4 Western Identity and the First Crusade

Though the study of identity has seen significant advances since the mid-twentieth century, this work has concentrated above all on ethnic identity, especially in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.4For an overview of recent work, see Pohl, ‘Strategies of Identification’, 1–64, and Meier, Geschichte der Völkerwanderung, 99–116. For the High Middle Ages, see Weeda, Ethnicity in Medieval Europe; Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities; Bartlett, Making of Europe, chs 8–10. Wider concepts of supra-national identity have, by contrast, received less attention, with most scholarship focusing on the concepts of Christendom and Europe. By the late 1950s, the concept of Christendom (Christianitas) in the High Middle Ages had come to be understood as a quasi-political corporation of Christian kingdoms under the pope.5Jean Rupp, L’Idée de Chrétienté dans la pensée pontificale des origines à Innocent III (Paris: Les Presses modernes, 1939); Gerhart B. Ladner, ‘The Concepts of Ecclesia and Christianitas and their Relation to the Idea of Papal plenitudo potestatis from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII’, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae 18 (1954): 49–77; Jan van Laarhoven, ‘Christianitas et la Réforme grégorienne’, Studi Gregoriani 6 (1959–61): 1–98; Paul Alphandéry, La Chrétienté et l’idée de Croisade, 2 vols (Paris: A. Michel, 1954–9); Paul Rousset, ‘La notion de Chrétienté aux XIe et XIIe siècles’, Le Moyen âge 69 (1963): 191–203. For a brief overview of this scholarship, see Dominique Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu: Une histoire monumentale de l’Église au Moyen Âge (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006), 200–1. Since then, research has focused on expanding the boundaries of this idea geographically to cover the peripheries of Latin Europe and chronologically into the Carolingian era.6On these trends, see inter alia Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 265–74; Tim Geelhaar, Christianitas: Eine Wortgeschichte von der Spätantike bis zum Mittelalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015); Tim Geelhaar, ‘Talking about christianitas at the Time of Innocent III (1198–1216): What Does Word Use Contribute to the History of Concepts?’, Contributions to the History of Concepts 10, no. 2 (2015): 7–28; Nora Berend, ‘Defense de la Chrétienté et naissance d’une identité: Hongrie, Pologne et péninsule Ibérique au Moyen Age’, Annales 58 (2003): 1009–27; Piroska Nagy, ‘La notion de Christianitas et la spatialisation du sacré au Xe siècle: un sermon d’Abbon de Saint-Germain’, Médiévales 49 (2005): 121–40; Tim Geelhaar, ‘La christianitas carolingienne: une nouvelle “Chrétienté”?’, in La Chrétienté dans l’histoire: une notion mouvante, ed. Nicole Lemaitre (Paris: Parole et silence, 2014), 29–45. See also Bartlett, Making of Europe, 250–5; Iogna-Prat, La Maison Dieu, 196–203, 394–8. Similarly for the study of Europe, the standard narrative more or less remains the one established by Fischer and Hay in 1957, according to which the idea gained political significance under the Carolingians, but lost relevance between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries.7Fischer, Europa, and Hay, Europe. For a complete overview of the historiography, see Oschema, Bilder von Europa, ch. 2. For more recent approaches to the concept of Europe in anglophone scholarship, see David Wallace, ed., Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). There have nevertheless been some concerted attempts since the 2000s to reevaluate the ideological significance of Europe in the High Middle Ages that have set the tone for contemporary scholarship on medieval geography more generally.8See esp. Oschema, Bilder von Europa; Gautier Dalché, ‘Représentations géographiques de l’Europe’; and Baumgärtner, ‘Europa’.

In contrast with Europe and Christendom, the study of the ‘west’ as a language of supra-national identity has received comparatively little attention.9As a concept in modern history, see Jasper M. Trautsch, ‘“Der Westen”: Theoretisch-methodische Überlegungen zu einer Begriffsgeschichte’, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 60/1 (2018/19): 409–40. This is no doubt in part a product of Fischer’s negative appraisal of its value as a locus of identification for the Carolingian authors in contrast with the concept of Europe.10Fischer, Europa, 77–8; cf. Oschema, Bilder von Europa, 187–91. Such a disparity is, however, puzzling as especially in subsequent centuries, and above all in the context of the Crusades, the language of occidens is if anything more prominent than that of Europe.11E.g., Oschema notes how, from the latter half of the twelfth century, the east-west dichotomy is one of the linguistic formulae which supersedes Asia and Europe as a rubric for discussing the relationship of Europe and the Crusader States (Oschema, Bilder von Europa, 196, and Klaus Oschema, ‘L’Idée d’Europe et les croisades (XIe–XVe siècle)’, in Relations, échanges et transferts en Occident au cours des derniers siècles du Moyen Âge: Hommage à Werner Paravicini, ed. Bernard Guenée and Jean-Marie Moeglin (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2010), 83–6). Both Lapina and Mauntel, for example, have shown how in the context and aftermath of the crusading movement, the west developed significance as vocabulary of self-identification for Latin authors.12Mauntel, ‘Competing with the East’; Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous, ch. 6. Developing upon this approach, this chapter will underscore the significance of the west in the aftermath of the First Crusade and extend the focus on contemporary uses of the term occidens beyond specifically crusading related sources.13For criticism of an exclusive focus on east-west opposition, however, see Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’, 144–5, 167–73, and Wolever, ‘Translatio imperii’, 255–7.

