“Hec qui scire sitis lege de Iherosolimitis/Multiplicant laudes rem si gestam bene gaudes.” With this Latin verse, a scribe in twelfth-century Germany sought to prepare the minds of monastic consumers of First Crusade letters (Figure 1).Footnote 1 It instructs inquisitive readers that they should read of Jerusalem and celebrate (gaudes) the first crusaders’ conquest of the city in 1099 because, in so doing, they will magnify the glory of the event. Such intercession with God was the key method through which Western clergy supported and participated in the crusading movement during the twelfth century. The form of this divine mediation changed, however, from celebration to supplication after the Kingdom of Jerusalem crumbled before Saladin in 1187 and the papacy urgently ordered cycles of penitential prayers throughout Christendom to intercede with God for the return of the Holy City.Footnote 2 The transmission and reception of First Crusade letters in these contexts represented a form of “scribal crusading.” It was a devotional activity that one of the earliest chroniclers of the expedition, Fulcher of Chartres, recognized in the prologue to his Historia Hierosolymitana: “It is especially pleasing to the living, and it is even beneficial to the dead, when the deeds of brave men (particularly of those serving as soldiers of God) are either read from writings [scripta] or soberly recounted from memory among the faithful.”Footnote 3 The discovery of new manuscript witnesses of First Crusade letters reveals a concerted industry by German religious, previously underappreciated, to participate in the crusading movement from behind the walls of their cloisters in just such a way.
Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg M. p. th. q. 17, fol. 90r. The Laodicea letter. Of especial importance is the rhyming instruction to the reader that precedes the letter text. Reproduced with the permission of the Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg.
The series of new discoveries began in the early 1980s when Benjamin Kedar unearthed new copies of the “Laodicea letter,” composed in September 1099 by the crusade leadership to announce the capture of Jerusalem to the West, and Patriarch Daibert's appeal to the faithful of Germany in April 1100 seeking defenders of the Holy Places.Footnote 4 To these findings we can now add the present author's discovery of a new recension of the Laodicea letter in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, a hitherto unknown witness of the same missive in the Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg and, with Georg Strack, copies of both letters in the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg.Footnote 5 These discoveries demonstrate that much more can be done to expand the evidence base for the First Crusade — one of the most heavily researched events in medieval history. The significance of this lies in revealing the regional responses to, and engagement with, the event, such as the short rhyming inscription that offers us a precious glimpse into how monastic readers consumed and engaged with these texts as part of their support for the wider crusading movement. The new manuscript witnesses allow us to explore reception and transmission in much greater detail, and this article demonstrates for the first time that the source base for both First Crusade letters is almost entirely German, not French, as one might have expected, and also identifies two distinct textual traditions.Footnote 6 The manuscripts also shed light on the circulation of the patriarch's appeal, since all known versions of the text can now be shown to have been copied with the Laodicea letter as a pair in Franconia/Bavaria. Such study of the regional context allows one to analyze circulation and reception much more precisely than the standard division of the letters according to recension permits. I argue that the intensive copying of First Crusade letters in southern Germany demonstrates a concerted effort by local religious to strengthen the connection between their region and the beginning of the crusading movement — a claim that hinged on the praise of the German people expressed in the patriarch's letter and the subsequent high level of southern German participation in the crusading expeditions of 1100–1101. This scribal activity served not only to celebrate and commemorate German involvement in the Holy Land crusades but also, perhaps, to supply material for the local promotion of contemporary crusades.Footnote 7
1
This article is chiefly concerned with the following manuscripts:
Würzburg M. 17: Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg M. p. th. q. 17, a collection of saints’ lives, copied in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which preserves both the Laodicea letter and the patriarch's appeal from April 1100. The final folios of the codex containing the crusade letters must have been copied in the twelfth century.
Erlangen MS 224: Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg MS 224, a collection of the letters and a sermon of Bernard of Clairvaux, copied at the beginning of the thirteenth century, which contains both the Laodicea letter and the patriarch's call from April 1100.
The first manuscript, Würzburg M. 17, is a small codex dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, composed of 92 parchment folios and measuring 22 × 15 cm (Figure 1). The codex is ruled in a single column. The manuscript was produced in southern or central Germany, and its first known provenance dates from the seventeenth century: the Benedictine monastery of St. Stephan in Würzburg, Franconia, northern Bavaria.Footnote 8 The weight of probability is that the manuscript also belonged to this foundation in the Middle Ages. The codex is a collection of saints’ lives and, preserved at the end of the codex, the two First Crusade letters.
The second manuscript, Erlangen MS 224, is a small, tightly bound and well-preserved codex dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century (Figures 2 and 3). The manuscript contains 168 parchment folios measuring 19.3 × 14 cm that are divided into two columns of text.Footnote 9 Fifteenth-century ownership inscriptions on the first and last folios reveal that the manuscript previously belonged to Heilsbronn Abbey, a Cistercian foundation situated southwest of Nuremberg (Nürnberg) in Franconia/Bavaria, and the codex can possibly be identified in the thirteenth-century library catalogue as the book listed as “Epistolae ipsius in uno.”Footnote 10 Given the provenance of the manuscript, its contents are perhaps unsurprising: letters and a sermon of the most famous member of the Cistercian order, Bernard of Clairvaux. Yet nestled among Bernard's writings are copies of four significant letters concerning the crusading movement, all of which were hitherto unknown to scholarship: the two First Crusade letters with which this article is concerned and copies of Audita tremendi and the Hilferuf of Patriarch Eraclius.Footnote 11
Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg MS 224, fol. 150v. The Laodicea letter begins in the middle of the right-hand column (author's photograph). Reproduced with the kind permission of the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg MS 224, fol. 153r. The beginning of the left-hand column contains the final section of the Laodicea letter. The appeal of Patriarch Daibert to Germany begins in the middle of the same column (author's photograph). Reproduced with the kind permission of the Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg.
Of the two manuscripts, Erlangen MS 224 was completely unknown to historians of the crusades. There is a simple explanation for its obscurity, namely, that, at the time that Heinrich Hagenmeyer was preparing what became the standard edition of First Crusade letters, which he published in 1901, the manuscript in question was improperly catalogued. The preeminent finding aid for Erlangen's manuscript collection at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the catalogue compiled by Johann Conrad Irmischer, first published in 1852. Irmischer's catalogue lists the manuscript (under its old call sign of MS 419) as containing only letters and a sermon by Bernard of Clairvaux — there is no mention of any other texts.Footnote 12 In addition to Irmischer's catalogue, Hagenmeyer might have consulted the handwritten list of manuscripts from Heilsbronn Abbey, compiled until 1817 by August Friedrich Pfeiffer, which, aside from noting a sermon by Bernard of Clairvaux as one of the contents, gives the title of the codex in question only as “Bernhardi Epp.”Footnote 13 The authoritative catalogue of manuscripts held in Erlangen, edited by Hans Fischer, which first recorded the existence of the crusade texts, did not appear until 1928 — long after Hagenmeyer's edition was in circulation. It therefore seems most probable that the omission of Erlangen MS 224 from Hagenmeyer's edition can be explained by the shortcomings of Irmischer's catalogue. That the manuscript has only now come to light can be attributed to the fact that much work remains to be done on the manuscript source base of First Crusade letters.Footnote 14
More puzzling is the question of how Hagenmeyer missed the Laodicea letter in the other codex, Würzburg M. 17, given that he made his edition of the patriarch's letter of April 1100 from this manuscript. It is inconceivable that Hagenmeyer would have overlooked this letter had he examined the text in person, since it occupies the folios immediately preceding the letter of the patriarch (as indeed it did in Hagenmeyer's time — it was not bound into the codex after 1901).Footnote 15 For the Würzburg manuscript at least, it appears that Hagenmeyer was reliant on secondhand information supplied by his network of contacts, who, undoubtedly excited by the discovery of the only known copy of the patriarch's letter (see below), perhaps failed to pass on information about the Laodicea letter, which was already known from other manuscript witnesses. Hagenmeyer's oversight of the Laodicea letter in the Würzburg manuscript was thus probably the result of a communication failure.
