The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean 9780823278183

Citation preview

the french of outremer

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fordham series in medieval studies Mary C. Erler and Franklin T. Harkins, series editors

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the french of outremer Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean laura k. morreale and nicholas l. paul editors

fordham university press New York  2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—­electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—­ except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per­sis­tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-­party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or ­will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www​.­fordhampress​.­com. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data available online at https://­catalog​.­loc​.­gov. Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 20 19 18  5 4 3 2 1 First edition

contents Introduction / 1 laura k. morreale and nicholas l. paul What We Know and ­Don’t Yet Know about Outremer French / 15 laura minervini The Denier Outremer / 30 alan m. stahl Ernoul, Eracles, and the Collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem / 44 peter edbury L’Estoire d’Eracles in Outremer / 68 philip handyside Western Eyes on the Latin East: The Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier and Robert of Clari’s Conquête de Constantinople / 86 massimiliano gaggero A Neglected Relationship: Leontios Makhairas’s Debt to Latin Eastern and French Historiography / 110 angel nicolaou-­konnari “Re-­Orienting” Estoires d’Outremer: The Arabic Context of the Saladin Legend / 150 uri zvi shachar The Tasks of the Translators: Relics and Communications between Constantinople and Northern France in the Aftermath of 1204 / 179 anne e. lester The Pilgrim Translation Market and the Meaning of Courtoisie / 201 zrinka stahuljak

viii contents

The French of Outremer Beyond the Holy Land / 221 fabio zinelli Roles for ­Women in Colonial Fantasies of Fourteenth-­Century France: Pierre Dubois and Philippe de Mézières / 247 renate blumenfeld-­kosinski List of Contributors / 283 Acknowl­edgments / 285 Index / 289 Color plates follow page 182

The French of Outremer

ENGLAND

Paris

Troyes

WESTERN EMPIRE

Adrianople Venice Zadar Ferrara Genoa Bologna Bari Le Puy Pisa ITALY Naples GREECE

Constantinople

FRANCE

Le Mans Poitiers

PAYS D’OC

Edessa

Konya

Antioch

CILICIA

ACHAIA

Barcelona

LEVANT

CYPRUS

Jerusalem

SICILY

CATALONIA

Alexandria IBERIA

Baghdad

Tripoli Damascus

Famagusta Limassol

Damietta ARABIA

Cairo EGYPT

Aswan

Mecca

AFRICA

YEMEN

Dongola 0

500

1,000

2,000 Kilometers

Zabid

NUBIA

Tripoli

Som me R .

Beirut

Corbie Amiens

Lita n

i R .

Arras

Sidon Tyre GALILEE

Acre

Rouen

Hattin

Sea of Galilee Tiberias

Nablus

an

Caesarea

Seine R.

Cresson Jord

Chastel Pelerin

Paris

R.

Jaffa Chartres

0

25

50

100 Kilometers

Ascalon 0

25

50

Significant locales for the French of Outremer

Ramla Jerusalem Montgisard

100 Kilometers

Dead Sea Kerak OULTREJOURDAIN

introduction Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul

T

he French of Outremer is a title replete with ambiguity, one that plays on the multiple medieval resonances and modern historiographic traditions of two terms. “French” can designate a language, a literary tradition, or a cultural identity. In the central ­Middle Ages franceis invoked place and ­people in only the most general sense: the douce France that, to the heroes of the Chanson de Roland, was the opposite of Islamic Spain.1 Although, for the Roland’s readers, Francia was an increasingly mythic “empire of memory,” it was in the guise of ф ραγγοζ (“Frangos”) and ‫“( االفرنج‬al-­Ifranj”) that the g­ reat diversity of Latin Christian ­peoples who took part in crusades appeared to observers in the Levant.2 “Outremer” has been used for centuries to designate vari­ ous “overseas” territories, and to this day outre-­mer is associated with a variety of l­egal, administrative, and cultural relationships between France and its former colonies throughout the world. In the francophone West of the central and ­later ­Middle Ages, la terre d’outremer designated a similarly complex patchwork of principalities forged in the eastern Mediterranean in the context of the First Crusade in the de­cade from 1098–1109 and lasting u ­ ntil the fall of the last bastions of Frankish dynastic power in Cyprus and mainland Greece in the late fifteenth ­century. Th ­ ese principalities, whose borders and populations waxed and waned with the fortunes of the crusading movement, are variously known to modern scholarship as “the Crusader States,” the “Latin East,” “The Frankish Levant,” and, still, Outremer.3 The lands of Outremer had in common an eastern Mediterranean context and origins rooted in the crusades, but all w ­ ere also dominated by a Latin Christian Eu­ro­pean elite who participated in a francophone culture. For this reason, our juxtaposition of “French” with “Outremer” might seem unnecessary or even redundant. In fact, however, we believe the joining of the two to be instructive and critically impor­tant. Since the late nineteenth ­century, both “French” and “Outremer” have remained principally the