Oschema highlights in particular the linguistic impact of the crusade on the ‘window of time’ (Zeitfenster) between 1095 and the 1120s, which saw an unusual proliferation of the terms Europe and Asia in papal correspondence. New requirements created by the success of the crusade and the emergence of the Crusader States, along with the continued need to negotiate the fraught political environment of the investiture and relationship with the Greek Church, created a period of terminological flux, as the papacy experimented with new ways of articulating a space distinct from both the empire and Greek Church.16Oschema, Bilder von Europa, 195–200. As Oschema emphasises, the use of Europe and Asia was just one of a group of competing linguistic strategies, which ultimately lost out to the language of ‘side of the sea’ and the east-west dichotomy.17Oschema, Bilder von Europa, 196. Even within Oschema’s Zeitfenster, occidens is used in many of the same contexts as Europe and for many of the same reasons. Indeed, in Oschema’s very first example, Paschal uses occidens alongside the Europe-Asia dichotomy to describe Hospitaler possessions in western Europe and the Levant respectively.18Oschema, Bilder von Europa, 195n2, 4; Paschal II, Epistola 356 (PL 163, 314C–315D). This window of terminological anarchy around the First Crusade highlights the sort of context in which occidens could develop as a vocabulary of identification that the success of the crusade served to calcify for later generations.

The rise of new and inconsistent terminology is a broader issue around the First Crusade more generally. A longstanding puzzle for crusade historians has been the lack of terminological or conceptual precision in descriptions of the First Crusade or crusading on the part of medieval commentators during the twelfth century.19Chistopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), ch. 1, esp. 10. There is no doubt about the gravity of the conquest of Jerusalem in contemporary sources. Robert the Monk compares it to the incarnation, asking whether ‘a more miraculous undertaking has occurred since the creation of the world, aside from the mystery of the redeeming cross, than what has been done in our times on this journey of our Jerusalemites?’20Robert the Monk, Historia Hierosolymitana prol., ed. D. Kempf and M. G. Bull (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013), 4, cf. trans. Carol Sweetenham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 77 [hereafter Robert, Hist.]: ‘Sed post creationem mundi quid mirabilius factum est preter salutifere crucis misterium, quam quod modernis temporibus actum est in hoc itinere nostroroum Iherosolimitarum?’. I have slightly modified Sweetenham’s translation. Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades, 1099–2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 8. On the legacy of the First Crusade, see especially Jonathan Phillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 2, and Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (London: Continuum, 1986), chs 4 and 6. This sort of sentiment pervades not only accounts of the crusade itself, but also general histories of the next half-century.21Among other crusade histories: Guibert, Dei gesta pref., 1.1, CCCM 127A, 80–1, 86; Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana prol.3, ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1913), 116 [hereafter Fulcher, Hist.]; Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana 1.1, ed. and trans. Susan Edgington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 2–3. Among chronicle sources: Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum 7.5, ed. Greenway, 422–3; WM, GR 4.305.5, ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 542–3; OV, 9.1, ed. Chibnall, 5:4–7; Ps.-Frutolf, 1106 Continuation 1099, ed. Irene Schamle-Ott, Franz-Josef Schmale and Benedikt Marxreiter, MGH SS 33.2 (preliminary digital edition, 2018), 18–19. Preliminary editions of Frutolf and his continuers are currently accessible at https://mgh.de/de/die-mgh/editionsprojekte/bamberger-weltchronistik (accessed September 24, 2023), cf. MGH SS 6, 211. Nevertheless, there is no consistent terminology for what the crusade was, for those who took part or for attempts to emulate it.

At the level of group identification, there is already significant divergence among the histories of the First Crusade. Riley-Smith notes a general agreement among the crusading sources that crusaders were soldiers of God, but hints at existing complications with the common designation of Franci.22Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 111–12, 135. On the use of ‘French’ as the translation for Franci, see Marcus Bull, ‘Overlapping and Competing Identities in the Frankish First Crusade’, in Le concile de Clermont de 1095 et l’appel à la croisade: Actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (23–28 juin 1995) (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 1997), 195–211. A loose convention of core terminology does seem to have developed fairly early, but it was applied inconsistently and with different emphases. The use of Franci as a general designator for the crusaders was widely adopted, but ‘German’ authors, for example, more often distinguished eastern and western Franks.23Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana 1.6, 7.6, 25, 10.8, ed. Edgington, 44–7, 594–5, 618–19, 726–7; Ps.-Frutolf, 1106 Continuation 1099, MGH SS 33.2, 26, cf. MGH SS 6, 213–14; Léan Ní Chléirigh, ‘The Crusaders and their Enemies: The Latin Terminology of Group Identity in Chronicles of the First Crusade’ (PhD diss., Trinity College Dublin, 2010), 204–6, 327–8, 330, passim; 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. Conor Kostick (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 116–18; Bull, ‘Overlapping and Competing Identities’, 208. This language is not unique to the ‘German’ sources, cf. Fulcher, Hist. 1.7.1, ed. Hagenmeyer, 163. While the ethnic terminology has been addressed in a concerted and nuanced manner, scholarship has treated ‘occidentales’ in a substantially undifferentiated manner.24See, however, Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous, ch. 6. Both Bull and Riley-Smith lump it together with a collection of miscellaneous terms, giving little indication of the contours of its use.25Bull, ‘Overlapping and competing Identities’, 202; Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 111–12. On closer examination, however, there is some significant variation. As a strategy of identification, it had little appeal for many historians of the crusade. There is no reference to the west whatsoever in Raymond of Aguilers and no substantial reference in the Gesta Francorum or Albert of Aachen. On the other hand, it is famously evoked by Fulcher of Chartres and serves as an important principle among the so-called ‘northern French Benedictine mafia’ of Baudri of Bourgueil, Guibert of Nogent and Robert the Monk.26Tyerman, Debate, 9; Albert does implicitly contrast the Latin world with the east on a few occasions, but never identifies the former as explicitly ‘western’. See, e.g., Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana 9.14, ed. Edgington, 654–5.

