Crusades

Volume 17

Benjamin Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Benjamin Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138353626
• eBook ISBN: 9780429757624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Crusades covers seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095–1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history.

Routledge publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Particular attention is given to the publication of historical sources in all relevant languages – narrative, homiletic and documentary - in trustworthy editions, but studies and interpretative essays are welcomed too. Crusades also incorporates the Society's Bulletin.

The editors are Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hebrew University, Israel; Jonathan Phillips, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; Nikolaos G. Chrissis, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.

The Letters of Stephen of Blois Reconsidered

Simon Thomas Parsons
King’s College London
[email protected]

Abstract The two letters of Stephen-Henry, count of Chartres and Blois, to his wife Adela, sent back to the West from the crusader camp, have proved enduringly popular as sources for the sieges of Nicaea and Antioch, for medieval letter-writing, and for Stephen’s life and pilgrimage. Yet since Hagenmeyer’s extensive 1901 study, there has been little academic consideration of their textual tradition or their relationship to the wider historiography of the First Crusade. Building upon an updated understanding of high medieval epistolography, this article constitutes a reassessment of these letters’ relationship with the narrative accounts of the First Crusade, demonstrating that they possess very close stylistic, textual, and structural links with the early crusade histories. Investigation of the manuscript tradition, the evidence for lost letters, and what seem like prophetic hints within the two texts, suggest that their compositional circumstances were considerably more complex than had previously been admitted, raising questions about their historiographical status. Various possibilities to explain these inconsistencies and similarities with other accounts are outlined. It was perhaps the case that the letters were drawing on an early Ur-text, written while the crusade was underway. Alternatively, the letter form of these accounts could have acted as a fictive framing device for the transmission of crusading narrative – although this could have been carried out very early, with the help of eyewitness material. Regardless, manifestly close textual resemblances prohibit these letters from being considered as unproblematically valid reportage, historiographically or analytically separate from the dynamic traditions of twelfth-century crusade text formation.

Introduction

Stephen (properly Stephen-Henry), count of Chartres and Blois, was one of the foremost leaders of the First Crusade, to the extent that he was elected to a position of some responsibility over the other magnates.¹ His great reputation was somewhat diminished by his ignominious flight from outside Antioch which resulted in the Byzantine relief force under Emperor Alexios Komnenos turning around and failing to help the besieged crusaders in 1098. His subsequent return to the East, on the instruction of his wife, and his death on the Crusade of 1101 only partially salvaged his status.² He is of chief interest to the field of First Crusade historiography as the one who supposedly authored, or dictated, a group of letters sent to his formidable wife Adela, herself the daughter of William I the Conqueror.³ Two of these short communications survive, written in a uniquely personal and frank style, both in twelfth-century manuscripts, and these have been seen as excellent evidence for Stephen’s life, the First Crusade, and eleventh-century letter writing.

Both letters have been translated many times into English, and are easily accessible; therefore I will only briefly sketch their contents here.⁴ New editions, prepared directly from the surviving manuscripts, are included in an appendix to this article. The first of the two surviving letters appears to be an intimate message sent by Stephen to Adela from Nicaea, after he had travelled through Byzantium and (contrary to the depiction by other contemporary chroniclers) been impressed with the hospitality and tolerance of Alexios. He describes the battle outside Nicaea against a Turkish relief force, the capture of the city, and the subsequent showering of gifts by Alexios upon the crusaders. He was especially proud of his own garrison duty of Nicaea after the city’s fall, and how much this pleased Alexios.⁵ The second letter is supposedly sent in rather more dangerous circumstances, during the siege of Antioch by the Christians in March 1098. The second letter claims itself to have been drafted in the main by Alexander, chaplain of Stephen, who accompanied his lord on both the First Crusade and his later 1101 expedition.⁶ The journey from Nicaea to Antioch is passed over relatively quickly, with Adela being assured that she had “heard enough.”⁷ The tribulations of the siege, the machinations of the enemy, and several engagements are described, including the Lake Battle and the Bridge Battle.⁸ To conclude the missive, Stephen himself takes over from his scribe and writes a personal statement of intent to his wife to return home as soon as possible.⁹

The purpose of this article is to argue that the two surviving letters of Stephen of Blois, while they were both almost certainly composed by the same writer, should not be viewed as providing a different category of evidence when compared to the canonical narrative accounts, and, as a result, questions must be raised over the veracity of their self-presented epistolary nature.¹⁰ A re-evaluation of these two short texts alongside the full range of First Crusade testimonies demonstrates their stylistic and textual similarity to other early narratives. One interpretation of this resemblance is that the letters of Stephen were drawing upon an Ur-text, which later was incorporated in the early Latin narratives, and could have been composed while the crusade was underway. Whether these letters were ever genuinely sent from the crusade-in-progress back to the West (and this remains a possibility) cannot be determined, but certain elements suggest that the epistolary framing device is suspect, and would be explained more easily in the context of a later compositional date. Regardless, their status as an independent, quasi-eyewitness, source of information for the progress of the crusade is maintained, as some elements of the narrative are either unique or verifiable from elsewhere.¹¹ They are testament to a developing narrative of the crusade in the late eleventh or early twelfth century.

I

Although the textual and manuscript tradition of the letters was discussed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century crusade historiography, the publication of Hagenmeyer’s Epistulae et chartae ad historiam primi belli sacri spectantes in 1901 effectively constitutes the last serious investigation into their nature, not least because of the voluminous notes, discussion, and introduction, as well as Hagenmeyer’s difficult language and writing style. Paul Riant’s detailed analysis in his Inventaire critique des lettres des croisades (1880) preceded this by some twenty years: his study of the texts acts as the source for many of Hagenmeyer’s conclusions. Historians since then have used the texts as evidence for Stephen’s character, his relationship with his wife, his role on the expedition, and the progress of the First Crusade, without systematically approaching the key issues of the circumstances of their production, their concordances and differences with other accounts, and their authenticity as “sent” texts.

In short, commentary on the letters has continued, while detailed textual and para-textual analysis has not. Meanwhile, scholarly conceptions of the nature of medieval letters have developed since the early twentieth century, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• ARTICLES
• REVIEWS
• Bulletin no. 38 of the SSCLE
• Guidelines for the Submission of Papers
• Membership Information