The crusades exerted a tremendous impact on contemporary as well as Renaissance Latin literature, especially on historiography, poetry, and epistolography.
Narrative History
The image and historical commemoration of the crusades and their ideological concepts were decisively conceived and stylized in Latin historical narratives, most of which were dedicated to the outstandingly successful First Crusade (1096-1099), by participants as well as by writers in the West. These narratives were sometimes reworkings of oral testimony or of existing written accounts, sometimes within the framework of chronicles covering a broader chronological and different geographical range, such as the Hiero-solymita of Ekkehard of Aura (c. 1116) or the Gesta regum Anglorum of William of Malmesbury (d. 1143).
Jerusalem as a strategic and spiritual destination is the focus of interest: its importance is reflected by the various titles chosen by the authors and by topoi and terminological conventions that soon became literary commonplaces. The chroniclers often devote particular attention to certain leaders or contingents in the campaigns and make use of the traditional rhetorical arsenal of the genre to dramatize and illuminate the events described with speeches, battle scenes, and heroic combats, often at the expense of historical accuracy. The drier chronicles, such as the Gesta Francorum, were soon complemented by literarily sophisticated and ambitious works of historiography, some of which are distinguished by the formal pattern of prosimetrum: that is, at key points in the action, the authors intersperse their prose with sections of verses, songs, or even narrative poems with epic dimensions. Crusade sermons (especially those given by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont) as well as letters were also often integrated into the texts, or at least added, in the manuscript tradition.
Among the most celebrated authors are Fulcher of Chartres, Radulph of Caen, Guibert of Nogent, and especially Robert of Rheims (Robert the Monk), whose Historia Iherosolimitana was one of the common reference books on the First Crusade up to the end of the Middle Ages. Between 1119 and 1140 Albert of Aachen described the First Crusade and the establishment of Christian dominion over the Holy Land in his Historia Hierosolimitana, a work in twelve books that has been described as a “Christian Aeneid in prose” [Peter Christian Jacobsen, “Albert von Aachen,” in Haupt-werke der Geschichtsschreibung, ed. Volker Reinhardt (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1997), p. 8].
Far less popular were the other and generally less successful expeditions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Confronted with persistent political and military setbacks, the authors transformed their chronicles into vehicles for criticism, resignation, and even satire; the prosimetrical form was more or less abandoned. Odo of Deuil, who belonged to the entourage of King Louis VII of France during the Second Crusade (1147-1149), concluded his lucid report, De profectione Ludovici VII regis Francorum in Ori-entem, under the impression of failure. The Historia pere-grinorum, by an anonymous author originating from the area of Lake Constance, abruptly ceased describing the crusade of Frederick Barbarossa with the emperor’s death (1190). The Historia de profectione Danorum in Hierosoly-mam (c. 1200) emphasizes the spiritual dimensions of pilgrimage, since the crusaders, from Denmark and Norway, reached Palestine too late to take part in the military actions of the Third Crusade (1189-1192).
The Fourth Crusade (1202-1204) attracted historians and apologists again: with a sense of humor and irony, Gunther of Pairis, a Cistercian monk from Alsace, applied the literary topoi and other features of crusade histories to his account of the fall of Constantinople, the Hystoria Constan-tinopolitana (1208): he associates the seizure and sack of the Byzantine capital by the crusaders (who included his abbot, Martin of Pairis) with the fall of Jerusalem in the First Crusade. In the tradition of Boethius, he created a prosimetrum in its most accomplished form. Oliver of Paderborn (d. 1227), who had preached the crusade in the Rhineland, based his Historia Damiatina, a report of the capture of Damietta during the Fifth Crusade (1220), on letters he had previously written about the subject.
Whereas most of these chroniclers concentrated on certain periods and facets of crusading history, by the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth outstanding authors broadened their scope in retrospection. Besides the chronicle of Robert of Rheims, the Chronica of the Jerusalem court historian William of Tyre (d. 1186) and its continuations and translations were the most influential sources for the medieval view of the crusades. The First Crusade figured prominently in this work, which William continued with an account of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem until 1182; his analytical and literary acumen made the chronicle shift into a pessimistic survey from the perspective of Outremer. James of Vitry, bishop of Acre (d. 1240), embedded the history of the crusades in his Historia orien-talis, a comprehensive political and cultural description of the Holy Land.
After the final loss of Acre (mod. ‘Akko, Israel) to the Muslims in 1291, the impetus for composing Latin crusade histories decreased. Nevertheless, the existing texts supplied material for numerous memoranda and treatises belonging to the genre known as De recuperatione Terrae Sanctae (“About the Recovery of the Holy Land”), such as the Liber secretorum fidelium crucis of the Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello (d. 1343), which was part of his initiatives to promote a new crusade. One of Sanudo’s sources was the Speculum historiale (1246-1259) of the Dominican friar Vincent of Beauvais, whose extracts from the chronicle of William of Tyre provided information about the crusades on a basic and secondary level.
