Crusades

Volume 11

Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Jonathan Riley-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409446668
• eBook ISBN: 9781351985383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval 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 appears in both print and online editions.

The Relationship Between the Gesta Francorum and Peter Tudebode's Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere: The Evidence of a Hitherto Unexamined Manuscript (St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, 3)

Marcus Bull
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
[email protected]

One of the most seemingly intractable and long-running problems in the study of the contemporary historiography of the First Crusade has been the relationship between two of the so-called “eyewitness” accounts of that expedition, the anonymous text generally known as the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (hereafter GF) and the Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere attributed to a priest, probably from Civray in Poitou, named Peter Tudebode (hereafter the text that bears his name will be referred to as PT).¹ Within the tangled and still imperfectly understood web of relationships between the many histories of the First Crusade that were written soon after the event, both the eyewitnesses and what might be termed the “second generation” texts, the nexus between the GF and PT is self-evidently the single closest. Lexically, syntactically, substantively in terms of the propositional content of each text, and globally in their respective plot architectures, a particularly close affinity is immediately evident. Although each text contains passages absent from the other – this is more the case in PT, which is generally the more expansive – sequences in which there are close correspondences predominate. In the closeness of the two texts something more is at stake than the patterns of borrowings and influences that can be detected between other narratives of the First Crusade. More particularly, the relationship between the GF and PT differs from those between the GF and its adaptations by Robert the Monk, Guibert of Nogent, and Baldric of Bourgueil, who were able to express the GF’s plot content in more elevated literary registers.² In contrast, the difference in the historiographical ambitions evidenced by the GF and PT in those portions in which they directly overlap resides very precisely in what might sometimes appear to be trivial lexical preferences and sentence-building habits that do not usually translate into the sorts of variations in substantive detail with which historians of the First Crusade reading these texts are typically concerned. Indeed, analysis of the differences between the two texts has tended to focus on those points where there is substantive variation, in other words where one text makes statements not parallelled in the other. This has been the approach taken in a recent study by Jean Flori, for example.³ But, as will emerge more fully below, an itemization of differences in the texts’ respective propositional contents is of limited hermeneutic value: it bypasses the rich textuality of the material in favour of limiting one’s attention to the cruder measure of the texts’ paraphraseable factual content. In fact, there is much more analytical purchase in a close comparison of the lexical and syntactical textures of the GF and PT at the points where they most closely correlate. A new discovery, a text preserved in a manuscript in St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, reinforces the value of such a textuality-centred approach, as this paper will demonstrate.

It is first necessary to review in outline the debate about the status of the GF and PT. This debate emerged in the formative years of crusade scholarship in the seventeenth century, resurfaced with the increase in scholarly attention to the First Crusade narratives in the nineteenth century, and has been renewed since the 1970s. In his great anthology of crusade texts, the Gesta Dei per Francos (1611), Jacques Bongars printed the text of the GF, which he stated he derived from two manuscripts: one borrowed from Paul Petau, which is almost certainly to be identified with what is now Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica, Reg. Lat. 572; and a second lent to him by William Camden.⁴ This second manuscript, which has not been identified, must have been the source of several additional readings, typically comprising one or more clauses expanding on an action or character utterance, that Bongars inserted within the text of his edition, which otherwise follows the readings of the Petau manuscript very closely. (These additions are to be found in the version of the GF presented in his 1890 edition by Heinrich Hagenmeyer, who was persuaded that the expanded text in Bongars represented an early stage in the GF’s composition and thus functioned as an appropriate base text.)⁵

Bongars did not include the PT in his compendium. It did not appear in print until its publication in the fourth volume of André Duchesne’s Historiae Francorum Scriptores in 1641.⁶ The appearance of the text in this series was largely the work of the Poitevin historian Jean Besly, who discovered the manuscript upon which the edition was based and whose local patriotism informed his belief that the PT, seemingly the work of a priest from his own part of France, was the original from which the GF derived. This was the view subsequently enshrined within the Receuil des historiens des croisades; significantly, Wallon and Regnier, the editors of the GF in volume three of the Historiens occidentaux series, chose to qualify the title of the text with the coda “seu Tudebodus abbreviatus.”⁷ In contrast to this position, nineteenth-century German-speaking scholarship, most influentially in the person first of Heinrich von Sybel and then Heinrich Hagenmeyer, argued for the opposite view, asserting the priority of the GF.⁸ It is the latter position that has generally commanded assent in modern scholarship. The question of the relationship between the texts was reopened, however, by the editorial work on the PT of John and Laurita Hill, which followed up on their study of a third eyewitness account of the First Crusade, that by Raymond of Aguilers. The Hills argued for the existence of what they termed the “common source,” a now-lost account of the First Crusade that stood behind both the GF and PT in the forms in which they survive (as well as Raymond of Aguilers’s text) and explains their many affinities.⁹ Unfortunately, however, the Hills did not adequately develop their ideas about the form that the hypothetical common source took, nor the precise configurations of its respective influences upon the texts believed to derive from it. This same imprecision extends in the Hills’ edition of PT to the absence of a discussion of the interrelationships between the four manuscripts that were consulted, even though this question is self-evidently important for the development of the common source thesis, especially in light of the fact that the Hills’ critical apparatus itself reveals shifting permutations of proximity to readings in the GF among the various PT manuscripts.

For all its apparent imprecision, however, the common source thesis has been revisited by two recent scholars. In much the more nuanced discussion of the relationship between the GF and PT, Jay Rubenstein has argued for a variant of the common source hypothesis, according to which the text of the PT as we now have it is the result of a two-stage process of composition: a reworking of a now-lost aboriginal account of the First Crusade, which Rubenstein labels the “Jerusalem History,” was added to by the former crusader Peter Tudebode drawing upon his own memories of the crusade. The “Jerusalem History,” in this view, was also the ancestor of the GF in the form in which it now survives: certain non sequiturs and breaks in the story logic that it can be argued are present within the GF may then be explained as the result of faulty copying at some point in the transmission of the text anterior to the surviving manuscript witnesses.¹⁰ A somewhat less economical and less convincing model has been suggested by Jean Flori: a common source, itself possibly derived from an antecedent account of the crusade, was subject to multiple rewrites to arrive at the text of the GF as it now survives, while Peter Tudebode adapted a copy of the redaction that emerged from an early – the second – stage in this morphology. The text of the PT is thus closer to the common source than the extant, much-revised, GF.¹¹ The principal weakness of Flori’s approach is the elaboration of its suggested multi-stage process of composition (none of which has manuscript warrant, incidentally), a schema devised, it seems, to accommodate a narrow and anachronistic a priori assumption that the GF, like all the narratives of the First Crusade, primarily ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• A Note to Our Readers
• Abbreviations
• Articles
• Reviews
• Short Notices
• Bulletin No. 32 of the SSCLE
• Guidelines for the Submission of Papers
• Membership Information