An Empire of Memory (44 page)

106 Annales Augustani, MGH SS 3: 134; Bernold of St Blasien, Chronicon, MGH SS 5: 464; and

Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronicon, MGH SS 6: 367.

The Franks Return to the Holy Land

157

‘brothers in the love of God’. These men were Franks, Flemish, Frisians, Gauls,

Allobroges, Lotharingians, Alamanns, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aqui-

tanians, Italians, Dacians, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks, and Armenians. But

together they were Franks, who celebrated together as Nicaea and Antioch fell, as

the lance was found, as Kerbogha was defeated, and as they traced their bloody steps

into Jerusalem to reclaim the Holy Sepulcher. This is language all but lifted from

the Oxford Roland.107

There was no one origin of the First Crusade. Too often we forget that. Each army that

went east after 1095 had different currents washing over it. Even within those armies, it

is quite likely that individuals had many different ideas inspiring them to set off on this

expedition. And no two people were exactly the same. Bohemond did not join the First

Crusade for the same reasons as Raymond of Saint-Gilles and neither joined for the

same reasons as Peter the Hermit, Robert of Normandy, Anselm of Ribemont, Peter

Tudebode, Bohemond of Taranto, Pons of Balazun, Emicho of Flonheim, or anyone

else. Still, there is a reason that those who responded to the First Crusade came from

within the borders of Charlemagne’s historical empire and clustered around locations

displaying a particular devotion to the Charlemagne legend in the ninth–eleventh

centuries (compare Figures 1.1 and 5.1). There was something that united the

crusaders, something that kept them on the same path, even as they constantly

bickered about the crusade’s direction and purpose.

Urban II offered a general narrative framework that would be familiar to all of his

audiences, but a framework flexible enough to be modified in particular in-

stances.108 Urban could speak to the aristocracy about their Frankish heritage

without ever using the word ‘Frank’ because, when Urban told his story, it

wasn’t new. Many of his audience members had heard it before in the Charlemagne

and Last Emperor legends, in the history they believed they shared as descendents

of the Franks. Regardless of whether they received the message from Urban himself,

his legates, or the numerous itinerant preachers who fanned out across Europe,

many of those who responded to the call ‘dreamt’ on the narrative themes they

heard––ideas like ‘populus Christi’, ‘defense of the ecclesia’, ‘reconquest’, ‘Christen-

dom’, ‘Constantinople’, and ‘Jerusalem’.109 As we have seen in preceding chapters,

all of the East was thought to be Christian land; not only Christ’s patrimony but a

Frankish protectorate under Charlemagne and sacred space to be retaken during

the Last Days, when the world would once again be made Christian by a host of

Franks marching eastwards under the banner of the Frankish Last Emperor.110

107 Fulcher of Chartres, Historia, ed. Hagenmeyer, 255–6 (vs. Kerbogha), 202–3 (description of

the army), and 306–7 (poem on Frankish capture of Jerusalem). Compare Fulcher’s lists with the

descriptions of Charlemagne’s conquests and the battle against Baligant in the contemporary Oxford

Roland. See above at nn. 34–5.

108 e.g. the men of the Italian maritime city-states may not have engaged as well as their northern

counterparts with the narrative of Frankish history that underlay this more general message. But that is the genius of a message containing a shibboleth: those who need to, get it.

109 On ‘dreaming’ on Urban’s message, see Flori, ‘Une ou plusieurs “première croisade”?’, 22.

110 Urban II’s ‘theology of history’, so convincingly described by Alfons Becker, might subtly echo

this idea. The pure ecclesia was punished by Muslim invasions but was in the process of ‘reconquest and 158

