Simon Lloyd says when speaking of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century knighthood: “A significant proportion of the literature composed for their entertainment was concerned with the deeds of knights confronting the infidel. The struggle lay at the heart of the Charlemagne cycle and provided the crucial focus of the chansons de croisade and compositions which celebrated later crusading heroes such as Richard I. Arthurian romance held up the ideal in somewhat different fashion, but works such as Perlesvaus and the Queste del Saint Graal served equally to instil the notion that the knight should wield his sword in a sacred cause.”¹¹ Chansons de geste and romances could therefore serve as “edificatory tales, with a strong exemplary content.”¹² As this book will show, however, the import of the chansons de geste and chivalric romances for medieval Crusade propaganda extended far beyond the salubrious messages contained within the texts themselves. In fact, from the very beginning of the Crusade, both lay and clerical authors imported the formal and thematic characteristics of chivalric literature into—generically often very different—historiographical writings in order to motivate their audience to participate in the Crusade. Furthermore, in line with the recent critical focus on piety in Crusade motivation, most of those who have investigated the role of chansons and romances as Crusade propaganda have argued that they served to incite especially religious sentiments.¹³ In contrast, this book examines how Crusade propaganda utilized aspects of the chanson de geste and chivalric romance to appeal to specifically secular motivations to take the cross; accordingly, it will show not only that chivalric literature was used far more widely in Crusade propaganda than has been assumed but also that it served very different purposes.

      Crusade propaganda—the formal and informal ways used to further the cause of the holy war and to convince fighting men to risk all on the far reaches of Christianity—came in many forms, from papal encyclical and clerical sermon to lay narrative and song, and much of this has been the subject of study in recent years.¹⁴ However, historiographical writings on the Crusade that functioned as exhortatory constructs have on the whole received less