ИЛИЯНА БЕНИНА, НИКОЛА БЕНИН
Изследвайки английски, латински, френски и немски текстове, от „Gesta Francorum“ и „Chanson d'Antioche“ от XII век до „Krônike von Prûzinlant“ и „La Prise d'Alixandre“ от XIV век, книгата проследява историческото развитие и географското разпространение на тази нова употреба на светската рицарска литература, както за оформяне на паметта и интерпретацията на минали събития, така и за осигуряване на продължаването на свещената война.
Съдържание
Бележка за имената xi
Въведение 1
Част I. Песента за жестовете в пропагандата на кръстоносните походи
1. Поклонници и заселници 11
2. Gesta Francorum 26
3. „Historia Iherosolimitana“ на Роберт от Реймс 51
4. Старофренският цикъл на кръстоносните походи: Кръстоносният поход като война на семействата 75
Част II. Рицарски романс в пропагандата на кръстоносните походи
5. Предизвикателството на романтиката и тринадесети век 99
6. Николай от Йерошин и кръстоносният поход през четиринадесети век 124
7. Приключенията и Изтокът във втория старофренски кръстоносен цикъл 156
8. Идеалният кръстоносец в „Ценята на Аликсандра“ 174
Заключение 189
Бележки 199
Цитирани трудове 243
Индекс 261
Introduction
Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English polemicist John
Gower turned his attention to the Crusade, which was approaching
its three-hundredth anniversary. Although he was not altogether
opposed to the holy war,1
Gower argued that in his day the practice of crusading had fallen into disrepute because its supporters and
participants no longer had the right motivations. The prelates who
urged their flock to take the cross, he said, often merely sought to further their own worldly goals.2
Furthermore, those who took up arms
against the unbeliever were rarely driven by noble aspirations. In the
Mirour de l’Omme of ca. 1376–1379, Gower enumerated the reasons
for which his contemporaries set out on Crusade, two of which he
found especially reprehensible:
The first is (so to speak) pride in one’s own prowess—“I will go in
order to win praise.” Or also, “It is for my beloved, so that I may
have her affection—for this I will work.” . . . If you will work in pride
for worldly vainglory, whereby you may be superior to the others,
then you must give your garments and your wealth to the heralds, so
that they may proclaim with great clamor your valor and largess. . . .
On the other hand, if it be that you go over the sea because of a
woman of whom your heart is enamored, hoping that on your return
the girl or lady for whom you have labored may deign to have pity on
you, then you are lacking the right medicine.3
Rather than to serve God, which alone made Crusade worthwhile by
Gower’s standards, his contemporaries were fighting out of a desire
for worldly renown or to win the favor of women. Although Gower
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2 Introduction
may not have liked it, the first of these motivations is perhaps not
surprising. He specifically talks about the chivalric class, the knights
who for many years had carried most of the burden of crusading, and
as early as the eleventh century chivalry had found common ground
between the desire to achieve glory through deeds of prowess and the
wish to serve God.4
The Crusaders of Gower’s time certainly were
not the first to set out hoping to save their souls and win renown in
the process, or vice versa. The second of Gower’s concerns, however,
was less evident in military history. To brave faraway dangers to win
the love of a lady demonstrates another kind of idealism, one whereby
service to God is complemented or even replaced by the service to
women; it is to be expected from the heroes of chivalric romance—a
Lancelot or a Tristan—but not of those risking life, limb, and fortune to fight the pagan on the frontiers of Christendom. If we believe
Gower, then some of the Crusaders of the later Middle Ages were
guided by motives reminiscent of imaginative literature.5
An important body of Crusade scholarship has examined what
motivated those who first left to fight for the cross. Although some
have proposed socioeconomic and political motivations,6
more recent
work has highlighted the role of lay piety in the decision to participate in Crusade.7
Scholars such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and Marcus
Bull have argued that individual devotion, often grounded in local
religious practice, was what propelled those who set out for the frontiers of Christianity.8
Turning from the motivations of individual participants to the arguments used to convince them to take the cross,
Bull has also emphasized the preeminence of piety in the call to Crusade. He has claimed that, although some Crusaders may also have
been motivated by other factors, such as patriotic pride, the desire for
personal glory, and family honor, these issues were never part of the
Crusade appeal itself: “Patriotic and militaristic enthusiasms might
have influenced the way in which an arms-bearer interpreted the crusade appeal: they cannot adequately explain why he should have been
thinking about it in the first place. At the heart of the crusade message lay an appeal to piety.”9
Although individual piety undoubtedly
played an important role, the critical preoccupation with religious
motivations has obscured crucial aspects of Crusade propaganda,
which exhibits far more breadth and complexity. This book examines how, from the very beginning of the Crusade in the last years
of the eleventh century, historiographical works that propagated the
holy war appropriated the formal and thematic characteristics of
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Introduction 3
chivalric literary genres to appeal specifically to aristocratic interests that ranged beyond religious devotion. These genres—the chanson de geste and chivalric romance—were popular with the fighting
class that was most often called upon to participate in the Crusade,
and throughout their history they served to bring issues important to
this class into public consciousness. By using the commonplaces of
chivalric literature to shape their writings, the lay and clerical Crusade propagandists discussed in this book actively sought to associate
the holy war with other, more secular matters to which arms bearers
were drawn—from the loyalty and mutual obligation between lord
and vassal, to family honor, the thirst for adventure, and the desire
for women—and to invoke these as parallel or complementary motivations for participating in the Crusade. As the following chapters
explore, exactly how they utilized the characteristics of chivalric literature depended on the religious, sociopolitical, and military concerns
they addressed with their works, whether the precarious position of
the Christian principalities in the Levant, the ambitions of powerful men, or the need for recruits in an era of Christian defeat and
disillusionment.
