Gone Medieval - Rewriting the First Crusade

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

The Crusades still capture the imagination today, for all of their professed good intentions they were also bloody ideological wars.But have we misunderstood some of the key sources for the First Crusade? The letters on record are not only from popes and bishops but also written by crusaders who were actually on the campaign.Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. Thomas Smith, a leading historian of the Crusades, to learn more about what we might have previously missed.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Ella Blaxill. The producers are Joseph Knight and Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The Crusades still capture the imagination today. For all of their professed good intentions, they were also bloody ideological wars. But have we misunderstood some of the key sources for the First Crusade? Dr Thomas Smith is a leading historian of the Crusades and his brand new book, rewriting the First Crusades suggests that we have. What have we missed? And what new light can Tom's approach shed on the story of the First Crusade? Well, I'm delighted that Tom is joining us now to help us to find out more. So welcome to God Medieval, Tom. Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for having me. I'm a big fan of the podcast. Oh, it's a pleasure to have you here. I can't wait to get into the detail of this as well. The book is absolutely fascinating,

so definitely a recommended read. The book deals with what are called epistles from the First Crusade. So what do we mean when we say, epistles. So we're thinking about the letters from the First Crusade. So we've got 22 letters that date from the time of the First Crusade. And this is actually a really big corpus for that period. So we're thinking about the period from about 1095 to about 1,100. And 22 letters is actually a really pretty significant cache of documents there. If we're thinking about medieval letter writing, their letters written before, during and after the Crusade. They're written by leading proponents who launched the Crusade. We've got letters by popes, by prelates, so bishops. We've got letters from Crusaders who are actually on the campaign

writing from the Crusade camps. And we've also got purportedly letters from the Emperor of Byzantium as well. So there's a really wide range of letters from a wide range of actors who are involved in the Crusade. They're really key sources for understanding what happened on the Crusade and how contemporaries responded to the event. And it's quite a striking hall, as you say, for that period to have so many letters on one particular event, which I guess speaks the importance of it. Exactly. I think this is a big collection of letters from this period is actually quite rare. And this is also one of the things that makes it difficult to look at these letters and say whether they're authentic or not. So one of the key themes of the book is identifying which letters from the first crusader are actually written by the Crusaders at the time or those that are invented or rewritten later on by onlookers. And it's hard to kind of compare them because there aren't many other letters that survive in those kind of numbers from this period from the end of the 11th century, early 12th century. They're really key sources for understanding what happens on the first crusade, but they're also really essential for understanding how contemporaries respond to the event and what they're talking about, what's

the oral cultures around the crusades. So they're a really fascinating selection of documents for a number of different reasons. And you talk a little bit in the book about how, despite the fact that this is such an unusual and decent sized amount of survivals, they've been less well-studied maybe then the long-form narratives of the crusades we have that tell us the whole story with all of the battles and all of that kind of thing. Why have these letters been less well looked at than those narratives? That's a great question. I mean, I think there's a practical element here, and one of the things is that they're not all translated into English. I think that's probably one thing that's holding people back from engaging with all of the letters as a corpus. They haven't been studied

intensively as a whole for over 100 years. So the last scholar who looked at the whole collection and it was called Heinrich Hagggemeier, and he published an edition of the text in 1901. Now, this was a really thorough edition. It was incredibly dense in terms of the scholarship, but also in terms of the German footnotes. There's like hundreds of pages of German footnotes, which I think give one an impression

that firstly this has been done to death, the topic, actually that there's nothing left to say. But also I think it can be in some ways, perhaps an intimidating subject to approach as well. And so there are scholars who have worked on individual letters, and there have been some really great work done recently on some of the letters from the first we say, but no one had looked at the whole collection and looked at them in a different way and with a different set of research questions that have been applied to them, you know, over

100 years ago. I guess it can be tricky when it feels like either it's all being done in one huge study, so what's the point of going there again? And also when it's been done by someone who is considered an authority, you know, you're in danger of getting into somebody's territory, stepping on toes, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, definitely. is that the weight of scholarship as well that's been written in response to the letters and in response to this edition from 1901, that actually there's a lot invested in accepting

these letters as being authentic or taking them as they've always been read and actually looking at them afresh does pose challenges to the historiography. And also I think there's that sense that it's all been done. I think, you know, one of the key ideas in the book is that we should be going back to the manuscript sources for the Crusades and for other medieval areas of history and going again, looking at what manuscripts there are. We've got these great new digital tools to discover manuscripts and to engage with them to look at them online from the comfort of our homes.

