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Thomas Smith, "Rewriting the First Crusade: Epistolary Culture in the Middle Ages" (Boydell & Brewer, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Avid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter. And the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service. Yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal Akerman to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid TV promo code N B N O V I D. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Thomas Smith about his book titled Rewriting the First First Crusade, published by Boydell and Brewer in 2024. This book takes us deep, deep into some very interesting letters and other sorts of manuscripts written around the time of the First Crusade. That's in fact one of the things we're going to be talking about. When exactly were these things written? Not just by whom. Really helps us understand what was actually going on here. Why the Crusade was a big deal.
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C
To whom?
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B
When was it a big deal? And so it's a really fun history where kind of through what seems like just one piece of one document, actually, we can investigate a whole bunch of things. So, Tom, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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C
Hi, Miranda, thanks so much for having me on.
- [02:49]
B
Could you please introduce yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Which letters are we talking about and why do they matter for our understanding of the First Crusade?
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C
Okay. So, yeah, my name is Tom Smith. I teach history at a boarding school in England and also do historical research outside of that into medieval history and the Crusades. I wanted to write this book because it was. Well, actually, it was sort of came about by chance, really. I was working in the Bavarian State Library in Munich. I was teaching a course for undergraduate students at the university, and I wanted to go and show them some Crusades documents. And so I called up the Crusades manuscripts, and they had a really good collection. And there was one that stood out because it had a weird date. And I thought, well, this is strange. And so I thought, I better look at this manuscript. So I had a look at the manuscript, and I realized that this letter from the First Crusade actually had a different text to that which had been published. So it turned out to be a new version of the letter, a later version that had been modified by audiences later on. I found this really fascinating. And I thought, I couldn't believe my luck at having found this. And because everyone wants to work on the First Crusade, it's the most famous, and I think it was probably the entry point for a lot of people into the history. And I thought that was where it would finish. And I wrote it up as an article, and I published that and went about my normal business. And then I found more of these letters. And more and more manuscripts kept coming up that were new. And first I thought I'd write them up as articles, and then I decided to write it up as a book. I thought there was quite a lot of material here. And the thing that was really exciting about this was that the letters hadn't been looked at as a corpus of documents in well over 100 years, but they were still being relied upon by scholars to write some of the key aspects of the history of the First Crusade, because they're really valuable documents that have these unique insights that aren't featured in the longer Chronicle resources. So I started working on this and turning it into a book. And what I realized is that actually, the letters are so much more valuable than they'd been perceived to be. I think they'd always been taken as straightforward eyewitness reportage of what actually happened. So people thought that because these were supposedly written at the. In the heat of the moment by the crusaders in the crusader camp, that these are all very trustworthy letters and very trustworthy documents that can be used to write the history of the First Crusade. And what I began to realize is that actually a lot of these documents were invented after the end of the First Crusade or were heavily modified afterwards so as to speak to particular agendas and motivations of people who wanted to engage with the history of the First Crusade. So what this meant was two things, really. The first thing was that actually a pretty substantial part of this source base was not what people thought it was. They weren't written, all of them, at the. In the heat of the moment in the crusader camp. Some of them were invented by monks in monasteries in the decades after the First Crusade. And then the other thing that I noticed about it and realized was that actually, this is really important evidence for thinking about how the history of the Crusade is being transmitted and received and how people are interacting with it. So what I was trying to do was not to make a negative contribution to the scholarship and say that we can't use a big chunk of the source material anymore. I was also trying to say that we could use them in a different way, hold them up, really, as a mirror in parchment to the communities which produce these. So I think that what I hope the book does is that it gives us a new way of looking at the First Crusade. It rewrites some of the history of the First Crusade. Some of the things which scholars originally thought had happened on the Crusade actually turn out not to have occurred. And so it changes some of the history there, but also shows how people were interacting with these documents and rewriting the history through the letters in manuscript over the centuries that followed. So I hope it shows the First Crusade in a fresh light. And it's such a great phenomenon, and I think this is hopefully an interesting contribution to how we understand it.