1

2  Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul property of separate scholarly disciplines, the former residing in the literary and linguistic realm of French language studies and the latter within the purview of historians of the crusades. ­Until relatively recently, ­t here seemed to be l­ittle that the one group of scholars might say to the other.4 When aspects of French-­language culture of Outremer have been brought to the fore, moreover, the Frankish culture of the Levant has been seen as subordinated to the metropole of the Capetian Kingdom of France—­t he crusading East a curious dead end in the other­wise glorious march of the French nation. In designating the essays collected ­here as studies in “The French of Outremer,” we owe a clear debt to our colleagues Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne and Thelma Fenster. Their innovative approach to French language in the British Isles as the “French of E ­ ngland” did much to expand scholarly appreciation of what ­were once marginal areas of French language studies.5 Their emphasis, moreover, on the importance of French in the multilingual culture of the medieval British Isles and their championing of the rich ­corpus of surviving of French-­language texts created t­here has provided both inspiration and direction to our own inquiry into the uses of French in the eastern Mediterranean. Like the scholars currently at work on the French of ­England, we are interested in language, society, and culture; like them we want to bring to the fore a relatively neglected corpus: the extraordinary textual and artistic output of the French-­speaking p ­ eople of la terre d’outremer. The few scholars to have addressed the larger questions of the significance of French in Outremer have often done so in strictly pragmatic terms. They have asked, for instance, w ­ hether the language served as a unifying force among Westerners in the Crusader States or if French-­language use perpetuated divisions among t­ hose who came to s­ ettle in the East and who brought their own linguistic competencies with them. David Jacoby’s early work on French lit­er­a­ture in the Latin East, for example, argued emphatically for a common and unified literary culture where the language served to transmit courtly and chivalric values to an audience of strictly elite consumers.6 Jacoby concluded that crusader-­era members of the Levantine nobility read and enjoyed French-­language works produced in the Holy Land and actively sought out new texts coming from the West. The importation of Western texts for the consumption of Eastern nobles in turn reinforced Western values in the new settlements and maintained cultural ties with

introduction  3 the w ­ hole of Christian society. Other scholars claimed that francophone residents of the Latin East felt such a strong connection to the West that they considered themselves and their written products integral rather than marginal to the literary culture of the rest of Christendom, a view that few modern historians of the French language would have embraced.7 More recent assessments have qualified the characterization of a unified and restricted group of French-­language users in the East, in part by widening the focus of inquiry to encompass non-­elite users of the language and to include written texts that ­were not strictly literary in nature. Alan Murray, for example, has suggested that at the time of the First Crusade, the French language was in­effec­tive as a unifying force since it was largely incomprehensible to members of the multiple linguistic groups who came east to fight, including speakers of Occitan, Franco-­Provençale, Flemish, Low and High German, Norman French, and vari­ous Italian dialects.8 It was only a­ fter the crusaders had been well-­established in their eastern territories, he maintains, that French served as a common language among Christian settlers. Similarly, scholars who have examined linguistic practices among members of the military ­orders have been skeptical of claims that members shared a uniform knowledge of French, since new recruits arrived from locales throughout the West where dif­fer­ent vernacular traditions w ­ ere the norm.9 Users of French in Outremer therefore appear as ­either a tightly knit group who communicated only among themselves and eagerly followed literary developments from the West or as a fragmented assemblage who over time came to use the language as a con­ve­nient ­middle ground, a mutually intelligible means of ad hoc communication. Many arguments about the use of French in Outremer have been informed, sometimes innocently, by a much larger debate about w ­ hether or not to characterize the Latin East as a very early manifestation of Eu­ro­pean colonialism.10 This debate, which has raged since the 1970s, has always had a cultural component, as historians queried ­whether the Latin East was a place of cultural and intellectual production or totally dependent on a “French” cultural metropole. In 2004, for example, the editors of an other­ wise extremely valuable collection of essays about the culture of the Frankish Levant wrote that “the majority of settlers ­were French and the art and culture of Paris was of abiding interest to them.” This assumption of a straightforwardly colonial relationship between the Frankish Levant and Capetian France (or, as ­here, just the capital of Paris), has enormous

4  Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul implications for the study of French-­language texts produced in the East. Fortunately, a renewed attention to the texts themselves has encouraged an uncoupling of language and identity with regard to the French of Outremer. Most recently, for example, sociolinguist Cyril Aslanov has written that “the French identity and the Old French language played a central and unifying role in the mosaic of ­people who settled in Syria-­Palestine ­a fter 1098, in Cyprus ­a fter 1191, and in other Greek-­speaking countries ­a fter 1204.”11 Even as Aslanov’s statement argues for the unifying role of the language, he upsets the presumption that the uses of French and French identity ­were one and the same in Outremer. The “French identity” is one assumed by the Westerners in the East and not one originating in a French ­mother country. Perhaps the most substantive argument in ­favor of a reassessment of the Old French works created, elaborated, and circulated in Outremer comes from the texts themselves. The sheer variety, quantity, and originality of the corpus would defy attempts to label this material or its creators as derivative from or in any way peripheral to the medieval francophone world. Not only was French the idiom chosen for a range of dif­fer­ent types of literate proj­ects in the East, several of t­ hese proj­ects represent very early, if not the earliest, examples of that kind of text first produced in French. It was in the Frankish Levant that writers produced one of the earliest vernacular ­legal treatises (Livre au roi), the earliest vernacular prose history (Chronique d’Ernoul), a major chanson de geste (Chétifs), and prob­ably one of the earliest Arthurian romances (the Estoire dou Graal of Robert de Boron).12 In addition to t­ hese types of works and the letters, memoirs, devotional manuals, and funerary inscriptions, we also have fragments of the earliest vernacular knightly autobiography; we hear snatches of the French lyr­ics sung in Syria and Cyprus, and we hear of vernacular falconry treatises. Many of ­these Eastern works, such as Ernoul, Chétifs, and the Estoire dou Graal, made their way to western Eu­rope and ­were consumed voraciously by Western readers, as was the guide to aristocratic conduct written by the Cypriot knight Philip of Novara.13 Literary consumption certainly went in both directions across the Mediterranean, but the evidence of the surviving manuscripts, which bear witness to Outremer texts copied and distributed widely throughout the West, strongly suggests the place of Outremer as a producer, rather than simply a consumer, of French-­language culture.