2
The two First Crusade letters preserved in these manuscripts are very well known and both have appeared in English translation.Footnote 16 The first of the missives, the so-called “Laodicea letter,” was composed at Laodicea (modern Latakia, Turkey) in September 1099 by some of the leaders of the First Crusade, then on the return journey to the West, with the purpose of announcing the capture of Jerusalem to the pope and the people of Christendom (see Appendix 3 for a collation of the new texts).Footnote 17 The named authors of the letter are Daibert, archbishop of Pisa (who was soon to become patriarch of Jerusalem), Godfrey of Bouillon (who was not present in person), Raymond of Toulouse, and all the bishops and crusaders “in terra Israel.”Footnote 18 The letter regaled the faithful of the West with the events of the First Crusade up to that point, from the successful siege of Nicaea in the summer of 1097, through to the bloody conquest of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 and the miraculous victory at Ascalon in August, up to the sojourn of the crusaders at Laodicea in September.Footnote 19 The commanders dispatched this missive in order to trumpet the achievements of the crusade and also, especially with its subsequent reworkings and additional final sections, to function as an excitatorium to rouse would-be crusaders to take the cross and march to the defense of the Holy Places, which were in desperate need of protectors.Footnote 20
According to Hagenmeyer's system of numbering the passages of the letter, the first recension contained only seventeen sections (see the letter text, Appendix 3). Once the text began circulating in the West, a second recension was created that added an additional exhortatory section (no. 18) requesting the faithful of the West to settle the debts of returning crusaders. The third recension preserves yet another additional section (no. 19) commemorating milestones in the course of the crusade, most probably in order to facilitate its liturgical celebration.Footnote 21 There is a single surviving copy of a fourth recension of the text that displays significant variations from the others in its final sections, omitting the deeds of the French and Norman leaders after the crusade and skipping to the commemoration of the date of the capture of Jerusalem.Footnote 22
The new versions of the Laodicea letter in the Würzburg and Erlangen codices bring the total number of known copies to twenty-one. Hagenmeyer, apparently, was aware of only seventeen copies and did not establish their provenance.Footnote 23 I have returned to examine the provenance of each manuscript witness in detail for the first time in Appendix 1 (which contains all manuscript sigla used in this article). Although many more copies must have been lost, it is clear that the letter was extremely popular. Indeed, the number of manuscript witnesses is really quite high and is much higher than the number of copies for some crusade chronicles considered to be important. What is astounding, though, is that all of the twenty-one known copies were produced in German territories or at the very edges of the Empire (see Map 1).Footnote 24
Earliest known origin or provenance of manuscripts containing the Laodicea letter (recension number in brackets).
There appears to be a clear regional distribution of the different recensions, that can be traced in three waves moving from east to west. Most first-recension copies survive in what is now Austria; second-recension texts sweep up north-westwards from Bavaria and Franconia; and third-recension letters cluster around Lower Lotharingia — the heartlands of Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the foremost leaders of the First Crusade. The clustering of these manuscipts around the Rhine and the Danube and along the route of German crusaders when traveling to and from the Holy Land could also be significant.Footnote 25 One must, however, exercise due caution when drawing conclusions from these regional waves. As an indicator of patterns of manuscript production, this is extremely suggestive. But at least some of the pattern of survival must be coincidental. There are also a number of outliers, such as the first-recension copy in Thuringia and the fourth-recension copy in Bavaria that was clearly derived from a third-recension model.
The copies of the second recension preserved in Würzburg and Erlangen, though not identical (the Würzburg version, notably, omits a passage at the end of section 17), are extremely similar and share two mistakes: “Marorum” for “Maurorum” and, although this part of Würzburg manuscript is worn, seemingly, “castorum” for “castrorum” (see Appendix 3, both section 14). Moreover, comparison of the textual variants of these new manuscript witnesses with the existing corpus shows that, not only are they related to each other, but they also follow very closely a number of first- and second-recension versions produced in a relatively cohesive geographical spread across modern Thuringia, Bavaria, and Austria. The new texts share some thirty-five to forty textual variants with manuscripts E, G, M1, M2, V, V1, V4, W, Z — see Appendix 2 for a tabulated sample of variants. There is also another clearly identifiable textual tradition in manuscripts F, F1, V2, and V3, which share a large number of common variants and form a tight cluster around the River Rhine. There are also a small number of variants that both regional traditions share. These anomalies are clues to the existence of further lost manuscripts that once preserved the Laodicea letter. As Kedar argues, such regional cohesiveness in the manuscript tradition across the different recensions (in this case, first- and second-recension copies) complicates the utility of Hagenmeyer's system of numbering the recensions according to the presence of the final exhortatory sections.Footnote 26 While Hagenmeyer's division of the recensions remains indispensable, the identification of regional textual traditions — such as that of the first- and second-recension copies circulating in Thuringia, Bavaria, and Austria, and that of second-recension copies transmitted around the Rhine — offers a more precise means of assessing the circulation and reception of these letters in the Middle Ages.
Although the letters are mostly preserved in manuscripts produced at Benedictine and Cistercian religious houses, it is not possible to discern a pattern of regional transmission according to religious order, such as Damien Kempf and Marcus Bull noticed with Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana, copies of which can be divided into two traditions, one transmitted in the Cistercian houses of southern Germany and the other diffused through the Benedictine foundations of northern France.Footnote 27 It is abundantly clear, though, that the surviving source base for the Laodicea letter overwhelmingly comes from southern and western Germany and Austria, with a substantial pocket of manuscripts also surviving from Lower Lotharingia. This geographical pattern of extant manuscripts must be shaped to some extent by the accident of survival, and surely there were further copies of this letter made outside of these regions. But it is astonishing that, given the popularity of the crusading movement in France, the Laodicea letter is preserved almost exclusively in German, and not French, manuscript traditions — something that has not been noted in the historiography before. This, taken with the fact that more than half of the manuscript copies of Robert the Monk's Historia — “some fify of the manuscripts” — “are connected with Germany,” is an extremely important signifier of German interest in, and support for, the crusading movement, and the First Crusade in particular.Footnote 28 This is quite extraordinary when one considers that, while the copyists of Lower Lotharingia had their own local hero to commemorate, the other imperial territories had no such link with a First Crusade commander of Godfrey's stature, the top tier of the leadership being composed almost exclusively of French and Norman nobles: Hugh of Vermandois; Bohemond of Taranto; Raymond of Toulouse; Robert of Flanders; Robert of Normandy; and, for a time, Stephen of Blois.Footnote 29 Godfrey of Bouillon represents a special case because he straddled the cultural and political spheres of both Germany and France. Although his lands were considered Germanic because they belonged to the Empire, he himself was very much a product of the Frankish aristocracy, and, as Alan Murray points out, “while most of his [crusade] followers may have been subjects of [Emperor] Henry IV, the majority of the lords and knights were probably French-speakers from the duchies of Lower and Upper Lotharingia.”Footnote 30 Thus he could be claimed as a crusade hero by both French and German writers.