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B
That's a great introduction to the book and the key contributions. And what an amazing find to go into an archive and be like, hang on a second, right, that's what we all love as historians is finding things by chance, by luck, in archives, and so cool when they end. Up being an entire book, not just as you sort of started off with an article. I want to get into kind of concretely what this means then, in terms of kind of what can we figure out when we look at these letters and start to realise, sort of as you've done. Wait a second, maybe what we thought they were saying isn't quite what we always assumed. So starting obviously with the beginning of the First Crusade, there has to be a reason that Western Europeans are asked to calm to Byzantium and support what is going on there. What is the usual story that we tell about kind of this convincing and invitation and why might the story actually be different if we undertake the kind of analysis you've done of these letters?
- [07:58]
C
Yeah. So I think one of the key moment in the history of the Crusaders, as most people know, is that Byzantium was under attack by the Seljuk Turks. And they send then calls to the west, to the papacy, for aid, and they're expecting a small group of mercenaries, probably a few hundred, to turn up and support them. And they do that by sending envoys to Pope Urban II, the Council of Piacenza in 1095, and then he thinks about this and formulates this plan and then launches the Crusade, which becomes a runaway success. In terms of recruitment, what I think. I think how the letters, reinterpreting the letters helps to nuance this understanding is actually in terms of how the Byzantine Empire played a role in calling for that aid. So I think definitely there is a call for aid from the Byzantine Empire, but previously there are three letters that were supposedly written which relate to Byzantium and were supposedly letters written by the emperor to the West. And one of those three had been known to be what we might call a forgery. It's an invention that had been known for a long time. But actually the other two letters supposedly written by the emperor to the west were thought to be authentic, and they were taken to be authentic by leading scholars of Byzantine diplomacy in the period. And they make up some of the few sources that we supposedly had of Byzantine letters being translated into Latin and sent to Europe. And these letters were fleshing out the Emperor's kind of sort of agenda and why he was writing to the west and how he conceived of the Crusade and how he helped them along the way, all these sorts of things. So if we take that away, actually it removes some of that texture from the context of Byzantium calling for aid. I think that definitely there is a spark there from Byzantium, but I think maybe we need to revise downwards the thought that the emperor is sending lots and lots of letters to the west and that he's really quite as involved as people might have thought. I still think that we have to look for the origins of the First Crusade in the conception of the idea, really in the west, rather than in the near east, as some scholars recently have suggested.
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B
Okay, so then, focusing on the origins of the Crusade in the west, what can we understand about the processes of organizing and recruiting to actually make this happen? You know, after the call for help has come, you know, the extent to which it may not have come as much from the East. Fine. Now we actually have to make something happen from the point of view, for example, of the papacy. What do those letters help us better understand about how it went from idea to practical outcome?
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C
Yeah, that's a great question. I think this gets to the heart, really, of how scholars understand the launch of the First Crusade, because the papacy is always portrayed as being central in that, and that this is the brainchild of the Pope and that he organizes this really rigidly controlled structure of preaching and recruitment, and that this is very much driven by a really defined papal program of exactly what the Crusade is about. And I think that if we go back to the letters, actually, I don't really think we quite have the evidence to support the grandest interpretations of the papacy role. So I think my contribution here is to say, hold on a minute, let's have a look at these letters, let's think about what they really say, and can we really join dots on a kind of really big scale to show the papacy organizing it in a really, in the most sort of maximalist interpretation? So I think what it shows is that when we look at the papal letters, I think I argue in the book that we've only got a handful of letters, we only got a couple. And actually, some of them, I think, probably have been modified in transmission, I think, at least through clauses being removed and the letters being chopped down in other ways, perhaps actually the content of them being modified. And so it's not quite as stable a foundation for our understanding of how the papacy actually organizes the Crusade as we thought. I think it's undeniable that the papacy does, of course, launch the Crusade, it does organise a program of recruitment. But I think that actually the letters need to be seen as these individual responses to particular situations. They're not actually letters that the Pope is sending out where he's trying to promote a really grand, overarching view of exactly what the Crusade is and defining what the Crusade is, he doesn't do that with the letters. And I think that we need to revise that downwards again. And I think the papacy, of course, plays the key role in launching the Crusade, but I think that we can no longer pursue these maximalist interpretations of that. The Pope knows exactly what the target of the Crusade is, that he knows exactly how to organize it and how it's going to actually play out. I think some of the. I think, really, I think probably the papacy launches it, and I think they're expecting as well, for a small number of nights, probably what Byzantium is asking for, a few hundred mercenaries. And I think that the Pope is very effective in tapping into these undercurrents of popular devotion. And I think the idea runs away with itself. I think it's not entirely certain that Pope Urban II actually launches the Crusade at the target of Jerusalem at the Council of Clermont. I think the evidence in the letters is really not certain that he does that at all. And if we look at the letters from the end of the Crusade as well, from the successor of Pope Urban ii, Pascal, then we can see there actually as well, there's a certain amount of ambiguity about whether the papacy, how it sees Jerusalem as the main target of the Crusade, it's not the exclusive target of the Crusade. And so I think, basically what I'm saying is we need to change the way that we approach that evidence and actually see the papal plan as maybe not being quite as fixed and as well developed as scholars have previously thought.
