An Empire of Memory (43 page)

did not intend to lead this army eastwards; this was not an Italian expedition like

that of Sergius, nor was it a papal expedition in the same way as Gregory’s. The

work of this project was left to others. Urban’s intended audience would recreate a

peace amongst themselves, return to East, destroy the enemies of Christ, protect the

92 On the politics of Bologna, see Gerhard Schwartz, Die Besetzung der Bistümer Reichsitaliens unter

den sächsischen und salischen Kaisern: Mit den Listen der Bischöfe, 951–1122 (Berlin, 1913), 162–5. We should also remember that Bologna had a particular devotion to Jerusalem, with a series of structures

throughout the city that replicated the sites of the Holy Land. See Ch. 3, at n. 29.

93 Cowdrey, Gregory VII, 66–7; Kathleen G. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh

Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester, 2005), 130–3; and Urban II, Privilegium pro

Vallumbrosanis, PL 151: 322–4.

94 Urban was not too successful at forbidding monks from joining the Crusade. For example, a

letter of Urban’s to the monastery of Saint-Gilles mentions that that abbot and some monks were

journeying to Jerusalem and the abbot of Marmoutier seems to have abandoned his monastery to go as

well. Anselm of Canterbury lamented the departure of the abbot of Cerne. Urban II, Pro monasterio S.

Aegidii, PL 151: 478; Geoffrey, Ad Odonem, 162–3; and on Anselm, Christopher Tyerman, England

and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago, 1988), 18–19. On the monastic response to Urban’s call

generally, see the thoughtful analysis in Purkis, Crusading Spirituality, 12–58.

95 Christopher Tyerman calls the message ‘old wine in new bottles’. Unlike my conclusions though,

Tyerman is thinking of a vintage only twenty or so years old. Tyerman, God’s War, 57, 64–5.

96 For Urban’s attention to Christian libertas, see Becker, Papst Urban II., ii. 333–71.

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The Franks Recreate Empire

populus Christi, and return their brothers to union with the West. In the ears of an

aristocracy that still thought of themselves as Franks, it was like déjà vu.

Not once, in any of his letters related to the First Crusade, did Urban mention

Charlemagne or use the word ‘Frank.’ Moreover, we have to be careful, for the

reasons outlined above, about trusting what Robert of Reims thought and Guibert

of Nogent surmised about Urban using an explicit language of Frankishness.

Regardless, the narrative Urban seems to have offered his audiences––the story of

how this expedition would play out––fundamentally echoed eleventh-century

understandings of Frankish imperium under Charlemagne. Urban’s audiences

would have recognized it as such. The attendees at Clermont and the recipients

of Urban’s letters, particularly those from SW Francia, Lombardy, Flanders,

Lotharingia, Normandy, and around the Île-de-France, clung to their (oftentimes

imagined) Frankish heritage through the eleventh century (see Figure 1.1). Indeed,

ideas of Frankish identity, such as those explored in depth in previous chapters,

pervade the narrative sources of the First Crusade.

While a cursory glance at contemporary sources of the First Crusade reveals that

the crusaders were all too aware of their regional differences, the narrators of the

First Crusade insisted that the army was a unified people and used the word ‘Frank’

more than any other to talk about themselves as a united Christian people.97

Unsurprisingly, given their origins in West Francia and more specifically locations

close to the Capetian heartland, an area filled in the late eleventh century with

monastic and Capetian Frankish memory, the language of Frankishness over-

whelms authors such as Baudri of Dol, Guibert of Nogent, and Robert of Reims.

Guibert of Nogent believed that the impetus for the crusade came from Urban’s

awareness that pagans beset Christendom in Iberia as well as in the East. Those who

would rescue universal Christendom would be the Franks, to whom, Guibert

assured the reader, Urban explicitly directed his call.98 In Urban’s speech at

Clermont, as recorded by Robert of Reims, Urban followed his litany of Muslim

depredations and his exhortation to remember their predecessors Charlemagne and

Louis the Pious with this rhetorical question addressed directly to the Franks: ‘On

whom therefore is the labor of avenging these wrongs and of recovering this territory

incumbent, if not upon you?’99

But chroniclers outside of northern Francia, including the Norman authors

Ralph of Caen and the anonymous compiler of the Gesta Francorum, the Poitevin

Peter Tudebode, the Provençal Pons of Balazun and his Auvergnat co-author

Raymond d’Aguiliers, and the Italian author of the Montecassino Chronicle, all

97 We must note again that Franci did not mean ‘French’ here. See Peter Knoch, Studien zur Albert

von Aachen: Der erste Kreuzzug in der deutschen Chronistik (Stuttgart, 1966), 92–3, 97–8, 107; Bull,

‘Overlapping and Competing Identities’, 195–211; and Balard, ‘Gesta Dei per Francos’, 473–84.