And actually, one looks at a great big, fat addition and thinks, you know, there can't be any letters left to find on new manuscripts because it's all been done. And actually, what became clear to me was that there was a lot of manuscripts out there that people hadn't taken into account. As a little bit of a teaser for the book, have you been able to identify some new letters as well as reassessing the well-known ones? Well, I haven't actually identified any new letters.

letters per se. But what I have found is some new manuscripts that changed the way we think about the letters. So, I mean, it all kicked off with a discovery that I made in Munich. And I was teaching a course there and the Byrussia Stardt's Bibliotheque. There is incredible. They've got this great collection of Crusades, documents, books, and manuscripts. And I thought, I'll take the students there and we'll look at some of these manuscripts and pull them up. And so I pulled up a catalogue and I thought, what have they got? And I found this first crusade letter. And it had the wrong date, which kind of intrigued me it made me think, oh, that's a bit weird, but I definitely want to see this. So I'll pull it up and I looked at the manuscript and I thought, hold on a sec,

this text is actually different from that which had been published and which people had spoken about. And I realized that this manuscript had never actually been published and it had a variant text. So it wasn't a new letter per se, but what it was was a different version of that letter, which was written from a more Teutonic sort of German perspective. It cut out the deeds of French Norman Crusaders. And we could see then how that letter was being written. received. And there's other manuscripts then that I've found and worked with, which changed the understanding of the text. So one of the key things is that the letters as we have them, they're

the result of dynamic manuscript copying. So texts aren't the same as in the modern world where it's printed and the text is fixed. Instead, the text at the time are much more malleable and plastic and people are engaging with them and changing them and modifying them and cutting bits out and adding completely new sections and inventing texts. And it's a much more dynamic way of engaging with text and narrative and epistolary culture. And so you've got letters where you've got new versions that show us that the original letters were different from that, which we thought. We use them like as a parchment mirror to see what people in the Middle Ages were thinking about the Crusades. There's one example, which I'm particularly fond of. And it's a new manuscript.

It's from Rhymes in Northern France. It's a copy of a letter sent by one of the Crusades. called Anzum of Ribamont. So he writes this letter during the Crusade and sends it back to the Archbishop of Rhymes called Manassas. Now, this new manuscript has a different text from that, which was in the edition and the translation, and it gets us closer to his original letter what he actually wrote in the Crusade camp,

which is fascinating in of itself. But it's also really important for thinking about why did then contemporaries add on a huge chunk of text at the end that wasn't original to his letter? And that's just as valuable, and it shows us then how people are engaging with these texts and that they're living organisms, really. They're not ossified and fixed, but they're very malleable and porous. And I think that's one of the really exciting things about

working with letters, but especially working with them in manuscripts. Sounds like we're getting very close to kind of medieval editors trying to create the clickbait headlines that would make people want to read. They're making something really specific for their audience and they're tailoring and targeting their messages. Precisely. Yeah. And I think they're inventing these letters as well to meet that need. They're thinking about audience. What do people want to read about? And so one of the arguments in the book is that they're inventing these First Crusade letters. And why are they doing that? They're doing that to fill in gaps in their knowledge that perhaps letters that have been

lost or were never written. And if you want to know about something, what does your audience want to know? You create it and invented. And that's something that's very common to the medieval monastic clergy. I'm sure some people would say it still exists in the world today very much. So what had previously been understood about this group of letters? Were they just genuinely all taken as unvarnished eyewitness first-hand accounts of what had happened in the First Crusade? Generally, yes. I think that's the main way they've been approached by most scholars. I think, you know, there's a really important article published recently by Dr. Simon Parsons, and that looks at the letters of Stephen McBois to his wife Adela from the Crusade.

And he turns this comfortable conceit on its head that actually we can't just take them as trustworthy reportage from the battlefield. And we've got to think about the fact they might be fictitious, you know, letters constructed as framing devices for this crusade narrative that people are transmitting it orally and in written form. So previously people had seen these as being trustworthy documents that people wrote on the spot in the crusade camps and therefore because they're written under these different conditions, under pressured conditions and they're not coloured by literary agenda as the longer sources were and I think they're always seen as documents that were written sort of of their moment and that

makes them trustworthy and we can give them more weight than perhaps the longer sources that have clearly been constructed in monasteries. The other way they were seen, I think, is there's minor sources for the crusade. And that's one of my main arguments in the book as well, is actually to see the letters as incredibly important in the transmission and reception of ideas about the crusade. So you have some of the big sources. How many manuscripts do they survive in? Some of them survive in a couple of manuscripts or seven manuscripts or 14 manuscripts. But actually the letters, some of those survive in really large quantities. The famous letter from the end of the First Crusade that's written in September 1099 to the people of the West and the Pope, it announces the success

of the crusade, that survives in over 20 manuscripts at the moment. There's probably more out there to find. So actually, people are more likely to receive their knowledge of the Crusade and their ideas about it from these letter texts than they are from these longer narratives which have been seen as foundational. So I'm also arguing for a shift in how we perceive the letters as major sources for the crusade rather than simply as minor ones. And I suppose in those letter formats, there are more digestible account that people can deal with. You know, nobody's going to sit and necessarily read or listen to pages and pages and pages and pages of narrative that talk about how wonderful one of the individuals were.

but this really kind of punchy letter that feels like it's from the front line would hit home much better. Precisely. I think they're so much more digestible, as you say. Some of that's to do with their length, as you suggest, that they're much easier and faster to copy and to read. So actually, to copy one of these letters, you need some parchment, you need animal skin to write it on.