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B
I mean, to some extent, coming from outside the First Crusade's historiography, that seems sensible. Right. Very little in history is just as organized as a leader might sort of claim it to be. And thinking about kind of what's being written at the time is a really interesting aspect to uncover this, because, as you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, we usually think of these letters as having been written sort of in the heat of the moment, and that helps us understand, you know, how we can assess their usefulness to us. And you're making some kind of more detailed analysis about the extent to which that's true. But we do do still have some letters that crusaders are writing while they're off on Crusade. So, first off, why were they doing that? They were pretty busy. Why were they writing very long letters home?
- [14:59]
C
Yeah, I think that's such a fascinating question. I think it derives from this desire to receive and spread news in this period. And so I think there are audiences back at home who want to be kept informed of what's going on. But I think the main reason is that the authors of these letters see the epistolary form, the letter, as a projection of soft power, basically, that the control of narrative, and to be able to have these narratives written up and then sent back home is a way for them to project their power, perhaps as the uncontested leader of the First Crusade, in the case of Stephen of Bois, for instance, who I think uses. He writes two letters back to his wife and his family and his retainers in northern France. Why does he do that? As you say, it's actually very difficult to send a letter back to the west during the Crusade. They're in an active war zone. Their lines of communication back to the west don't really exist because they're, you know, sort of beating a new path towards the east now. They don't have really a lot of naval support or a clear road back to take a letter. So if you're going to do this, you've got to have a good reason to do it. And I think actually we can understand it in the sense of news networks and the projection of authority. So a lot of the letters I like to think about here are the ones of Stephen Bois, who writes to his wife, and I think he's doing that. They've previously been interpreted as romantic love letters sometimes, but actually, I don't think that's the case. I think what Stephen was doing was trying to establish uncontested dominance as the leader, the main leader of the whole Crusade in the east. And he was also doing that in the west as well by sending this narrative back. What's really interesting about his letters is that when they're then received, I think that they're modified as people receive them. So later on, once the whole story of the Crusade is well known, and actually Stephen leaves the Crusade in disgrace because he abandons the expedition during the siege of Antioch. That actually people then modify the text to update the narrative and to put in knowing hints at the fact that he is soon about to abandon the Crusade from the standpoint of his letters. But I think what he's trying to do is to establish his authority. And people going on Crusades accrue enormous prestige in the west from going. And so it's a stage for their nightly martial deeds. And the letter is a great format. It's a great vehicle for them to spread this understanding and to spread the news of what they're doing and to garner prestige in the West. So that's one main reason the Other one, I think, is these news networks. So there's a really fabulous author of letters called Anselm of Ribamont, who I really love. He's one of my favorite letter authors during the First Crusade because he's from a rung down the social ladder. So Stephen Aboir is very much at the top, and Anselm Rivmon is probably rung down from him, and he's very clearly got a well established news network in the west. And he's sending letters back to bishops and archbishops who are spreading the message around to their networks of other bishops. And so I think what he's doing there is he's trying to keep them informed. There is a thirst for news. He wants to spread this and let them know how they're getting on. But one of the main concerns that the authors of the letters actually have is for their souls and the spiritual efficacy of the army. So their main concern in these letters that are sent back, the genuine letters and actually the ones that are confected, is for people to pray on behalf of the Crusade army. They're really, really interested and concerned to secure batteries of prayers from religious communities in the west because they want people to pray for their souls, to pray for the fallen Crusaders, their fallen comrades who have died, but also to pray for the success of the Crusade itself. So it's really interesting because it helps to show that right from the very beginning, even during the campaign of