The period of the crusades to the Holy Land, from the first expedition of 1096–9 to the final loss of all Latin possessions there in 1291, covers the entire sweep of medieval romance lyric, from its origins to the decline of the troubadours and the change of direction in the Old French lyric between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth. So it is understandable that the crusade song should follow the same trajectory in parallel with the Occitan courtly canso and the French grand chant courtois. There are no known vernacular lyric texts which concern the First Crusade, but from the time of the Second Crusade of 1145–9 short poems with explicit references to the oriental expeditions begin to bloom in both Occitan and Old French.

In the troubadour lyric, especially in its earliest phase, the crusade song generally takes on the form and tone of the sirventes4 and is characterized by versification calqued on a pre-existing love song or canso, as well as by the sirventes’ predominantly political, religious, or moral tone. This consists primarily of exhortation to go on crusade to the Holy Land, and also includes sporadic caustic polemical attacks on kings and nobles and, later on, clerical inconsistency and hypocrisy. The crusade song is firmly rooted in current events and provides us with a clear reflection of the various positions taken by the audience on the subject of crusading.

The Old French crusade song gradually tends to diverge from its Occitan counterparts, first through the introduction of the courtly love theme typical of the grand chant courtois, and then by the development of this theme at the expense of homiletic-type exhortations or the polemical and sarcastic tone typical of Occitan songs.

This development is probably emphasized and amplified by the particularities of the Old French manuscript tradition. If the Occitan tradition is inclusive and open to all the possible realizations of troubadour lyric compositions, from dialogue forms (tenso) to sirventes, enueg and plazer, dawn songs, crusade songs and other forms rich in specific historical allusions, the French songbooks generally appear more markedly aristocratic. More luxurious as material objects, they focus at first on an exclusive, monothematic canon of love songs and then on a rigid distinction between genres and the proliferation of fixed forms.