Ever since Louis Bréhier wrote, more than a century ago, that “dans
la Chanson de Roland . . . apparaît l’idée de la guerre sainte contre
l’Islam,”10 scholars have argued that chivalric literature could propagate interreligious conflict in the Middle Ages. As Simon Lloyd says
when speaking of thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century knighthood: “A significant proportion of the literature composed for their
entertainment was concerned with the deeds of knights confronting
the infidel. The struggle lay at the heart of the Charlemagne cycle
and provided the crucial focus of the chansons de croisade and compositions which celebrated later crusading heroes such as Richard I.
Arthurian romance held up the ideal in somewhat different fashion,
but works such as Perlesvaus and the Queste del Saint Graal served
equally to instil the notion that the knight should wield his sword in a
sacred cause.”11 Chansons de geste and romances could therefore serve
as “edificatory tales, with a strong exemplary content.”12 As this book
will show, however, the import of the chansons de geste and chivalric
romances for medieval Crusade propaganda extended far beyond the
salubrious messages contained within the texts themselves. In fact,
from the very beginning of the Crusade, both lay and clerical authors
imported the formal and thematic characteristics of chivalric literature
into—generically often very different—historiographical writings in
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4 Introduction
order to motivate their audience to participate in the Crusade. Furthermore, in line with the recent critical focus on piety in Crusade
motivation, most of those who have investigated the role of chansons
and romances as Crusade propaganda have argued that they served
to incite especially religious sentiments.13 In contrast, this book examines how Crusade propaganda utilized aspects of the chanson de geste
and chivalric romance to appeal to specifically secular motivations to
take the cross; accordingly, it will show not only that chivalric literature was used far more widely in Crusade propaganda than has been
assumed but also that it served very different purposes.
Crusade propaganda—the formal and informal ways used to further the cause of the holy war and to convince fighting men to risk all
on the far reaches of Christianity—came in many forms, from papal
encyclical and clerical sermon to lay narrative and song, and much of
this has been the subject of study in recent years.14 However, historiographical writings on the Crusade that functioned as exhortatory
constructs have on the whole received less scholarly attention. This
is unwarranted; as Gabrielle Spiegel has observed, medieval historiographical writings provide rich soil for the study of techniques of
exhortation and propaganda: “Historiography, as the medieval genre
par excellence devoted to a ‘realistic’ representation of the social and
political world, is at the same time a genre thoroughly saturated with
ideological goals. Especially in the Middle Ages, historical writing,
precisely to the degree that it claimed to be free of imaginative elaboration, served as a vehicle of ideological elaboration.”15 The ensuing
chapters discuss a broad range of historiographical writings, from
narrative history to aristocratic biography, chronicle, and what is usually referred to as “popular history”; these date from the twelfth century to the fourteenth, and were written in Latin and the vernacular,
by both clergymen and laymen, in places ranging from the Near East
to northern France to the Baltic. While they exhibit great variety, the
works analyzed in this book are tied together by several factors. First,
they all purport to narrate the history of the Crusade or the deeds
of individual Crusaders;16 although some, notably the works of the
First and Second Old French Crusade Cycles, are very imaginative,
even these were considered truthful accounts of events in the Middle
Ages.17 Second, they all serve to propagate the holy war and to motivate their audience to aid the cause d’Outremer. Third, they unrelentingly appropriate the conventions of chivalric literature to fulfill that
purpose.