One must exercise caution when attempting to draw a distinction between “German” and “French” communities. Of course, there was no such political entity as “Germany” or “France” according to the modern sense of the terms. While medieval conceptions of the lands and their peoples, and the terminology used to describe them, varied, it is clear that both Germans and non-Germans thought of a “German” people distinct from their French and Italian neighbors.Footnote 31 This was made up of a patchwork of regional identities that probably exerted a more powerful influence on a person's self-identification as “Bavarian,” rather than “German” (as, indeed, it still does among some). Thus Albert of Aachen could write of a terra Theutonicorum and a crusader who was Theutonicus natione (“German by birth”), lump groups of crusaders together as peregrini Theutonici and viri de genere Theutonicorum (“men of German race”) for ease of reference, but also differentiate between “Germans [Theutonici], Swabians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Lotharingians” when he wanted to be specific, demonstrating that he was acutely aware of regional identities.Footnote 32 These regional identities were unified, however loosely, politically in the regnum Theutonicorum and linguistically by dialects of a Theutonica lingua.Footnote 33
Using the pilgrimage account of John of Würzburg, who visited Outremer as a pilgrim in 1170, Nicholas Paul has demonstrated that there was a kind of German identity — one that was specifically German-speaking and defined in opposition to a “French” identity — that crusaders and pilgrims were articulating forcefully.Footnote 34 John's complaints about the commemoration of the deeds of “French” first crusaders in the Holy City at the expense of German first crusaders demonstrate that he defined himself by his membership of the latter group.Footnote 35 His critique of what he saw as unfair French dominance in Jerusalem sheds invaluable light on the status of Godfrey of Bouillon as a quasi-Germanic crusade hero. John claims Godfrey and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne as being “from our regions” (“de nostris essent partibus”), while paradoxically aligning the territory over which they ruled, Lotharingia, with the “other nations” of the French (or Franks, “Franci”), Lotharingians, Normans, Provencals, Auvergnats, Italians, Spanish, and Burgundians.Footnote 36 The pertinence of John's views to our analysis here is increased exponentially by the fact that he hailed from the very region where our new manuscripts were produced. Our pilgrim did not seem to recognize any inconsistency in expressing such a statement, and it demonstrates not only the ambiguous status of Godfrey and his domains in relation to the regnum Theutonicorum but also the ends to which this might be put by those searching for German First Crusade heroes. Albert of Aachen, Murray writes, was working to a similar agenda. Albert sought to “give him [Godfrey] a more unambiguously German identity by stressing his status as Duke of Lower Lotharingia,” and he played down the fact that, “as Lord of Bouillon and Count of Verdun, Godfrey belonged to the western, French-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire.”Footnote 37
The paradox of John of Würzburg claiming Godfrey as a “German” hero from “French” lands, combined with Albert of Aachen's rhetorical realignment of him, is proof that the absence of high-status German leaders on the First Crusade presented a problem to German observers. The more muted initial response to the First Crusade in imperial lands can be explained largely by the Investiture Contest, which precluded not only the attendance of German clergy at the Council of Clermont (where the expedition was launched) but also the preaching of the expedition in many German territories.Footnote 38 Subsequently, after the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, this absence of unequivocally German leaders appears to have been something of an embarrassment for monastic communities within the terra Theutonicorum. So much so that the fourth recension of the Laodicea letter, which circulated in southern Germany/Austria, excised the final sections naming and commemorating the French and Norman leaders.Footnote 39 This intensive copying of First Crusade letters in southern Germany appears, then, to have been motivated partly by the desire to forge a stronger link with the expedition by laying claim to its cultural heritage.Footnote 40 The most significant epistolary artefact from this cultural heritage was not, however, the Laodicea letter, but the letter of Patriarch Daibert to the German people.
3
The patriarch's appeal to Germany is similar to the Laodicea letter in that it also took the form of an excitatorium (see Appendix 4 for a critical edition of the text).Footnote 41 Indeed, it was the very necessity of securing reinforcements for the fledgling Kingdom of Jerusalem that led Daibert (by now installed in his new position as patriarch of Jerusalem) to compose his appeal to Germany in April 1100.Footnote 42 Daibert addressed his letter to all the archbishops, bishops, princes, and faithful of Germany, explaining the precarious situation that, after the first crusaders had returned home, the Latin conquests were being held by a small number of defenders who, in return for money and gifts, had pledged to hold the line until fresh reinforcements arrived from the West. Daibert therefore called upon the faithful of Germany, whom he singled out as the most pious of all peoples, to send funds and manpower to the Near East as soon as possible. The letter is unusually short for a text designed to function as an excitatorium, but this is perhaps explained by the method in which the appeal originally circulated. Daibert entrusted one Brother Arnulf (not Arnulf of Chocques, as is sometimes claimed) to carry the letter back to Germany, and, as Daibert's letter states, Arnulf also had oral messages to supplement the written text and would recount the events of the First Crusade as well as answer any questions that his hosts might have had.Footnote 43
Daibert's appeal, along with other oral and written reports arriving from the Near East and the new preaching campaign in the West, seems to have had the intended effect, because Germany — along with France and Italy — became one of the heartlands of recruitment for the crusading expeditions of 1100–1101.Footnote 44 Among the new crusaders from the southern region of the Empire were counted such notable participants as Duke Welf of Bavaria; Ida, the widow of Margrave Leopold II of Austria; Archbishop Thiemo of Salzburg; Bishop Ulrich of Passau; and the chronicler, Ekkehard of Aura.Footnote 45 Although this is proof that the targeted recruitment in Germany was successful, it is not possible to assess with precision the impact of the exhortatory letters and the exertions of Brother Arnulf (oral messages being of course much harder to trace in the written source material). It is inconceivable, though, that the first crusader Arnulf, dispatched from Jerusalem by the patriarch himself, would not have been feted as a hero in Germany. Arnulf, and the messages he carried, both written and oral, must have played an important part in whipping up crusading fervor in southern Germany.Footnote 46
The copy of Daibert's letter of April 1100 that survives in the Erlangen manuscript represents an important addition to the source base for this text. At the time that Hagenmeyer published his edition in 1901, there was only a single known manuscript witness of the text in existence, whose final sections, unfortunately, were partially illegible: Würzburg M. 17. The letter was first discovered in 1883 in the Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg by the librarian, Hermann Haupt. He brought the letter to the attention of Reinhold Röhricht, who in turn notified Paul-Édouard Riant, who produced the first edition of the text in 1884, supplying conjectural additions to the damaged sections.Footnote 47 With one exception, Hagenmeyer accepted these conjectures in his edition of 1901.Footnote 48 This remained the only known version of the text until 1982, when Kedar announced his discovery of a better preserved copy in Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 28195 and corrected the conjectural final sections of Riant and Hagenmeyer.Footnote 49 The third known copy of the letter in Erlangen MS 224 is closely related to the Munich text, and both are better preserved than the Würzburg version, yet a critical edition of the full, improved text has, hitherto, never been published (Appendix 4). Comparison of all the texts permits one to correct further the standard edition by Hagenmeyer, which is missing a short passage that has escaped notice since Riant, writing in 1884 (set in italics, directly below).
