3 - Crusading, Chivalry and the Saracen World in Insular Romance

Summary

The romantic figure of the crusader knight is firmly rooted in our popular imagination, largely thanks to Sir Walter Scott's romances of the Third Crusade, but tracing this stereotype in medieval literature in England, or identifying a body of insular ‘crusading romances’, is not a simple matter. The romance of Richard Coeur de Lion is very loosely based on the career of Richard I and his achievements in the Third Crusade to the Holy Land (1189–92), fighting against the Muslim leader Saladin for the Christian crusader states that had been established in the wake of the First Crusade (1096–9). In addition, there is a substantial body of texts, including Anglo-Norman chansons de geste and Middle English romances, in which the action is based on legendary stories of encounters between the emperor Charlemagne and Islamic powers in Europe; and in a very wide range of romances the hero demonstrates his prowess in battle against a convenient Saracen enemy (whether an army or a giant). In different ways, however, these texts can all be seen to engage obliquely with the history of European Christian military expeditions against the Saracen East, whether the East is represented directly as the Christians’ destination in the Holy Land, or indirectly as the various named eastern homelands of Saracens encountered in Europe.

As Christopher Tyerman remarks, ‘militant Christianity, enshrined in tales of Charlemagne or warrior saints, was in fashion in the Anglo-Norman world’. It might thus seem surprising that the astonishing victories of the First Crusade, arguably the most glorious achievements of ‘militant Christianity’, were not treated in either the Anglo-Norman or, later, the Middle English narrative tradition, although they formed the subject of the Old French crusade cycle of chansons de geste (the most important being the Chanson d’Antioche and the Chanson de Jérusalem). Not until the prose translations of William Caxton and RobertCopland in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did the marvellous career of Godfrey of Bouillon, king of Jerusalem, appear in English.