We all think that science is special. Its products—its technological spin-off—dominate our lives which are thereby sometimes enriched and sometimes impoverished but always affected. Even the most outlandish critics of science such as Feyerabend implicitly recognize its success. Feyerabend told us that science was a con-game. Scientists had so successfully hood-winked us into adopting its ideology that other equally legitimate forms of activity—alchemy, witchcraft and magic—lost out. He conjured up a vision of much enriched lives if only we could free ourselves from the domination of the ‘one true ideology’ of science just as our ancestors freed us from the domination of the Church. But he told us these things in Switzerland and in California happily commuting between them in that most ubiquitous product of science—the aeroplane.

There are two discrete groups of campaign letters from the First Crusade. One is the cluster of four letters, explored in the following chapter, that purport to have been written by leaders of the crusade before the capture of Jerusalem, addressed as open letters to the West or the pope. These ‘collective projects’, Nicholas Paul writes, are distinct from ‘the letters composed by named individual authors to named individual recipients’, that is, the missives of figures such as Stephen of Blois and Anselm of Ribemont. The present chapter examines these narrative letters sent from within the crusader host. We are fortunate to possess five such epistles, including two letters by Stephen of Blois, another two by Anselm of Ribemont, and a single letter from Lucca. These letters are not only rare because the first four appear to have been sent directly from the campaign specifically, but also as epistolary products of their time generally. They belong to the concept of ‘fast historiography’ which Lars Boje Mortensen identifies emerging in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in which the transmission of news from crusade campaigns played a significant role.

As Martha Carlin and David Crouch caution, we must not imagine that relatively ordinary people did not send letters in the Middle Ages; it is merely that they have not survived. As their edition of ‘lost letters’ from thirteenthcentury England reveals, we must imagine a world in which a fascinating gamut of casual and informal letters was circulating, ranging from magnates worrying about wine orders, through students writing to their parents to ask for money and masters instructing pupils to stop wasting time, to gossip about alleged adultery. By their very nature, most of these letters did not concern what contemporaries considered ‘important’ topics worthy of recording for posterity, and this, combined with the fact that parchment was expensive and could be scraped clean to create palimpsests, means that they were not actively preserved.

Though, as count of Blois and Chartres, one of the foremost nobles of Christendom, Stephen of Blois could hardly be counted as ordinary, it is no coincidence that the apparently touchingly personal letters which he purportedly sent from the First Crusade to his ‘dearest wife’ are some of the most well-known of all medieval letters.

Alexios I to Robert I of Flanders (Epistulae, no. I)

Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Pal. Lat. 962, fols 62r–64r (s. xv).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4611, fols 50v–52r (s. xiii3/4).

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. ser. n. 3607, fols 42r–44r (s. xiii1/4).

Anselm of Ribemont's first letter to Manasses of Reims (Epistulae, no. VIII)

Reims, Bibliothèque municipale de Reims, MS 96, fol. 1r–v (s. xiiin).

Anselm of Ribemont's second letter to Manasses of Reims (Epistulae, no. XV)

Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya, MS 944, fols 292r–295r (s. xii).

Patriarch Symeon of Jerusalem and the other bishops to the people of the West (Epistulae, no. IX)

Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Pal. Lat. 962, fol. 62r (s. xv).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 4611, fol. 50v (s. xiii3/4).

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouv. acq. lat. 310, fol. 226r–v (s. xii).

Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 962, fol. 62r (s. xv).

Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. ser. n. 3607, fols 41v–42r (s. xiii1/4).

Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 354 Helmst., fol. 264v (s. xv2/4).

The crusade leaders to Pope Urban II (Epistulae, no. XVI)

Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1390, fols 119v–120v (s. xii).

Daibert of Pisa, Godfrey of Bouillon, Raymond of St Gilles, and the crusader army to the pope and the Christian faithful (Epistulae, no. XVIII)

Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg, MS 224, fols 150vb–153ra (s. xiiiin).

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 211, fol. 174r–v (s. xii3/4).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 23390, fols 60r–62v, 57r (s. xiii1).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28195, fols 114ra–115ra (s. xiii2/4).

Salzburg, Stiftsbibliothek St Peter, Codex S. Petri Salisburgensis b.IX.22 (XXXIV.7), fols 2r–3r (s. xv3/4).

Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg, M. p. th. q. 17, fols 90r–91v (s. xii).

Patriarch Daibert of Jerusalem to all the German people (Epistulae, no. XXI)

Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg, MS 224, fols 153ra–153vb (s. xiiiin).

Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28195, fol. 115r (s. xiii2/4).