the First Crusade, they see it as being actually crusading on a home front as well, that people at home play a role in affecting the outcome and performance of the Crusade. And so it's not just about knight swinging swords in the east, it's also about your religious communities, both male and female, of the people at home, and that they're praying for the success of the Crusade. So I think these are really powerful motivations for people to write these letters. And I think what's really interesting is during the First Crusade, there is an evolving narrative of the Crusade that is starting to take shape. And the really tantalizing question is, do these letters represent these proto versions of those narratives? And as this narrative is starting to take shape, are these snapshots? Well, they are snapshots of that narrative. And so how do they relate to the other sources? It's really interesting, and I think we need to see it also as a communal endeavor that the people writing these letters, it's not just Stephen aboard Selma and Vermont picking up a pen and writing this themselves, but actually these are communal products that are Written. Well, they're dictated by the authors, but we might have multiple authors who are dictating this in a communal aspect. You've got a scribe who's then mediating that text and writing it down, and then actually the physical transport of that letter back to the west and then the dissemination of it both orally and in written form. So it's a really fascinating lost world that we can reconstruct around the letters. So that's, I mean, probably one of the main reasons why I find them so fascinating.
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A
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- [21:41]
B
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com yeah, it's a really good example of why these are interesting documents. I mean, for one thing, also why there's not that many of them. It's hard to get, as you said, get this information back and sort of definitely puts a different complexion on it instead of imagining, you know, it's the equivalent of a private email. Like it's not, it's more like a kind of WhatsApp group message that then gets forwarded and edited around. And that's not necessarily how we think of letters, but clearly we should be thinking of it more in that sort of sense. And also therefore maybe being a little bit skeptical about letters that say they were written in this moment, but you know, were they? Obviously that's a question we should be asking, but is that a question we can answer? What kinds of clues might we look at to determine, hmm, this letter says it was written in the heat of the moment, but maybe it wasn't.
- [22:56]
C
Yeah, that's such an interesting question. And I think some of it's gut feeling, I'm not going to lie, like you're looking at it, you know, you do get a sense that some of these aren't just quite as convincing as documents. And I think that this taps into, you know, wider approach to letters and epistolary material in medieval culture, I think is exactly as you were suggesting that I think because we write and receive letters, we like to think we know how that letters work, but actually they work in a very different way in the Middle Ages, as you say, they're more like open letters and, or like a group chat and they're being spread and disseminated a lot and they're being written with an eye or with an ear to them being received orally. So I think that's really interesting. How do we know then that some of them have been messed around with? Well, I think you get the gut feeling of looking at it. Is it detailed? Some of the inventions I think are not very detailed at all. And one gets the sense that this has been written by someone who doesn't have a first hand knowledge of what's actually going on on the Crusade. And I think that these are written in, I think going back to that point about how letters are actually used and what function they play in medieval society. I think they're very used to engaging with the epistolary form as a form of entertainment, as a form of history writing. And actually there's a really long established tradition of people inventing letters as a form of entertainment between two correspondents. And I think the first Crusade becomes such a huge thing after the success in capturing Jerusalem in 1099. Everyone wants to have a piece of this. They all want to have a document or they want to have some sort of connection to the history. And so they're very well attuned and very familiar with the concept of creating invented epistolary material as a way of engaging with the past, engaging with narrative, and recording these events. So I think that's really interesting. How else do we identify them? Well, we can compare the different manuscripts. And so by comparing different manuscript versions, you can actually see how the texts have developed and how people were very well attuned to add