The case of the Gesta Francorum serves as a useful starting point. It is not altogether clear to what extent we should consider the Gesta Francorum an individual text so much as a collection of related material that coalesced in a few relatively stable forms.27Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum’. Whatever its origins, this tradition is unquestionably one of the most important foundations for subsequent histories of the First Crusade, with many expressly building upon it. The west is marginal at best within the Gesta Francorum itself. The noun occidens only appears three times, two of which are unremarkable, local spatial descriptors.28GF 10.32, 37, ed. Hill, 77, 87. Respectively noting the river Orontes on the west side of Antioch and the leaders who besieged Jerusalem from the west side. The third case, however, is of interest. The Gesta describes how the crusaders, trapped in a now besieged Antioch, watched as one night a fire emerged from the sky out of the west and swept through the Turkish army, scattering a portion of their forces.29GF 9.26, ed. Hill, 62. Although the text does not explicitly identify the crusaders with this sign, such an association would be entirely typical of spatial signa and at least one contemporary reader draws this specific connection.30See p. 000 above; Robert, Hist. 2.1, ed. Kempf and Bull, 13; see also Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous, 139. Whether or not this was universally understood, the story provides a powerful and resonant image of the west as prophetically combatting the Turks.

The early history of the broader Gesta tradition shows some interest in geographically contextualising the crusaders as western. This can be seen already in the history of Peter Tudebode, a text closely related to the early formation of the Gesta.31Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum’, 197–202. Rubenstein suggests that Tudebode did not actually write ‘his’ history, but instead lightly annotated a variant version of the ‘Jerusalem history’. It will nevertheless be discussed under the conventional name. Before the siege of Antioch, a soldier brings forward a rusted sword, which Kerbogha uses to mock the Franks, asking in the Gesta Fracorum’s version: ‘are these the warlike and splendid weapons which the Christians have brought into Asia against us[!?]’.32GF 9.21, ed. and trans. Hill, 51: ‘Haec sunt arma bellica et nitida, quae attulerunt Christiani super nos in Asiam’. In Tudebode’s version a sentence has been added explaining that ‘the Christians are originally from western lands, by that I mean Europe, which is the third part of the world’.33Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere 4.3, RHC Occ. 3, 67, trans. John Hugh Hill and Laurita L. Hill (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1974), 91: ‘orti in occidentali terra, scilicet in Europa, quae est mundi pars tercia’. I have lightly edited Hill and Hill’s translation. Similarly, in almost every complete manuscript of both the Gesta Francorum and Peter Tudebode, we find the Descriptio sanctorum locorum Hierusalem, which begins: ‘if anyone, coming from the western lands, wishes to go to Jerusalem, let him direct his course due eastwards …’.34Descriptio sanctorum locorum Hierusalem, ed. and trans. Rosalind Hill, The Deeds of the Franks and the other Pilgrims to Jerusalem (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1962), 98: ‘Si quis ab occidentalibus partibus Hierusalem adire uoluerit, solis ortum semper teneat …’; Hill in GF, xxxviii–xlii; compare Hill and Hill in Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere, 5–6, with SISMEL, ‘MIRABILE: Digital Archives for Medieval Culture. Medieval Latin Database’, s.v. Descriptio sanctorum locorum Hierusalem, http://www.mirabileweb.it/title/descriptio-sanctorum-locorum-hierusalem-title/195074 (accessed September 24, 2023), and Reinhold Röhricht, Bibliotheca geographica Palaestinae: Chronologisches Verzeichniss der auf die Geographie des Heiligen Landes bezüglichen Literatur, von 333 bis 1878 (Berlin: H. Reuther, 1890), 28–9, s.v. Innominatus I. This is in a sense fairly mundane information. It is hardly obscure knowledge that the participants in the First Crusade came from Europe or the west and providing geographical context for historical works was a standard practice.35Kempshall, Rhetoric, 305–7. Indeed, an early copy of Tudebode was copied alongside two further short geographical treatises: De orbe and one beginning ‘Mundus tripartus est’.36Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum’, 190; Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 4892, 243r–244r and 245r–245v. This geography alone already reveals an important conceptual blending of Europe and the west, and more importantly it presents the west and Europe as triumphant and conflated, at least in a qualified manner, with Christianity. Nevertheless, within the immediate Gesta tradition, these ideas remain sparse and unsystematic.

It is with the so-called theological refinement of the Gesta Francorum that a consistent interest in the west, and its relationship to the east, emerges. In the wake of Bohemond’s 1106 tour of northern France, three northern French Benedictines – Baudri of Bourgueil, Guibert of Nogent and Robert the Monk – set out to rewrite the crude and insufficient narrative they found in the Gesta.37Riley-Smith, The First Crusade, 136–7; Rubenstein, ‘Lambert of Saint-Omer’, 70; Nicholas L. Paul, ‘A Warlord’s Wisdom: Literacy and Propaganda at the Time of the First Crusade’, Speculum 85, no. 3 (2010): 534–66. They sought to set it on proper theological grounds, clarifying the context and justifications for the venture, as well as establishing its place within a biblical exegetical and prophetic framework.38Riley-Smith, The First Crusade, ch. 6. It is within this context that each author further elaborates on the western origin of the crusaders.