That's very expensive. But actually, these letters are quite short. Some of them are two, three, 400 words. They don't take very long to copy. You could probably copy one of the shorter letters in well under an hour. the longer ones in not much more. So it's very fast to copy them. It doesn't cost as much as these long texts. I think that it makes them very mobile. Books in the Middle Ages were mobile. I think we like to think of medieval books as mostly staying in some monastery somewhere

sort of chained to a bookshelf. But actually there's a lot of scholarship that's showing that books are very mobile. People are taking them with them. We've got these marvelous manuscripts from the Middle Ages with these leather covers which go all the way around the edges to protect them from the elements from wind and rain. People who have taken these books with them. And one of the things that I'm arguing in the book is that actually if we look at where these letters are copied in their manuscripts, that's really instructive.

So a lot of the letters are copied within the pages of these books, within the folios, as you would expect. But quite a few of them are actually copied on the fly leaves of the codices of the books. So obviously in a medieval book, just as in a modern book, you would have blank fly leaves, blank pages

that are there to protect the rest of, of the text. And some of these First Crusade letters are copied onto those blank pages. So I think what's going on there is people are carrying these books around with them. They're carrying letters around, both in book format, but also as single sheet parchment letters and as pamphlets. And they're coming into contact with people. And I think there's a sense of urgency there. People are saying, I've got a First Crusade letter. I've got a letter from Jerusalem. And the other people they're coming into contact with are collecting these documents. And there's a real interest there. And so they copy them down in a sort of spontaneous way in the fly leaves of these manuscripts. So I think

if we look at that format as well of where they copied it, it's showing us a number of things. It's showing us a sense of urgency, a real sense of interest. They're copied with a lot of different texts as well. So there's not universal interest in these first crusade letters, but it's something approaching that. I think there's something the message speaks to a really wide section of society. And also, I think this is hot news. This is what people want to find out about. There is a desire to find out news in the Middle Ages just as there is in the modern world. And that's one way you can do it through collecting copies of these letters. I guess it sounds a little bit like the medieval equivalent of something going viral,

doesn't it? It's like a brief TikTok. It's a quick, snappy thing that is easy to copy and distribute around. And suddenly it's finding its way into everybody's pocket. Precisely. And as you say, it's just so much more easier to do that with a shorter text. It's much more easy to manage, both in terms of copying and reading it. loud and then listening to it or reading it for oneself. And I think one thing we have to imagine as well is that these letters obviously are being received in oral cultures as well. I think when we get a letter today, we're probably going to read it silently to ourselves. We have much more personal, private correspondence. But it's not like that in the Middle Ages. People are writing these letters

very much as we would write an open letter that's designed for publication, so to speak, it's designed for dissemination to a wiser public. And these things are being read aloud. as well, people aren't just reading them silently. And obviously, there's a question mark over how these are being used these letters. They're being read and meditated upon in monasteries, of course. They're being copied as a form of scribal crusading. I argue that is a way of contributing to the crusading movement by copying the letters out, but also by praying to God, by meditating upon their content. But also they're probably being used as crusade propaganda. And obviously, a letter is much more direct, as you say, than a longer text. It's also much

easy to take with one in a bag or a satchel or something. And so we've got to imagine these letters. They're either being read aloud, possibly to preach later crusades, to preach the end of the last waves of the first crusades. As I argue in the book, the Crusade of 1111.01, I think actually is considered by contemporaries as the end of the first crusade. We can see that in the letters. And we know that preaching is going on during the crusade itself at the latter stages from the evidence that we have in the looker letter, for example. So the letters are being used. probably for sermons. They're probably being read aloud directly, but also probably preachers are using these letters as stores for their exemplar to use in their preaching sermons.

We can't prove it, but that's what seems to be happening. Actually, when we look at when and where they're being copied, we can match it up with, say, the preaching of the Second Crusade. Some of the manuscripts trace their provenance back to where Bernard of Glevo is preaching the Second Crusade. So there's really long afterlife of these letters and they're being used in a multiplicity of ways. It's really fascinating. Yeah, it is. You mentioned that it was kind of this letter that you came across in Munich that initially sparked this idea that there were different versions of these letters out there. So how do you then begin to re-evaluate the authenticity and the versioning of these letters?