This additional passage, which is found in all three manuscripts, was actually present in the edition of the Würzburg codex made by Riant, but it is omitted from Hagenmeyer's edition.Footnote 51 It is clear, however, that Hagenmeyer knew about this passage, since he glosses it in his detailed analysis of the missive later in the book as “classical words from the pen of an Italian [Daibert] about the diligence of the German people in comparison to other peoples.”Footnote 52 Yet, despite the reference to this gloss in his edition of the letter, Hagenmeyer did not include the passage, either in the main text or in the critical apparatus. Given that Hagenmeyer attributed these flattering words to Daibert himself (the “Italian”), he cannot have considered the passage to be a later insertion. Rather, the explanation for this omission is more prosaic: Hagenmeyer must simply have overlooked this passage while editing the letter.
Correcting Hagenmeyer's edition to restore this passage lauding the piety of the Germans hardly revolutionizes the content of the letter, but it does represent an important missing piece of Daibert's rhetoric in appealing “omnibus Teutonicae regionis.” It fits into a context of other contemporary crusade appeals, such as Robert the Monk's reported version of Urban II's appeal to the Franks as the most pious of all peoples at Clermont in 1095, and the crusade encyclical Quantum praedecessores of 1145/6, which attributed similar innate qualities to the French people (and the Italians, almost as an afterthought).Footnote 53 This “nationalistic” flattery thus had a long pedigree, and, judging by the fact that Patriarch Daibert's letter from April 1100 was still being copied in southern Germany in the early thirteenth century, it was clearly a message that resonated with contemporary audiences.
Indeed, the letter of April 1100 in particular represented an important link between the German people and the beginning of the crusading movement. Although there had been high levels of participation by German pilgrims in the first wave of the First Crusade, many of these contingents were dispersed or destroyed before they reached the Holy Land; the survivors served under the banner of Godfrey of Bouillon, who, as the closest thing to an imperial leader on the expedition, made a natural rallying point.Footnote 54 As discussed above, the expeditions of 1100–1101, however, witnessed high levels of recruitment from southern Germany, and this explains why Daibert's appeal from April 1100 is preserved in manuscripts from the region: the patriarch's letter not only provided a tangible and irrefutable link between German knights and the beginning of the crusading movement, but it also identified the Germans as the most pious of all Christian peoples.
Considering the importance of the letter to the tradition of German involvement in the crusades, it is puzzling that Daibert's excitatorium is not preserved in more manuscripts, especially given the widespread popularity of the Laodicea letter in German religious houses. It is unlikely that German scribes interested in the First Crusade would have omitted this letter if they had access to it. Hagenmeyer made a similar observation when, commenting on the seemingly limited manuscript transmission of the letter, he suggested that it probably enjoyed more popularity than the written source base attests and also that further copies may have been lost.Footnote 55 The discovery of the Erlangen text reinforces this argument, not only by adding to the number of known copies, but also by shedding light on the letter's textual tradition and regional diffusion.
All three copies of the patriarch's appeal were transmitted with the Laodicea letter as a pair, this despite the fact that Würzburg M. 17 on one side, and Erlangen MS 224 and Munich Clm 28195 on the other side, contain different texts and originated in different religious orders (the former, from a Benedictine house, saints’ lives, the latter two, from Cistercian houses, the works of Bernard of Clairvaux). This suggests that in medieval Franconia/Bavaria the two crusade letters were seen as a pair and were being copied as a unit. Given the tight regional grouping of all three copies of the patriarch's letter of 1100 (see Map 1), it is possible that the Cistercian and Benedictine houses were exchanging manuscripts with each other, similar to the regular sharing between orders that is known to have taken place elsewhere.Footnote 56 Yet the textual differences between the older Würzburg text (edited by Hagenmeyer) and the younger Erlangen and Munich copies make it more likely that the latter were not copied from the former but from intermediary copies, now lost.Footnote 57 This textual evidence for the existence of more copies of the letter that are no longer extant — or at least are at present unknown — reinforces Hagenmeyer's argument that the surviving source base for the letter probably represents only a fraction of its medieval corpus. It is highly unlikely that Daibert's letter to Germany would have been widely copied, if at all, outside of German-speaking regions, given that the patriarch singled out the Germans as a people in his short letter and, in lauding their piety, elevated them above all others. This seems to find support in the apparent Cistercian tradition of copying the Laodicea letter with the works of Bernard of Clairvaux: although Brussels MS 1439 (B2) shares similar texts with Erlangen MS 224 and Munich Clm 28195, the former codex, which was produced in Wallonia (modern Belgium), omits Daibert's letter to Germany. Unfortunately, the question of whether this was a deliberate decision on behalf of the manuscript's compiler not to copy the appeal of 1100, or if the text simply was not circulating in Wallonia, cannot be answered using the available sources.
4
In addition to regional context, the temporal context is also important, as I have argued elsewhere.Footnote 58 The period in which Erlangen MS 224 and Munich Clm 28195 were produced, the early thirteenth century, represented perhaps the most intense period of German involvement in the crusading movement: the Third Crusade and the German crusade of 1197–98 were still within living memory, and the former was a major source of inspiration for early thirteenth-century writers (for example, the compiler of the second version of the Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta Regis Ricardi, the so-called “IP2” version, was writing around the time of the Fifth Crusade and, as Helen Nicholson states, was probably copying the text as part of a response to that expedition);Footnote 59 the Teutonic Order was beginning to flourish and expand; there was large-scale German involvement in the Fifth Crusade; and, after a decade of preparation, Emperor Frederick II led a crusade to the Holy Land which succeeded in recovering Jerusalem (by negotiation) for the first time since 1187. Eleven of the manuscripts that preserve the Laodicea letter were produced in the twelfth century, and it is plausible to suggest that at least some of these eleven manuscripts were copied in the context of the Second and Third Crusades, which saw large contingents of German crusaders depart for the Near East.Footnote 60 Significantly, the places of production for some of the twelfth-century manuscripts dovetail with locations visited by Bernard of Clairvaux during his preaching tour for the Second Crusade: B at Gembloux; V2 at Mainz; W at Würzburg (which, although not visited by Bernard, witnessed an explosion of anti-Jewish violence contemporaneous with his preaching campaign); and a thirteenth-century copy, B2, at Villers.Footnote 61 There may be a correlation between Bernard's attempts to stir up enthusiasm for taking the Cross and surges in the copying of First Crusade letters. This interpretation supports the arguments of Kempf and Bull for a causal connection between enthusiasm for the Second Crusade and the flourishing circulation of Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana in Germany in the twelfth century and, vice versa, that the text was also used to promote the Third Crusade.Footnote 62 Such copying represented the monastic contribution to the crusading movement.