Born in 1046, Baudri of Bourgueil was one of an important group of Latin poets around the Loire Valley and later rose to become abbot of Bourgueil and then archbishop of Dol.39On the Loire poets, see Wim Verbaal, ‘Loire Classics: Reviving Classicism in some Loire Poets’, Interfaces 3 (2016): 109–28. He was an attendee at the Council of Clermont and produced his history in 1108, just a year after receiving his bishopric.40Riley-Smith, The First Crusade, 136. Though not as systematic as the other two, he does explicitly frame the crusade around east and west. In the prologue to his Historia Ierosolimitana, Baudri describes how ‘in our times, [Jesus] aroused almost the whole of Christendom, wherever it was’ to assemble the militia Christiana to wrest Jerusalem from Turkish control.41Baudri, Hist. prol., ed. Biddlecombe, 3: ‘Ipse temporibus nostris Christianitatem suam, ubicunque terrarum erat, pene totam excitavit’. Despite Christianity’s notional universality, Baudri emphasises the western origin and eastern goal for the crusading movement: ‘for without divine inspiration it should not be believed that [his faithful], wealthy in all things, would wish to go from the west into the east as soldiers’ against barbarous nations.42Baudri, Hist. prol., ed. Biddlecombe, 3: ‘Non enim sine diuina inspiratione credendum est, ab Occidentali in Orientalem plagam, omnium rerum copiosos uelle militatum iri’. This repetition of Christ’s inspiration of the crusade highlights not only the western origin of the crusaders, but also suggests a certain preeminence for the west as a Christian region, since apparently ‘almost the whole of Christendom’ is to be found there. Although it does not reference the west, Urban’s sermon clearly echoes this introduction: ‘go forth soldiers of Christ, and hasten together at once to defend the Eastern Church’.43Baudri, Hist. 1.4, ed. Biddlecombe, 9: ‘Christi milites audacter procedite, et ad defendendam orientalem ecclesiam uelocius concurrite’. Thus, for Baudri the crusade is conceptualised around a distinction between the western soldiers of Christ and the Eastern Church beset by the barbarian peoples of the east.

Beyond the initial section, there are only three further references to the west in Baudri, two of which are drawn directly from the Gesta.44The description of Antioch and the fire from the west: Baudri, Hist. 3.10, 24, ed. Biddlecombe, 72, 90; cf. GF 9.26, 10.32, ed. Hill, 62, 77. In the last case, Baudri inserts a panegyric to Gaul in the siege of Nicaea, describing how ‘armed, you [Gaul] have taken the route from western Europe, and set up your tent and the stakes of your canopy in Asia’.45Baudri, Hist. 1.24, ed. Biddlecombe, 26: ‘Ab occidentali Europa armata iter arripuisti; et in Asia tentoria tua et conopeorum tuorum paxillos collocasti’. This vision of the west is not so clearly Christian in focus, but reflects perhaps more closely a post-Carolingian vision of a Frankish west, centred on Gaul, of the sort that we find with Rodulfus Glaber in the mid-eleventh century.46Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’, 171–3. There are also notable similarities with Tudebode’s geographical excursus, as both contrast Europe and occidens with Asia, supporting Rubenstein’s contention that Baudri used Tudebode’s version of the Gesta specifically.47Cf. Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere 6, RHC Occ. 3, 67. Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum’, 188–9, provides some highly indicative suggestions about the different versions of the ‘Jerusalem history’ that the three French Benedictines may have read. In particular, Baudri makes reference to a few stories and narrative variations unique to Tudebode. Doubly so as this panegyric looks forward to Baudri’s only other personification of Gaul in his rendition of Kerbogha’s speech about the rusty sword, the context for Tudebode’s excursus. Here he changes the ‘Christiani’ of the Gesta to ‘those locusts from beggarly Gaul’, breaking from his general preference for the term ‘Christiani’.48Baudri, Hist. 3.2, ed. Biddlecombe, 62: ‘Hec sunt arma bellica, arma nimis pretiosa, que attulerunt locuste ille de mendica Gallia’ (These are the warlike arms, the exceedingly precious arms, which those locusts from beggarly Gaul carry). Cf. GF 9.21, ed. Hill, 51, and Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere 6, RHC Occ. 3, 67. On the prominence of Christiani in Baudri, see Ní Chléirigh, ‘Crusaders and their Enemies’, 127–37. Among the French Benedictines, however, Baudri is by far the least interested in the west as a theme, as he seems to associate it with Christianity primarily through a Gaulish lens.