Yeah, so some of it's got a feeling, I'm not going to lie. You're looking really at content. And I think that what we have to take into account is that there aren't really fixed rules for how one writes a letter in the Middle Ages. there are things called R's Dictaminus manuals. So these are like style guides basically for how to write a letter. These are signed to become quite popular in the 11th century. But actually by the time of the first crusade, we're not really sure how widespread they are,

how much they're being used. And just because these guides exist, doesn't mean that people are actually using them. There's also the fact that really famous writers of letters also don't abide by these rules all the time. Rules are meant to be broken, right? So people are bending these rules all the time. So one way,

I'd look at these letters and try and work out if they're authentic. I would look and I would compare them to these start guides, and I would see, okay, if they got particular parts, that works really well for papal letters. So in the book I have a chapter about Urban II's letters for the First Crusade, and I think that one or two of them have been modified later in transmission and that maybe the letter we have now is not exactly the same as that which was issued by the papal trancery.

That's quite easy to do because we can look at the kind of elements that a papal letter should have and we can compare it to the surviving letter. And we can see, okay, this section doesn't quite match. There's a peculiarity here in the wording. There's something missing here. It's very short. There's an odd focus on a particular word, which has been repeated a lot,

such as in the letter to Catalonia. So we can do that with the official letters, so to speak. But the letters that are written by Crusade Nobles by Crusader Knights, that's very difficult because, as we mentioned at the start, there's not a lot of letters out there that are similar to the First Crusade ones. it's very hard to say, well, this is authentic because we haven't got much to compare them against. So in terms of content, I'd be looking for are they quite monotone? Some of them have a really obvious agenda, which is to recruit support for the crusade and to get people to go out to the crusade.

The content might be quite knowing in the sense that it looks towards the end of the crusade, or there might be very rough. Some of the details are incredibly vague. Makes you think, is this person actually on the crusade or do they have a kind of layperson's understanding of what's going on the crusade? they've heard something about it and they decide to write a letter and to create one. So they know something about the Crusade, but it's not actually stemming from the Crusaders themselves. So it's really looking at content, it's looking at style, and it's thinking about the purpose of the letters and also trying to match up like, are these people actually where they say they should be?

And that led me on to identify some of the letters as being inventions, I think. You're talking the book about kind of textual archaeology in this process of stripping away those layers and sort of mining into the documents. and I thought that was a really interesting way to approach it. And I guess, as you say, you peel back those layers, you start to get a slightly different picture of what you're reading. Yeah, I mean, I think I like this idea of it being sort of textual archaeology. You're excavating layers of text, just as an archaeologist would be excavating layers of soil.

And as you go through those layers, in an excavation, you would get closer to, I don't know, the thing you're looking for, basically, the older period in time. And we can do the same with these letters. and what is key there is finding manuscripts and finding as many as possible and then comparing them. That's really the key there. And so being able to find a few new manuscripts allows one to have new perspectives on letters where perhaps there was only one manuscript surviving. We see that with some of them.

But if you've only got one text, then you've got nothing to compare it against. But if you can find one and two more new manuscripts, you can say, well, this is interesting. This section doesn't exist in the new manuscript. So we can detect a layer there that's been added on by someone later. and by peeling those away, we can start to get back to, so to speak, the original letter, which in itself is really interesting in thinking about what's actually written on the crusade. But I think what I'm really fascinated by as well is actually how people are responding to the crusade and these layers they're adding. What are they adding and why?

What does that tell us about the crusading movement and how people are engaging with them? Yeah, and that's definitely something I'd like to explore a little bit more, kind of the contemporary motivations for wanting to alter accounts that people are coming to. Would you see this as maybe part of a church agenda or a secular agenda to craft a mythology around the Crusades to make it appear in the West to be something it wasn't really in the East? Yeah, that's a great question. I think, you know, why are they doing this? Well, they're doing it, I think, primarily to engage with the Crusade. I think this is the big news topic. People are really excited by it. They want to find things out.

about it. They also want to play an active role in it. So copying it down is obviously a work on behalf of God. That's a spiritual exercise. But also I argue in the book that it's a form of scribal crusading. So people participate in the crusading movement, not just by picking up a sword and going to the east, but also by copying these texts out, by praying to God. And this fits into a lot of new scholarship by people like Cecilia Gaposchkin and Lester, Catherine Allen Smith, Megan Cassidy Welch, who are looking at ways of engaging with the crusade that aren't just fighting basically that are kind of centre on spiritual participation. So I think that's one reason they're doing it. Another reason is to update them. So actually you've got these letters from the

