Graham A. Loud - The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck

The chronicle of Arnold, Abbot of the monastery of St John of Lbeck, is one of the most important sources for the history of Germany in the central Middle Ages, and is also probably the major source for German involvement in the Crusades. The work was intended as a continuation of the earlier chronicle of Helmold of Bosau, and covers the years 11721209, in seven books. It was completed soon after the latter date, and the author died not long afterwards, and no later than 1214. It is thus a strictly contemporary work, which greatly enhances its value.

Abbot Arnolds very readable chronicle provides a fascinating glimpse into German society in the time of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and his immediate successors, into a crucial period of the Crusading movement, and also into the religious mentality of the Middle Ages.

Graham A. Loud is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Leeds, where he was Head of the School of History 201215. He holds a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship 201719, during which he is working on a book about the social history of the principality of Salerno, c.10201300, as revealed by the charters of the abbey of Holy Trinity, Cava. Among his previous books are The Age of Robert Guiscard. Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest (Harlow 2000), The Latin Church in Norman Italy (Cambridge 2007), Roger II and the Creation of the Kingdom of Sicily (Manchester 2012), and The Origins of the German Principalities, 11001350, edited with Jochen Schenk (Routledge 2017). He has also translated The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa for the series Crusade Texts in Translation (2010).

Crusade Texts in Translation

Editorial Board

Malcolm Barber (Reading), Peter Edbury (Cardiff), Norman Housley (Leicester), Peter Jackson (Keele)

The crusading movement, which originated in the 11th century and lasted beyond the 16th, bequeathed to its future historians a legacy of sources which are unrivalled in their range and variety. These sources document in fascinating detail the motivations and viewpoints, military efforts and spiritual lives of the participants in the crusades. They also narrate the internal histories of the states and societies which crusaders established or supported in the many regions where they fought. Some of these sources have been translated in the past but the vast majority have been available only in their original language. The goal of this series is to provide a wide-ranging corpus of texts, most of them translated for the first time, which will illuminate the history of the crusades and the crusader-states from every angle, including that of their principal adversaries, the Muslim powers of the Middle East.

Titles in the series include

Graham A. Loud

The Chronicle of Arnold of Lbeck

Carol Sweetenham

The Chanson des Chtifs and Chanson de Jrusalem

Anne Van Arsdall and Helen Moody

The Old French Chronicle of Morea

Keagan Brewer

Prester John: The Legend and its Sources

Martin Hall and Jonathan Phillips

Caffaro, Genoa and the TwelfthCentury Crusades

Denys Pringle

Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 11871291

First published 2019

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2019 Graham A. Loud

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ISBN: 978-1-138-21178-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-05324-5 (ebk)

My interest in the Chronicle of Arnold of Lbeck began with a casual conversation many years ago with Bernard Hamilton, the former president of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. This led me to read the chronicle for the first time, if rather too hurriedly. Much later, I looked at this text in greater depth when searching for primary sources to present to the students taking my third-year option at the University of Leeds on Emperor and Authority in Medieval Germany, for whom I translated Arnolds account of the downfall of Henry the Lion. I returned to his chronicle once again while working on my previous translation in this series, The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, and it was while completing that work that I decided to produce a complete translation of Arnolds chronicle as a companion volume. The attentive reader will note that I have called this work simply the Chronicle of Arnold of Lbeck for reasons that are explained in the introduction the traditional title of the Chronicle of the Slavs is inappropriate and unjustified.

I am grateful to John Smedley of Ashgate publishers, who originally commissioned the book, and to Routledge for honouring the contract when Ashgate was taken over. Over the several years that I have been working on this book many others have assisted me, often by patiently answering importunate questions, or advising on problematic passages. Among them have been Oliver Auge, Julia Barrow, David DAvray, Susan Edgington, Bill Flynn, Thomas Frster, John Gillingham, Sebastian Modrow, Alan Murray, Guy Perry, Tom Smith, Olivia Spencer (a graduate student who kindly assisted with the translation of a particularly confusing chapter), and Helmut Walther. Above all, my retired colleague at Leeds Ian Moxon has been an unfailing source of advice on translation, the scansion of verse and classical literature in general, as he was also for The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa. David Crouch and (once again) Bernard Hamilton kindly commented on drafts of the introduction. It has been a particular pleasure to collaborate with Oliver Auge (Kiel) and Sebastian Modrow (Griefswald), who are preparing a German translation of this same work. Finally, I am as ever most indebted to my wife, Kate Fenton, and for so much more than just her work on the maps and genealogical charts, and patient nursing of malfunctioning computers, although she has done all this, as she has for my previous books.

Leeds and Lyme Regis,

September 2018