3 - The Historiographical Construction of a Northern French First Crusade

Summary

This paper asks why there is a pronounced French, and more specifically northern French, dimension in the contemporary or near-contemporary historiography of the First Crusade. The phrase ‘northern French dimension’ is meant to draw attention to two overlapping but formally distinct aspects of the crusade’s narrative source base. The first is the simple but important fact that a substantial number of the authors of Latin accounts of the First Crusade in the first decades of the twelfth century, writing either free-standing narratives or portions of larger historiographical projects, were based in or came from northern France: these include Fulcher of Chartres, Ralph of Caen, Robert of Reims, Baldric of Bourgueil, Guibert of Nogent, Bartolf of Nangis, Orderic Vitalis, Hugh of Fleury, and Gilo of Paris. The second is the insistent Francocentricity that characterizes these texts: this is variously registered through the choice of language, narratorial commentary, the emphases placed upon certain individual and collective agents, plot cruxes, and the interpretations of character motivation that are offered. It is on this second aspect that this paper will focus.

If space permitted, it would be useful to consider further the northern French crusade historians themselves, their interconnections and contributions to historiographical culture as a whole, especially given that crusade historiography continues to be marginalized, even overlooked, in treatments of central medieval history-writing. But the main argument developed here is that there was more at stake than a straightforward correlation between the northern French connections of so many First Crusade writers and their French perspectives on the crusade, even after allowance is made for the operation of small-scale patriotisms and the near-inevitable lumpiness in favour of local interest-value and locally available sources of information that typically characterize even the most ambitiously wide-ranging medieval historiographical endeavours. As we shall see, the northern French leaning of the First Crusade source base throws valuable light on the ways in which the crusade was turned into narrative, in other words the world-making strategies that authors exploited in order to make the crusade story coherent and followable, and which in due course hardened into a set of self-perpetuating reader expectations.