First Crusade, from the campaign, say, from people like Anselm of Ribamont. And actually, they're writing them in, say, 1098. They don't know what happens later on in the crusade. Antoine Ribbont dies. So people then in the West will know what happens afterwards. So they're writing to update them. So they're adding a new section which updates the letter with what they know has happened since then. And some of that is to respond to the requests of the authors within the letters. So in the letters of Ansel, he writes two fascinating letters from the Crusader camp. One of his main concerns is to acquire spiritual support from the people of the West, so prayers on behalf of the Crusaders and their dead. And in his original letter, he doesn't

give a list of the names of people who have died, but in this later manuscript where someone's added in a section, they've added a long list, like a postscript, of the names of First Crusaders, who die from their home region. So they're updating these letters, they're engaging with them, adding something. But they are also shaping them to their own agenda. So I mentioned at the start that this Munich manuscript, it displays a kind of more Germanic interest in the crusade,

and it cuts out the French and Norman leaders of the crusade. So people are trying to get them to fit with their particular locality. And I think one of the key things I was arguing there is that actually a lot of these manuscripts are copied in Germany and fewer in France, and one might think. And so I think that tells us something about the crusading movement, that there's intense interest among Germanic monastic houses and that they want to engage with the crusade because maybe they didn't feel such a connection

because there's no sort of quintessential, unproblematic German leader of the crusade as there is for the French and Normans. So they're shaping them to their own agenda. But there is as well, I think, sort of broader agendas at play here as well, as you're suggesting. So with the Pope Urban the second's letter, the Catalan count. So there's one which I think has probably been modified in transatlantic. by Catalonia and clergy. This letter says to them, don't go on crusade to Jerusalem, to the Counts, stay and rebuild the Church of Tarragona in Catalonia and help defend it from the enemies

of the Christians there, and that you'll get the same reward, spiritual reward indulgence for doing that as you would going to Jerusalem. And I think that, you know, this survives in this cache of surprisingly well-preserved documents from Catalonia all about this topic. And, you know, I think there's probably an attempt there to shape the agenda of how these letters are received, at least in their archiving, if not in actually modifying their content as well. But otherwise, I think it's more organic. It's really reflective of community interest. So I think it's how people are interested, what they're interested in their particular monastery, in their region. And I think that shapes what content we see and what additions and modifications

and cuts are being made to these letters. Yeah, and I guess the opposite effect of that is that when you find these changes, is that helps you identify the agenda in that area. It tells you what they're interested in, what they're focusing on the story they want to preserve. Precisely. And I think that's really the value there, is that it's not just what happened on the Crusaders,

what's going on in the West afterwards. Sounds a bit like those people in Catalonia are sort of looking for an excuse not to go to Jerusalem and just stay at home and do a bit of what they want to classify as crusading. So... Yeah.

Exactly. I guess if we found out that sources like this were being changed today, we would be screaming forgery. We would be screaming fake news. We would see this as hugely problematic if we suddenly found out that news reports were willfully doctored and changed

to deliver messages. Is that something that medieval readers were less concerned about authorship and ownership of stories than they are about the moral tales that they can deliver and the purpose that they can serve? So would they just have not been concerned

whether this was 100% factually accurate in the way that we might today? This is such a fascinating question. What's interesting is that they are concerned about forgery. So you have in letter writing culture in the middle ages, they have these ways of trying to work out is a letter of forgery. They're really worried that they might fall prey to forge letters. Because obviously you can use these as political tools to achieve your ends. There's lots of skull duggery going on here with letters. But I think also on the other hand, they're existing and operating and thinking in this crusading story world, which has far less clear lines of demarcation. than we might have in our modern world about what's going on in a foreign war, for instance. So I think we can't draw too final line between fiction and fact. And I think that allowing for that in a more holistic way

and taking that face value, I think that allows us to engage with the letters in a more medieval way, in a way closer to medieval audiences. It makes one think about modern society as well. And obviously, there's a massive proliferation of fake news as well. And people like to invent stuff to try and achieve their ends. they like to hear what they're expecting to hear or they want to hear, and they want to hear

particular messages crafted to meet that appetite. But I also think about how we consume history as well. And actually, you know, historical novels are incredibly popular. And actually, you can learn a lot of history from those. And there's not such a clear separation there between what's history and maybe what is fiction when they're really carefully researched and they've got sort of factual information within them. I also think about modern docudramas, which seem to be quite popular at the moment, where you've got a mixture of what we might call history, but also then sort of fiction and fictionalised recreation within those docudramas. So I think in our modern society, equally, the lines are more blurred than we might think. But I think definitely in the middle ages,

