A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  If our opening statement is true then it is almost superfluous to ask why the crusades were so frequently reflected in song, the more so since several poets were leading crusaders. There are songs by such leaders as Thibaut IV of Champagne, by Folquet, bishop of Toulouse at the time of the Albigensian Crusade, and by such important magnates as Conon of Béthune and Guy of Coucy. Moreover, many poets depended for their livelihood, at least in part, on the patronage of prominent crusaders. The troubadour Raimbaut of Vaqueiras, for example, in a ‘lettersong’ to Boniface of Montferrat, reminds his patron of his past kindnesses: ‘I praise God that he has helped me inasmuch as I found in you such a good lord, for you raised me so nobly and gave me arms and did me great good and lifted me up from low to high and, from the nobody that I was, made of me an esteemed knight, accepted at court and praised by ladies’ (‘Valen Marques, senher de Montferrat’, ll. 5–10). Raimbaut goes on to recall how Boniface and he fought at the siege of Constantinople but reminds his patron that you cannot live on reminiscences:

  With you I laid siege to many a strong castle, many a mighty citadel and many a fine palace belonging to emperor, king, or emir, and the august Lascaris and the protostrator besieged in Petrion, and many other potentates. With you I pursued to Philopation the emperor of Romania, whom you deposed to crown another in his stead. But if I am not richly rewarded by you, it will not seem as if I was ever with you or as if I had served you as much as I have recalled to you, and you know, Lord Marquis, that I am speaking the truth!

  (ibid., ll. 31–43)

  Similarly, poems which praise heroes of the crusade tend to refer to their generosity as patrons as well as to their warlike exploits. A fictional debate between God and the monk-turnedtroubadour, the Monk of Montaudo, provides a good example. God asks the monk why he failed to seek the help of King Richard.

  Monk, you did wrong in not going as quickly as you could to the king who holds Oléron who was such a good friend of yours, and that is why I think he was right to break off his friendship with you. Oh, how many good sterling marks must he have lost in gifts to you! For it was he who raised you up from the mud. Lord, I would indeed have gone to see him were it not for your fault: for you permitted him to be imprisoned. But the Saracen ship—have you forgotten how it sails?—if it ever gets into Acre, there will be plenty of wicked Turks there. A man is foolish who gets mixed up in a dispute with you!

  (‘L’autrier fui en Paradis’, ll. 33–48)

  The reference is to the imprisonment of Richard by Leopold of Austria in the course of his return from Acre in 1192. A similar idea, expressed in the same jocular tone, recurs in the poem ‘On his poverty’ (1270) by the Parisian poet, Rutebeuf: ‘Death has caused me much loss and you too, good King, in two voyages, have taken away good people from me, as has the pilgrimage to far-off Tunis, a barbarous place, and the wicked, godless people have done the same…’ (ll. 20–4). Rutebeuf is complaining that King Louis’s crusade has deprived him of the kind of people who would normally give him financial support.

  Patrons and poets were in touch with events. But there are other reasons for the role played by the crusades in the court poetry of this period. Not surprisingly, it extols those values and virtues to which the aristocracy laid claim, virtues which they felt distinguished them from those of other classes. Since there was a close tie between the notion of nobility and the question of land-holding, some of these virtues may be termed feudal. They include commitment to one’s suzerain, and an acceptance of the feudal duties of auxilium (armed help in time of attack by enemies) and consilium (counsel and the rendering of justice). The crusade is often expressed by poets in terms which express this. The Holy Land is seen as God’s rightful territory, usurped by marauders, which his vassals must therefore do all they can to restore to him. If they fail to do so, then they are failing in their feudal duty: ‘.…e must indeed be condemned who abandons his lord in his hour of need…’ (‘Vos ki ameis’, ll. 11–12) says an anonymous song of c .1189. The earliest French crusade song, an anonymous composition from about 1145–6 makes matters even clearer.

  Chevalier, mult estes guariz,

  Quant Deu a vus fait sa clamur

  Des Turs e des Amoraviz

  Ki li unt fait tels deshenors.

