Top 5 First Crusade Letters

Guest post written by Thomas W. Smith, author of Rewriting the First Crusade.

This is like asking a parent to pick their favourite child (or cat). With twenty-two First Crusade letters to choose from, it is hard to whittle the list down to just five without feeling some sense of guilt (sorry, Urban II). After a ruthless process of elimination, here are my personal top five letters: 

5. The Laodicea Letter 

Written at Laodicea (modern Latakia) by the leaders of the crusade in September 1099, it is often overlooked that this is the first complete written narrative of the crusade, rather than the Gesta Francorum as is often erroneously claimed – yes, this is a personal (some might say petty) bugbear. A widespread and fascinating manuscript tradition, which saw audiences quickly adding a rhymed introductory inscription and postscripts to supply the dates of battles for religious celebration, mark this out as one of the premier textual vehicles for the transmission of crusade narrative. As a manuscript site it fostered the intersection of news, history-writing, and theology, and opens up new ways of thinking about medieval interaction with letter texts.  

4. Stephen of Blois’ letters to Adela 

I am cheating here slightly by sneaking in two letters as one, but the letters of Stephen of Blois to his wife, Adela, written in the crusader camp in 1098, really must be taken as a pair in order to understand them properly. These are the most famous and widely commented upon letters, having beguiled readers for centuries with their seemingly personal and romantic tone. Recent research, however, has drawn their authenticity into question. Before he fled the siege of Antioch in 1098, I suggest that Stephen used these letters to transmit narrative from the crusade as an expression of soft power in the East and West. I argue that the cores of the letters should be considered authentic, with anachronistic passages – about Stephen looking forward to seeing his wife soon – added afterwards by scribe-readers who were cognisant of what happened later in the siege. In order to tie the letters into the full story of the crusade that had emerged by the time they were writing, these scribe-readers inserted the knowing hints alluding to Stephen’s subsequent abandonment of the expedition. 

3. Paschal II’s letter to the crusaders 

Traditionally much less discussed than the letters of Urban II from the launch of the expedition, Pope Paschal II’s missive to the victorious crusaders in the East from 28 April 1100 has a bearing on some of the major scholarly debates about the papal conception of the crusade. First, it proves beyond doubt that the papacy considered the crusade to be a form of pilgrimage. Second, it reveals that the papacy did not consistently consider Jerusalem to be the single most important target. Third, it shows that historians’ previous understanding of when the indulgence of remission of sins was granted was overly simplistic. Finally, as the earliest dated response to the news of the crusade’s success, we need to revise the current consensus about when returning veterans and news from Jerusalem reached the West; it appears to have been later than previously thought. With all this packed into one document, Paschal trumps Urban to secure his place on the list, something I hope he would have been very happy about: recognition at last. 

2. Adhemar and Symeon’s letter to the West 

My book identifies several First Crusade letters as fictitious documents invented by monastic communities in twelfth-century Europe, which has major ramifications for our understanding of the crusade’s history. For this reason, one of the fabricated documents had to be represented in the top five. I have selected the letter purportedly despatched to the West in October 1097 by the papal legate Adhemar and Symeon, the exiled Greek patriarch of Jerusalem. The reassessment of this letter as a confection means that we can no longer use it to prove: that Adhemar and Symeon had a close working relationship during the crusade; that the Roman Church recognised the Greek patriarch as the rightful spiritual leader of Jerusalem; that it supplies first-hand evidence for Adhemar’s conception of his role on crusade; that Adhemar departed from the crusader host during the campaign to meet Symeon on Cyprus; or that it provides one of the earliest uses of the Latin term for “crusader” (crucesignatus – “one signed with the cross”). Quite literally, the reassessment of this letter forces us to rewrite parts of the history of the First Crusade. 

1. Anselm of Ribemont’s letter to Manasses  

It was an extremely tough decision, but I have selected Anselm of Ribemont’s first letter to Archbishop Manasses of Reims, from November 1097, for the top spot. As a committed letter-writer and tragic hero killed by a catapult stone at the siege of Arqa in 1099, Anselm of Ribemont is arguably the coolest First Crusader (there, I said it). There is something especially intriguing about a middle-ranking voice from the crusader camp who gives us a different perspective from the leaders. As the first link in the chain of an extensive medieval news network, via which Manasses circulated letters to the episcopal community of north-western Europe, Anselm was a crucial figure for the transmission of crusade narrative. The main reason that Anselm claims the top spot though is that a manuscript discovery regarding his first missive unlocks new ways of thinking about the entire corpus of First Crusade letters. The new manuscript preserves a shorter, demonstrably earlier version of Anselm’s letter and proves that previous editions, translations, and studies have therefore used a later, modified text. This finding demonstrates how audiences were rewriting the letters from the First Crusade, updating them in dynamic, interactive modes of scribal engagement. It not only changes the way we think about Anselm’s letter, but also contextualises the edits made to Stephen of Blois’ letters and “Bohemond’s” additions to the leaders’ letter of 11 September 1098, among others. Actually, any chance we can make this the top ten letters?