Exploration of scribal activity as a form of participation in the crusading movement not only further expands our knowledge of the political-cultural geography of Europe in the High Middle Ages but also raises two important questions. The first is, why did southern German monks display such intense interest in the epistolary artefacts of the First Crusade? The second is, what does this tell us about regional responses to the expedition? There are two main reasons that German scribes were copying First Crusade letters as a form of monastic involvement in this period of extensive Germanic crusading activity. One is that the scribes were celebrating and reinforcing the German tradition of crusading, which — as the patriarch's appeal of April 1100 documented, and the expeditions of 1100–1101 proved — had a pedigree that could be traced back almost to the capture of Jerusalem itself. There was an important liturgical and devotional aspect to this, as is clear from the passages appended to the third and fourth recensions of the Laodicea letter, which summarized the dates of the key battles and the capture of Jerusalem for ease of liturgical celebration.Footnote 63 Anne Lester has argued that “prayers, both private and corporate, as well as processions and liturgical rites became a fundamental manifestation of crusade participation on the home front.”Footnote 64 The Würzburg manuscript furnishes us with precious and conclusive proof that this was indeed how some medieval monks consumed and engaged with these texts. Returning to the inscription with which the present article opened, the rhyming Latin text at the head of the folio, directly above the Laodicea letter, instructed its readers to read of Jerusalem and to rejoice over its capture because, through their monastic praise, they were enhancing the glorious reverberations from the event itself and supporting the crusading movement.Footnote 65
Another reason that clergy were copying these texts, which is possibly connected to the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux, may have been that these letters represented effective material that could be used to support and inform crusade preaching campaigns in the West. This intepretation perhaps finds reinforcement in the fact that a number of copies of the Laodicea letter and the appeal of Daibert circulated with other texts that performed an exhortatory function and were closely linked to preaching: B2 is a thirteenth-century copy that preserves sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux; E was copied in the thirteenth century and, alongside a copy of the crusade encyclical Audita tremendi and the Hilferuf of Patriarch Eraclius (which launched the Third Crusade), also contains a sermon of Bernard of Clairvaux; M2 is another thirteenth-century copy that preserves Audita tremendi, Eraclius's Hilferuf, and works of Bernard of Clairvaux, such as his tract in praise of the Templars, the Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militiae; and V1 is a twelfth-century manuscript that contains a copy of Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana.Footnote 66 But how would the copies of First Crusade letters being assiduously produced in monastic contexts reach an outside audience? One method was through Cistercian preaching in support of crusades to recover the Holy Land.Footnote 67 The second was through monastic contact with the outside world, which took the form of letter-writing and welcoming guests. As Janet Burton and Julie Kerr write, “the precint walls were not impenetrable and the Cistercians, like other religous communities, engaged with society from within the confines of their cloisters. The brethren sent out their prayers to assist individuals and support specific ventures such as war and the crusades. They welcomed guests, buried outsiders and wrote letters of advice to men and women of all states.”Footnote 68 It must also be remembered that, in order for the monks to gain access to and copy the crusade epistles in the first place, there had to be some engagement with the outside world. It was through such contact that monastic scribes might have hoped to disseminate persuasive texts to other clergy and the laity in support of the crusades.
But the circulation of these First Crusade missives was not limited merely to codices with a crusading theme. The diversity of texts with which the letters were copied and to which they were appended is quite astonishing: Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana; other historical texts; annals; letter collections; liturgical texts; homilies; saints’ lives; sermons; the works of Sts. Augustine and Bernard; and Albertus Magnus's Physica and an Ars dictaminis. It is clear that these crusade letters had an almost universal appeal to medieval copyists and that they transcended traditional thematic divisions.
5
What, then, have these previously unknown copies of First Crusade letters from southern-German archives contributed to our understanding of the reception and transmission of the letter texts? It is clear that the seam of documentary sources for the First Crusade is by no means worked out; the core contribution of this article is to demonstrate that a refocusing of scholarly effort on the manuscript sources and their regional contexts reaps a much deeper and more advanced understanding of regional involvement in the crusading movement. The foregoing examination has revealed, through the first detailed investigation of the provenance of the manuscript witnesses, that the Laodicea letter is preserved in German rather than French textual traditions.Footnote 69 This is significant given that, aside from the quasi-Germanic figure of Godfrey of Bouillon, the leadership of the First Crusade was entirely French and Norman. It calls into question the ease with which we should consider France the spiritual and cultural homeland and most dedicated supporter of the crusading movement. Indeed, it remains an open question as to why the Laodicea letter is not extant in a distinctly French tradition. This may simply be a quirk of survival. Or perhaps it underlines the importance of the regional reception of crusade texts: could it be that the prominent position of Raymond of Toulouse as a named author of the letter and the assertion in its text of the veracity of the Holy Lance found at Antioch (which had divided the crusade host itself while on campaign in the Near East) rankled northern French audiences? The wide diversity of texts with which the Laodicea letter circulated demonstrates the almost-universal appeal of crusade letters to medieval copyists, but it is the regional context that explains why the patriarch's call to arms of 1100 found favor only in Franconia/Bavaria. Textual comparison of the Würzburg letter with the copies preserved in Erlangen and Munich demonstrates, however, that the texts are at several steps’ remove from each other, proving that there were more copies of the letter that are no longer extant (Appendix 2). Through the invaluable rhyming text that precedes the Laodicea letter in the Würzburg codex, this new copy of the epistle also provides us with a rare glimpse into the ways in which the crusading movement touched monastic communities, not just in Germany, but throughout the West. For “the medieval monk,” consuming, copying, and engaging with these texts was not merely a form of work acceptable to God. Rather, these texts offered an active means of supporting the crusades from within the walls of their monasteries by wielding the spiritual weapon of prayer. This, then, was a form of scribal crusading.
Appendix 1
Provenance of Manuscript Witnesses of the Laodicea Letter
This appendix is the result of original research into the provenance of each manuscript witness of the Laodicea letter — something that Hagenmeyer did not attempt beyond listing the century in which each copy was made — which I have compiled from relevant publications, catalogues, and online databases. The manuscripts are listed here in alphabetical order according to their sigla. Manuscript sigla are those in Hagenmeyer, Epistulae et chartae, 111–12. I have assigned new sigla to the copies discovered after Hagenmeyer's edition following the logic of his system. The location of the Laodicea letter in each codex, where known, is given as precisely as possible, according to the available information in the printed and online catalogues, in brackets.