introduction  5 Happily, this impressive and long-­overlooked literary culture now has its champions. Within the last de­cade, specialists in the study of “French” and “Outremer” have turned to face each other and found that each has much to contribute to the other.14 Scholars of the French language are increasingly ­eager to look beyond more traditional approaches, to fully engage with works from outside the bound­aries of modern France, and to question the role of the eastern settlements in the story of the language.15 Historians of the crusades, having mined French-­language texts for centuries to reconstruct and comprehend a po­liti­cal narrative, now fully acknowledge the creation of ­t hose texts as monuments and tools in the shaping and ordering of po­liti­cal communities.

overview of the essays This collection brings together ­these champions, historians of language, lit­ er­a­ture, crusader society, and material culture to offer a completely new consideration of the francophone world of the eastern Mediterranean that is decidedly interdisciplinary in its approach. While striving for clarity and cohesion, we also believe that true interdisciplinarity acknowledges a variety of research methods and perspectives. Indeed, to be truly inclusive of fields as dynamic as crusade history and Mediterranean multilingualism, we sought out scholars at dif­fer­ent stages in their professional ­careers, working in vari­ous languages and within diverse scholarly traditions, as contributors to this volume. In the context of the emerging nature of this topic, we see the contributions of all of our essayists as complementary and critically impor­tant as we test the bound­aries of our inquiry. Many of the essays included ­here emerge from longstanding and entrenched disciplinary traditions. In the interest of providing pathways for cross-­disciplinary readers, we offer some preliminary remarks on two debates that inform a number of the essays. The first addresses the complex ­family of Old French historical narrative texts that has formed the basis for our understanding of the timeline of events in the crusading Mediterranean, and the second concerns the tradition of nationally oriented philologies that have ­shaped how scholars recount the story of French and other Eu­ro­pean vernaculars. Among the types of evidence scrutinized by historians for the life and histoire evenementielle of the Latin East are the narratives. Beginning with

6  Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul the major twelfth-­century Latin chronicles of Fulcher of Chartres and William of Tyre, a­ fter around 1200 the narratives concerned with the Frankish Levant w ­ ere composed almost entirely in the French vernacular. Manuscript compilations and redactions of ­these works from the thirteenth c­ entury onward give the erroneous impression that ­these works all emerge from a single tradition or practice of continuing the masterwork of William of Tyre. Despite nineteenth-­century editorial proj­ects intended to disentangle them, that impression proves difficult to dislodge. A sequence of chapters in this book demonstrates the true complexity and dynamism of the narratives of Outremer. The subjects for analy­sis ­here include a Latin chronicle written in the East translated into French in the West (Handyside); an in­de­pen­dent Old French chronicle composed in the West drawing upon vernacular Eastern material (Gaggero); comparisons of this second chronicle with continuations of the first (Edbury); and literary interpolations within the Eastern Old French text (Shachar). The linguistic bound­ aries of the narrative corpus are pushed outward by a comparison between ­these types of works and a Greek narrative composed in the context of crusader Cyprus (Konnari). Chapters that address linguistic aspects of the Outremer corpus rest on a tradition of philological study that emphasized locating texts, often in decontextualized samplings, based largely on graphic patterns and established linguistic norms. While some of our authors rely on this methodology (Minervini, Zinelli), they also acknowledge that ­these texts and their creators traveled from place to place, so that the linguistic evidence cannot stand alone as a final determinant of textual origin. Their careful layering of philological, codicological, and historical evidence encourages us all to take what we can from older methodologies and embrace the contributions of related disciplines. Our first essay, by Laura Minervini, establishes a basis for our inquiry, setting out the state of research into the language that was written and spoken in Outremer. The evidence used in linguistic studies is broad but must usually rely on textual sources. Another extremely impor­tant but less often consulted site for the articulation of collective identity is coinage. It is to the most common coin of the eastern realms, the silver denier, that Alan Stahl turns in our second essay. ­Whether it was on the eastern Mediterranean mainland, in Cyprus, or in Greece, the denier coin type referred, textually yet wordlessly, to a broader French-­speaking world. Much more