An influential recent strand in the historiography on the First Crusade argues for a geo-political reorientation of its origins from ‘the foothills of Clermont’ to Asia Minor and Constantinople. The Eastern context played an important role in the launch of the crusading movement; it was, after all, probably the call for military assistance that Byzantine envoys presented to Urban II at the Council of Piacenza in March 1095 that sparked the chain reaction which led some 60,000–100,000 men, women and children to take up arms and march to the East. The main plank in this argument is that the emperor of Byzantium, Alexios I Komnenos, wooed the Westerners with personal letters designed to stir up enthusiasm for a military expedition to defend Byzantium in a call from the East. This argument relies on the existence of diplomatic exchanges between East and West, and specifically on three epistles purportedly written by Alexios to high-ranking figures in Europe. While scholars agree that Alexios sent a call for military aid to the pope at Piacenza, the argument that the emperor wrote a personal appeal to Robert I of Flanders and two missives to Abbot Oderisius I of Montecassino rests on shaky foundations. It has been suggested ‘that Alexios knew how to appeal to westerners’ in these documents, and that they struck a chord with Europeans. It is not surprising, however, that the letters transmit a solid grasp of the interests and concerns of the Western clergy, because, I contend, the texts were written by them. Peter Schreiner and Christian Gastgeber have proven this definitively in the case of the letter to Robert I of Flanders, and the present chapter argues that the two letters to the abbot of Montecassino are also Western inventions. Some maintain, however, that the letter to Robert of Flanders is based upon an authentic letter, and Alexios’ two letters to Montecassino are still considered genuine by leading scholars of Byzantine diplomacy as well as historians of the crusades. Given the unresolved tension in the historiography between those who champion the authenticity of these documents and those who proffer more sceptical interpretations, it is necessary to re-engage critically with the Byzantine letters.

Among the collections of the Bibliothèques d’Amiens metropole is a single parchment leaf which measures approximately 288 x 249 mm. Across the leaf, in two columns, is inscribed the Latin text of a letter from the First Crusade. The document is addressed to the pope and the people of the West and relates the events of the expedition up to the capture of Jerusalem and the Battle of Ascalon in 1099. An original crusade letter from the end of the eleventh century, that is, the parchment sheet written by the named authors (or, rather, a scribe on their behalf) that changed hands between them and the addressees would be an artefact of the utmost rarity. But the Amiens manuscript is not one of those. It bears the textual accretions of two postscripts added by audiences in Europe who began to rewrite the epistolary corpus very soon after the crusade. These additions denote that it belongs to the third recension of the text, having evolved rapidly through two previous versions in the period immediately after 1099. At some point in its history, this twelfth-century copy became detached from the initial context of its creation: the binding of a medieval book. For the epistle preserved in Amiens represents one of many copies of letters from the First Crusade that were produced in Europe during and – on a much larger scale – after the expedition with the aim of sending its news, contextualising its events, and remembering it.

The Amiens leaf is a relic of the epistolary culture of the crusade. It stands witness to the impulse to record, engage with, and rewrite the event, in a similar vein to the longer Latin narratives which have attracted sustained scholarly attention for centuries. The attempt to ascertain exactly how those texts were composed, compiled and transmitted, together with their extremely complex interrelationships, has revolutionized our understanding of the First Crusade itself and the recording of history in the twelfth century. Yet while scholars have lavished attention on the full-scale narratives, the key texts that have yet to be factored properly into this discussion are the epistles.

News of the capture of Jerusalem first reached the West in the form of oral messages and stories and written documents. The only surviving letter is that given by Daibert, archbishop of Pisa, the new papal representative on the crusade, Godfrey of Bouillon (in absentia) and Raymond of St Gilles at Laodicea in September 1099, although we can probably assume that there were others, now lost. The arrival of the news in the West appears to have spread rapidly and sparked correspondence between interested contemporaries who sought not only to distribute it but also to interpret it from a theological perspective and to inspire and recruit further warrior–pilgrims to defend the newly acquired Latin conquests. This chapter examines the six surviving letters written in the aftermath of the crusade – which all appear to be authentic – and examines how contemporaries responded to the news from the East and repackaged it. In so doing, it problematises the consensus on the date at which the news arrived from the East, something which affects our understanding of the final stages of the First Crusade, the ‘crusade of 1100–01’, the transmission and reception of the news, and also makes an intervention in the longstanding debate about the original papal aim of the crusade and whether it was conceived as an expedition to recover Jerusalem.

The letter from Daibert and other crusade leaders to the pope and all Christians

The first surviving epistle to transmit the news of the success of the crusade ranks among the most significant letters for the transmission of crusade narrative. Given at Laodicea (Latakia, modern Syria) in September 1099 by elements of the crusade leadership, this missive is apparently the first known written narrative of the capture of Jerusalem and, indeed, of the entire campaign in Outremer, to have circulated in medieval Christendom. Evidence that contemporaries received it as such is furnished by MS Amiens, LESC. 91 D (5174), where the text is preceded by the heading ‘Itinerarium Hierosolimitarum’ (‘Account of the Jerusalem journey’) in a twelfth-century hand (Fig. 1a).