A = Amiens, Bibliothèque centrale Louis Aragon MS Lescalopier 91 (no. 5174; third recension) is a single-sheet parchment copy of the letter dating to the twelfth century. The provenance is unknown — perhaps it entered the collection at Amiens as a regional acquisition?Footnote 70
B = Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique MS 5649–67 (no. 5652, fols. 8r–9v; second recension) is a miscellany compiled from different codices. The Laodicea letter, written in a twelfth-century hand, is found in a section that also contains the life of Saint Gertrude. The provenance of this collection is the Benedictine abbey of Gembloux (Belgium).Footnote 71
B1: Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique MS 3156 (fols. 18v–19v; third recension) is a collection of saints’ lives, produced in the late fourteenth century (1388), which also includes the Laodicea letter. The provenance is the monastery of Stavelot (Benedictine) in Belgium.Footnote 72
B2: Brussels, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique MS 1439 (fols. 161r–164v; third recension) is a collection of the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux (plus the Laodicea letter) produced in the thirteenth century at the Cistercian abbey of Villers in Wallonia.Footnote 73
C = Milan, Biblioteca nazionale Braidense AE. XII. 40 (fols. 39r–40r; second recension) is a late copy from the end of the fifteenth century, which, although now held in Milan, was produced by the community of Augustinian canons at Windesheim, near Zwolle (modern Netherlands). The Laodicea letter accompanies a copy of Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana (fols. 1r–39r) and a number of miscellaneous letters, such as Pope Pius II's Epistola de profectione in turcos (fols. 57r–62v).Footnote 74
E = Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg MS 224 (fols. 150vb–153ra; second recension), produced at the beginning of the thirteenth century at Heilsbronn Abbey, a Cistercian foundation southwest of Nuremberg, is a collection of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux and is apparently related to Munich Clm 28195 (M2), which contains the same crusade letters and exhibits only minor textual differences (see Appendices 2, 3, 4).Footnote 75
F = Frankfurt am Main, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek MS Barth. 41 (Ausst. 18) (fols. 248v–249r; second recension) was produced in the Mittelrhein region (the territory along the River Rhein, between Bonn and Bingen) in the first quarter of the twelfth century. It is a collection of homilies, to which the Laodicea letter was added.Footnote 76
F1 = Frankfurt am Main, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek MS Barth. 104 (fols. 105rb–106rb; second recension), the Annales Disibodenbergenses was produced in Disibodenberg (south-west of Mainz; Cistercian) in the mid-fourteenth century; the Laodicea letter is inserted into the annals.Footnote 77
G = Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek Cod. Guelf. 1024 Helmst. (fols. 53r–55v; first recension) is a twelfth-century collection of letters, including the Laodicea letter, made in Erfurt.Footnote 78
M = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 14330 (fols. 178r–179v; second recension) is an eleventh-century manuscript of the works of Augustine almost certainly produced by Otloh of St. Emmeram (Regensburg), possibly during a visit to Fulda; the Laodicea letter, however, is a twelfth-century addition, presumably made at St. Emmeram (Benedictine) in Regensburg.Footnote 79
M1 = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 4594 (fol. 36; first recension) is a miscellany manuscript that contains three previously separate texts, one of which is the letter collection of Ulrich of Bamberg (which preserves the Laodicea letter). The manuscript dates to the second half of the twelfth century and came from the Benedictine monastery of Benediktbeuern in Bavaria. It is noteworthy that Benediktbeuern was also the home to an early thirteenth-century copy of Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana, since the Laodicea letter often traveled with or was copied at religious houses that possessed this text.Footnote 80
M2 = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 28195 (fols. 114ra–115ra; second recension) is a collection of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux (such as his tract in support of the Knights Templar, the Liber ad milites templi de laude novae militiae) that includes the same crusade letters as Erlangen MS 224 (E). Its provenance is Kaisheim Abbey (Cistercian), Bavaria; it was produced in the second quarter of the thirteenth century.Footnote 81
M3 = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 23390 (fols. 60r–62v, 57r; fourth recension) is a miscellany manuscript containing a varied selection of texts, including the “Translatio Eusebii de destructione Jerusalem,” various sermons, a letter of Frederick I from the Third Crusade, and the only known copy of the fourth recension of the Laodicea letter. It is probably from southern Germany or Austria; the crusade letters it contains were probably copied in the early thirteenth century.Footnote 82
P = Paris, BNF, lat. 5507 (fols. 107–10; second recension) is a fourteenth-century copy of Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana that also includes the Laodicea letter. Its provenance is the Cistercian abbey of Signy (about 60 kilometres northeast of Reims).Footnote 83
V = Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 398 Han (fols. 104–5; first recension) is a collection of the letters of Ulrich of Bamberg that also includes the Laodicea letter. The manuscript dates to the second half of the twelfth century and probably originated from the Cistercian monastery of Heiligenkreuz near Vienna, Austria.Footnote 84
V1 = Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 427 Han (fol. 1; first recension) is a miscellany manuscript written by a number of different scribes in Austria in the twelfth century (before 1152). It contains texts on history, including Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana.Footnote 85
V2 = Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 701 Han (fol. 148; second recension) dates to the twelfth century and its earliest provenance is the Benedictine monastery of St. Alban in Mainz. The manuscript contains, for the most part, a long liturgical text, followed by a collection of various ecclesiastical letters, the last of which is the Laodicea letter.Footnote 86
V3 = Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 2373 Han (fols. 160v–161v; second recension) was produced in the second quarter of the fourteenth century (after 1328), either in the Upper Rhine region of southern Germany or in Austria; its earliest provenance (second half of the fourteenth century) is the university of Vienna, but the pattern of regional variants locates this manuscript more probably in the Upper Rhine. It contains Albertus Magnus's Physica, an Ars dictatoria, and a number of letters connected to the Near East such as a fictitious letter by “Prester John” and the Laodicea letter.Footnote 87
V4 = Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 9779 Han (fols. 1r–2v; first recension) is a very late copy (on paper) from the seventeenth century of unknown provenance. It contains a hitherto unknown copy of Robert the Monk's Historia Iherosolimitana, as well as other texts relating to the crusading movement. According to Hagenmeyer, some of the texts in Cod. 9779, including the Laodicea letter (and presumably the Historia Iherosolimitana), were copied from Cod. 427 (V1); therefore it was probably produced in Vienna.Footnote 88
W = Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg M. p. th. q. 17 (fols. 90r–92v; second recension) was produced in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (the crusade letters must belong to the twelfth century) in southern or central Germany and probably belonged to the Benedictine monastery of St. Stephan in Würzburg. It is predominantly a collection of saints’ lives, and the Laodicea letter and the letter of the patriarch of Jerusalem from 1100 are copied at the end of the codex.Footnote 89
Z = Zwettl, Zisterzienserstift Cod. 283 (first recension), another copy of the letter collection of Ulrich of Bamberg, includes the Laodicea letter. The manuscript dates to the second half of the twelfth century and was produced in Zwettl, Austria (Cistercian). Zwettl also had (and still has) a twelfth-century copy of Robert the Monk's Historia, providing another link between the Laodicea letter and Robert's Historia.Footnote 90
Appendix II
Textual Variants of the Laodicea Letter and Patterns of Regional Transmission
This table provides a representative sample of textual variants shared by a selection of manuscript witnesses of the Laodicea letter in order to demonstrate two regional textual traditions. The first is that of first- and second-recension versions produced across modern Thuringia, Bavaria, and Austria, which share some 35–40 variants (E; G; M1; M2; V; V1; V4; W; Z). The second is that of the second-recension copies found in manuscripts F, F1, V2, and V3, which share a large number of common variants and form a tight geographical cluster around the River Rhine. It is also important to note a small number of variants that both traditions share: this proves the existence of lost intermediary copies.