I think that we need to approach them in a way which doesn't say, well, this is factual and this is fiction, and therefore we deal with them separately actually. I think they're consuming it all at once in this overarching story world, which is both made up of legendary deeds and things, which we would say really happened. And I think they're not so bothered about that. Yeah, there's some really interesting parallels to the way that we consume things today. And people always say, you know, fake news is such a new phenomenon. Well, here's some 900-year-old fake news that's going on. There's nothing new. And I always say to people, if you want to be able to sift your way through that, then studying

history is one of the best ways to do it because it's all about getting closer to the truth in the source material. And that's what we're all trying to do on social media and everything else today. So study history people. Exactly. Can you give us like a really good, tangible, specific example of where a letter was thought to be genuine, but now you believe it isn't? Yeah. So there's two letters, which I'm going to use as an example here. So they're written by one of the key leaders of the crusade, Adamaire of Le Pui. So he's the papal legate that's appointed by Pope Urban the second as the spiritual leader of the crusade. And all of the crusade leaders basically see him as the

guiding voice on the crusade up until his death. So he's a really central figure to the first crusade. Now, he's thought, or previously was thought to have written two letters with another leading ecclesiastical figure. This was Simeon, the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem who was in exile. So he had been the Greek Orthodox spiritual leader of Jerusalem, but he was in exile after the city had been lost. And during the crusade, they're thought to have written two letters back to the West. and these had always been taken as authentic. And I reevaluate these letters as inventions in the book. And there's a number of reasons for that.

But chiefly, it's looking at the contents problematic, looking at when they're written, and also looking at where the authors are geographically, physically, makes us question whether they're real or not. So both the letters ask for assistance for the crusades while it's supposedly ongoing. And they have a really clear agenda to try and get people out to the East. They criticize

backsliding in the West so people who have taken Crusade vows but not fulfilled them. But actually I think that they make a lot more sense if one thinks that they're written after the success of the First Crusade, after 1099, when the Christians have captured Jerusalem and they've set up these new polities or states in the Latin, what we would call the Latin East, and they're really desperate for recruits to go out there and help defend them. So if we place these letters in that context, they make a lot more sense. than if we think about them as being written during the First Crusade itself.

There's a number of problematic things with them in terms of the way they're constructed, looking at the kind of formula that are used. They just look suspicious as epistolary material, basically. And if we accept that they are inventions, of which I'm certain, then it rewrites some of the history of the First Crusade itself. So what's at stake here? Well, Ademar's movements and the course of the Crusade. Previously, scholars have thought that Ademar leaves the Crusade army,

in the Near East and pops across Cyprus to pen this letter with Simeon, because Simeon, the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem in exile, is on Cyprus. But that makes no sense. Why would the spiritual leader of the Crusade, probably one of the most important, if not the most important figure of the Crusade, he's not going to get on a ship, leave the crusade, travel to Cyprus to write two letters with Simeon and then send them and then go back. That means it's no sense at all. So it means that we need to rewrite that actual history of the crusade in terms of what happens there in terms of their movements. It rewrites the history of the relationship between the Latin and the Greek churches because people had used these letters to say, well, look, they've written

two letters together. They also have a really close working relationship. And actually that the leadership of the First Crusade is influenced by the Greek Orthodox Church. It wasn't, I don't think. And also about Adam R's conception of his role, this is another key question about what does he think he's doing, what is his role as a leader because he's an ecclesiastical figure? You know, how does he fit into that leadership council? So that needs to be re-evaluated because in this letter he says this is why I'm supposed to be doing. And also it makes us re-evaluate the first use of the word cruchy signata. So scholars have got really interested in when's the first use of this term?

Because this means signed with the cross. This is, you know, the equivalent of the word crusader, basically, someone who's signed with the cross. This is given us the first instance of the use of that term. and they say, well, this existed during the First Crusade, but I don't think this was written during the First Crusade. I think this was invented probably very soon afterwards, but this means that we have to rewrite some of the history of the Crusade

and rethink how we use these letters to support some of the narrative of basically what happens on the Crusade and what we think about it, because some of these letters, they've always been dipped into to sort of cherry-pick really top material that you can't find in the longer narrative, say, well, we know this happened because it appears in this letter, and this is really valuable. But actually, I think these are inventions. And so we need to change what we know about parts of the Crusade as a result.

And can we perhaps see some of the agenda at work there? If this is a criticism of people who haven't been on Crusade, with a view to getting them hopefully over there to bolster the Crusader states that have been established, is framing it as something from the First Crusade, almost a way of saying, look, you've missed out on all the glory. We will win. We did win.

Here's your chance to still come over and get some of that glory. and some of that kudos and, you know, get yourself into heaven, almost, you know, by positioning it as earlier, saying, you know, we're calling people over to take part in something that we won, we're doing the same again. Precisely. And I think you've got all that weight then of the prestige that goes behind the First Crusader. So after the success of the First Crusade, this is the Church Triumphant.

