The epistolary form, that is a text that follows the style of a letter, was central to the creation, transmission and reception of history-writing on the crusades in medieval Europe. Indeed, letter-like narratives emerging from crusading expeditions proved vital to the facilitation of long-term remembrance of these ventures. New research is revealing that the letters sent to audiences in the Latin West from the crusader armies in the East, which often transmit sections of crusade narrative wrapped in epistolary framing, were subject to similar literary impulses that drove the outpouring of longer-form history-writing and textual remembrance across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They should not, therefore, be taken automatically as trustworthy eyewitness reportage, but must instead be treated with a critical eye towards both their authenticity and how their texts are woven from, and into, the fabric of other contemporary history-writing – something that Simon Parsons has demonstrated convincingly. I have addressed elsewhere the importance of returning to the manuscripts of letters and other crusade sources, and in this essay I want to approach the epistolary output of the crusading movement from a different angle. Drawing upon letters stemming from crusading campaigns in the Holy Land, with the main focus falling on the First, Second and Fifth Crusades, this essay analyses two interconnected aspects of the epistolary culture of the crusading movement: historical writing and remembrance. It contributes to the scholarship on medieval epistolography and the crusades in the following ways. First, it emphasises the blurring of the boundaries between the genres of crusade letter-writing and the creation of longer-form historical narratives. Second, it demonstrates the dynamic versatility, porous borders and malleability of letter texts as vehicles for history-writing and remembrance. Third, it sheds light on how written correspondence helped to forge and maintain the ecclesiastical-political communities of writers and receivers of crusade letters, and, by extension, how these documents could act as touchstones for communal, spiritual remembrance.

History-Writing

Although crusade letters had a sense of immediacy as news media, the information they contained also took the form of history-writing. There is extensive evidence that the senders and receivers of crusade epistles conceived of them as history-writing in their own right.