Appendix III
Collation of New Copies of the Letter from the Leaders of the First Crusade to the Pope and the Faithful of the West, Given at Laodicea, September 1099 (Hagenmeyer no. XVIII)
Note on the transcription: of the two new copies of the Laodicea letter (E and W), I have taken the base text for this transcription from E because, despite some peculiar spellings of the names of places and people (which are in of themselves of interest for further research on local reception of the letter), it is a marginally better witness than W, which lacks a short passage at the end of section 17. E is collated against W, and variant readings are given in the notes. Proper nouns and references to God are capitalized. The consonant “u” is transposed with the letter “v.” Punctuation follows that of the manuscript. Section numbers from Hagenmeyer are given in square brackets.
Manuscripts:
E = Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg MS 224, fols. 150vb–153ra
W = Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg M. p. th. q. 17, fols. 90r–91v
[1] DominoFootnote 91 pape Romane ecclesie, et omnibus episcopis, universisque fidei Christiane cultoribus, Pisanus archiepiscopus, et alii episcopi, et Gotefridus Dei gratiaFootnote 92 ecclesie Sancti SepulcriFootnote 93 nunc advocatus, et ReginmuntFootnote 94 comes Sancti Egidii, cum universo Dei exercitu, qui est in terra IsrahelFootnote 95 , salutem et orationem. [2] Multiplicate preces cum iocunditate et exultatione in conspectu Domini, quoniam magnificavit misericordiam suam, conplendo in nobis, ea que promisit in temporibus antiquis. [3] Etenim cum capta Nicea cunctus exercitus discederet, plus quam trecentaFootnote 96 milia armatorum, illic fuerunt et licet hec tanta multitudo universam Romaniam occupare, flumina epotare, segetes omnes una die depascere posset tanta tamen plenitudine conduxit vite necessaria Deus, ut de ariete nummus, de bove vix duodecim acciperentur. Preterea etsi principes, et reges Sarracenorum contra nos surrexerintFootnote 97 , Deo tamen volente facile victi, et conculcati sunt. [4] Ob hec itaque feliciter acta, quia quidam intumuerant, opposuit nobis Deus Antiochiam urbem, humanis viribus inexpugnabilem, ubi per novemFootnote 98 menses detentos in obsidione eiusdem ita humiliavit, ut omnis superbie nostre tumor desideret. Igitur nobis sic humiliatis, ut in toto exercitu vix centumFootnote 99 boni equi reperirentur, aperuit Deus copiam sue benedictionis, et misericordie nosque in civitatem induxit, atque Turchos et eorum omnia potestati nostre tribuit. [5] Cum hec quasi viribus nostris acquisita obtineremus, nec Deum qui contulerat digne magnificaremus, tanta Sarracenorum multitudine obsessi sumus, ut de civitate nullus egredi auderet. Preterea fames ita in civitate convaluerat, ut vix ab humanis dapibus se aliqui continerent. Longum est enarrare miserias que in civitate fuere. [6] Respiciens autem Dominus populum quem tam diu flagellaverat, benigne consolatur, ac primo quasi pro satisfactione tribulationis, lanceam suam munus non visum a tempore apostolorum pignus victorie nobis obtulit deinde corda hominum adeo animavit, ut illis quibus egritudo, vel fames, vires ambulandiFootnote 100 negaverat, arma sumendi, et viriliter contra hostes dimicandi virtutem infunderet. [7] Inde cum triumphatis hostibus fame et tedio exercitus deficeret Antiochie maxime propter discordias principumFootnote 101 in Syriam profecti, Barram et Marram, urbes Sarracenorum expugnavimus, et castella regionis optinuimus. Cumque ibi moram disposuissemus, tanta fames in exercitu fuit, ut corpora Sarracenorum iam fetentium a populo Christiano commestaFootnote 102 sint. [8] Deinde cum divino monitu in interiora HyspanyeFootnote 103 progrederemur, largissimam atque misericordem et victoriosissimam manum omnipotentis patris nobiscum habuimus. Etenim cives et castelliani regionis illius per quam procedebamus ad nos cum multis donariis legatos premittebant, parati servire, et oppida sua reddere. Sed quia exercitus noster non multus erat, et IherosolemFootnote 104 unanimiter festinabatFootnote 105 , acceptis securitatibus, tributarios eos fecimus, quippe cum de multis una civitatibus que in maritymisFootnote 106 illis sunt, plures homines haberet quam in exercitu nostro fuissent. [9] Cumque auditum esset Antiochie et Laodicie atqueFootnote 107 Rohas, quia manus Domini nobiscum esset plures de exercitu qui ibi remansit, consecuti sunt nos apud Tyrum. Sic itaque Deo conviatore, et cooperatore nobiscum, usque ad IherosolemFootnote 108 pervenimus. [10] Cumque in obsidione illius multum exercitus laboraret, maxime propter aque inopiam, habito concilio, episcopi et principes circinandam esse civitatem nudis pedibus predicaverunt, ut ille qui pro nobis in humilitate eam ingressus est, per humilitatem nostram pro se ad iudicium de suis hostibus faciendum, nobis eam aperiret. Placatus itaque hac humilitate Dominus octavo post humiliationem nostram die, civitatem nobis tradidit, eo videlicet die, quo primitiva ecclesia inde abiecta fuit, cum festum de dispersione apostolorum a multis fidelibus celebratur. Et si scire desideratis quid de hostibus ibi repertis factum fuerit, scitote quia in porticu Salomonis, et in templo eius, nostri equitabant in sanguine Sarracenorum usque ad genua equorum. [11] Deinde cum ordinatum esset qui civitatem retinere deberent, et alii amore patrie et pietate parentum suorum redire voluissent, nunciatum est nobis quod rex Babyloniorum AscalonamFootnote 109 venisset cum innumerabili multitudine paganorum ducturosFootnote 110 Francos qui Iherosolimis erant, in captivitatem et expugnaturus Antiochiam sicut ipse dixerat, aliter autem Dominus statuerat de nobis. [12] Itaque cum in veritate conperissemus exercitum Babilonyorum AscoloneFootnote 111 esse contendimus obviam illis, relictis sarcinis et infirmis nostris, in IherosolemFootnote 112 cum presidio. Cumque exercitus noster et hostium se conspexissent genibus flexis adiutorem Deum invocavimus, ut qui in aliis nostris, necessitatibus legem Christianorum confirmaverat, in presenti bello confractis viribus Sarracenorum et diaboli regnum Christi et ecclesie a mari usque ad mare usquequaque dilataret. [13] Nec mora, clamantibus ad se Deus affuit, atque tantas audacie vires ministravit ut qui nos in hostem currere videret, fontem aque vive, sicientemFootnote 113 certumFootnote 114 segnem adiudicaret, miro videlicet modo cum in exercitu nostro non plus quam quinqueFootnote 115 milia militum et quindecimFootnote 116 milia peditum fuissent, et in exercitu hostium centumFootnote 117 milia equitum et quadringentaFootnote 118 milia peditum esse potuissent. Tunc mirabilis Deus in servis suis apparuit, cum antequam confligeremus, pro solo impetu nostro hanc in fugam multitudinem convertit, et omnia arma eorum diripuit, ut si deinceps nobis repugnare vellent, non haberent arma in quibus