Crusade, Settlement and Historical Writing in the Latin East and Latin West, C. 1100-C. 1300

This collection offers a holistic understanding of the impact of both crusading and settlement on the literary cultures of Latin Christendom. The period between the First Crusade and the collapse of the "crusader states" in the eastern Mediterranean was a crucial one for medieval historical writing. From the departure of the earliest crusading armies in 1096 to the Mamlūk conquest of the Latin states in the late thirteenth century, crusading activity, and the settlements it established and aimed to protect, generated a vast textual output, offering rich insights into the historiographical cultures of the Latin West and Latin East. However, modern scholarship on the crusades and the "crusader states" has tended to draw an artificial boundary between the two, even though medieval writers treated their histories as virtually indistinguishable. This volume places these spheres into dialogue with each other, looking at how individual crusading campaigns and the Frankish settlements in the eastern Mediterranean were depicted and remembered in the central Middle Ages. Its essays cover a geographical range that incorporates England, France, Germany, southern Italy and the Holy Land, and address such topics as gender, emotion, the natural world, crusading as an institution, origin myths, textual reception, forms of storytelling and historical genre. Bringing to the foreground neglected sources, methodologies, events and regions of textual production, the collection offers a holistic understanding of the impact of both crusading and settlement on the literary cultures of Latin Christendom. Front cover 1 Contents 6 List of Illustrations 8 Acknowledgements 9 Notes on Contributors 10 List of Abbreviations 14 The Crusades, the Latin East and Medieval History-Writing: An Introduction 16 1 History-Writing and Remembrance in Crusade Letters 49 2 A ‘swiðe mycel styrung’: The First Crusade in Early Vernacular Annals from Anglo-Norman England 63 3 To Bargain with God: The Crusade Vow in the Narratives of the First Crusade 83 4 ‘The Lord has brought eastern riches before you’: Battlefield Spoils and Looted Treasure in Narratives of the First Crusade 101 5 Foundation and Settlement in Fulcher of Chartres’ Historia Hierosolymitana: A Narratological Reading 117 6 After Ascalon: ‘Bartolf of Nangis’, Fulcher of Chartres and the Early Years of the Kingdom of Jerusalem 136 7 Repurposing a Crusade Chronicle: Peter of Cornwall’s Liber Revelationum and the Reception of Fulcher of Chartres' Historia Hierosolymitana in Medieval England 152 8 Between Chronicon and Chanson: William of Tyre, the First Crusade and the Art of Storytelling 170 9 History and Politics in the Latin East: William of Tyre and the Composition of the Historia Hierosolymitana 189 10 ‘When I became a man’: Kingship and Masculinity in William of Tyre’s Chronicon 206 11 Laments for the Lost City: The Loss of Jerusalem in Western Historical Writing 226 12 The Silences of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum 1 243 13 The Natural and Biblical Landscapes of the Holy Land in Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis 257 14 The Masculine Experience and the Experience of Masculinity on the Seventh Crusade in John of Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis 274 15 Writing and Copying History at Acre, c. 1230-91 292 Index 304