  Cher a tort unt ses fieuz saiziz;

  Bien en devums aveir dolur,

  Cher la fud Deu primes servi

  E reconnu pur segnuur.

  (ll. 1–8)

  Knights, you are indeed fortunate that God has issued his call for help to you against the Turks and the Almoravids who have perpetrated such dishonourable deeds against him. They have illegally seized his fiefs; we must indeed lament this, for it was there that God was first served and acknowledged as lord.

  The message is hammered home in terms of feudal duty, in images of God as a seigneur and the knights as owing him the kind of protection that they owed to their suzerain. The refrain promises Paradise to those who accompany the monarch.

  Ki ore irat od Loovis

  Ja mar d’enfern n’avrat pouur,

  Char s’alme en iert en Pareïs

  Od les angles nostre Segnor

  (ll. 9–12)

  Anyone who now accompanies Louis will need have no fear of hell, for his soul will be in Paradise with the angels of Our Lord.

  The knights are reminded of their own skill in arms and of the debt they owe to Christ: ‘Knights, consider well, you who are esteemed for your skill in arms, give your bodies as a gift to him who was put on the cross for you’ (ll. 17–20). Louis VII is held up as an example: he is depicted renouncing wealth, power, lands, like a man giving up the world to follow a saintly life. Christ’s wounds and Passion are recalled. This is not merely a pious reminder: it is intended to whip up the hearer’s desire to take revenge on God’s enemies who have deserved it. ‘Now he summons you because the Canaanites and the wicked followers of Zangi have played many evil tricks on him: now give them their reward!’ (ll. 41–4). The conflict is seen as a tournament between Hell and Heaven: God summons his friends to join his team; he has appointed the date and the place—Edessa—for the tournament; the prize will be salvation, and God’s vengeance will be wrought by the hands of the crusaders. They are reminded of Moses dividing the Red Sea and of how Pharaoh and his followers were all drowned; one of a number of occasions in crusade songs when Muslims are equated with the followers of Pharaoh.

  In several songs, the crusade is seen as the opportunity for knights and barons to demonstrate that they not only possess but excel in the qualities which distinguish their classes.

  God! We have for so long been brave in idleness! Now we shall see who will be truly brave; and we shall go to avenge the doleful shame at which every man ought to be downcast and sorrowful, for in our times the holy places have been lost, where God suffered death in anguish for us; if we now permit our mortal enemies to stay there, our lives will be shameful for evermore.

  God is besieged in the land of his holy patrimony; now we shall see how those people will help him whom he freed from the dark prison when he died upon that cross which is now in the hands of the Turks. Know well, those who do not go are shamed unless poverty, old age, or sickness prevents them; but those who are healthy, young, and rich cannot remain behind without suffering shame.

  (Conon of Béthune, ‘Ahi, Amours! com dure departie’, ll. 25–40)

  Idleness, shame, lack of prowess are to be avoided at all costs by the knightly and baronial classes to whom these songs are addressed (they often begin with Chevalier . .. or Seigneur . .. or Baron . .. ). Such injunctions not only serve as a suitable subject for a crusade song, they also accord perfectly with an important poetic requirement. Medieval poets and scholars had been taught that the two principal functions of rhetoric were praise and blame. They had also been taught to think and to reason in dialectical patterns. The ideology of the crusade therefore provided a perfect structure: those who heeded the call were to be praised, those who were deaf to it were to be blamed.<
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  All the cowards will stay over here, those who do not love God, or virtue, or love or worth. Each of them says: ‘But what about my wife? I wouldn’t leave my friends at any price.’ Such people have fallen into a foolish way of thinking, for there is no friend in truth except he who was placed on the true cross for us.

  Now those valiant knights who love God and the honour of this world will set off, for they wisely wish to go to God; but the snotty-nosed, ashen-faced ones will stay behind. They are blind, I make no doubt of that, those people who refuse just once in their lives to help God and lose the glory of the world for such a small thing.

  (Thibaut of Champagne, ‘Seigneurs, sachiez, qui or ne s’en ira’, ll.

  8–21)

  The troubadour Marcabru is a master of this technique.