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Introduction 5
The book consists of two parts, the first of which examines the use
of the formal and thematic commonplaces of the chansons de geste
in Crusade propaganda over roughly the first century after the First
Crusade. Chapter 1 describes the continuing need for manpower in
the Crusader states in the aftermath of the First Crusade, outlines
the origin and genre characteristics of the chansons, and examines
their usefulness for Crusade propaganda. The excitatoria I discuss in
chapters 2 to 4—the anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (completed by early 1101), Robert of Reims’s Historia
Iherosolimitana (ca. 1106–1107), and the three texts of the so-called
historical cycle of the First Old French Crusade Cycle (La Chanson
d’Antioche, Les Chétifs, and La Chanson de Jérusalem, redacted in
the late twelfth or early thirteenth century)—describe similar subjects, all narrating the remarkable events of the First Crusade. Insofar as Robert of Reims drew extensively on the Gesta Francorum
when writing his work, and the Old French Crusade Cycle in turn was
heavily influenced by the Historia Iherosolimitana, the texts provide
excellent ground for comparative study. These works furthermore
illustrate the role of the successful First Crusade in later Crusade propaganda and show the importance of Jerusalem in early Crusade ideology.18 I will demonstrate how their authors turned to the chansons
to address the requirements of the nascent Crusader states, the expansionist aspirations of Bohemond of Taranto, and the need for manpower after the Battle of Hattin in 1187, respectively.
The second part explores how chivalric romance, which gained
in popularity from the last quarter of the twelfth century onward,
affected the propagation of the Crusade until the end of the fourteenth century. Chapter 5 demonstrates that romance, with its heavy
emphasis on secular and often illicit love, was at first thought antithetical to the goals of Crusade, and that its commonplaces were consequently used sparingly in propaganda. Chapters 6 to 8, however,
show how excitatoria increasingly looked toward romance to shore
up support for the holy war, especially after the collapse of the Crusader states in 1291. The works examined in these chapters illustrate
the expansion of the Crusade beyond the Holy Places: Nicolaus of
Jeroschin’s Middle High German Krônike von Prûzinlant (ca. 1331–
1344) describes the subjugation of much of the Baltic by the Teutonic
or German Order; the works of the Second Old French Crusade Cycle
(in particular Le Bâtard de Bouillon and Baudouin de Sébourc, ca.
1350–1370) see Christians ranging as far as Baghdad and assaulting
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6 Introduction
Mecca; while La Prise d’Alixandre, written by Guillaume de Machaut in the early 1370s, narrates the conquest of the Egyptian port of
Alexandria by Peter I of Cyprus in 1365. Beyond highlighting the
spreading reach of the holy war in the centuries following the First
Crusade, to include population groups and target areas farther afield,
the works I analyze in the second part of the book have in common
the virtue of demonstrating a different awareness and interpretation
of geographical space. They show remarkable interaction between
Christian heartland and non-Christian frontier; as they appropriate
the characteristics of chivalric romance to suit their purpose as Crusade excitatoria, they turn this frontier into a world of courtly love
and adventure.
A study of the rhetoric and the strategies of persuasion in Crusade excitatoria cannot explain why those who chose to take up
arms throughout the many centuries of Crusade did so. Nevertheless, the old dictum that propaganda has a target audience that, it is
hoped, will respond positively to it suggests that the authors I discuss
expected their approach to have such an effect. Although we cannot
know what Crusaders thought when deciding to take the cross, the
repeated use by Crusade excitatoria of the tropes of vernacular chivalric literature over the better part of three centuries suggests an audience receptive to the portrayal of the Crusade in terms reminiscent
of the chansons de geste and chivalric romance, and perhaps equally
willing to think of the Crusade in those terms. Those knights who,
under the critical gaze of John Gower, set out on Crusade to win the
favor of their ladies did so after many years of the rhetoric of Crusade
associating it with the extraneous, chivalric concerns embodied in
vernacular literature. If propaganda for the Crusade affected its audience as it intended to, then what horrified Gower may have had deep
roots that extended back as early as the First Crusade.
The notion that chivalric literature affected how the Crusade
was presented in excitatoria, and so may have influenced how it was
understood by an audience of the Western aristocracy, adds a further
dimension to an important stream of recent criticism. The past few
decades have seen scholars consider imaginative literature such as the
chansons de geste and romance not only as entertainments with the
power to incite their audience to action but also as a reflection of aristocratic attitudes, including attitudes toward the Crusade.19 Chivalric
literature has come to be regarded as a storehouse of arms bearers’
memory of and concern for the holy war to which so much of their
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Introduction 7
effort was devoted. This approach is, however, decidedly unidirectional; in seeing literature as a reflection of historical understandings
of and opinions on the Crusade, it mostly ignores how imaginative
literature in turn shaped these understandings and opinions. This
book therefore argues for a bilateral consideration of the relationship between perceptions of the Crusade and lay literature. Across the
three most important centuries of Crusade, those propagating it continually appropriated literature, and reacted to literary developments,
in order to mold Western understanding of the nature and purpose of
holy war.20 Just as chivalric literature reflected aristocratic attitudes
toward the Crusade, it contributed perhaps in equal measure to their
formation.
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