Guibert of Nogent, a student of St. Anselm and, from 1104, abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, has a more systematic portrayal of east and west in his Gesta dei per Francos.49Riley-Smith, The First Crusade, 136. Guibert situates the crusade from the outset within a ‘geopolitical’ analysis of the east. He begins by lambasting the instability of the easterners’ faith, claiming that, except for the British Pelagius, the east has been the source of all heresies and that the political upheavals in this region of the world are God’s punishment.50Guibert, Dei gesta 1.2, CCCM 127A, 89–90; the notion that the east is the source of heresies is hardly new, see for example Liudprand of Cremona, De legatione Constantinopolitana 22, ed. P. Chiesa, CCCM 156 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 196–7; cf. Léan Ní Chléirigh, ‘The Impact of the First Crusade on Western Opinion Towards the Byzantine Empire’, in Kostick, ed., Crusades and the Near East, 161–89. On Guibert’s discussion of heretics in the west, see esp. Guibert, Monodiae 3.17, ed. and trans. Edmond-René Labande, Autobiographie (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), 428–34; cf. Jay Rubenstein, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind (New York: Routledge, 2002), 114–16. The crusade is thereby framed around a contrast between a pious Western Church and heretical Eastern one. The Western Church is presented as a reference point for orthodoxy, while Eastern practices are described as at odds not only with the ‘ancient laws of the fathers’, but also ‘with the holy ritual of the Western Church’.51Guibert, Dei gesta 1.2, CCCM 127A, 92, trans. Levine, 31: ‘Cum ab institutis paternorum canonum et ab Occidentalis aecclesiae pio ritu sensu ac multimoda actione discordent’. Guibert’s interpretation of clerical celibacy is likewise ‘confirmed by the authority of the Western Church’.52Guibert, Dei gesta 1.2, CCCM 127A, 93, trans. Levine, 32: ‘constantissime Occidentalis aecclesiae auctoritate firmetur’. This criticism of the east also underscores the preceding praise of the Latin crusaders’ piety. In contrast with ancient pagan wars, citing Lucan on the madness and pointlessness of civil war, the crusaders had ‘such a keen desire to overthrow the enemies of the Christian name, [that they] sought exile and passed beyond the Latin world, even the known world’.53Guibert, Dei gesta 1.1, CCCM 127A, 86–7, my trans., cf. trans. Levine, 27–8: ‘tanta aviditate ad christiani nominis hostes evertendos exilium petere orbemque Latinum, noticias etiam terrarum excedere’. Cf. Lucan, 1.8–9, 12, ed. Shackleton Bailey, 1. This also underscores the close connection between latinus and occidentalis, which can also be seen in the subsequent contrast between latinus orbis and the east and Africa.54Guibert, Dei gesta 1.2, CCCM 127A, 90. Finally, despite its religious import, Guibert’s notion of east and west is centrally connected to a notion of climatic determinism. The instability of the Eastern Church, which is a product of ‘the purity of the air and the sky in which they are born, as a result of which their bodies are lighter and their intellect consequently more agile’, is mirrored in the Asiatic instability of the eastern kingdoms.55Guibert, Dei gesta 1.1, CCCM 127A, 90–1, trans. Levine, 30: ‘Ipsi plane homines pro aeris et celi cui innati sunt puritate cum sint levioris corpulentiae et idcirco alacrioris ingenii’. Ní Chléirigh, ‘Western opinion’, 166, is likely right that the identification of the Greeks with levitas is drawn from Isidore of Seville, Etym. 9.2.105, but the idea of Asiatica levitas goes back at least to Cicero (Isaac, Invention of Racism, 393). And while Guibert does not offer a comparably broad principle for other groups, his history is replete with this sort of ethnic stereotype.56E.g., Guibert, Dei gesta 1.1, 2.1, 7.26, CCCM 127A, 89, 109, 319. Respectively, about the Scots, Germans and the Eastern love of astronomy. On ethnic stereotyping, see Weeda, Ethnicity in Medieval Europe.

Unlike Baudri, Guibert develops the theme of western peoples across his history. In Urban’s speech, he compares God’s restoration of the ‘mother of churches’ with returning the faith to partes orientis.57Guibert, Dei gesta 2.4, CCCM 127A, 113, trans. Levine, 43: ‘matrem aecclesiarum’. More importantly, Urban exhorts his audience to remember how God said of the Church: ‘I will bring your seed from the east, and gather you from the west’ (Is 43:5).58See Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous, 135–7, and more generally Katherine Allen Smith, The Bible and Crusade Narrative in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2020), 57–66 and 145–6. ‘ab oriente adducam semen tuum, et ab occidente congregabo te’. Guibert interprets this as a literal historical development. The Church was founded in the east and brought to the west, ‘but out of the west he assembled us, for through those who last began the proof of faith, that is the westerners (occidentales) … Jerusalem’s losses will be restored’.59Guibert, Dei gesta 2.4, CCCM 127A, 115–16, trans. Levine, 44: ‘sed ab Occidente eam congregat, dum per eos qui ultimi fidei documenta ceperunt, Occidentales scilicet. … Iherosolimitana dampna restaurat’. Indeed, once assembled, it is an army drawn ‘from nearly every region of the western parts’.60Guibert, Dei gesta 3.1, CCCM 127A, 136, my trans., cf. Levine, 57: ‘Ex cunctis fere Occidentalium partium regionibus’. The final book of the history returns to this theme as its opening line announces: ‘It offers no small example for our faith that by the labour of the western faithful the eastern Church is restored’.61Guibert, Dei gesta 7.prol., CCCM 127A, 266, my trans., cf. Levine, 124: ‘Fidei nostrae incentivum non minimum prebet quod Occidentalium labore fidelium Orientalis restauratur aecclesia’. In his biblical panegyric on the fall of Jerusalem, Guibert recalls Urban’s speech through the quotation from Isaiah and makes two further references to the west as the source of the crusading army.62Guibert, Dei gesta 7.21, 22, 43, CCCM 127A, 301, 309, 344. Thus, for Guibert, east and west are more than a mere framing device: they represent a coherent theme throughout his history and offer a broader image of the division of the Roman Empire and Christian Church between east and west, Latin and Greek, grounded in cultural stereotypes and climatic determinism.