  For the Lord who knows all that is, and all that will be and that ever was has promised us a crown and the title of emperor. And the beauty of those who go to the washing-place will be—do you know of what kind?—more than that of the morning star; providing only that we avenge the wrong that is being done to God both here and there towards Damascus.

  Close to the lineage of Cain, the first criminal, there are so many people and not one pays honour to God. We shall see who will be his true friend, for, through the power of the washing-place, Jesus will dwell amongst us, and the scoundrels who believe in augury and divination will be put to flight.

  And the lecherous wine-swillers, dinner-gobblers, fire-huggers, roadside-squatters will stay within the place of cowards; it is the bold and the healthy whom God wishes to test in his washing-place; the others will guard their own dwellings and will find a very difficult obstacle: that is why I send them away to their shame.

  (Marcabru, ‘Pax in nomine Domini’, ll. 28–54)

  The ‘washing-place’ of which Marcabru speaks is a sustained allegorical representation of the crusade in Spain. This song is one of the earliest (c .1149) and most famous of crusade songs. It expresses more clearly than any other the association which the poets made between the social values of cortezia and the crusade as a moral touchstone. Marcabru sees the failure of some barons to support the Spanish enterprise as symptomatic of a decline in joven —literally ‘youth’ or ‘youthfulness’—but not merely chronological youth; the term covers a range of characteristics associated by Marcabru and others with their positive model of the young knight or baron: generosity of spirit, youthful energy, dedication. Those who fail to lend their support are ‘broken, crestfallen, weary of proeza; they love neither joy nor pleasure’ (ibid., ll. 62–3). Proeza means warlike courage and skill but it also has connotations of enthusiasm and an honourable pursuit of glory. Marcabru expects to find such characteristics amongst the barons and their close followers. He cultivates in his songs the characteristic image of a stern moralizer castigating sloth and weakness of the flesh as well as any enfeebling of the hierarchy. He creates a picture of the ideal baron as energetic, ascetic, enthusiastic for glory and for virtue, and aware of the obligations implied by his social position. By combining this image with religious allegory and with the dialectical structure of the sirventes, the honour of the ideal lord and his obligations are identified with the glory and religious imperatives of the crusade. Those who do not go on the crusade are not being true to the values of their class.

  Desnaturat son li Frances

  si de l’afar Deu dizon no… (ibid., ll. 64–5)

  The French are unnatural if they refuse God’s work.

  But, as one would expect, the crusades are seen as a conventionally moral touchstone as well as a social one. Marcabru’s contemporary, Cercamon, sees participation in the crusade both as an indicator of a blamelessly moral life and as a means of avoiding evil: ‘Now a man may wash and free himself from great blame, any such as are burdened with it; and if he is worthy he will go away towards Edessa and leave behind the perilous world; for with such as this he may deliver himself from the burden which makes plenty of people stumble and perish’ (Cercamon, ‘Puois nostre temps comens’a brunezir’, ll. 43–8). The rest of the poem suggests that the ‘burden’ is that of malves-tatz, which Cercamon depicts as a mixture of avarice, pride, falsehood, lust, and cowardice. Peire Vidal’s, ‘Baron, Jhesus, qu’en crotz fon mes’ (c .1202), sees the crusade as repaying Christ’s sacrifice: ‘Barons, Jesus, who was put on the cross to save the Christian people, is summoning us all together to go and recover the Holy Land where he came to die for love of us’ (ll. 1–5). The penalty for failing to respond to this summons will be reproaches after our death and the forfeiture of Paradise. This is what is promised to those who go on the crusade. To do so is to give up the world which is, in any case, unreliable, an occasion of sin, a place where men betray even their friends. The Bavarian poet, Albrecht von Johansdorf, author of five songs on crusading themes, offers an interesting development of this idea. He points out that the Holy Land has never been in greater need of help—he is writing soon after Saladin’s victory at Hattin—but some fools say, ‘Why can’t God take care of it without our help?’ The answer given is in terms of Christ’s sacrifice, undertaken not out of necessity but out of pity: ‘He did not need to take this great suffering on himself but was full of pity for us in our plight. If any man now will not have pity upon his cross and his Sepulchre, then he will not be given heavenly bliss’ (‘Die hinnen varn’, ll. 8–11). The crusader’s action is identified with Christ’s redemption of sinners. The crusade is undertaken out of pity, out of love. An anonymous twelfth-century trouvère makes the same point.