introduction  7 than a ­simple imitation, the denier represented a platform on which the eastern principalities could add their own distinctive ele­ments. Po­liti­cal legitimacy and status depended not just on repre­sen­ta­tions of power in the pres­ent, but also on control of the collective understanding of the past. As Peter Edbury demonstrates h ­ ere, the memory of the events leading up to the decisive ­Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn (July 4, 1187), where the combined armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem w ­ ere defeated by Ṣalāḥ al-­Dīn al-­Ayyūbī (Saladin) was still of central importance for the inhabitants of the Latin East in the 1250s. The stories told by survivors of Hittin, mediated through the sympathetic early memories of their families and supporters, led to a further revision of the Old French narrative tradition we know as the Continuations of the twelfth-­century chronicle of William of Tyre. William of Tyre’s narrative invited vernacular continuations b ­ ecause it had been translated into Old French at some point in the 1220s. How exactly was this landmark proj­ect of Latin to Old French prose translation undertaken, and how did the perspective of the translator (who was working not in Palestine, but northern France) change the perspective of the narrative? ­These are the questions animating the essay by Philip Handyside, who reveals some of the changes introduced by the translator to make the work more comprehensible to a Western audience. His efforts ­were spectacularly successful, and his translation succeeded not only in the West but also on its return to the Latin East. While we do not know precisely where in the francophone West Handyside’s translator was at work, Massimiliano Gaggero suggests that we may be able to locate a “cultural center” for the dissemination of the model of Old French prose historiography at the Abbey of Corbie. It was at Corbie that two Old French texts associated with events in Outremer, Robert of Clari’s Conquête de Constantinople and the Ernoul-­Bernard chronicle, most likely assumed the shape in which we know them ­today. Both texts ostensibly composed by lay noblemen, Clari’s Conquête and Ernoul-­Bernard demonstrate the innovation in form and authorship for French-­language texts that we can now increasingly associate with Outremer and the crusades. Two other essays, by Angel Nicolaou-­Konnari and Uri Shachar, explore additional aspects of the creative potential of the frontier zone, a place where the use of Old French highlights the permeability of ethnic and religious bound­aries. The work at the center of Nicolaou-­Konnari’s essay, Leontios Makhairas’s Recital Concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus, was

8  Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul written in Cypriot Greek but, as she demonstrates, betrays influences from the Old French historiographical traditions of Outremer. Similarly, although the Estoires d’Outremer, the focus of Uri Zvi Shachar’s essay, was written in Old French, the story it tells about Saladin agrees with narrative traditions that w ­ ere circulating in Arabic far beyond the borders of the Frankish East. The power of the work for the Outremer nobility, Shachar suggests, lies in the combination of Old French chivalric modus with the Arabic materia. The issue of translation, raised indirectly by Shachar and Nicolaou-­ Konnari’s work on the movement of narrative influences across languages, is squarely at the center of the essays by Anne E. Lester and Zrinka Stahuljak. Each, however, ­handles the question of translation differently. Lester invokes the concept of linguistic translation to understand the pro­cess by which the material culture of the Byzantine Empire, taken from Byzantine churches and palaces following the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, was interpreted in new environments in the Latin West. This was a pro­cess, as Lester explains, that required both ­people and artworks in the form of new reliquaries. Stahuljak examines the market for translators that served Eu­ro­pean pilgrims to the Holy Land ­after the fall of the last stronghold of Frankish po­liti­cal power in the East in 1291. While Outremer as a po­liti­cal force had ceased to exist on the mainland, Stahuljak finds something more than a memory of the Frankish culture in the peculiar invocation of the term courtoisie in the context of hiring translators. If we consider how one term like courtoisie would be understood by speakers and writers traveling across the medieval francophone world, it becomes immediately apparent that Italy, so often the point of transit between Latin West and Latin East, could also play a critical role as cultural mediator. Th ­ ere is no better evidence of Italian communities playing this role than that presented by Fabio Zinelli, who finds the scripta of Outremer French (to use Minervini’s term) in texts written in Italy both before and ­after 1291. More than just a scribal habit or foreign accent, Zinelli argues that Outremer French had clear po­liti­cal connotations for the Italian writers and copyists who invoked it in their texts. Even as Zinelli’s Italian chroniclers and copyists gestured lightly but meaningfully ­toward the East with their adoption of the Outremer scripta, a more forceful statement of intention with regard to the Eu­ro­pean past

introduction  9 and f­ uture of the Levant was in preparation in the Kingdom of France itself. The Norman ­lawyer Pierre Dubois and the royal advisor and diplomat Philippe de Mézières both wrote treatises, each about a c­ entury apart, in which they proposed plans for the reconquest of the Holy Land. Strikingly, as Renate Blumenfeld-­Kosinski explains, both advised that w ­ omen should play impor­tant roles. Looking closely at what t­ hese two strategists had to say about the place of ­women in ­future crusading conquests, Blumenfeld-­ Kosinski shows that the fantasy of a new terre d’outremer looks less like fantasy and the high medieval past, resembling more and more the colonial ­future.

five thematic strands Hybridity and Innovation What we have just presented is one way of following the sequence of essays in this volume. In fact, however, we encourage readers to see the many topical threads that run through ­these essays and that ultimately intertwine. Many of the essays, for instance, but particularly t­ hose of Minervini, Nicolaou-­Konnari, and Shachar, treat the construction or emergence of new, hybrid forms of language and written expression. ­These forms resulted both from the introduction of the French language into eastern territories and from the creation of a new, separate francophone space (Outremer) in which textual traditions evolved in their own right while coming repeatedly into contact both with other linguistic and cultural worlds (Cypriot Greek and Ayyubid Arabic) and with con­temporary francophone cultures (such as chivalric romance and biography). Translation and Transportation Other essays, as signaled previously, engage with themes of translation and transportation. While some of t­ hese essays (for instance, Handyside and Stahuljak) speak directly to the pro­cess of translating between other languages and French, o ­ thers tease out less discernable acts of translation that work to convey linguistic (Zinelli) or literary norms (Shachar, Gaggero) from Outremer to another tradition or locale. Other essays explore the mechanics of transporting French-­language practices and prac­ti­tion­ers from Outremer to the West (Zinelli, Stahuljak) as well as totems of Eastern religious identity (Lester) from an Eastern to a Western context. In some way,

10  Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul all of t­ hese essays begin with an idea, narrative, object, custom, or person originating from Outremer and describe how their removal from the context of the Latin East may have altered them in some way.