parts on. So what's really interesting about the letters is they tend to accrete and accrue postscripts that are written, added on to the end of the letters. So these are often used as vehicles for the messages of the scribe readers who have added these parts to the text. And by we're kind of doing excavation, really, we're excavating the different layers of those texts by comparing different manuscripts, we can see that some manuscripts don't have those extra layers. And then it makes. It poses the question, well, have these extra layers been removed? Have they been cut down by an editor scribe, or actually, have they been added? And I think that we're looking at the wider context as well and analyzing what we know. We're doing textual comparison. And what I've been able to argue is that actually some of these additions are later made later, and actually been able to get back to some of the earlier versions of the text by finding new manuscripts and comparing those to the manuscripts that people knew. There was one case, again with a letter of anselm of ribbon. There was only, you know, a very limited manuscript base that was known for that. And I managed to find, I was very fortunate and found a new copy, a new manuscript copy of that letter, and was able to compare it and show that actually this was an earlier form of the text, an earlier version that was closer to so what that crusader actually wrote on campaign. And we can see then this demonstrates then this process in action of people later, scribe readers, adding bits to these letters. So what's really interesting is we can see them as a locus really, of scribal attention and people engaging with the history afterwards. Now, this doesn't mean, of course, that all of these inventions are forgeries, so to speak. I think what's fascinating about them is that people are adding this information, but actually this is authentic information, which they know about at the time, which they've received already through their news networks. So these additions can actually preserve new knowledge about the Crusade, which was popular knowledge, common knowledge, in the sort of years very soon after the first Crusade. But what we can show now is that they're not actually original to the first Crusade. Letter writers who put Pen to parchment, actually, on the expedition.
- [27:27]
B
Okay. So it would be too, far too unfair to call it fanfic, but maybe it's like, I don't know, updates added to a news article saying, well, actually, since we published this, you know, these three things have changed. Would that be fair?
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C
I would totally call it fanfic as well. I endorse this message. I'm fine with that.
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B
All right, good to know. If we think then, about what this means for our sort of historiographical understanding more broadly. Obviously not saying, as you said, right. We're not throwing out these letters and saying there's nothing we can learn from them. Right. We're going, well, actually there is, but it might be different than what we previously thought we could learn from them. So what does this do for our existing sort of narratives of the First Crusade? What sorts of messages can we go? Yeah, okay, that still seems to work. Or maybe not so much this. Or, ooh, this would be cool to look out further.
- [28:20]
C
Yeah. I think the broad outline of the expedition doesn't really change very much. There are some tweaks that we need to make to it. I think we're looking at, say, revising down the initial context, the role of the Byzantine emperor, perhaps revising down the role of the papacy a little bit and just ratcheting it down slightly and then seeing, obviously, it changes our view on how people are engaging with this material after the First Crusade. I think, again, it's a mirror to society in the immediate aftermath, or for the Western Christians, immediate afterglow of the capture of Jerusalem. And I've also. What I've also tried to do is put more attention actually on the letters of Urban II's successor, Pascal. Because what happens is, I think everyone has become fixated on the letters of Pope Urban II when he launches the Crusade. And this is a very narrow sore space. To reconstruct the papal attitude and approach towards the First Crusade is incredibly valuable, but actually it's very narrow. But if we look at the letters of Pascal II after the Crusade, this sheds light on some of the key questions about whether Jerusalem is the target, whether the papacy sees the expedition as a pilgrimage. And spoiler alert, it totally does. Like very. From very early on, Pascal II makes it very clear that they think of it as a form of pilgrimage. It also adds new understanding to one of the main things about the First Crusade. Any student essay about why do people go on the First Crusade? People will say, well, it's religious devotion. It's driven by the remission