The Franks Recreate Empire

Now, at the end of this study, it should not surprise us that the participants in

the First Crusade, even though they came from what we think of as such disparate

regions, could rely on a common political culture, using it to harken back to older,

eighth- and ninth-century conciliar models in order to govern the armies as they

marched to Jerusalem.111 It should not surprise us that the crusaders themselves

and the narrators of this event could use Franci and christiani almost interchange-

ably. It should not surprise us if the crusaders and their later chroniclers saw the

travelers as new Israelites, a chosen people, marching to reclaim the Holy Land

from its profane invaders. None of these were new ideas. This was indeed ‘old wine

in new bottles’, a vintage borrowed from the ninth-century Franks, filtered through

the passage of time, and now repackaged in slightly different form by the interac-

tion between speaker and audience in 1095–6.112

Expressed first in sources from the ninth century, this definition of the Franks

as warriors, chosen by God to exercise His will, survived (often manifested in a

conscious intellectual attachment to a Frankish Golden Age believed to have existed

under Charlemagne) in the writings of men scattered across Charlemagne’s old

empire; men such as Notker the Stammerer of St Gall, Adso Dervensis, Benedict of

Monte Soratte, Ademar of Chabannes, William of Jumièges, the anonymous

author of the Descriptio qualiter, and Pseudo-Alcuin. But this understanding of

Frankish identity also survived in the memories of the high and low aristocracy of

those same regions, due to the dependence that aristocracy’s piety owed to their

close connection to the aforementioned religious, as well as the aristocracy’s willful

restoration’. See Becker, Papst Urban II., ii. 333–71. Constantinople mattered as much as Jerusalem in this scheme. Looked at this way, the modern historiographical debate about the First Crusade’s

ultimate goal––Constantinople or Jerusalem––might actually be a case of not seeing the forest for

the trees. Jerusalem and Constantinople were not symbolically equivalent in the eyes of Urban and the

crusaders but the ideas of aiding the Eastern empire and retaking the Holy Sepulcher interpenetrated

one another and would have been hard to separate at the end of the 11th cent. On this debate, which

has a vast bibliography, see the useful summary in Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘Erdmann and the

Historiography of the Crusades, 1935–1995’, in Luis García-Guijarro Ramos (ed.), La Primera

Cruzada novecientos años después: El concilo de Clermont y los orígenes del movimiento cruzado

(Madrid, 1997), 17–29.

111 Koziol, ‘Political Culture’, 47, 71–5; and Christopher Tyerman, ‘Principes et Populus: Civil

Society and the First Crusade’, in Simon Barton and Peter Lineham (eds.), Cross, Crescent and

Conversion: Studies on Medieval Spain and Christendom in Memory of Richard Fletcher (Leiden,

2008), 150–1.

112 The phrase is from Tyerman, God’s War, 57. Tyerman, however, is speaking Urban repackaging

Gregory VII’s ideas. On the crusaders as a new chosen people, see Paul Alphandéry, ‘Les Citations bibliques chez les historiens de la Première Croisade’, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, 99 (1929), 139–57; Delaruelle,

‘Essai sur la formation’, 107–10; Johan Chydenius, Medieval Institutions and the Old Testament (Helsinki, 1965), 81–2; Rousset, Les Origines, 187–92; Joshua Prawer, ‘Jerusalem in the Christian and Jewish

Perspectives of the Early Middle Ages’, in Gli ebrei nell’alto medioevo: 30 marzo–5 aprile 1978, 2 vols.

(Spoleto, 1980), ii. 744; Anne Derbes, ‘A Crusading Fresco Cycle at the Cathedral of Le Puy’, Art Bulletin, 73 (1991), 561–76; Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent, 100–1; and Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 111–12, 147–8; among others. On the crusade as constituting ‘Christendom’, see Jan van Laarhoven, ‘“Christianitas” et réforme grégorienne’, Studi Gregoriani, 6 (1959–61), esp. 37–98; Paul Rousset, ‘La Notion de Chrétienté aux XIe et XIIe siècles’, Le Moyen Âge, 69 (1963), 191–203; and Jan van Laarhoven, ‘Chrétienté et croisade: Une tentative terminologique’, Cristianesimo nella storia, 6 (1985), 27–43.