Practicalities Although fantasy and exoticism played an impor­tant role in many of the French texts coming from Outremer, some French-­language users confronted the Outremer experience more concretely. Coins in Jerusalem featuring French-­language inscriptions formed a part in the quotidian real­ity of the Latin East (Stahl), and French-­language place names marked the neighborhoods where settlers came to live their daily lives (Minervini). Strategies for getting to (Stahuljak) or recapturing (Kosinski) the lands of Outremer required a realistic, not romanticized, approach t­ oward language and communication. ­These essays often push beyond the strictly literary uses of French to consider how the language served a specific need or community in Outremer. Negotiating Identity Texts from and about the Frankish Levant repeatedly assert the existence of a clearly understood ultramarine identity, often associated with the term poulains. Precisely what ele­ments of dress, speech, be­hav­ior, and ideology might have constituted grounds for recognition within this group remain an obscure and a relatively unexplored subject. Much light is shed ­here, however, on the kinds of supports, some material and iconographic (Stahl), ­others linguistic (Zinelli, Minervini, Stahuljak), cultural (Shachar), and ­po­liti­cal and commemorative (Edbury, Handyside, Gaggero) around which such an identity could have been constructed. Importantly, and unlike so much of what has been written about Eu­ro­pean identity in the ­Middle Ages, the Frankish (poulain) identity that emerges from ­these essays is not one constructed primarily in opposition to a non-­European or non-­Christian Other. More often it appears to have been negotiated and even co-­opted or i­ magined (Kosinski) with reference to other Latin Eu­ro­ pean communities, responding forcefully to what­ever t­ hose communities might say about the poulains (Edbury).

introduction  11

Italy’s S ­ ilent Role The title of this collection naturally privileges interactions with the French vernacular, which is in turn most closely associated with the Kingdom of France. The Italian peninsula was also home to French-­language products and prac­ti­tion­ers, and the connections that existed between the French of Italy and French of Outremer (Zinelli) remain an open question. Not only ­were French-­language texts exchanged between Italy and Outremer with some frequency, French speakers often traveled through Italy ­either coming from (Lester) or g­ oing to the Holy Land (Stahuljak). Despite the secondary role that the Italian space has traditionally occupied in crusades study, it functioned as a cosmopolitan locale that connected East and West, where p ­ eople, objects (Stahl), and texts w ­ ere imported and exported. If we look beyond the temporal scope of the essays found in this collection we see that Italy eventually took on a dominant role in the areas in the East, such as the Morea, that w ­ ere once francophone and that identified culturally as French.16

the digital addendum In opening ­these new inquiries into hitherto unexamined modes of medieval communications, we aim to harness a range of new modes of scholarly communication. This book is supplemented by a digital addendum allowing greater elaboration and exploration of the questions raised in ­these printed essays.17 The digital medium allows the authors in this volume to create an online repository of digital knowledge, as is the case with Philip Handyside’s linked manuscript stemma, or to use new ways of sharing the lived experience of francophone settlers, as with the printable crusader coins from Alan Stahl’s essay. We hope the digital addendum ­w ill open new ave­nues of exploration and knowledge exchange. notes

1. Simon Gaunt, “The Chanson de Roland and the Invention of France,” in Rethinking Heritage: Cultures and Politics in Eu­rope, ed. Robert Shannan Peckham (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 90–101; Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Bound­aries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Lit­er­a­ture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 29–31. 2. For the memory of the Franks, see Matthew Gabriele, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem Before the First

12  Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul Crusade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For Frankish identity in the context of conquest and crusade, see Marcus Bull, “Overlapping and Competing Identities in the Frankish First Crusade,” in Le Concile de Clermont et l’appel à la croisade (Rome: École française de Rome, 1997), 195–211; Alan V. Murray, “Ethnic Identity in the Crusader States: The Frankish Race and the Settlement of Outremer,” in Concepts of National Identity in the M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray (Leeds: Leeds Studies in En­glish, 1995), 59–73; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Eu­rope: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1993), 101–5. 3. It is impor­tant to note that the ultramarine gaze that designated a far shore as a terre d’outremer extended in both directions. So the residents of the Latin East would commonly refer to the West as “outremer.” 4. See, for example, Daniel H. Weiss and Lisa J. Mahoney, France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Cyril Aslanov, Le français au Levant, jadis et naguère: À la recherche d’une langue perdue (Paris: H. Champion, 2006); and especially the work of Peter Edbury and Laura Minervini, both of whom have contributed essays to this collection. 5. Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne, “General Introduction: What’s in a Name; The ‘French’ of ‘­England,’ ” in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 1–14. 6. “Les contacts entre Occident et Orient, ainsi qu’entre les pays de conquête de la Méditerrané orientale,” argues Jacoby, “ont été grandement facilités par un facteur linguistique”; David Jacoby, “La littérature française dans les états latins de la Méditerranée orientale à l’époque des croisades: Diffusion et création,” in Essor et fortune de la chanson de geste dans l’Eu­rope et l’Orient latin, Société Roncevalles (Modena: Mucchi, 1984), 619. 7. Aslanov, Le français au Levant, 35. 8. Alan V. Murray, “National Identity, Language and Conflict in the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1096–1192,” in The Crusades and the Near East: Cultural Histories, ed. C. Kostick (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 115. 9. Anthony Luttrell, “The Hospitallers’ Early Written Rec­ords,” in The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, ed. J. France and W. Zajac (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 135–54; Joseph M. Brincat, “The Languages of the Knights: Legislation, Administration and Diplomacy in a Multilingual State (14th–16th centuries),” in Language and Diplomacy, ed. Jovan Kurbalija and Hannah Slavik (Msida, Malta: DiploProjects, Mediterranean Acad­emy of Diplomatic Studies, University of Malta, 2001), 261–79. 10. The argument for a colonial character was made most forcefully by Joshua Prawer, The Crusaders’ Kingdom: Eu­ro­pean Colonialism in the M ­ iddle Ages (New York: Praeger, 1972). For counter-­arguments, see Moses I. Finley, “Colonies: An Attempt at a Typology,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series 26 (1976): 167–88, and the debate in “The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: The First