The figures from the Crusade, people like Bermon, these great leaders, they become massive celebrities in the West. They're probably some of the most famous people in the West. from the year, sort of 1099 onwards, that early 12th century. So yeah, exactly as you say, it gives people the chance to take part and to join in and take a portion of that prestige. And also it allows them as well, if they're inventing these letters to assume the voices,

the persona of those figures. So, you know, if you're assuming the persona of Ademar, the papal legate, then it gives your message so much more authority than just some monk in a monastery in Bavaria. That's much more powerful. And there's an authentic letter from the leader. of the Crusade that's written on the 11th of September 1098. And that's an authentic letter, I argue, in the book. But actually, it's got a section that's been added on on the end, which I think

is a later addition. And in that postscript, it switches from being the leadership of the crusade writing to the Pope and the people of the West to that crusade leader Bermond himself. And he criticises the Pope. It's quite unrealistic in tone. And they're criticising these backsliders and so on. And the tone is very different. But it makes a lot of sense if we think, well, this is probably a monk in some church, somewhere in Europe, who's really annoyed, gets sort of frothing at the fact that people on, they've taken crusade vows and haven't actually left yet, and they want to support the crusade movement. How do you do that? You assume the voice of Burmonde. You criticize these people and therefore you spread your messages. You talk about, you know, that going viral,

that is reaching a wider audience if you can tap into a celebrity figure. And I think that's one of the reasons why there's such a popular vehicle for the messaging of the clergy and sort of turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. And again, we would say that that's really dodgy thing to do today, but I guess the justification is that you're encouraging people to go on crusade. If you're a monk in a German monastery, you're thinking, I can contribute here, I can drive people to get involved in this by, like you say, harnessing that voice and encouraging them through that way. So they wouldn't necessarily see it in the same way as we would as forgery. Exactly. I think they're doing it for a good purpose, aren't they? The ends justify as the means here.

You talked a little bit there about how some of this can change our understanding. of the events of the First Crusade and that people weren't necessarily where we might have thought they were and it allows us to adjust some of that. Does it also give us some insight into how the First Crusade is viewed in other times and in other places,

particularly after its success? Exactly. I think so that's one of the most interesting things. I was really careful in the book, I hope to say that, okay, if we're doing this textual archaeology, we're doing this excavation of the layers, what I don't want to do is discard all of the letters that are fictitious or semi-fictitious

as, you know, onto the spoil heap of this excavation and say, well, these are useless now. We don't use these anymore. Actually, I think they're fascinating because they're showing you what was important to people later on. What do they know about the Crusade? Some of this is probably preserving lost stories from this oral story world about the Crusade. What are people hearing about at the time? This is fascinating.

But also, if we look later into the Middle Ages as well, we can see people are still engaging with them later on. And during the 12th century, obviously, up until 1187, they're celebrating. There's a manuscript that I found in Wurzburg, and it's got a rhymed Latin inscription at the top that says, think about the contents of this letter and praise the deeds, and it's going to magnify the glory on earth. And I think that shows us how they're engaging with these letters, that it's an active form of reception, that actually they're celebrating the success of the First Crusade, they're interceding with God. But this doesn't stay the same throughout the entire medieval period. So in 1187, the Egyptian Sultan Saladin destroys the four, of the Latin East, basically the settled crusaders at the Battle of Hatene, and pretty much

wipes them from the map almost and recaptures Jerusalem. So the Christians lose Jerusalem, which they'd held since the First Crusade in 1099. That marks a watershed in the way that people are engaging with these letters and other crusade texts. Up until 1187, they've been celebrating these texts. They've been interceding with God and thanking him for his favor. But afterwards, they're supplicating with God to allow the return of the holy places, to allow them to have his favour to regain the Holy Land. So I think there's a watershed change there in 1187, but also you've got later on in the medieval period. So most of these letters, the manuscripts, most of them are copied in the 12th century, which makes a lot of sense. That's the period

when you've got this afterglow of the success of the First Crusade. Some are copied in the 13th century as well. Fewer in the 14th. But then suddenly you get a bump of copying in the 15th century. So it had been on a downward trend, but suddenly then 15th century, people start rediscovering these texts and copying them again. Why are they doing that? Because they're worried about the threat of the Ottoman Turks and they're returning to rediscover these First Crusade texts and they're copying them as a way of engaging with that element of the Crusaderie movement, perhaps as a way of trying to intercede with God to help defend against the Ottoman Turks, but also as a way to spread history and also to use them as recruitment materials, I think. Yeah, and I guess it plays into that sort of medieval idea of

