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The representation of the crusades in the songs attributed to Thibaud, Count Palatine of Champagne

1999; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s0304-4181(98)00017-7

1873-1279

William Chester Jordan,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Abstract Thibaud of Champagne (1201–1253) was count of Champagne and, from 1234, king of Navarre. He was an accomplished poet, and indeed is better known as a chansonnier than as a statesman, although he was involved in many of the most important political struggles in France and led a crusade to the East. Several songs attributed to him deal with crusading. A fresh reading of these poems affords an opportunity to penetrate the mental world of a representative member of the French aristocracy in the first half of the thirteenth century, and it confirms Jonathan Riley-Smith's famous observation that, in the Catholic ethical universe of the time, crusading was an `act of love'. 1 This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 32nd International Congress of Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), May 1997, where it profited from the criticisms of the commentator, Professor James Powell of Syracuse University, and from those of other scholars in attendance. My thoughts on the subject of the paper have also benefitted profoundly from conversations with my friend, Professor Susan Einbinder of Hebrew Union College. I wish to thank her, a literary scholar, for graciously sharing her erudition and sensitive readings of Thibaud's poems with a historian. Keywords: ChansonCrusadeThibaud IVJews Notes 1 This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 32nd International Congress of Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo), May 1997, where it profited from the criticisms of the commentator, Professor James Powell of Syracuse University, and from those of other scholars in attendance. My thoughts on the subject of the paper have also benefitted profoundly from conversations with my friend, Professor Susan Einbinder of Hebrew Union College. I wish to thank her, a literary scholar, for graciously sharing her erudition and sensitive readings of Thibaud's poems with a historian. 2 A lavish biography of Thibaud IV is that by Claude Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, comte de Champagne (Paris, 1987). It is unfootnoted and at times speculative, but the endorsement of a scholar as careful as Michel Bur (12) allays some concern over its reliability. 3 On the circumstances of the accession, see Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 205–09. 4 Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 36. See also John Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus. Foundations of French royal power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, and elsewhere, 1986), 197–98. 5 Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 38. 6 The matters treated in this paragraph are explored in greater detail in William Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 97–103, 105, 126. 7 See William Jordan, `Princely Identity and the Jews in Medieval France', in: Juden und Judentum in der Sicht christlicher Denker im Mittelalter, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wolfenbüttel, 1997), 264–68. 8 Cf. the extraordinary passage in the Grandes Chroniques de France, excerpted with translation notes in Thibaut de Champagne. Prince et poète du XIIIe siècle, eds. Yvonne Bellenger and Danielle Quéruel (Lyons, 1987), 138–39, according to which a rebellious Thibaud was stunned into capitulation at the sight of Blanche's beauty (de la grant biauté de lui il fu tous esbahis). 9 Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 129–30. 10 The standard edition is that of Axel Wallensköld, Les Chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, roi de Navarre. Edition critique (Paris, 1925). It is rooted in what is sometimes disparagingly called the `old philology'; Wallensköld tried to recreate the hypothetical Urtext of the songs from the various readings in a large variety of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts. The precise texts he provides are therefore nowhere to be found in any specific manuscript. Kathleen Brahney, ed. and trans., The Lyrics of Thibaut de Champagne (New York and London, 1989), works instead from a base manuscript, providing variant readings in notes. I have benefitted from both their approaches. For a systematic study of Thibaud's love poetry, see Martha Dolly and Raymond Cormier, `Aimer, souvenir, souffrir. Les Chansons d'amour de Thibaut de Champagne', Romania, 99 (1978), 311–46. 11 Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 113–24. 12 The rather dismissive chapter on Thibaud's crusade (sometimes numbered the Fifth) in Kenneth M. Setton, ed., A History of the Crusades, II: The Later Crusades, 1189–1311, eds. Robert Wolff and Harry Hazard, 2nd ed. (Madison, 1969), is not to be recommended. 13 Thibaud wrote three songs conventionally classified as chansons de croisade, a modern genre classification. They might as easily be classified as sirventes (a contemporary category), serious songs with a polemical agenda (C. Th. J. Dijkstra, La Chanson de croisade. Etude thématique d'un genre hybride [Amsterdam, 1995], 43 n. 31) or moral, political or introspective flavour (Michael Routledge, `Songs', in The Oxford illustrated history of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith [Oxford and New York, 1997], 94). The three so-called crusade songs composed by Thibaud are nos. 53–55 in the Brahney edition and in Wallensköld's as well; cf. Dijkstra, 204–06. Dijkstra (41) queries but ultimately accepts the classification of no. 55 as a crusade song. Joseph Bédier and Pierre Aubry, Les Chansons de croisade (Paris, 1909), 199–206, also place no. 19 of Brahney/Wallensköld (no. 18 of theirs, and Dijkstra, 207) in this category as well, but although no. 19 makes reference to the crusades and provides useful information on Thibaud's attitudes, it does not otherwise conform to the rather vague determinants of the chanson de croisade genre. Some scholars find the category `crusade songs' itself troubling (`not very helpful', in the words of Routledge, `Songs', 93). Others are more indulgent. For further on the matter of genre, see Dijkstra, 3, 29–34. For the description of chansons de croisade as `songs of exhortation and polemic' (a phrase borrowed by Pierre Bec from Jean Frappier), see Bec's discussion, La Lyrique française au moyen âge (XIIe–XIIIe siècles), 2 vols. (Paris, 1977), I, 151–52, but note that, following Bédier and Aubry, he inaccurately attributes four songs of the genre to Thibaud. 