introduction  13 Eu­ro­pean Colonial Society? A Symposium,” in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar (London: Variorum, 1992), 341–66. For commentary, see Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 14–19, and Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Oxford: Manchester University Press, 2011), 178. 11. Aslanov, “Crusaders’ Old French,” in Research on Old French: The State of the Art, ed. Deborah L. Arteaga, Studies in Natu­ral Language and Linguistic Theory 88 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 207. 12. For the date of the Livre au Roi, see Livre au Roi, ed. Myriam Greilsammer (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, 1995), 83–86. For the date of Ernoul, see Peter Edbury’s essay in this volume. For Chétifs as a product of the court of Antioch, see Linda M. Paterson, “Occitan Lit­er­a­ture and the Holy Land,” in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lit­er­a­ture and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 83–100. For the Eastern context of the Estoire dou Graal, see Helen Nicholson, Love, War, and the Grail: Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights in Medieval Epic and Romance (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 151. 13. On Philip’s popularity, see Roberto Tagliani, “un nuovo frammento dei ‘Quatre âges de l’homme’ di Philippe de Novare tra le carte dell’Archivio di Stato di Milano,” Critica del Testo (2013): 44–51. Thanks to Christopher Rose for drawing our attention to this essay. 14. For more on this, see Laura Minervini’s essay in this collection. 15. Gaunt, “French Lit­er­a­ture Abroad: ­Towards an Alternative History of French Lit­er­a­ture,” Interfaces 1 (2015), accessed at http://­riviste​.­unimi​.­it​/­​ interfaces​/­article​/­v iew​/­4938. 16. Thanks go to Zrinka Stahuljak for this keen observation. 17. The digital addendum can be accessed at http://­fordham​.­bepress​.­com​/ medieval​_­pubs​/­1​/­.

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what we know and d ­ on’t yet know about outremer french Laura Minervini

T

he label Outremer French refers to an Old French dialect used in the Latin East with specific features distinguishing it from other Old French dialects. Its existence is not a new discovery: among the pioneers of this field ­were Antoine Thomas and Edith Brayer in the early 1920s and ’30s, followed by Gianfranco Folena and Valeria Bertolucci in the following generation.1 The sources for their study of the language came primarily from texts published in the monumental collection Recueil des historiens des Croisades,2 as well as texts they edited themselves. Although Folena never edited an Outremer French text, he made ample use of Jean Richard’s impor­tant collection of Cypriot documents,3 and his work with Outremer French was principally the byproduct of his efforts to document the spread of the Venetian dialect in the eastern Mediterranean. On the w ­ hole, this group of scholars worked on a relatively limited corpus of texts that w ­ ere often not carefully edited from a philological point of view. Despite ­these restrictions, the keen insight of ­these early scholars is praiseworthy, and their groundbreaking research remains valuable ­today. The impressive results achieved by Thomas, Brayer, Folena, and Bertolucci in documenting the presence of a French-­speaking community in the Latin East, with its own well-­documented dialect, was unfortunately disregarded by most authors of Old French handbooks and histories of the French language. It is to the credit of Alain Rey, Frédéric Duval, and Gilles Siouffi to be the first to devote a chapter to the diffusion of French in the eastern Mediterranean in their recent book, Mil ans de langue française.4 What changed in the last few years in terms of understanding Outremer French was, on the one hand, a greater availability of reliable editions of the texts produced in Outremer, including Philip of Novara’s Mémoires, the Chronicle of the Templar of Tyre, John of Ibelin’s Law Book, and the Acre Bible.5 In addition, historical research on the social and cultural history of Outremer has also advanced, led by scholars such as Joshua Prawer, David 15