We know less about Robert the Monk than the other two. He may have been a student of Baudri prior to becoming abbot of St. Remy, where he remained until 1097 and during which period, he too attended the Council of Clermont. Seemingly as a result of administrative incompetence, he lost this post. After a successful appeal to Urban II, he went to Senac, but fared little better there, being deposed again shortly before his death in 1122.63Riley-Smith, The First Crusade, 135–6; Kempf and Bull in Robert, Hist. xvii–xxv, suggest that local ecclesiastical politics may also have played a role. His Historia Iherosolimitana is by far the most popular history of the First Crusade, surviving in over 90 manuscripts.64Sweetenham in Robert, Hist. 8–9; Tyerman, Debate, 9–10. While he develops a theology similar to that of Baudri and Guibert, Sweetenham emphasises the greater quality of his storytelling and the clarity of his writing.65Sweetenham in Robert, Hist. 61–8. Guibert (Dei gesta pref., CCCM 127A, 82), by contrast, chastises the weak intellect of those who cannot follow his prose.

Robert not only provides a clear and unambiguous discussion of east and west, but he also explicitly disambiguates some of the obscurities in the Gesta Francorum. This is especially clear in his version of Gesta’s heavenly fire story. All three Benedictines repeat the story of how the crusaders, besieged within Antioch, saw fire fall from western sky onto the Turkish army.66GF 9.26, ed. Hill, 62; Guibert, Dei gesta 5.22, CCCM 127A, 224–5; Baudri, Hist. 3.10, ed. Biddlecombe, 72; Robert, Hist. 7.4, ed. Kempf and Bull, 69. In the original passage, some unspecified portion of the Turkish army is terrified by the fire and flees to Bohemond’s gate for unstated reasons. Each author seeks to clarify this passage in some way. Baudri explains that this sign also encouraged the Christians, who saw it too; that only some (quidam … eorum) of the Turks fled; and that out of fear they camped wherever they could (ubi potuerunt), namely, in front of Bohemond’s gate. Guibert adds that both sides saw the miraculous sight and that the Turks quickly fled the spot where the flames fell, though he does not link this to Bohemond’s gate. He also explains that the sign presaged the Turks’ destruction. Robert, however, is the only one to comment on the western origin of the flame and focus exclusively on the meaning of the sign, entirely removing the description of the Turks moving their camp. He explains that the fire represents God’s anger and that it came from the west because it represents the Franks. While this association of the west with the crusaders may be implied in the other renditions of this story, Robert is the only one to make it explicit.67Cf. Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous, 137–40.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Robert’s history is his peculiar geography. Like Guibert, Robert begins with the composition of the crusading army and their western origin, but he makes a further distinction between the northern and southern dukes. Thus book two begins: ‘meanwhile, as these things were done, out of remote western regions, from the northern part the Lord called forth’ the counts of Flanders and Normandy, along with lesser known lords of Britain and Brittany (majoris et minoris Britanniae).68Robert, Hist. 2.1, ed. Kempf and Bull, 13, my trans., cf. trans. Sweetenham, 89: ‘Interea, dum haec aguntur, de remotis occidentalium partibus a parte aquilonis excitavit Dominus comites duos …’. Drawing on a common trope, Robert uses Britain to emphasise the remote origins of the crusaders; indeed its very northernness is underscored by the word’s position at the very end of the paragraph on the north.69Cf. Guibert, Dei gesta 1.1, CCCM 127A, 86, and Baudri, Hist. 1.8, ed. Biddlecombe, 12–13. This description is mirrored in the next paragraph, which begins: ‘from the southern part’ came the armies of Adhemar and Raymond.70Robert, Hist. 2.2, ed. Kempf and Bull, 13, my trans., cf. trans. Sweetenham, 90: ‘a parte australis’. This is then raised to the level of prophecy through a slightly modified quotation from Isaiah 43:

What is more, by modifying Isaiah, Robert qualifies the universal expression by changing the four directions to three and, in his exegesis, further reduces two more to regions to the west. This reduction not only inflates the world-historical significance of France, but also establishes an unusually clear east-west dichotomy, in contrast with the more typical three and four part models.74See Akbari, ‘From Due East’; Akbari, Idols in the East, 35–50; Wolever, ‘Translatio imperii’. Guibert, by contrast, distinguishing Africa in principle from the ‘east’, even if they remain conceptually grouped: ‘I would be surprised if, with the exception of the east and Africa, any books about heretics could be found in the Roman world’.75Guibert, Dei gesta 1.2, cf. 1.4, CCCM 127A, 90, cf. 98–9, trans. Levine, 30, cf. 35: ‘mirabor si preter Orientem et Affricam vix aliqui sub Latino orbe cernentur’. Cf. Akbari’s example of Peter the Venerable (‘From Due East’, 20n8). Robert not only homogenises the north and, more surprisingly, the south into the west, but also implicitly pushes Africa into the east. While describing Constantinople as the capital of the east, in opposition to Rome as the capital of the west, Robert explains how it served as a refuge for eastern Christianity, where the relics of the east were brought as it fell to the pagans. He then notes in an aside that ‘Asia and Africa were once Christian possessions; they are now subject to the filthy rituals of the Gentiles’.76Robert, Hist. 2.20, ed. Kempf and Bull, 21, trans. Sweetenham, 101–2 (emphasis added): ‘Asia et Africa fuerunt olim Christianorum, que nunc subiciuntur ritibus immundis gentilium’. Unlike, for example, Peter the Venerable, Robert makes no further qualification of Africa as southern.77Akbari, ‘From Due East’, 20; Peter the Venerable, Liber contra sectem Saracenorum 1, D 1811s, ed. Kristzeck, 231; cf. Peter the Venerable, Summa totius haeresis Saracenorum A 2vd, ed. James Kristzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 208. This lopsided geography has a specific eschatological function for him. The fact that Christianity holds only one part of the world (Europe) is held in tension with the three corners that it inhabits and, as Lapina astutely notes, this looks forward to the prophecy of Kerbogha’s mother that the Christians will be victorious and that ‘from east and from west, from north and from south shall [their] coast be’.78Robert, Hist. 6.12, ed. Kempf and Bull, 63, trans. Sweetenham, 156: ‘A solis ortu et occasu, ab Aquilone et mari, erunt termini vestri …’. Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous, 137n59. The east is therefore all that remains to complete the expansion of Christianity.

