Chronicles of the Crusades

"Yes—Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s The Conquest of Constantinople and Jean of Joinville’s The Life of Saint Louis . The rationale for including this book is that, at some point, you’ve got to hear the original voices. I wouldn’t want to recommend five works on the Crusades without giving you the opportunity to read what a crusader actually wrote. And if there is a medieval chronicle that stands out for being approachable, then it’s Joinville’s. He’s writing in French—for a lay, rather than a clerical audience—and it suddenly becomes real and alive in a way that just doesn’t happen with earlier Latin writers. It is Joinville, for instance, who tells us that when he was leaving his castle to go on crusade, he couldn’t bring himself to look back. One of the children that he was leaving behind was just a few weeks old. You don’t hear that sort of thing in many other sources. Similarly, Joinville gives us asides, anecdotes and funny stories. He reveals, for example, that when the crusaders were encamped together at Sidon, the Count of Eu used to play practical jokes. The Count had a little catapult made and used to fire stones whilst the crusaders were eating, causing comedic havoc on the dinner table. He also got hold of a small bear and sent it into Joinville’s camp, where it killed some of the chickens. All this is heavy medieval humour that has not aged well, but it was clearly very tension-relieving at the time. Joinville is explicitly writing as part of the formal canonisation process for St Louis (Louis IX of France). So there is a clear mission statement: to show that the king was an admirable person. But it’s not a completely positive portrait. In fact, there are moments where Joinville is really quite critical. For instance, when Louis declares his intention to go on his second crusade in 1267, Joinville clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea this time—and, in the end, the future chronicler stays at home. In this way, then, you’re not just getting Joinville’s reminiscences of Louis’s first crusade. You’re also receiving a remarkable insight into France in the mid-thirteenth century, as well as a portrait of an outstanding king. And—in this book as a whole—you also get Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s The Conquest of Constantinople : his account of the Fourth Crusade. Yes. This expedition culminated in the capture and sack of Constantinople, which is really the most shocking event that took place in all the Crusades. That’s especially the case when you bear in mind the fact that the movement had originally started so as to save the Greeks from the Turks. And then, a hundred years or so later, it’s the West that destroys Byzantium, mashing Constantinople into a pulp. Well, there is a lot going on here. On the one hand, there has long been a schism between the Latin West and Greek Orthodox Churches—and this can be exploited to justify what happened in 1204. Even more than that, though, Geoffrey presents the Fourth Crusade as a great chivalric enterprise, driven by honour. And, of course, there is another key point, which is that the ultimate legitimator is success. If you capture a great city like Constantinople, which has never been seized by a non-Greek army before, then it is quite clear—to most medieval thinkers—that God is on your side. Yes—and what is most fascinating is that you can compare his description with that of a contemporary Greek historian. In his O City of Byzantium , Niketas Choniates gives us a quite different view. What everyone can agree on is that the sack was truly horrific. On the one hand, though, we have Geoffrey trying to defend it as the legitimate outcome of a long and complex process, driven ultimately by chivalric ideals like honour. On the other hand, though, we have Niketas, who clearly thinks that this event marks the end of civilisation as we know it."