Renaissance humanists, concerned with the threatening experience of Turkish expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly after the fall of Constantinople (1453), began to discover the crusades of the high Middle Ages anew. Rhetorically refined according to modern standards and rewritten for propaganda purposes, humanist historiography idealized the First Crusade as a catalyst summoning a European alliance against barbarous enemies and thus as a model that ought to be imitated under contemporary circumstances. Flavio Biondo (d. 1463) actually projected the loss of Constantinople onto his version of the Council of Clermont (1095), and the reputation and popularity of Biondo’s Historiarum decades up to the sixteenth century were also due to this ingenious manipulation. The Florentine chancellor Benedetto Accolti (d. 1464) wrote a monograph about the First Crusade, the De hello a Christia-nis contra harharosgestopro Christisepulchro etludaea recu-perandis, whose composition in 1463/1464 was closely linked with the preparations of Pope Pius II for an expedition against the Turks. The Historiarum rerum Venetarum decades by Marcus Antonius Sabellicus, published in 1487, and the De rebus gestis Francorum libri by Paolo Emili, written in 1498-1529 and dedicated to King Louis XII of France, reshaped the First Crusade into a monument of local pride and national greatness. Robert of Rheims and William of Tyre were the main sources for these humanist historians and their literary and publicistic approach to the crusades.
Poetry
Latin crusade poetry comprises a great variety of poetical texts about wars against the heathen, though in a more precise and technical sense it deals with the campaigns in the Holy Land. Shorter poems, such as rhythmic crusade songs, can be distinguished from historical epics and versified accounts of the crusades. In contrast to the historiographical sources, their manuscript tradition usually is precarious. The Latin crusade songs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries constitute a corpus of about thirty rhythmic and metrical poems; their transmission is disparate, and only a small proportion of them are accompanied by musical notation. The largest complex, with seven pieces about the Third Crusade, is assembled in the Carmina Burana, an early thirteenth-century collection of songs in a manuscript of probably Tirolean provenance, which was later preserved in the monastery of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria. The Latin crusade songs are less concerned with the capture of Jerusalem in 1099 than with its loss after the battle of Hattin (1187). Exuberant songs about Christian victories, such as Jerusalem, laetare, appear alongside appeals to take the cross and laments for the triumph of the heathen, such as Christiani nominis corruit insigne (1189-1192).
Nearly all authors of Latin crusading epics directed their
Imagination toward the First Crusade. Before 1120, Gilo of Paris adapted the Historia of Robert of Rheims, as did Metellus of Tegernsee, who between 1146 and 1165 turned Robert’s prose into rhymed hexameters in his Expeditio Jerosolimitana. Of the Solimarius, by a poet known only as Gunther, not more than 240 lines have survived; it was composed before 1186 and sent to the family and court of Frederick Barbarossa. Once again, Gunther embellished Robert’s Historia with the colors of classical epic.
Events preceding the Third Crusade, particularly the siege of Acre (1189-1190), form the subject of three more or less contemporary occasional texts: Carmen Buranum no. 50 (Heu, voce flehili cogor enarrare), a poem of Haymarus Monachus consisting of 224 goliardic stanzas (Dum Romanuspontifex degeret Veronae), and the mournful elegiacs by an anonymous eyewitness of the siege, whose versified diary closed in 1190 after he received news of Barbarossa approaching (Scrihendo tristes elegos imitatus amaros). It is still uncertain whether a fragment of twenty-six hexameters can be connected with an epic entitled Anti-ocheis concerning the Third Crusade, which Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury commissioned from his nephew Joseph of Exeter (Iscanus).
Humanist poets of the sixteenth century took up the First Crusade as the subject of Latin epic poems, and like the historians of their time they tried to bridge the gap between the medieval crusades and contemporary Turkish invasions. The Italian Giovanni Maria Cataneo (d. 1529/1530) seems to have relied upon Robert’s Historia, but his Solymis is almost completely lost. The Lotareis of the otherwise unknown Frenchman Perotus, written between 1563 and 1574 (MS Paris, Bibliotheque Mazarine, 1944) exalts the heroism of Godfrey of Bouillon and makes a connection to the Guise family, particularly Charles III, duke of Guise (1543-1608), and Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, to whom he addressed his work; its nine books, containing some 7,000 hexameters, have not yet been edited, probably because they lack any life or color. Pietro Angeli da Barga (d. 1591), however, created the magnum opus of humanist crusade epics, the Syrias: after the great naval victory of Lepanto over the Turks (1571), he was convinced that the success of the First Crusade could be repeated soon.
Epistolography
With the flourishing of Latin epistolography in the twelfth century, it is hardly surprising that the crusades should be reflected in Latin letters. Among the considerable number dating from the First Crusade are impressive requests for help, such as the much-debated message of the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos to the count of Flanders (1088), which was widely spread together with the Historia of Robert of Rheims. Epistolography also includes reports and memoirs that participants sent to relatives or political protagonists. News of decisive events, such as the death of Frederick Bar-barossa, was communicated by letters. Some of the narrative sources are adorned with epistolary formulas; others are based on material collected from letters. The gradual diversion of the Fourth Crusade is reflected in the correspondence exchanged between Pope Innocent III and the leaders of the expedition. The six surviving letters written by James of Vitry in 1216-1221 are an important source for the siege of Dami-etta and contain notes he later used for his Historia.
More specifically, some crusade letters are actually written exhortations to take the cross. These highly artificial, much circulated texts are similar to crusading sermons. Bernard of Clairvaux issued his famous letter no. 363 (Sermo mihi ad vos de negotio Christi), for example, to promote the Second Crusade. These letters remained a useful model for crusade histories and letters up to the fifteenth century.
-Peter Orth
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