16  Laura Minervini Jacoby, Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans E. Mayer, Jean Richard, Michel Balard, Bernard Hamilton, Jonathan Riley-­Smith, and Peter Edbury, to name but a few. Although their works ­were first published in the 1970s, philologists did not become aware of them ­until much ­later due to lack of curiosity, academic habits, or cultural and disciplinary fences. The conditions are now more favorable for the development of research on Outremer French, and initial attempts have been undertaken by Cyril Aslanov, Pierre Nobel, Fabio Zinelli, and myself, from dif­fer­ent perspectives and using dif­fer­ent methodological tools.6 Many other, more ju­nior scholars are now also engaged with this material from vari­ous disciplinary perspectives. What, therefore, is new about Outremer French? What have we discovered that was previously unknown to the “founding ­fathers and ­mothers” of our field of research? I would suggest two main directions. The first concerns the social diffusion of the language, not only in the French ruling class, but also among the lower strata of society. The second attempts to identify the specific linguistic features that distinguish Outremer French from other Old French dialects. It was previously believed that French in the Latin East, Flanders, and Italy did not give rise to its own literary tradition, nor to a peculiar linguistic variety. In the words of Serge Lusignan, “aucune de ces implantations artificielles du français n’a donné naissance à une littérature propre, ni produit un registre original de la langue écrite, ainsi que ce fut le cas en Angleterre.”7 The question remains open as to w ­ hether the situations of Italy and Flanders should be considered instances of “artificial implantation” of French, and if so, what characteristics ­these implantations might have shared. In fact, the cultural and po­liti­cal situations within the two regions varied greatly, since southern Italy was home to a French-­and Occitan-­ speaking social elite following the late thirteenth-­century arrival of the Angevins, a French-­speaking dynasty, while a network of cultural influences was at work in Flanders and other areas to the north. The Latin East, however, was another story: as it is well known, in the wake of a mostly French-­ speaking ruling class, a stream of settlers from northern and southern France arrived overseas, in the newly founded Crusader States—­the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291[–1489]),8 the Principality of Antioch (1098–1268), the counties of Edessa (1098–1149) and Tripoli (1104–1289). Such a pro­cess of migration makes the social situation of the Crusader States comparable—­ according to some scholars—to that of modern colonies.9

what we know about outremer french  17 The ruling class of the Crusader States, and of Cyprus and Morea from the thirteenth ­century, was mainly composed of members of the northern­and southern-­French aristocracy. Jonathan Riley-­Smith has demonstrated that most of the “first crusaders”—­that is, the participants in the military expedition of 1096–1099—­left the Holy Land a­ fter the conquest.10 However, their expeditions to the East opened the way to subsequent waves of migrating nobles, along with their attendants. The research of Alan Murray and Thomas Asbridge has demonstrated that the Principality of Antioch, founded by Bohemond de Hauteville a­ fter the First Crusade, was largely ruled by Normans in the first thirty years of the twelfth ­century.11 Jean Richard came to a similar conclusion for the Occitan nobility in the county of Tripoli, founded by Raymond IV de Saint-­Gilles.12 More newcomers arrived from Anjou, Poitou, Champagne, and other French regions over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.13 Other components of Frankish society in Outremer ­were also native French or Occitan speakers and included officers of the chanceries, the upper ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the core members of the religious ­orders, most notably the Templars and Hospitallers.14 It is more difficult to recognize the origin and linguistic competence of members of lower social classes, including settlers residing in the coastal cities or in inland towns and villages. Research on onomastical data, however, shows evidence of the prominent role of the French,15 and similar conclusions can be drawn from an analy­sis of “new town” foundations.16 But one must acknowledge that much information is still lacking in this field.17 Demographic data does help to explain the choice of French as opposed to other vernacular forms as a written language for vernacular texts from the thirteenth c­ entury on. Occitan might have been a likely competitor, but it ultimately was not: although much of the aristocratic elite of the Crusader States originated in southern France and dialects of Occitan ­were prob­ably used in speech, t­ here is no evidence that they ­were ever used in writing in the Latin East. This may be due to the fact that when the vernacular was first used for practical texts in the late 1220s, the eastern branch of the Toulousian dynasty no longer existed18 and relationships between the county of Tripoli and the Pays d’Oc had weakened considerably.19 ­To the data concerning demography may be added the fact that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries no vernacular language in Eu­rope was as prestigious as French for a cluster of cultural, po­liti­cal, and social reasons.20

18  Laura Minervini In the Latin East, French was both an ethnolect, used by the Franks’ ­sociocultural group and symbolically associated with it, and a vehicular language, allowing communication between ­peoples of dif­fer­ent native languages. In the Crusader States a number of ­legal barriers divided the Latins (or Franks) from the indigenous populations, composed of Muslims, Christians, and Jews who ­were mostly native speakers of Arabic or Greek. The Franks themselves ­were not linguistically homogeneous: besides French and Occitan speakers, they included groups of individuals—­ Italians, Germans, En­glish, Spanish—of differing linguistic backgrounds. Most notable was the sizable population of Venetian, Pisan, and Genoese merchants and sailors who lived in coastal city settlements, where they ­were allowed special quarters with partially autonomous administration. The linguistic diversity of the settlers is a key ele­ment, since the need to find a common ground fi­nally helped to promote the use of French, competing with Latin as a written language of the Frankish community. Contacts between the Franks and the indigenous population w ­ ere indeed frequent and sometimes even rich and fruitful, although the topic of acculturation is much debated and deserves a deeper discussion.21 Such contacts imply the use of a common language that was possibly, though not necessarily, French. What has been forgotten is that the same need for a common language of exchange applies to social interactions among Franks of diverse origin. It is impor­tant to note that French was not the only bridge language in the region. In the ­Middle East and in Northern Africa, Arabic was also used in both speech and writing. Greek and Italian dialects also functioned as vehicular languages in the eastern and western Mediterranean. All of ­these languages—­whose status was not the same within their own speech communities—­were used with vari­ous degrees of competence by dif­fer­ent kinds of speakers and writers: one has to assume a continuum of forms and registers, from the most careful and literary to the most shabby and broken. At the one end of this continuum ­there ­were written texts, following a more or less codified set of grammatical rules and stylistic conventions; at the other end, t­ here ­were possibly pidginized, reduced, and simplified va­ ri­e­ties of ­these languages, but such va­ri­e­ties ­were seldom written down and are therefore not recorded. Although the Mediterranean lingua franca was at one time thought to have originated in the Crusader States, this thesis is based on fantasy rather than real­ity: t­here is no historical connection

