12 - The Silences of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum 1

Summary

One of the key criteria for evaluating the accuracy of a primary source is its closeness to the events it describes, so that historians generally give much greater weight to accounts produced during or soon after events than those produced a generation later, and to works composed by those involved in events rather than those recounting events at second- or third-hand. The history of the crusader states immediately before and during the Third Crusade has thus been thrown into doubt by recent scholarship that has called into question the date of composition and authorship of several of the Latin Christian sources for the years 1186–92. The detailed and purportedly eyewitness account in the Chronique d’Ernoul, which formed the basis of the account in the Old French Continuation of William of Tyre, has been shown by Peter Edbury to have reached its current form in the 1230s rather than the late 1180s. James Kane and Keagan Brewer have analysed the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum and the so-called ‘Latin Continuation of William of Tyre’ and established that, rather than dating from the early 1190s, the latter must date from at least ten years later, while the former is a composite text incorporating material composed very soon after events, at the end of the 1180s or early 1190s, but brought into its current form long afterwards, perhaps after 1222. Catherine Croizy-Naquet has questioned the authorship and date of the Estoire de la guerre sainte, usually attributed to Ambroise, and Stephen Spencer has asked whether the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi could have been composed before 1201 rather than the early 1220s.

As long ago as 1962, Hans Eberhard Mayer showed that the Itinerarium peregrinorum 1 (so called because it later formed the basis of the first book of the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi) was written during the Third Crusade, before 2 September 1192, and was a primary source for many of the events it describes. Subsequent scholarship argued that the text was composed by a clerk in the entourage of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who led a contingent of the Third Crusade.