Thus, all three of the French Benedictines make it a point to frame the First Crusade overtly around an east-west dichotomy between the Latin world and both the Greek Church and the peoples of the east. While Baudri only goes so far as to introduce these as relevant categories of identification, in so doing he equates ‘almost all Christendom’ with the west.79Baudri, Hist. prol., ed. Biddlecombe, 3: ‘Christianitatem suam … pene totam’. Both Guibert and Robert, on the other hand, develop concerted theories about the relationship of east and west. They depict the Latin west as the last bastion of Christianity and focus on providing a prophetic account of the west’s enlightenment of the east. Lapina further highlights how their use of solar imagery consciously inverts the original mission of the apostles.80Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous, 132–7; Mauntel, ‘Competing with the East’, 22–6, expands this general argument into the Late Middle Ages; on solar imagery, cf. Wolever, ‘Translatio imperii’. This inversion further reinforces the construction of the west, not only as preeminently Christian, but as a region charged with an apostolic mission towards those regions of the world not yet or no longer Christian.81Cf. Glaber, Hist. 1.5.24, ed. France, 40–3.

There is one further history that furnishes a famous account of the west. Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to Baldwin I and witness to the Council of Clermont, provides a unique and important account of the crusade. Not only does he provide one of three independent eyewitness accounts, but as a resident of Jerusalem from 1100, his is one of the only histories of the decades after the First Crusade written by a settler in the Latin kingdoms.82Harold S. Fink in Frances Rita Ryan, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095–1127 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 3–7. Like the Benedictines, Fulcher contextualises the crusaders as western, describing the crusading army as ‘a multitude from all western countries’ and the crusade was an act of ‘all western people’.83Fulcher, Hist. prol.5, 1.6.9, ed. Hagenmeyer, 118, 161, trans. Frances Rita Ryan, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095–1127 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), 59, 73: ‘tanto collegio ab occidentalibus partibus’; ‘omnis populus occidentalis’. However, this language plays only a marginal role in Fulcher’s history. The one exception is his famous passage in book three where he exhorts his reader to:

This sense of partiality pervades Fulcher’s geographical vision. Although east-west is the operant geographical axis of Fulcher’s history, as seen for example in the description of the river Geon, flowing from Paradise to the Mediterranean, this geography is constantly relativised to the Latin kingdoms.87Fulcher, Hist. 2.57–8, ed. Hagenmeyer, 596–9; Verena Epp, Fulcher von Chartres: Studien zur Geschichtsschreibung des ersten Kreuzzunges (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 157. Julian Yolles reads this as part of a broader process of the east’s sublimation into and homogenisation with Paradise.88Yolles, ‘Latin Literature’, 333–6, 341. Though the rhetorical point is apt, the contextual nature of Fulcher’s geography does not seem to admit such a geographical conflation of the east. In the very example of the Geon, he very clearly distinguishes Palestine from Paradise. The river Geon ‘has the Red Sea between itself and the east, [for] we understand that Paradise is in that east (in quo oriente)’.89Fulcher, Hist. 2.58.1, ed. Hagenmeyer, 599, my trans., cf. trans. Ryan, 217: ‘habet enim inter se et Orientem mare Ruberum, in quo Oriente intelligimus esse Paradisum’. By constructing the sentence this way, rather than, for example, ‘habet enim mare Ruberum inter se et Orientem, in quo intelligimus esse Paradisum’ or ‘Orientem, ubi intelligamus esse Paradisum’, Fulcher has established a clear grammatical distinction between ‘that east’ of Paradise and the ‘eastern region’ evoked by Urban II or the ‘eastern parts’ of the Turks in the first recension.90Fulcher, Hist. 1.3.2, 1.11.4, ed. Hagenmeyer, 132–3, 193: ‘orientale plaga’; ‘orientalibus partibus’. ‘For it has the Red Sea between itself and the east, in which we understand Paradise to be’ or ‘… the east, where we understand paradise to be’. We can also see this in the description of the crusaders surrounded by their enemies: ‘from one side Egypt and Ethiopia, from another Arabia, Chaldea and Syria, from another Assyria and Media, from another Parthia and Mesopotamia and from another Persia and Scythia’.91Fulcher, Hist. prol.4, ed. Hagenmeyer 117, my trans.: ‘hinc Aegyptus et Aethopia, hinc Arabia et Chaldaea atque Syria, hinc Assyria et Media, hinc Parthia et Meopotamia, hinc Persida et Scythia’. Ryan’s translation of prol.4 should not be trusted in its presentation of the geographical logic. Although the geography here is a little strange, with the seemingly inverted positions of Parthia and Persia, it presents a roughly anticlockwise sweep around the Latin kingdoms, from south to north.92Compare the geographical framework of Burchard of Mont-Sion 150 years later as discussed by Baumgärtner, ‘Winds and Continents’, 23–37. In both cases, Fulcher’s geography always extends outwards from Palestine. So, while Fulcher certainly focuses upon an east-west geographical dichotomy, it is not an exclusive binary in the way that Akbari seems to imply nor a homogenous totality as Yolles suggests. Unlike Robert or Guibert, Fulcher has no pretence of providing a complete taxonomy of world geography or the east.