  You who love with a true love, awaken! Do not sleep! The lark draws day towards us and tells us in its speech that the day of peace has come which God in his great sweetness will give to those who will take the cross for love of him and who will suffer pain night and day through their deeds. Then he will see who truly loves him.

  He who was crucified for us was not lukewarm in his love for us but loved us like a true lover [fins amins] and, for us, lovingly carried in great anguish the Holy Cross, sweetly in his arms, before his breast, like a gentle lamb, simple and pious; then he was nailed with three nails, firmly through the hands and the feet.

  (‘Vos qui ameis’, ll. 1–10, 21–30)

  The idea of the crusade as an act of love is part of the religious orthodoxy of the time, but another connection between the crusades and love derives from a literary rather than an ecclesiastical source. One of the principal themes of medieval poetry is love. Indeed, in the case of the German poets, the name by which they are known—Minnesänger —means ‘those who sing of love’. Typically the poet adopts the persona of a man in love—usually hopelessly so—with an unnamed lady. The features which characterize the expression of this fin’amorin the songs of the troubadours, trouvères and Minnesänger are longing, tension which is unresolved, and praise of the beloved. These features can be developed in a number of ways. For example, if the tension is unresolved, we may be told the reason why: the lady is of such supreme character and status, so ‘distant’ from the lover that he despairs of ever attaining the lofty heights where she dwells. There may be other obstacles and dangers: actual distance, rivals, gossip-mongers (known as losengiers ), or the lover’s timidity. It is not difficult to see how such elements of the love-song may be transferred to the idea of crusading. The unresolved longing may express the intention, as yet unfulfilled, to go on the crusade, or it may be used to suggest the idea of the journey which seems so long and to which no end can clearly be seen. Hartmann von Aue, in a song written at about the time of the Third Crusade, deliberately associates Minne with love of God, as expressed in the crusade as a ‘pilgrimage of love’: ‘Lords and kin, I am making a journey; blessings on my land and people. No need to ask where I am going: I tell you clearly where my journey leads. Love (Minne) captured me and has freed me on parole. Now she has sent me a message that I should set out for her love. It is inevitable: I must go thither: how could I break my promise and my oath?’ (‘Ich var mit iuwern hulden’, ll. 1–8).
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br />   He only reveals towards the end of the second stanza that he is referring to the crusade. However, rather than exploiting the allegorical possibilities, it is more often the case that the poets associate the idea of the crusade with the idea of human love, by adopting the language or the conventional situations of lovepoetry. This is increasingly the case as time goes by. For the Second Crusade, only one surviving poem makes this association, but by the end of the century, and more particularly in Germany, it has become very common. The earliest example sees matters from the point of view of the woman left behind by the crusader. Marcabru’s ‘A la fontana del vergier’ (c.1147) begins with the allusion to spring and nature which is a traditional feature of courtly song. In the usual pastorela the ‘I’ of the poem—generally presented as a knight—encounters a maiden. She sings of the joys or pains of love. The knight attempts to seduce her but is refused. In this case the maiden’s sorrow has a specific foundation.

  She was a young girl, beautiful of form, daughter of the lord of a castle; and when I expected that the birds and the greenery might bring her joy, and that, because of the sweet new season as well, she might be willing to listen to my persuasions, she soon changed her mood.

  She wept beside the spring and gave a heartfelt sigh. She said, ‘Jesus, king of the world, my great sorrow grows because of you, for the shame perpetrated against you causes me great grief: the best men in all this world are going off to serve you, but this is what pleases you. It is with you that my lover is going away, the handsome, the noble, the worthy, and the powerful; all that is left to me here is my sorry plight, my frequent longings, and my tears. Oh! Cruel was King Louis who issued the summonses and edicts through which sorrow entered my heart!’