Putting History to Use: Three Crusade Chronicles in Context

Abstract

During the reign of Louis VII, probably at his 1137 Christmas court at Bourges, an otherwise unknown knight called “W. Grassegals” presented to the king a collection of three crusade chronicles: books by Fulcher of Chartres, Walter the Chancellor, and Raymond of Aguilers, now BNF lat. 14378. The texts tended to circulate together in the Middle Ages, and lat. 14738 appears to be the origin of the tradition. The manuscript opens with a dedicatory letter to the king written in the name of Grassegals, urging the king to take to heart the examples he finds in those texts. Taken together, these three books represent a distinct tradition in crusade historiography which may indeed have shaped Louis’s conduct as the first monarch to take the cross, particularly in terms of his decision to go to Jerusalem, his particular brand of crusader piety, and the decision of the crusade to attack Damascus.