The crusades have left a profound and disturbing legacy in inter-cultural and interfaith relations, nationally and worldwide, not least in the continuing aftermath of the then US President George W. Bush's 2001 ‘crusade’ against Iraq. Daily we witness the interminable ravaging of ancient Middle Eastern cities, as crusading rhetoric gushes from the global political discourse transmitted in the media. In seeking more than a simplistic view of the original, medieval crusading movement, we can draw on a wide variety of written sources. Most are in Latin. Ecclesiastical documents present official versions of the preaching, organisation and events of the medieval crusades. Narratives in both Latin and the vernacular offer a range of factual information, eye-witness or mythologised accounts of particular expeditions, the memorialisation of heroic ancestral deeds and fantasy adventures exploiting crusading themes. What the lyrics of the troubadours and trouvères provide is a myriad of different secular voices – thirty-seven trouvères, seventy-five troubadours – bringing to life up-to-the-minute responses to the crusading movement, not only in France and Occitania but also in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Cyprus, the Holy Land and Greece. These help us to understand what the multifarious public in the Middle Ages thought of the crusades: how it responded to particular expeditions; in what ways its responses varied according to time and place; how far it was inspired by the idea of holy war; how far it envisaged crusading and secular ideals as compatible; to what extent it accepted, influenced, participated in, resisted or challenged the Church's crusading propaganda; how its attitudes were affected by the Albigensian crusade launched against troubadour lands in the South; and how it faced the repeated failures of crusading efforts, as time went on.

Crusading troubadours and trouvères

Not a few of our troubadours and trouvères went on crusade themselves. Jaufre Rudel accompanied the French on the Second Crusade. Between then and the Third Crusade Peire Bremon lo Tort was in the service of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Giraut de Borneil made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Peire Vidal travelled to the court of Count Raymond II of Tripoli, where he was staying when Jerusalem fell to the Muslims in 1187.