European literature representing the Crusades was generated from the late-eleventh century past the fifteenth, in many genres and languages: Latin chronicles, long Old French verse narrative cycles later adapted into other vernaculars and prose, as well a variety of shorter lyric and narrative works. While Crusade historians have scoured the chronicles, most of the vernacular works remain relatively little studied, even as present-day Muslims have been summoned to avenge the deeds of crusaders of many centuries ago. Stefan Vander Elst admirably proposes an ambitious undertaking in examining this vast and shifting corpus, broaching texts in Latin, Old French, Middle English, and Middle High German.
The principal thesis, suggested by the title, is that all these works constituted “Crusade propaganda,” defined as “the formal and informal ways used to further the cause of the holy war and to convince fighting men to risk all on the far reaches of Christianity” (4). At times, the author substitutes the term “excitatoria,” a label more applicable to the material, if less catchy. This lexical alternation belies a premise of the book that deserves further examination. The origins of the word “propaganda” trace back to 1622, with the Church's founding of a council to oversee missionary efforts. Connotation of systematic efforts to influence public opinion date to the 1790s in both English and French, a time of expanding technologies for distributing cheap printed material. For the romance philologists of a generation just extinguished, trained in Europe's languages amidst the trauma of World War, “propaganda” was a vile term denoting bias and outright fabrications issued via mass media convincing nations to engage in atrocities. They would have banned the term from glib use. It is not a medieval term, and that deserves more discussion in this study as well. Proposing to focus on the rhetoric and the strategies of persuasion in Crusade excitatoria (6), Vander Elst says little about the extant manuscripts of the works. Discussion of transmission and reception would have been useful, although it might have undermined calling them “propaganda” since many survive in a single witness or a handful of varying manuscripts—a far cry from the reach of modern propaganda machines. While oral transmission was certainly possible, its reach remains open to conjecture.
After a nod to Gower in the introduction, chapters follow a proposed chronology. The Old French chansons de geste, notably the much-celebrated Chanson de Roland, are presented as exhortations to fight the Saracen in chapter 1, refuting the commonplace idea that crusaders were primarily motivated by the promise of indulgences. The thesis is that chanson constructions, such as the lure of Saracen wealth and the opportunity to avenge wrongs against God, the supreme overlord, offered powerful stimulus to assemble for war. Chapter 2 turns to the anonymous Gesta Francorum, composed by 1101 and considered highly influential for later crusade histories. Vander Elst proposes a comparatist reading of the Gesta that foregrounds its popular literary appeal. This, he argues, was more important to the authorial project than the representation of historical facts, that is, what most historians have sought to mine from the work. Reversing common theories of influence, Vander Elst posits that the Gesta exploited chanson de geste rhetoric and themes, and this was indeed the key to its success. While he touches briefly on transmission—the earliest chanson manuscript is now generally dated to the mid twelfth century, at least four decades after the Gesta was composed—he builds his argument on the hypothesis that the chansons date to the eleventh century. While probable, the exact forms and tropes of those early poems remain unknown. Reading the Latin chronicles as literary works certainly has merit. However, the limits of the chronological premise of this particular argument deserve more discussion. While much ink has been spilt by medievalists seeking “origins” of traditions, texts, and nations, many scholars now urge reading the chansons not as ancient fossils but as the fashionable products of their moment.
Those theological approaches to the Crusades may steer toward the chapter on Robert of Reims’ Historia Iherosolimatana, composed c. 1106–1107. Vander Elst continues to discuss this text as propagandistic in terms of both chanson and Gesta borrowings, but he also examines how the theological framework added by the French cleric to the Gesta’s storyline produced a narrative promoting an image of French exceptionalism, a new “chosen people.” Setting chanson tropes against parallel scriptural citations, Robert presented “the Crusade as a new Exodus, and the Crusaders as the fulfillment of age-old prophecy” (56–57).
Treatment of the Old French Crusade Cycle embarks from the premise that in the wake of the fall of Edessa c. 1145, there was an acute need to recruit new crusaders to maintain the Frankish holdings. Vander Elst interprets this cycle, produced c. 1190–1210, through the lens of Howard Bloch's thesis that epic cycles were principally preoccupied with patrilineal lineage, arguing this cycle depicts First Crusaders as much by their human kin groups as by their familial bonds with God (84). In continuation of this cycle, he argues that chivalric romance tropes were appropriated toward propagandistic goals. In the thirteenth century Histoire de Gille de Chyn, the protagonist journeys from torments of adulterous love in Hainault to crusade action in the Levant: the crusade represented an antidote to courtly love's problems. Similarly, the author sees a “romance influence” on Machaut's Prise d'Alexandrie, turning the Holy War into “just another adventure” (186), shorn of the spiritual value represented in earlier texts. Vander Elst insists on Nature's creation of the perfect Crusader by arranging a “conjunction of Mars and Venus” (180). (It might be worthwhile to consider that trope in astrological terms, beyond the erotic signification). Nicolaus of Jeroschin's fourteenth-century Krônike von Prûzinlant is read as propaganda for the Teutonic Order's crusades in the Baltic, shaping of crusade tropes such as adventure, generosity, wealth, and triumph over fearsome pagans to appeal to the changing concerns of the knightly class. Overall, Vander Elst has assembled a body of texts worth reading together, and he has also indicated a number of key ways they influenced one another over the period of active crusading.