of sins. And so basically, you get your sins, the slate wiped clean if you go on the Crusade. And I think that it was assumed that that was enacted basically by going on the Crusade. But actually one of the letters of Pascal II suggest that maybe you don't actually get remission of sins enacted until later on when they send the Papal legate to the Crusade army. So it adds all these kind of complexities that we didn't have. And I think that makes the First Crusade more interesting. And I think it opens up, hopefully, scope for more further research. It also changes some of the actual course of the campaign. So there's a few letters that are written by, supposedly by the Papal Legate Adamar of Le Puy. And he's the Pope's representative on the Crusade. He is the religious leader of the Crusade, essentially, who is in the top rung. Sorry, that's a German word. Here's top rung of the leadership of the First Crusade. And he supposedly writes two letters with the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, who is in exile on Cyprus. He's called Simeon. And it had been assumed by scholars that because they write supposedly these two letters together, that during the campaign of the First Crusade, the Pope's representative, the Legate Adamar of Le Puy, one of the most. The most important spiritual leader on the Crusade, one of the most important leaders on the entire Crusade, he unifies the entire army, suddenly up sticks, leaves the Crusade, jumps on a boat, sails over to Cyprus to write two letters with the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem in exile, and just abandons the Crusade for this, to write these two letters and then comes back and people have said this definitely happens on the Crusade, that he leaves. This is part of the campaign. So one of the most important leaders just gets up and leaves it for a short period of time to write these letters and then travels back. It just doesn't happen. Those letters are very clearly confected and they make much more sense if you understand them as confections. And so it actually changes our understanding of the first use of the word crusader. So those letters, I think, are invented in the 12th century, and it features the first use of the word cruce signatus, which in Latin means signed with the cross. It's the equivalent of the word crusader. And a lot have been made about that, that you have a letter from the campaign that's written by the spiritual leader of the Crusade saying, using the word essentially crusader. So we can't do that anymore. They used it as well to prove that actually the Latin Church and the Greek Orthodox Church represented by Simeon, were in really good contact. They were working together. This was an alliance all the way up until late in the Crusade. And then actually, this was a way of healing the schism between the Eastern and Western churches. We can't use that either, because that's very clearly not the case. And so you've got all of this stuff predicated upon these letters being authentic. And another thing is that Adama has the only description of Adamar of Le Pui, the papal legates, understanding the conception of his role, what it is. We can't use that anymore either, because it's very clearly not written by him. So all of this stuff about some of the core history of what happens on the Crusade and some of the core interpretation of how we should see the Crusade and the relationships of its main leaders just doesn't stand up to scrutiny anymore. Like, we can't use this as evidence. And I think very clearly what's happening is people were inventing these letters with clear agenda to promote their own narrative, to engage with this history, to think about how the Crusade maybe interacts with Byzantium and so on. But they're definitely not letters from the campaign itself. They're not what they claim to be. And so that literally rewrites some of the history of the first Crusade as well. So I think some of it needs to be. Well, I think the book has hopefully rewritten some of the history of the campaign for those parts which rely upon the letters.
- [33:52]
B
Yeah, that definitely makes sense for going. Hang on a second. If this didn't happen, therefore, then what else?
- [33:57]
C
Right, yeah, exactly.
- [33:59]
B
But the fact that these letters are made and that we have thought that they meant this for so long. Like, I know we mentioned it a little bit about kind of why there are many more letters at the end than the beginning, why this is popular. I think it's worth, though, dwelling on it a bit further, because, of course, you wouldn't make up these letters if there wasn't a reason to. They wouldn't get preserved if people didn't think they were interesting. So can we just talk about that a little bit more clearly? The fact that we have more letters from the end of the First Crusade than during it, that's not just a factor of. It's easier to write a letter when you're not in the middle of a war zone.