sperarent. [14] De spoliis vero non est querendum quantum captum sit, ubi thesauri regis BabylonieFootnote 119 occupati sunt. Ceciderunt ibi plus quam centumFootnote 120 milia Marorum [sic] gladio. Timor autem eorum tantus erat, ut in porta civitatis ad duo milia suffocati sint. De his vero qui in mari interierunt non est numerus, spineta etiam ex ipsis multos obtinuerunt. Pugnabat certe orbis terrarum pro nobis, et nisi spolia castorumFootnote 121 [sic], de nostris multos detinuissent, pauci essent de tanta multitudine hostium qui renunciare potuissent de bello. [15] Et licet longum sit, tamen pretereundum non est. Pridie quam bellum fieret, multa milia camelorum et boum et ovium cepit exercitus. Cumque iussu principum populus hec dimisisset ad pugnam progrediens mirabile dictu, multas et multiplices turmas fecerunt, similiter autem et boves et oves. Hec autem animalia comitabantur nobiscum, ut cum stantibus starent, cum procedentibus procederent, cum currentibus currerent. Nubes etiam ob estu solis nos defendebantFootnote 122 , et refrigerabant. [16] Celebrata itaque victoria, reversus exercitus IerosolemFootnote 123 , et relicto ibi duce GotefridoFootnote 124 , Reginmunt comes Sancti Egidii, et Ruobpertus comes Nortlmannie [sic], et Ruobpertus comes Flandrie, Laodiciam reversi sunt, ibi classem Pisanorum et Boemundum invenerunt. Cumque archiepiscopus Pisanus BoemundumFootnote 125 et dominos nostros concordare fecisset, regredi IerosolemFootnote 126 pro Deo et pro fratribus, comes ReginmuntFootnote 127 disposuit. [17] Igitur ad tam mirabilem fratrum nostrorum fortitudinis devotionem, et tam gloriosam et concupiscibilem omnipotentis Dei retributionem, et tam exoptandam omnium peccatorum nostrorum per Dei gratiam remissionem, et Christi etFootnote 128 ecclesie, et tociusFootnote 129 gentis Latine invitamus vos exultatione, et omnes episcopos et bone vite clericos, monachosque et omnes laicos, ut ille vos ad dexeramFootnote 130 [sic] Dei considere faciat. Qui vivit et regnat per omnia secula seculorum. AMEN.Footnote 131 [18] Rogamus et obsecramus vos per Dominum Ihesum qui nobiscum semper fuit et conlaboravit, et ex omnibus tribulationibus nos eripuit, ut sitis fratrum memores qui revertuntur ad vos benefaciendo illis, et solvendo debita eorum, ut vobis benefaciat DeusFootnote 132 , et ab omnibus peccatis absolvat, ut in omnibus bonis, que vel nos, vel illi apud Deum meruimus partem vobis Deus concedat. Amen.
Appendix IV
Critical Edition of the Letter from Patriarch Daibert to All the Faithful of Germany, Given at Jerusalem, April 1100 (Hagenmeyer no. XXI)
Note on the edition: this is the first critical edition made from all three manuscript witnesses currently known. Manuscript W forms the base text of this edition because, as the only twelfth-century copy, it is probably the closest witness to the original letter. With so few extant manuscripts, it is not possible to establish a meaningful stemma, but it is clear that E and M2 belong to the same tradition. Manuscript W, which preserves a number of different, apparently superior, readings, either represents an earlier stage of this transmission, or a separate branch. Since parts of the W text are damaged, deficiencies are corrected using the other two manuscripts. Proper nouns and references to God are capitalized. The consonant “u” is transposed with the letter “v.” Abbreviated Latin forms of “Jerusalem” are expanded accorded to the most common usage in each manuscript. My insertion of punctuation attempts to strike a balance between the desire for clarity with the attempt to remain faithful to the manuscripts; it does not follow one copy exclusively.
Manuscripts:
E = Erlangen, Universitätsbibliothek Erlangen-Nürnberg MS 224, fols. 153ra–153vb
M2 = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 28195, fol. 115r
W = Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek Würzburg M. p. th. q. 17, fol. 92
Previous editions:
Riant, “Une lettre historique de la première croisade,” 211–14; Hagenmeyer, Epistulae et chartae, (no. XXI) 176–77; Kedar, “Ein Hilferuf aus Jerusalem,” 113–14 (partial).
D[agobertus] Dei gratia patriarcha Iherosolimitanus, Sancti Sepulchri adiutorum servus, omnibus archiepiscopis, episcopis, principibus, aliisque omnibus Teutonice regionis scilicet CatholicisFootnote 133 , salutem Dei et benedictionem. Multa vobis dilectissimi nobis in Christo fratres scriberemusFootnote 134 , de magnis ac stupendis miraculis, innumerabilibusque beneficiis, que larga Dei bonitas in exercitu Iherosolimitano, sive in ipsa via, sive in capiendo sanctam Dei civitatem IherusalemFootnote 135 frequentissime declaravit, sed fratris istius Arnulfi nomine, perita facundia, qui omnia hec vidit, audivit, per omnia affuit, sufficienter vestre benignitatis auribus per ordinem narrabit omnia. Confidimus autem de vestra inspirante Domino Deo largitate, numquam deficienti, sed pociusFootnote 136 innata vobis pre cunctis gentibus pietate, sufficienter succurrenti, in omni iusta et necessaria peticione, quod scilicet quanto cognoscitis sanctam IherusalemFootnote 137 in maiore propter excellentiamFootnote 138 sanctitatis, maxime omnium locorum undique a profanis gentibus, et incredulis esse oppressam, tanto est maior ratio, et maior spes maxime utilitatis, omnibus succurrentibus illi tam sacratissimo et salutifero loco in hoc tempore et articulo, mirande necessitatis et periculi. Capta etenim in brachio dextere excelsi, sancta civitate IherusalemFootnote 139 occisisque tam in longa eius obsidione, quam etiam intra post mirandam ipsiusFootnote 140 capturam milibus Sarracenorum et Turcorum plurimis, multi non longe post recesserunt in propria, reliqui qui vel usque ad sanctum Domini PaschaFootnote 141 in IherusalemFootnote 142 et in aliis munimentis, que Dei magna nobis semper comes pietas, in manibus nostris tradiderat remanserantFootnote 143 cum Pisanis et Anglis, in eorum devecti navibus, exFootnote 144 maxima parte recesserunt. Reliquos vero quos vix retinere potuimus, magnis stipendiis et donativis conducimus, ut donec Deus nobis de vestra gente et lingua Latina adiutores mittat, defendant IherusalemFootnote 145 , Behtlehem [sic], Iopen, Tabariam, Samariam, castrum Sancti AbbraheFootnote 146 et Ramas beati martyris GeorgiiFootnote 147 sanguine sacratas, et alia insuper munimenta. Et quoniam Dei mandatorum fratres karissimi, estis cultores, et amatores probatissimi, festinanter de magna quam vobisFootnote 148 Deus supra omnes gentes dedit opulentiaFootnote 149 pro vestra omnium salute Deo cuius sanctuaria iam sunt in destructionis periculo succurrite, quia sine vestri et aliorum bonorum virorum auxilio, tantos sumptus et muneraFootnote 150 prout expedit, ministrare et explere non possumus. Quod autem huc Deo mittereFootnote 151 vobis placuerit, per fideles et vobis probatos viros cum dinumerata in sigillatoFootnote 152 scripto pecunia mittite.
