Stefan Vander Elst - The Knight, the Cross, and the Song: Crusade Propaganda and Chivalric Literature, 1100-1400

The Knight, the Cross, and the Song

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

RUTH MAZO KARRAS, SERIES EDITOR

EDWARD PETERS, FOUNDING EDITOR

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The Knight, the Cross, and the Song

CRUSADE PROPAGANDA AND CHIVALRIC LITERATURE, 11001400

Stefan Vander Elst

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS Philadelphia

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FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION.

Copyright 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

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ISBN 978-0-8122-4896-8

For Cynthia and Leo

CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS

A NOTE ON NAMES

Throughout this book, I have Anglicized geographical cognomina, except where the original is commonly used in historical and literary criticism. I will therefore refer to, for example, Robert of Reims and Graindor of Douai, but to Chrtien de Troyes and Guillaume de Machaut.

The Knight, the Cross, and the Song

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, Furthermore, those who took up arms against the unbeliever were rarely driven by noble aspirations. In the Mirour de lOmme of ca. 13761379, 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 ones own prowessI will go in order to win praise. Or also, It is for my beloved, so that I may have her affectionfor 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.

Rather than to serve God, which alone made Crusade worthwhile by Gowers standards, his contemporaries were fighting out of a desire for worldly renown or to win the favor of women. Although Gower 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.

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, 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 chivalric literary genres to appeal specifically to aristocratic interests that ranged