history as rhetoric as much as anything else. It's a way of delivering a political message for today. So if you're worried about the Ottomans, you look back to when we were threatened before and when we had some success. And you sort of reshape and recraft that to fit today. Precisely. And I think they're kind of timeless, almost in a way, actually, that the interest in these First Crusade letters spans centuries is really important. And why is it that they're not copying in the 15th century? Why aren't they copying letters from the Second Crusade or the Third Crusade or the Fifth Crusade. Because the First Crusade is the most successful. It's the most powerful. It's the one that they probably find the most interesting and inspirational. And I think it's also there's that

timeless quality that, say, the works of Shakespeare have, that Shakespeare's reworked and you will have modern productions with modern clothes and modern weapons and so on. And that's exactly what I think they're doing as well. They're reshaping this history and putting it to their end and uses later on in the Middle Ages. And I think that speaks to the importance of the letters and other crusade texts. Yeah. If we kind of zoom out from the First Crusade just a little bit, some of the new methods that you've talked about, the manuscript accessibility and all of that kind of thing, does that mean that other parts of history, particularly medieval history maybe, may also be due to rethink? Can this principle of addressing text this way be extended to other areas than the First Crusade? Definitely. So I think there's two things going on here. First is in terms of the manuscripts and finding new manuscripts. There's so much material out there and the digital tools we have at our fingertips are incredible. allow us to identify new variant texts that maybe have been cataloged but hadn't been taken

into account before. It allows us to look at a lot more manuscripts than people could in the 19th century. So this great addition that Heinrich Haggamyer did in 1901, it's an incredible addition. Like it's amazing in terms of its quality. It's been so long lasting and it still remains the standard edition. But he didn't see all of those manuscripts in person. How could he? In the 19th century, you don't have the internet. You can't simply pull one of these up on your computer screen. You have to write to someone and say, can you send me a copy? copy of this letter and someone else copies it out or you go and visit them in person, but how far you can travel is more limited and it's much more difficult. And what was really interesting was

finding new copies of manuscripts in the same books that Hargemeier had used in 1901 but didn't know existed. So how does that happen? Well, I think because someone's giving him a copy of this letter from an archive in Wurzburg, say, or France or whatever, and they send him a copy of the letter that he knows about, who he's asked for, or they don't send him the other one, or they don't know about it. And so there's a great deal of stuff that's out there that we can now find. And so I don't think this is limited to the First Crusade letters. And I think what's exciting about the First Crusade is that this was a topic which one thinks usually is kind of been worked out. And that's certainly how I approached it. It was the topic that got me into Crusades when I was interested in as a teenager.

That was the book on the First Crusade really got me into it. But I never thought I'd work on it myself. I didn't plan to. I thought, you know, I wasn't sure how much there was left to do. And it was these manuscript discoveries which led me down that path. And I think that if you can find new things for something that's as well studied as the First Crusade, then there's tons more material that's got to be out there for other topics as well, even really popular ones. And I think there's a lot of manuscripts still waiting to be worked on and new discoveries to be made. And I think that's really exciting. And I hope that actually my book will act as a spur to people to go out and find new manuscripts. I hope that there will be more First Crusade letters that I'd, you know, manuscripts I couldn't

find that other people will find. And I really hope that will happen. So I hope that will happen. it won't be the end of study of First Crusade letters. But also I think there's broader importance here. So I hope the book is a useful guide for studying letter writing culture from the middle ages and from the past more broadly. And it's a guide to reading letters. How do we approach these things, which at once seem so familiar to us. And actually, they're really quite alien. I think that we're, you know, letters traditionally in the past have been used fairly uncritically, perhaps, as these eyewitness reports. Because I think that's how we're inclined to see them, because that's the type of letters that we often write.

And so I think it lulls us into a sense of false security. We know how these documents work. We write them and receive them ourselves. But actually, in the middle ages, the culture is very different. So it feels familiar, but it's not. And I think that by challenging these assumptions, by seeing the letters, not simply as historical documents, but looking at them as liturgical tools, for instance, and how people are praying with these documents and using it to affect changes in the crusading movement,

This brings us closer to medieval engagement with the First Crusade and with these letters and with these manuscripts. And also it just brings us closer to the past. It allows us to understand it in a way which I think is more accurate, it's more interesting, and it's certainly more complex and more diverse than we might have thought. Wow. Well, there you go. Rewriting the entirety of medieval history. I mean, it's such an exciting opportunity, though, to approach things in a different way. I found the book absolutely fascinating and I'm really interested in the changes to the First Crusade, but also how it can be applied everywhere else. So thank you so much for joining us, Tom. It's been absolutely fascinating to talk through some of that detail a bit. Thanks so much

for having me. Matt's been such a pleasure. Well, there you go. If you thought you knew the First Crusade, maybe you need to think again. If that's left you wanting more, you can find out all about these sources for the First Crusade and how we interpret them in Tom's book, rewriting the First Crusade, which is out now. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us any way that you listen to podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. Anyway, I better let you go.

I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.