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

      A granz bastuns le batent e defruisent;

      E Tervagan tolent sun escarbuncle

      E Mahumet enz en un fosset butent

      E porc et chen le mordent e defulent.

      [CR ll. 2580–91: They rush off to Apollo in a crypt, / Rail against him and hurl abuse at him: / “O, wretched god, why do you cause us such shame? / Why did you permit our king to be destroyed? / Anyone who serves you well receives a poor reward.” / Then they grab his scepter and his crown / And hang him by his hands from a pillar; / Then they send him flying to the ground at their feet / And beat him and smash him to pieces with huge sticks. / They seize Tervagant’s carbuncle / And fling Muhammad into a ditch / Where pigs and dogs bite and trample on him.]

      The Christians are therefore constant in their faith, the pagans erratic. Both habitually attempt to draw the other toward their own religion, offering unimaginable riches if Frank would take on the worship of the pagan gods or if Saracen would become Christian; however, the inconstancy of the pagans makes them far more likely to switch sides.⁵³

      The opposition between Frank and Saracen, between Christian and non-Christian, as we find it in the chansons de geste is to a large extent based on the way the jongleurs and their audiences imagined alterity. On a human level Franks and Saracens are remarkably similar—both can be brave, wise, treacherous, or cowardly, and the epic epithets used to describe them as such are the same. Beyond that, the difference is one between unity against multiplicity, order against licentiousness. The Franks are one people obeying one king, obeying one law, worshipping one God; the Saracens, on the other hand, are disunited, serving many kings and many gods to whom their loyalty is suspect, reveling in opulence and dissipation.

      In the years before the First Crusade, the chansons therefore spoke of the heroic deeds of the ancestors in a time awash with conflict between Christian Franks and pagan Saracens. The earliest extant representatives of the genre characteristically describe a world in which the Christian frontier, political as well as psychological, is threatened by a religious outsider and is eventually enlarged at his expense. The chansons de geste were popular and reached a wide audience;⁵⁴ this popularity quickly extended beyond the French-speaking areas, and within a century of their origins chansons had been composed in, or translated into, Provençal and Middle High German.⁵⁵ The chansons’ particular representation of the opposition between Christian and non-Christian reached far and wide. The chroniclers of the First Crusade therefore wrote for an audience well aware of the form, themes, and socioreligious prejudices of the chansons, and they relied upon these to present the Crusades in a way that suited their purposes. As I will show below, writers used the conventions of the chansons de geste in a variety of ways, depending to a large extent on the circumstances in which they wrote their works. However, they turned to the chansons in the first place for a shared purpose: to instruct, motivate, and control the forces needed to maintain and support the Christian presence in the Holy Land.

      If the chansons were popular, they appealed especially to the very people whose political, social, and military concerns and practices they reflected: knights. From the beginning of the Crusades, knights had been vital to their success.⁵⁶ Urban II, in a letter to the monks of Vallombrosa of October 1096, identified them especially as the audience of the sermon at Clermont: “We were stimulating the minds of knights to go on this expedition, since they might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom.”⁵⁷ The next few years showed his farsightedness, as the participation of others in the Crusade proved disastrous; the popular campaigns of the early years led only to unrestrained violence and eventual annihilation, from the cities of the Rhineland to Xerigordon and Civetot.⁵⁸ Conversely, the army that conquered Jerusalem was built around knights and their retainers. The experiences of the First Crusade amply demonstrated that only trained and disciplined fighters with the financial wherewithal to maintain themselves on campaign could successfully contribute to Christian progress in the East. Were the Crusades to continue, and the Christian principalities in the Levant to survive, the unrelenting enthusiasm and participation of knights was absolutely necessary.

      Crusade appeals therefore had to address and convince knights to join the fray. There were many benefits of using the chansons in excitatoria aimed especially at knights. In the years following the First Crusade, when the theological and legal framework of Crusading was still under development, the chansons approached the holy war with a certain moral clarity, as a conflict between resolute, Christian Frank and dissolute, pagan Saracen, in which the former must eventually be victorious because of the superiority of his deity. They put a religious premium on the display of prowess in chivalric warfare, where the duty owed to God was repaid through blows of the sword.⁵⁹ They played upon their audience’s pride of ancestry, sense of continuity, and desire to emulate; Urban, or Robert, recognized these emotions as important early on:

      Moveant vos et incitent animos vestros ad virilitatem gesta predecessorum vestrorum, probitas et magnitudo Karoli Magni regis et Ludovici filii eius aliorumque regum vestrorum, qui regna paganorum destruxerunt, et in eis fines sancte ecclesie dilataverunt.… O fortissimi milites et invictorum propago parentum, nolite degenerari, sed virtutis priorum vestrorum reminiscimini.

      [HI 6; HFC 80: May the deeds of your ancestors move you and spur your souls to manly courage—the worth and greatness of Charlemagne, his son Louis and your other kings who destroyed the pagan kingdoms and brought them within the bounds of Christendom.… Oh most valiant soldiers and descendants of victorious ancestors, do not fall short of, but be inspired by, the courage of your forefathers.]⁶⁰

      Finally, the chansons put front and center the ties of loyalty and support between vassal and overlord, as well as the bonds of kinship between knight, peers, and family. These relationships, as recent historical criticism has shown, were of great importance in the recruitment of early Crusaders and motivated many to take the cross.⁶¹

      The advantages of using the conventions of the chanson de geste—its form, its themes, and its commonplaces—to present the Crusade were therefore many. Writers could connect the events of 1096–1099 to an extensive, popular body of works that presented religious war in a way that knights especially would understand and find attractive. Beyond informing and motivating knights, however, the use of the chansons also perhaps made it possible to control them. To those who saw a central role for the papacy in the Crusade, or believed in the militia Sancti Petri, the chansons’ foregrounding of the relationship between overlord and vassal offered a way to bind knighthood to the church with ties of obedience.⁶² In a campaign against God’s enemies, fought over Christ’s inheritance, at his request (“Deus lo vult”), God was both spiritual and temporal overlord of the crucesignati; even more than to any prince, the knights’ duty was above all to him, or his representatives on earth. Beyond the individual fight for salvation, Crusade was therefore also armed service owed to God. Conversely, laymen keen to continue the Crusades, such as the settlers of Outremer, could also find benefit from associating these to the works of the jongleurs, for it allowed them to stimulate the influx of desperately needed fighters independently of clerical sanction. Relying on papal proclamation of a Crusade to motivate knights to take the cross left support of the Holy Land beyond the control of its inhabitants; the settlements in their infancy needed help rather more frequently than that. The chansons, by highlighting reasons to fight the Saracen other than the indulgence—to demonstrate prowess, for vengeance, out of loyalty, or to defend and retake Christian land—took the explanation of what constituted Crusade out of the domain of the clergy and allowed laymen too to define and therefore to a certain extent control it.⁶³ After all, if a preudomme could get remission of his sins only on campaigns sanctioned by the church, he could fight the Saracen as duty owed to a divine overlord, or to demonstrate his skills as a knight, whenever he wanted.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Gesta Francorum

      Given the potential advantages the forms and conventions of the chansons offered for propagandizing the Crusade to Western audiences, it is not surprising that they began to be used almost immediately after the conquest