what we know about outremer french  19 between the languages used in the Latin East in the ­Middle Ages and the Italian-­based pidgin documented on the coast of Northern Africa from the sixteenth ­century on.22 French in the Latin East was employed for literary texts, be it in translations from Latin or in original French-­language works. French was used in documents, especially in the case of ­legal texts, treatises, and charters.23 The public dimension of French in the Latin East was further enhanced by its use in coins, seals, and inscriptions.24 Inscriptions in par­tic­u­lar are of g­ reat symbolic relevance, since inscriptions are seen to represent the highest degree of written expression in literate socie­ties.25At times, French even replaced Latin as a language of international relations. This was particularly the case in situations where Western diplomatic tradition was unknown, such as in the context of treaties with Armenian and Arabic allies or enemies.26 Onomastic and toponomastic use of French was also widespread: ­there is much evidence that personal names or by-­names ­were often French. Among the surnames found in the Latin East are the distinctly French Picard, Langlois, Lefevre, Laleman. Many place names, most famously including Chastel Neuf, Blanche Garde, Chastel Pelerin, Casal Imbert, Belfort, Le Caroublier, Cale du Marquis, Puis du Connestable, Montmusard, and Lordermer can be found in both French and non-­French sources.27 Fi­nally, French was commonly perceived as a medium of social integration: the ­jurist Philip of Novara wrote only in French, and the Hospitaller officer Guillaume de Saint-­Étienne, who has also been identified as the Lombard Guglielmo di Santo Stefano, patronized French translations of Latin works and wrote his own l­egal compilation to accompany a collection of the o ­ rder’s French-­language documents.28 French funerary inscriptions in ­Cyprus of individuals of Syrian and Italian origin point in the same direction.29 Oral usage is an extremely elusive ele­ment in historical linguistics. In the Latin East, French was used as a second language (what linguistics scholars would designate as “L2”) by an increasing number of foreign-­language speakers. As modern research on migration experiences suggests, passive competence—­that is, the ability to understand—­was more widespread than active competence, meaning the ability to speak; but the latter was prob­ably not restricted to the social elite. The pro­cess of language acquisition could be more or less successful and entailed a certain amount of interference

20  Laura Minervini from the speakers’ native languages—­that is to say, mainly from Occitan and Italian and from Arabic and Greek to a lesser degree. The prominent role of French in the multilingual situation of the Latin East is documented in con­temporary sources, both historical and fictional. In the Dialogus miraculorum by the Cistercensian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca. 1180–ca. 1240), for example, a dialogue between a Christian friar and noble Saracen is described as taking place in French. The Saracen even claims to have learned French at the royal court in Jerusalem: Pater meus erat vir nobilis et magnus, et misit me ad Regem Jerosolymitanorum, ut Gallicum discerem apud illum, ipse vero versa vice misit patri meo filium suum ad discendum idioma Sarracenicum (My ­father was a g­ reat and noble man, and sent me to the king of Jerusalem in order to learn French ­there, and he [the king] conversely sent his own son to my f­ ather in order to learn Arabic).30 And according to a crusading proposal prepared soon a­ fter the Second Council of Lyon (1274), French was used during the farewell sermon delivered in the Church of the Holy Cross in Acre by Tedaldo Visconti, who had been elected pope while visiting the Holy Land (1271). The new pontiff is said to have addressed the crowd first in Latin, then afterward in French, commenting, “Filii mei karissimi, quod in latino dixi, exponam vobis in gallico.” (My dear c­ hildren, what I just said in Latin, I ­will explain to you in French.)31 Further evidence of the availability of French as a spoken language is provided by an Arabic-­French glossary in Coptic script, copied in a sixteenth-­ century manuscript.32 It consists of a collection of words and sentences about topics including commerce, religion, and navigation and of a phrasebook for daily communicative needs. The work’s target audience included Coptic travelers to the Holy Land, and the glossary therefore supports the argument that French was employed in speech in the instances of linguistic contact between Latin and Arabic speakers. As a consequence of its historical context, Outremer French acquired its own peculiarities and characteristics. Through careful examination of the corpus of writings coming from the Latin East, it is pos­si­ble to identify several graphic, phonological, and morphological features that characterize French texts written or copied in the Latin East. Although some of the features are found in other Old French (and sometimes Occitan) dialects, the

what we know about outremer french  21 combination of t­ hese characteristics within individual texts is unique to Outremer French.33 Among them are the following: -­h-­ (for -­s-), e.g., ahne, batehme, ihle, mahle, tehmoigne (Wallonian) -­z-­ (for -­s-), e.g., assize, choze, espouze, iglize, mezure (Champenois, Lorrain, and Occitan) -­e-­ (