The Franks Return to the Holy Land

159

adherence to a common political culture that intellectually emphasized continuity

with this imagined Frankish past.113

Social memory informs identity but it can also tell a community how to act in

certain situations.114 Ideas can make people do things. Being called a ‘Frank’

mattered in the early Middle Ages because, as a component of identity, that

appellation governed a field of actions. In this particular instance, this ‘case study’

of the First Crusade, the invocation of Frankish identity became a call to sanctified

violence. The narrative that the First Crusade proposed was powerful because it was

framed in a language that both speaker and listener understood, even if in slightly

different ways. That language, sometimes implicitly, but often explicitly, described

the crusade’s participants as the populus christianus, as protectors of the ecclesia all

the way to the East. It called upon them as warriors, as God’s chosen people who

held a special place in sacred history, to fight against his enemies; and this narrative

was told at the end of the eleventh century, at a particular moment when the

Charlemagne legend had spread across Europe and shared elements with the Last

Emperor legend. This matrix told all those who thought of themselves as Franks that

their glory lay not only in the past. Many who thought of themselves as Franks, men

like Nithard and William of Jumièges, may have thought that their people’s special

place had been lost in the late ninth century, evidenced by events like Fontenoy.115

But the Franks always held out hope. They believed that they would have another

chance.

It came at the end of the eleventh. The First Crusade was a moment of promise;

both figure and fulfillment within sacred history; an opportunity to reclaim God’s

favor. The combination of late eleventh-century Frankish identity and a call to

Christian holy war told those who still thought of themselves as Franks to once

more take up their burden and march to the East against the enemies of Christ,

reclaiming God’s favor, putting on the glorious mantle their ancestors had worn

and participating in the prophesied glory to come.

113 On the flow of ideas between the aristocracy and their local religious houses, see Bull, Knightly

Piety, 155–203.

114 On social memory and action, see Walter Pohl, ‘Memory, Identity and Power in Lombard

Italy’, in Uses of the Past, 11; and James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford, 1992).

On the power of language to shape action, see François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, tr.

Elborg Forster (Cambridge, 1981), 1–79; and Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution:

Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), 5–6. For a dissenting

view specifically relating to the First Crusade, see John France, ‘Patronage and the Appeal of the First Crusade’, in Jonathan Phillips (ed.), The First Crusade: Origins and Impact (Manchester, 1997), 5–20.

115 Fontenoy was also remembered as catastrophic moment for the Franks by Hugh of Flavigny and

was directly tied to the success of the First Crusade. Hugh recorded that a great light was seen in the northern sky before the final battle of the crusade at Jerusalem. Such a light had been seen before, he continues, before Fontenoy, before the removal of King Louis, at the coronation of Hugh Capet, and

before the invasion of the Hungarians. The light portended great slaughter and a great historical

rupture for the Franks. Hugh of Flavigny, Chronicon, MGH SS 8: 481. Note, however, that Hugh

recorded these other events earlier in his chronicle but said nothing of a divine light in those sections.

He was, like our crusade chroniclers, reading history backwards. For more on how transformative the

First Crusade was for the West, see Rubenstein, First Crusade, forthcoming.

A P P E N D I X 1 :

Legend for Figure 1.1

M I S C E L L A N E O U S T E X T S

1. Saint-Gall: late ninth century

Notker the Stammerer, Vita Karoli Magni

2. Vienne: late ninth century

Ado of Vienne, Martyrologium

3. Reichenau: tenth century

Translatio sanguinis

4. Monte Soratte: mid-tenth century

Benedict of Monte Soratte, Chronicon

5. Montier-en-Der: mid-tenth century

Adso of Montier-en-Der, De antichristo

6. Novalesa: early eleventh century

Chronicon

7. Saint-Cybard of Angoulême: early eleventh century

Ademar of Chabannes, Chronicon

8. Niederaltaich: early eleventh century

Annales

9. Saint-Sauveur of Charroux: eleventh century

Privilegium and Historia

10. San Millán de Cogolla: eleventh century

Nota Emilianense

11. The Hague: eleventh century

Fragment de la Haye

12. Île-de-France/Paris: end of eleventh century

Descriptio qualiter Karolus Magnus

13. Alba: late eleventh century

Benzo of Alba, Ad Heinricum

14. Saint-Pierre of Chartres: late eleventh century

Earliest MS of Pseudo-Alcuin

15. Saint-Pé: late eleventh century

Charter mentioning Roland and Oliver as brothers

16. Saint-Aubin of Angers: late eleventh century

Charter mentioning Roland and Oliver as brothers