14 Menachem Bannitt, `Le Vocabulaire de Colin Muset', Romance Philology, 20 (1966), 151–67. Bannitt acknowledges (151) that the insight goes back as far as Gustave Cohen's work in the nineteenth century. 15 Lyrique française, I, 153–54. 16 Jonathan Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', History, 65 (1980), 177. 17 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 179, 181. 18 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 179 n. 12. 19 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 180. 20 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 180, 191. 21 Cf. Dijkstra, Chanson de croisade, 119–22. 22 Brahney, Lyrics, no. 53, stanza I, line 2. Future references to the Old French versions of the songs will be to number, stanza and lines, common to both Wallensköld's and Brahney's editions. My quotations of the Old French are to Brahney's edition (which, as already remarked, differs from Wallensköld's because of their contrasting methods). The English translations here and elsewhere, unless otherwise remarked, are those on facing pages in the Brahney edition. The songs are all undated, but Wallensköld conjectured (as had most scholars before him; and Brahney concurs) that they have to date from between the time Thibaud declared himself a crusader in 1230 and his departure to the East in August 1239. Then from internal evidence, Wallensköld tried to make more precise approximations. No. 19 (not a chanson de croisade, but with valuable information), he dated 1239–1240 (64); for no. 53, he could do no better than 1230–1239 (185). Nos. 54 and 55 were more amenable to his techniques. He dated no. 54 (189) to June–August 1239 and no. 55 (193) to 20 March–August 1239. 23 No. 53, stanza I, lines 5–7. 24 No. 54, stanza IV, line 31. The modern French translation of Alexandre Micha (Thibaud de Champagne, Recueil de chansons [Paris, 1991], 133) is to some extent more literal, `Je ne pourrai avoir un si bon maı̂tre', except maı̂tre does not capture the feudal terminology of the original seigneur like English `lord'; Bédier's modern French translation (194) retains seigneur. See also Routledge, `Songs', 98, and Dijkstra, Chanson de croisade, 159–63. Cf. the sentiment in a twelfth-century poem quoted by Riley-Smith, namely, that `he who abandons his lord in need [Jesus whose land has fallen to the enemy] deserves to be condemned' ('Crusading as an act of love', 181). 25 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 191 n. 95. 26 No. 53, stanza VI, lines 36–38. 27 For the usage haut Seigneur... /... son paı̈s", see no. 53, stanza I, lines 6–7; for Biau sire Dex... /... la vostre contree, see no. 53, stanza V, lines 33–34. 28 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 185–90. 29 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 190. 30 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 190. 31 The phrase, cas negres outramaris, is from a song (ca. 1195) of the chansonnier, Gavaudan, quoted in Routledge, `Songs', 107. 32 No. 53, stanza III, lines 15–18. 33 No. 53, stanza III, line 19. 34 No. 53, stanza III, lines 20–21, qui un secors ne fet Dieu en sa vie, / et por si pou pert la gloire du mont. 35 On these matters, see Jordan, French monarchy and the Jews, 99–102. 36 For a closely parallel discussion of the `chivalric' passages that I have been discussing, see Routledge, `Songs', 99. But Routledge does not mark the parallelism with images of Jews. 37 No. 53, stanza IV, lines 22–28. 38 No. 53, stanza IV, lines 22–28, Dex se lessa por nos en crioz pener, / et nos dira au jor ou tuit vendront: / `Vous, qui ma croiz m'aidastes a porter, / vos en iroiz ou tuit me angre sont; / la me verroiz et ma mere, Marie. / Et vos, par qui je n'oi onques aı̈e, / decendrez tuit en Enfer le parfont'. 39 Riley-Smith, `Crusading as an act of love', 185. 40 No. 55, stanza II, lines 23-24. 41 Routledge, `Songs', 102–04. 42 No. 19, stanza VI, lines 41–44. For some useful complementary remarks on the song from which this quotation comes, see Dijkstra, Chanson de croisade, 60–61. 43 No. 54, stanza I, lines 5–8. 44 No. 54, stanzas II and III, lines 10–24. 45 Alfred Jeanroy, Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen âge, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1925), 99–100. The sentiment is the central theme of another song written by a contemporary of Thibaud who joined the count on crusade; see Bédier and Aubry, Chansons de croisade, 209–13, and Dijkstra, Chanson de croisade, 59–60. 46 No. 54, stanza IV, lines 26 (tout...ce que je tant amoie) and 28 (mon cuer et ma joie). 47 No. 54, stanza IV, lines 29–30, De vous servir sui touz prez et garniz; / a vous me rent, biax Peres Jhesu Criz! 48 No. 54, stanza V, line 37. 49 No. 54, stanza V, lines 37–40. 50 No. 54, stanza VI, lines 41–44. The Old French is not problematic. Brahney translates quant as `when', whereas I have modified it to `as' in the clause `As I have lost a lady'. I think that this preserves the sense slightly better. 51 No. 55, stanza IV, lines 30–31 (en l'ostel, ce m'est a vis, / dont ja issir ne querroie) and 35 (ja de prison n'istrai vis). 52 No. 55, stanza IV, line 36. See also stanza V, lines 41–42 (si me vaut bien un morir / l'amors qui m'asaut souvent). 53 No. 55, stanza V, lines 43–45, and stanza VI, lines 47–49. 54 No. 55, stanza VI, line 46. The poet orders the `song' to say this to a named poet, Lorent, whom I take to stand for poets of these matters in general.