Crusading was deemed a penitential exercise, its warriors and other participants earning remission of their confessed sins if they survived and, in the eyes of most, the prospect of Heaven if they died. Accounts of crusades are shot through with scenes of collective penance. In his call for a new crusade in 1145, Pope Eugenius III exhorted crusaders to demonstrate suitable humility through sumptuary austerity, discouraging haute couture, gaudy or fur trimmed clothes as well as gilded arms, hunting dogs and hawks. However, in reality, such disapproval of the performative trappings of social grandeur cut little ice with the nobles and aristocrats who led crusade armies. From chronicles, charters of departing crusaders and, from the later twelfth century, contracts, financial accounts, and wills, it is clear that wealthy and privileged crusaders took their domestic lifestyles with them. This reflected not only personal habits of luxury but also the demands of lordship and patronage. These imposed the necessity for display, conspicuous consumption, and ostentatious generosity manifested in material trappings—martial (weapons), domestic (furniture, fittings, utensils, clothing) and religious (robes, altar decoration, liturgical vessels). It was notorious that crusader leaders required huge sums of money, in cash or bullion. While much of it went to pay for followers, transport, and materiel, much also went on preserving a lifestyle. In his occasionally acerbic account of Louis IX of France’s invasion of Egypt in 1249-1250, John of Joinville pointed to contrasting images: himself as an individual setting out as a penitent crucesignatus, barefoot, dressed only in a shirt as he visited local shrines at the start of his journey to the Mediterranean; and himself as a paymaster of knights whose standard of living needed support and as a courtier in the initially far from destitute household and entourage of King Louis. Louis had similarly and equally sincerely performed the role of the penitent in his public appearances during his journey south from Paris. That did not prevent him running an appropriately lavish court, which acted as the expedition’s social and cultural focus as well as employment, military and political hub. Joinville noted that after taking control of the Nile Delta port of Damietta, and after the usual scrap over booty, the French barons heedlessly indulged themselves in lavish meals, feasting being an essential element in the ordinary exercise of lordship but also important on military campaigns (for example witnessed visually in the Bayeux Tapestry).
Extravagant accompaniments to a nobleman’s or wealthy man’s crusade were nothing new. During the First Crusade, Stephen of Blois was pleased to receive additional gold, silver, gems, and cloaks as well horses and military equipment from the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos, whose vast imperial tent Tancred of Lecce sought to acquire to house his growing equipe. Richard I entertained royally at his prefabricated travelling castle of Mategriffon during the Third Crusade. He carried various treasures including the alleged sword Excalibur. Edward I’s baggage in 1271 included a manuscript of Arthurian stories; the importance of luxury literary texts for thirteenth century crusaders has been well-established, whether volumes brought from the west or commissioned when in Acre. Crusaders took their cultural identities with them in tangible form. All crusaders of any social standing were accompanied by their own teams of domestic servants and clerks for business and devotions as well as the physical accompaniments of status and wealth. Every crusade was marked by strenuous noble competition for gifts, tribute and booty to further enhance lordship and prestige as much as military capacity.
A uniquely detailed insight into a crusading nobleman’s material and human setting survives in five parchment rolls, now in the Archives Nationales in Paris, itemising the possessions of Eudes, count of Nevers at his death at Acre in August 1266, now re-edited and translated by Anne Lester and Laura Morreale. The eldest son of Hugh IV, duke of Burgundy, Eudes had taken the cross as proxy for his father’s vow of 1262. His stay in Acre had been brief, less than a year, probably without any significant military action. However, his death and the necessary sorting out of his legacies, debts, and disposal of property gave rise to a series of inventories and accounts drawn up in the weeks following his death. These reveal the precise extent of his lavish provision for himself (although he seems not to have dressed extravagantly, disporting himself publicly at least in suitably simple fashion) and his household. The accounts-inventories reveal expensive rings, enamels, decorated belts and hats, gold and silver cups and utensils, some encrusted with jewels; and, as well as clothing and footwear, an array of cotton, linen and other fabrics, both in use, such as hangings, tablecloths, curtains and carpets, but also bolts of cloth either for sale or export. Eudes’ chapel and library were equally well-supplied. Crusaders’ expenses were not just for necessities but for display. If, in Jonathan Riley-Smith’s familiar optimistic phrase, a crusade was “a military monastery on the move,” then it probably resembled one of the more luxuriously comfortable religious houses.
Eudes’ accounts-inventories have intrigued scholars since first edited by A.-M. Chazaud in 1871. The recent materialist turn in medieval studies has inspired more extensive discussion of both the documents themselves and the objects and financial dealings they itemise. Modern study uses such evidence to provide wider insights into social, cultural and religious practice. The setting of a crusader’s entourage at Acre invites particular interest in cross-regional and even cross -cultural exchange and influences. The excellent and clearly presented edition and translation offered here combines with a compelling forensic description of the rolls themselves and their relationship one to another. This impressive technical analysis takes the interpretation and implications of the rolls far beyond what was possible from Chazaud’s edition. This extension of the significance of the material is reinforced not only by the editors’ full commentary but also by the inspired decision to add complementary editions and discussions, with the editors joined by Anne Latowsky and Caroline Smith, of seven crusade-related poems by the well-known thirteenth century French poet Rutebeuf and two wills drawn up on crusade at Acre by the Englishmen Hugh Neville (in 1267) and the future King Edward I (in 1272). The volume is completed by seven brief essays that broaden the context further and deeper: by Andrew Jotischky on Acre’s landscape; Jonathan Rubin on life in Acre, Sharon Farmer on textiles; by Richard A. Leson on gems and cups; by Maureen C. Miller on Eudes’ religious devotions; by Caroline Smith on comparing the households of Eudes and Joinville; and Uri Zvi Shachar on inventories in the Arabic and Islamic worlds. The text is graced by thirty-two well-chosen colour illustrations.
A Crusader’s Death and Life in Acre is explicitly designed as a teaching tool, to lead students to consider the many different texts apart from traditional chronicle accounts and the ways in which such texts can be used to reveal particular, often neglected aspects of the past, especially how the material can here supply evidence for crusading circumstances, practices, and mentalities. It is also a bracing exercise in collaborative historical research. While inevitably not all judgments will receive unanimous agreement, and at times the interpretive weight placed on rolls that are simply lists of belongings, debts, dispersals and payments may appear to some excessive (do they really “reenact [my italics]...knightly ethos” or just describe [71]?; does the repetition of the conventional title messire really make the roll resemble “a pseudo-play script” [104-105]?), this is a most welcome addition to the corpus of translated sources for the study of crusading and its ambient culture. Whether students will gain as much from the editors’ choice of literary register is less certain. The commentaries are seeded with words and phrases that give academics a justly bad name for pretentious obfuscation; for example: “imbrication” (i.e., overlapping; a favourite, e.g., p. 9 and p. 63); “valuative and affective valences” (a tricky one this, I am not sure I get it at all, but in context something about the qualities of descriptive vocabulary, p. 12); “Old French as a multiform medium of expression” (i.e., a language, p. 69); or “multifold affordances” (i.e., many uses, p. 21). Clarity of language as of thought is not the enemy of complexity; obscurity and jargon are. Students would be best served by being taught that. It would be a pity if such arcane language put them off what is an extremely interesting and scholarly collection, for which the editors and contributors should otherwise be congratulated.