98 Guibert, Gesta Dei per Francos, ed. Huygens, 107–9.

99 ‘Quibus igitur ad hoc ulciscendum, ad hoc eripiendum labor incumbit, nisi vobis, quibus prae

ceteris gentibus contulit Deus insigne deus armorum, magnitudinem animorum, agilitatem corporum,

virtutem humiliandi verticem capilli vobis resistentium?’ Robert of Reims, Historia, 728. English tr.

from First Crusade, ed. Peters, 27.

The Franks Return to the Holy Land

155

used similar language.100 The two Norman authors fit well within the previously

outlined understanding of Frankishness begun by Dudo. Indeed, the Gesta Fran-

corum’s anonymous compiler does something telling at the beginning of his

account; he attributes the origins of the First Crusade to ‘a great stirring of heart

throughout all the regions of the Gauls . . . [and so when Urban’s] words had begun

to be rumored abroad through all the duchies and counties of the Gauls, the Franks

immediately [responded] . . . And now they removed themselves from their homes

in Gaul.’101 Like Guy of Amiens had done when talking about the armies of

William of Normandy, the Gesta drew a distinction. The land is Gaul, populated

collectively by Gauls. The crusaders, however, are Franks. Ralph of Caen does

much the same. In his preface, Ralph has Bohemond and Tancred reminiscing on

the armies of victorious Franks as they marched eastwards. Later, repelling an attack

from the Byzantines, Ralph describes Tancred’s army as Franks, even though we

might now think of them as Southern Italian Normans.102 Here, the Franks are a

people not defined by geography, but rather a group of different peoples becoming

one, becoming the gentes Francorum, taking the appellation ‘Frank’ by virtue of

their actions––just as we have seen done in the ARF, Notker the Stammerer, Dudo

of Saint-Quentin, William of Jumièges, Guy of Amiens, and the Oxford Roland.

Despite the fact that the men of the southern Francia were no keen admirers of

those from the north during the crusade, these southerners were, if anything, more

insistent than their counterparts in thinking of the crusaders as a united army of

100 The exception is ‘Albert’ of Aachen, who generally used Galli to describe the crusading army

and Franci for those from East Francia. Much like the Norman authors outlined above, the West

Franks were Francigeni. See Colin Morris, ‘The Aims and Spirituality of the First Crusade as seen

through the Eyes of Albert of Aachen’, Reading Medieval Studies, 16 (1990), 101–2; Susan Edgington,

‘The First Crusade: Reviewing the Evidence’, in Jonathan Phillips (ed.), The First Crusade: Origins and Impact (Manchester, 1997), 64; and Balard, ‘Gesta Dei per Francos’, 478. There are a couple of reasons, however, why ‘Albert’ may have used different language. He may have been trying to claim the term for

the Lotharingians, refighting the ideological battle over the term that was initially waged in the 840s.

Second, paradoxically, Aachen was not a particular locus of devotion to the Charlemagne legend in the

early 12th cent., likely because the chapel and palace were more important to Louis the Pious than

Charlemagne and it was remembered as such (note its absence from Fig. 1.1). Finally, most scholars

assume that Albert was a canon at the chapel of St Mary’s in Aachen. But what if our author was not

named ‘Albert’ (an Anglicization of ‘Adalbert’) but rather was a canon of Adalbert’s church in Aachen.

The one time the author mentions St Mary’s, it is with some distance and we think his name was

‘Albert’ only because the name was appended to a relatively early stemma of manuscripts (c.1200).