- [34:33]
C
Right, Precisely. I love this question. It's such a really interesting one. I think what happens is that my personal take on it is that during the first Crusader, I think when the first Crusaders sign up, to this and they take the cross and they depart for the East. I think probably most people think, well, we're never going to see these guys again. This is a suicide mission, basically, and they're not going to come back. And it only becomes clear that the First Crusade is such a huge success after they've made a lot of progress, after they've made their way to the east, they've captured Antioch, they've captured Jerusalem. Like this is a breathtaking moment for the religious communities of the West. And I think they're right. They see themselves, the Crusaders and the people living at the time, they're writing these new pages of biblical history. This is for them revolutionary that the Christian Crusaders have captured Jerusalem. The play the place of Christ's where he's walked, his death, his execution, his resurrection, his empty tomb. They've recovered the Holy Sepulchre Church. For them, this is absolutely groundbreaking news. And so I think then that comes with that comes the impulse to want to record that history, to write this down. This is a moment of huge occasion that people want to record for posterity and it is of great importance to them. Now, I think during the Crusade, it's not immediately apparent that, I mean, you know, if we understand, we rethink that papal launch of the Crusade, you know, is it really clear that are they going to make it to Jerusalem at all? You know, are they going to get wiped out on the way? I think the odds were definitely stacked against them. And so I think probably there wasn't great expectation in the west while it was ongoing that actually this would succeed in capturing Jerusalem. And so I just think people don't write things down. I also think, as you say, that it's very difficult to write these letters from war zones and get them back. So it's actually difficult physically to create, transmit and receive these letters. But some of them do come back. But after the success of the Crusade is such an earth shattering moment that I think everyone wants to transmit this news, to record it for posterity, to engage with it, to fill in the historiographical lacuna that has been created by the fact that no one was writing this down. Like, this is, you know, this is like in a, in a lesson when no one's writing anything down at the time and then it's only later on when people start to want to record stuff. And I think you see that here as well, that they, you know, no one's really got copies of this stuff and so they want to create new documents. And that's one of the reasons why they invent these things is a form of scribal invention that's actually very familiar to medieval monastic writers. So they invent things like texts about Jesus's childhood. So they don't have any knowledge of that, they don't have any text about that. So they. They've got a gap there in, in the scholarship and they. They want. There's a big demand for those types of texts, so people invent them. And I think that's what's going on here as well, that we should understand the letters by looking at them in that longer and broader context of scribal cultures, why people write texts, why they write letters, how they engage with them as a form of entertainment, of history writing, of memory making. And I think then when we look at it through that broader lens, instead of just seeing them as, this is a document about the Crusade, this preserves fact about the Crusade, then we can really understand them and start to understand why there are more letters that are written and recorded at the end than during it.
- [38:08]
B
Yeah, this is definitely really helpful to understand. And obviously also the popularity of this is key too. I mean, as you said, kind of everyone's like, oh, my goodness, I can't believe this happened. Right. Aside from the sheer fact that we see more numbers at the end than the beginning, are there any other indicators of kind of how popular these letters are? I mean, obviously enough that someone kept track of them. So we can look at them now?
- [38:31]
C
Yeah, definitely. I think we're looking there at the number of manuscripts that are copied, where they're copied. And I was really interested in this, looking at the context of the manuscripts that preserve and transmit these letters. So I think we need to think firstly about the context of preservation and survival. So when these letters are written up, they're written up on single sheet parchment. So this is a piece of animal skin that's been prepared. It's quite expensive, actually, the parchment as a writing material, so you're not going to waste this. So you've got a single sheet, you know, be very familiar to us in the form of what we might use to write a letter today. It's probably a slightly different shape and size, but it's a single sheet letter now that's going to be carried back to the west, to Europe, by a messenger who's then going to distribute this. And so people are going to copy the letter on the way. So they might do that in several different ways. They might either copy that into other single sheet forms, so they would also have a single sheet of parchment, and they would just copy it directly. And then what you've got then is a very ephemeral copy that's actually really quite fragile because it's hard to preserve that type of letter in that format. But what also happens is people are copying these down into books, into codices. So they're copying them down into blank space. They might have. In medieval manuscript books, just as today we have fly leaves, we have these blank pages where nothing. Nothing's there, it's just empty. And what we actually see in some of the copies is that they're made in these blank fly leaves. So you've got maybe a book from the 11th century which has completely different text about other things. And then someone has obviously come into