The earliest eyewitness accounts of the First Crusade: two critical texts

Application summary

The First Crusade (1096–1099) was the first large-scale holy war sanctioned by the papacy, establishing a precedent for religiously motivated warfare that shaped European history throughout the Middle Ages. Its culmination in the Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 became a cultural touchstone that has long influenced the Western – and, to a lesser extent, the Eastern – imagination of the encounter between Christianity and Islam. In the Middle Ages, its memory was preserved, celebrated, and reinterpreted in writing, speech, and image. Eyewitness histories played a pivotal role in this process, providing the foundation on which later narratives were built. The central outcomes of this project are critical editions of two eyewitness accounts: Raymond of Aguilers’ Historia Francorum qui ceperunt Iherusalem and the anonymous Peregrinatio Antiochie per Urbanum papam facta. Both editions rest on fresh editorial premises. For Raymond, we argue that departures in a certain manuscript represent his authorial voice, contrary to the judgement of earlier modern editors. Our edition will therefore present a wholly new text of a work central to the appreciation of the First Crusade. The Peregrinatio Antiochie, by contrast, has never appeared in print. It survives only in a single manuscript and, fragmentarily, in an early modern edition. Closely related to the celebrated Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, it appears in many respects closer to the so-called Ur-Gesta than is the Gesta Francorum itself. These two editions will reshape modern understanding of how the memory of the First Crusade was first constructed. Although the materials under study are historical, the theme of interfaith violence in the Near East carries a disturbingly contemporary resonance. To engage a wider audience in reflecting on this connection, we will collaborate with the opera production Carmina Hierosolymitana.