From the outset, St Adalbert’s house looked eastwards, towards Bohemia, and the house may well have

been populated by men from those lands. If so, this might explain the author’s reluctance to think of

himself as sharing a relationship with the West Franks. On the name ‘Albert/Adalbert’ in the

manuscripts and the mention at St Mary’s, see respectively Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana,

ed. and tr. Susan B. Edgington (Oxford, 2007), pp. xxiii, 448. On Aachen, see Robert Jeuckens, Stift

und Pfarre St. Adalbert in Aachen (Aachen, 1951); McKitterick, Charlemagne, 157–8; and Theo

Riches, ‘The Carolingian Capture of Aachen in 978 and its Historiographical Footprint’, in Paul

Fouracre and David Ganz (eds.), Frankland: The Franks and the World of the Early Middle Ages

(Manchester, 2008), 207–8.

101 ‘facta est igitur motio ualida per uniuersas Galliarum regiones . . . Cumque iam hic sermo

paulatim per uniuersas regiones ac Galliarum patrias coepisset crebrescere, Franci audientes talia

protinus in dextra crucem suere scapula . . . Iamiamque Galliae suis remotae sunt domibus.’ Gesta

Francorum, ed. Hill, 1–2; emphasis added.

102 Ralph of Caen, Gesta Tancredi, 603, 608.

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The Franks Recreate Empire

Franks. For instance, the Poitevin Peter Tudebode used the term ‘Franks’ more

often than the Norman author of the Gesta, and the Italian Montecassino Chronicle

at least replicated the number of times the Gesta invoked the army’s collective

Frankish identity.103 Pons and Raymond generally avoided using generic descrip-

tive terms for the army while it passed through the Balkans. When the crusaders

reached Nicaea, however, and the various crusading armies were finally united, the

language of Frankishness emerged and the crusaders became an exercitus Fran-

corum, composed of the gentes Francorum. For example, the co-authors have God-

frey of Bouillon urging Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles into battle for the glory of

God and their shared descent from the Franks. At Antioch, during the combat

against Kerbogha, the gentes Francorum fought to honor their shared heritage and

prove, by Frankish victory, that God honored his covenant with his people.104 The

Franks once more held God’s favor and the chosen people had reclaimed their

special place in sacred history.

The chroniclers of the First Crusade shared a common intellectual tradition.

Being a Frank was something you earned by being a warrior, allowing you to

participate in a common heritage and a common future. This is why it is entirely

understandable that Pons and Raymond could have speakers invoke a shared

heritage as the gentes Francorum in order to spur them on to battle, why those

who responded to Urban’s call could be called Franks according to the Norman

Gesta Francorum, and why Ralph of Caen compared Robert of Flanders and Hugh

of Vermandois at the battle of Dorylaeum to Roland and Oliver.105

References to a common Frankish heritage among those who participated in the

First Crusade could also be more implicit than explicit. The Annales Augustani

described the First Crusade as an amazing and unheard-of expedition with parti-

cipants from many and diverse provinces and nationes. Bernold of St Blasien wrote

that crusaders came from all over Gaul, Germania, and Italia. Sigebert of Gembloux

thought that (almost) all the Western peoples went––from Spain, Provence,

Aquitaine, Brittany, Scotland, England, Normandy, Francia, Lotharingia, Burgun-

dy, Germania, Lombardy, Apulia, and elsewhere.106 In describing the crusaders,

these early twelfth-century writers were also describing the inhabitants of Charle-

magne’s remembered empire as illustrated in Chapter 1, above. Fulcher of Chartres

had the army of Franks who confront Kerbogha draw up their battle-lines; the

Franks, Flemish, and Normans led the way, followed by the Alamanns and

Lotharingians, followed by the Gasçons and Provençals. Similarly, Fulcher de-

scribed the community of those on the First Crusade as diverse in languages but

103 See the observations in Bull, ‘Overlapping and Competing Identities’, 197–8, esp. n.10 where

Bull gives a few examples of Tudebode’s changes. There has not been a good in-depth study of the

Montecassino Chronicle, although Rubenstein, ‘Gesta Francorum’, 181–2 has some thoughts. It can be

found at Montecassino Chronicle, RHC Occ. 3: 172–229.

104 Pons of Balazun and Raymond d’Aguiliers, Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem, ed. John

Hugh Hill and Laurita L. Hill (Paris, 1969), 44–5, 88, 79–80, respectively. Note that this ‘Provençal’

understanding of the gentes Francorum parallels the ‘Norman’ understanding discussed above.

105 Ralph of Caen, Gesta Tancredi, 627.