contact with one of these letters and they've decided to copy it out. Now, what do they have to hand? Well, it seems they just had this book with an empty flyleaf, so they write it on the flyleaf. So I think we're thinking about are these books. The books are traveling. Books travel loads in the Middle Ages. So are people carrying these books around and they come into contact with the First Crusade letter and think, I've got to record this and I'm going to copy it down here because it's the only thing I've got. You also got people who are copying in more structured and more planned programs of scribal activity. So that would be where these letters might be integrated with other Crusade histories or other related texts, other letters, and they're being copied out as a set, and those are going into books as well. Now, of course, the books preserve these letters so much better than the single sheet copies. There is only one single sheet copy that survives of a First Crusade letter. And I was really hoping that it was going to be. I didn't think it would be the actual parchment that's sent back from the east to the west by the Crusaders. But I was hoping that maybe it was a copy of one of those single sheets and that this just got circulated and miraculously was preserved. But actually, it turns out it was removed from a book and was just in this archive in France and wasn't actually a single sheet in the sense that I was thinking. So those single sheet copies are very difficult to preserve because, of course, they're not bound between covers. A book is a very robust medium to preserve text because you've got hardbound covers. We attach lots of cultural value to books. People don't like to destroy them, and so most of the time anyway. And so in this Case we tend to have the vast, vast majority of First Crusade letters exist within the covers of books because they're better preserved than the single sheet copies. We've got to imagine, though, that there must have been hundreds, I probably think, of single sheet copies that were being transmitted. One of the most fascinating ones I really like, again, is in an archive in Paris in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, there is a pamphlet copy. So just as we think of pamphlets and leaflets today, actually there is a First Crusade letter which is copied in a. It's in two big sheets of parchment, have been folded up basically to form a little booklet. So it's got four. Well, when it's folded up, it's got what we might think of as eight pages of a modern book, say. So it's a tiny little booklet and the letter is preserved in that. And actually at the start of it as well, there is a musical score and there's a hymn about which connects to themes of crusading and Jerusalem. So they're clearly meant to be taken together. They're supposed to be singing this religious song and then you're supposed to be reading the letter and singing the Crusades, basically. And what's really interesting about this one is that it survived because it was bound into the covers of a book in a miscellany manuscript later on. But there must have been many more of these ephemeral copies as pamphlets as single sheet copies. And I just find that absolutely tantalizing to think about how they were being transmitted and received and people just carrying these round and transmitting them as pamphlets. And I think we're so fortunate that that one survives because it just opens up this whole new world of transmission and reception that we wouldn't get if we just had those book copies.
- [43:27]
B
I mean, who knows, maybe there's more of them out there. That would be super cool, you know, maybe more will be discovered. So thank you for telling us, as you said, about those tantalizing possibilities there. But of course, I think it's probably worth drawing our discussion to a close before we get way too far down the weeds. But before I let you go, is there anything you're currently working on or looking to work on next that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [43:52]
C
Yeah. So if you want to follow me, I'm on Instagram as Medieval Tom, and you can find all my latest news and publications there. I've got two books that are impressed right now. So one is an academic facing edition and translation of a First Crusade chronicle, which I've worked on with Dr. Susan Edgington that's coming out with Oxford medieval text in April 2026. So that's really interesting. That's of the Jester Francorum Jerusalem Expugnantium, or the Deeds of the Franks who Conquered Jerusalem. It covers the years 1095 to 1096 to 1100. And then I've got another book in press with Yale, which is my first trade public facing book. It's called the Fifth Crusade, A history of the epic campaign to conquer Egypt that is going to be coming out in July 2026. I'm really excited about this one. My first piece of writing for a wider audience is a story I've wanted to tell for about. I first encountered it about 20 years ago, the story of the Fifth Crusade and how they invade and attempt to conquer Egypt. It's a really fascinating history which places the it puts two things together you don't think should go together, which is the Crusaders and the Knights Templar in the land of the pyramids and the land of the Pharaohs and these two things coming together. And it's such a fascinating history, I think. And that juxtaposition of those two things helps us to see the crusading movement and the medieval near east in a different way. And it's such a fantastic story. So I'm really excited to bring that to a wider audience.
- [45:23]
B
Well, you certainly have plenty to keep you busy. And of course, anyone who wants more on what we've been talking about can read the book titled Rewriting the First Crusade, published by Boydell & Brewer in 2024 that we've been discussing. Tom, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [45:37]
C
Thank you so much for having me, Miranda, it's been such a pleasure talking to you and Doug Limu and I.
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