Despite its apparent martial strength, the 1101 crusade proved to be a shocking debacle. Forsaking the advice of both Stephen of Blois and Raymond of Toulouse, this expedition ignored the need for unified action. Instead, no fewer than three separate armies set out to cross Asia Minor, and each met its doom at the hands of a potent coalition of local Seljuq Turkish rulers, now only too aware of the threat posed by a crusader invasion. Having vastly underestimated the scale of enemy resistance, the 1101 crusaders were wiped out in a succession of devastating military encounters. Of those few who survived, only a handful, including Stephen and Raymond, limped on to Syria and Palestine, and even then they achieved nothing of substance.⁴⁴

Perhaps surprisingly, these reversals did little to dampen enthusiasm back in Latin Europe for the notion of ‘crusading’. Indeed, many contemporaries actually argued that the failure of the 1101 campaign, supposedly born out of sinful pride, simply served to reinforce the miraculous nature of the First Crusade’s achievements. And yet, despite papal attempts to experiment with this new form of sanctified warfare and to associate the memory of the First Crusade with different theatres of conflict, the start of the twelfth century was not marked by an explosion of crusading enthusiasm. In fact, it would be decades before the Frankish West roused itself to launch expeditions in defence of the Holy Land on the scale of those witnessed between 1095 and 1101. This left the Latins who had remained in the Levant after Jerusalem’s conquest dangerously isolated.

IN MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

The success of the First Crusade stunned Latin Christendom. For many, only the hand of God could explain the crusaders’ survival at Antioch and their ultimate triumph at Jerusalem. Had the expedition been thwarted in the Near East, the very notion of crusading would probably have fallen into abeyance. As it was, the victory fired enthusiasm for this new form of devotional warfare for centuries to come, and the First Crusade became perhaps the most widely recorded event of the Middle Ages.

Configuring the memory of the crusade in Latin Europe

The work of memorialising the crusade began almost immediately, as a number of participants sought, in the first years of the twelfth century, to document and celebrate the campaign. The most influential of these, the Gesta Francorum (the Deeds of the Franks), was written in Jerusalem around 1100, most likely by a noble-born southern Italian Norman crusader of some education. While this account does appear to have been informed by the personal experiences of its anonymous author, it cannot be regarded as pure eyewitness evidence, akin to the likes of a diary. Instead, the author of the Gesta Francorum adopted a new approach to the recording of the past, one that was just starting to emerge in medieval Europe as an alternative to the traditional year-on-year chronicle. Distilling the experiences of thousands of participants into a single, overarching narrative, he constructed the first Historia (narrative history) of the crusade, recounting a tale of epic scope and heroic dimensions. Other crusade veterans, including Raymond of Aguilers, Fulcher of Chartres and Peter Tudebode, drew upon the Gesta Francorum as a kind of base text around which to construct their own narrative accounts–a form of plagiarism commonplace in this era. Modern scholars have turned to this corpus of evidence, and to the letters written by crusaders during the campaign, to recreate a Latin perspective of the expedition. And by cross-referencing this close testimony with non-Frankish sources (by Muslims, Greeks, Levantine Christians and Jews), they have sought to build up the most accurate possible picture of what really happened on the First Crusade–what might be termed an empirical reconstruction.⁴⁵

In the first decade of the twelfth century, however, a number of Latins living in Europe set out to write–or more accurately to rewrite–the history of the crusade. Three of these–Robert of Rheims, Guibert of Nogent and Baldric of Bourgueil–were particularly important because of the widespread popularity and significance of the accounts they authored. All three were highly educated Benedictine monks living in northern France, with no first-hand experience of the holy war outside Europe. Working almost simultaneously, but apparently without any knowledge of the other two, each of these three monks composed new accounts of the First Crusade, using the Gesta Francorum as the basis for their work. According to their own words, they took on this labour because they believed the Gesta was written in a ‘rough manner’ that used ‘inelegant and artless language’. Yet, Robert, Guibert and Baldric went far beyond simply polishing the Gesta’s medieval Latin. They added new details to the story, sometimes gleaning this information from other ‘eyewitness’ texts, like that of Fulcher of Chartres, elsewhere drawing from the oral testimony of participants or perhaps from their own imaginings. Crucially, at a fundamental level, all three also reinterpreted the First Crusade.

Robert of Rheims, for example, utilised a far richer and more learned palette of scriptural allusion than that employed in the Gesta Francorum. He used these quotations from, or parallels with, the Old and New Testaments to position the crusade within a better-defined Christian context. Robert also emphasised the expedition’s miraculous nature, arguing that its success was not achieved because of the efforts of man, but through the divine agency of God’s will. In addition, Robert recast the whole story of the crusade. The Gesta preserved only an oblique reference to Urban II’s preaching of the campaign and was structured so as to present the siege and conquest of Antioch as the pinnacle of endeavour, covering events at Jerusalem almost as an afterthought. By contrast, Robert began his history with an extended account of the pope’s sermon at Clermont (which Robert claimed to have witnessed in person) and placed far greater stress upon the Holy City’s capture. In this way, he portrayed the expedition as a venture instigated, directed and legitimated by the papacy, and affirmed that the crusade’s ultimate goal was Christendom’s repatriation of Jerusalem.

Of course, Robert’s history did not alter the events of the First Crusade in any material sense; neither did the accounts penned by Guibert and Baldric. But their work is of fundamental importance to the understanding of the crusades as a whole, because, in comparison to texts like the Gesta Francorum, it was read far more widely by medieval contemporaries. As such, these Benedictine reworkings served to shape the way people recalled and thought about the crusade in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Robert of Rheims’ history was especially admired–the equivalent of a medieval bestseller among the learned elite. It was also used as a source for the most famous chanson de geste (epic poem) about the expedition, the Chanson d’Antioche, whose 10,000 lines of Old French immortalised the crusaders as legendary Christian heroes. Written in the popular chanson form–which fast became the most widely disseminated means in western Europe of recounting ‘historical’ events–the Chanson d’Antioche was designed to be recited publicly in a vernacular language familiar to a lay audience. As such, it too did much to mould the prevailing memory of the First Crusade in Latin Christendom.

From the first wave of ‘eyewitness’ accounts, through to the likes of Robert of Rheims’ Historia and the Chanson d’Antioche, the process of memorialising the crusade had a gradual but far-reaching effect upon the imagined reality of events: promoting Godfrey of Bouillon as the expedition’s sole leader; imbedding the memory of the Holy Lance’s ‘miraculous’ impact; and consolidating the idea that ‘martyred’ crusaders were guaranteed a heavenly reward. Perhaps the most historically charged reconfiguration and manipulation involved the events at Jerusalem on and after 15 July 1099. The Latins’ sack of the Holy City could be readily interpreted by Christian contemporaries as the decisive moment of divinely sanctioned triumph, or by Muslims as an act of unqualified savagery that revealed the Franks’ innate barbarism. It certainly is striking that Christian accounts made no attempt to limit the number of ‘infidels’ killed when Jerusalem fell–if anything, they gloried in the event. They also revelled in the scene of carnage at the Aqsa mosque. The Gesta Francorum noted that the crusaders were left wading up to their ankles in blood by the work of butchery. However, another ‘eyewitness’, Raymond of Aguilers, expanded on this image. Lifting a scriptural quote from the New Testament Book of Revelation, he declared that the Franks ‘rode in [enemy] blood to the knees and bridles of their horses’. This more extreme image gained wide acceptance and was repeated by numerous western European histories and chronicles in the course of the twelfth century.⁴⁶