Instead, Fulcher’s geography fits in with the broader function of his history as a ‘recruitment manifesto’ for Latin settlers. This is particularly evident in the focus given to integration and to the great wealth available even to those of meagre assets.93Fulcher, Hist. 3.37.4–6, ed. Hagenmeyer, 748–9. Thomas Asbridge, The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (New York: Harper Collins, 2011), 177; Yolles, ‘Latin Literature’, 333. His consciousness of east and west must therefore be understood in terms of his position as a settler in Palestine. The west is framed around a settler mentality, as seen in the joyful greeting that some new arrivals around 1101 received ‘when we saw that they had come from our countries in the west’.94Fulcher, Hist. 2.6.6, cf. 3.37.2–7, ed. Hagenmeyer, 388, 748–9, trans. Ryan, 149, 271–2: ‘quos cum de partibus nostris occidentalibus advenisse videremus’. Taken along with his highly contextual geography of the east, encircling Palestine, and the narrow qualification of his key passage on the west becoming east, Fulcher’s understanding of the west is local and pragmatic, based not on the Church and the Roman Empire, but around places of Latin habitation, either in Europe or the Middle East. Despite this difference in geographical scope, both Fulcher and the French Benedictines show how the First Crusade had provided a crucial context for the use of east and west as language of identification for Latin authors.

The use of the west, in particular, gains significance in these chronicle sources as a supranational identifier for the crusaders. A number of significant annals and chronicles from around the diocese of Liège adopt this terminology very early. The Annals of Liège and the Chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux, in particular, refer respectively to a rising of the ‘western Christians’ and ‘western peoples’.102Annales Leodiensis 1095, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 4 (Hannover: Hahn, 1841), 29: ‘occidentales christiani’; Sig., Chron. 1096, MGH SS 6, 367: ‘occidentales populi’. Although the relationship is unclear, these are central to a network of histories that adopt this convention.103Pertz in MGH SS 4, 8–9, and Chazan, L’Empire et l’histoire universelle, 108. Thus, when the Annals of Floreffe were established in 1139, they used the Annals of Liège for this entry.104Annales Floreffienses 1096, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH SS 16 (Hannover: Hahn, 1859), 623. Likewise, the Chronicle of Saint Humbert in Ardennes, in the diocese of Liège, also identifies those who responded to Urban’s call as the ‘Christian people of the entire west’.105Chronicon Sancti Humberti Andaginensis 82(102), ed. L. Bethmann and W. Wattenbach, MGH SS 8 (Hannover: Hahn, 1849), 615: ‘totius occidentis christianos … populos’. Finally, the Annals of Voormezele, Ypres, do not directly identify the crusaders as western, but after the capture of Nicaea in 1097, a comet appears in the west, perhaps again following the Annals of Liège.106Annales Foroselenses 1097, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH SS 5 (Hannover: Hahn, 1844), 36; Annales Leodiensis 1097, MGH SS 4, 29. There is some variation among these sources, but some go on to specifically impute collective activity to this body of westerners. Both Sigebert and the Annals of Liège, for example, describe the west as acting ‘in the same breath’, where the Chronicle of St. Humbert has them driven by ‘one and the same intention’.107Annales Leodiensis 1095, MGH SS 4, 29: ‘una conspiratione’; Sig., Chron. 1096, MGH SS 6, 367: ‘una aspiratione’; Chronicon Sancti Humberti Andaginensis 82(102), MGH SS 8, 615: ‘una eademque intentio’.

Another early and influential trend appears in Bavaria, around the chronicle of Frutolf of Michelsberg (d. 1103). He presages the crusade with various signs and describes how numerous people from ‘nearly all parts of the world, but chiefly the western kingdoms’ took up the journey to Jerusalem.108Frutolf of Michelsberg, Chronica 1096, MGH SS 6, 208, trans. T. J. H. McCarthy, Chronicles of the Investiture Contest: Frutolf of Michelsberg and his continuators (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 130: ‘ex omnibus pene terrae, sed maxime ab occidentalium regnorum partibus’. On Frutolf and his continuers, see McCarthy’s introduction. A more extensive discussion is found in the 1106 continuation, written by a participant in the Crusade of 1101 and Gregorian sympathiser.109McCarthy in Frutolf of Michelsberg, Chronica, 44–56. This continuation substantially rewrites the history of the crusade under the year 1099. It draws Urban back into the picture and describes the overtures from Alexius asking for the aid from the ‘West, which was already entirely committed to Christianity’.110Ps.-Frutolf, 1106 Continuation 1099, MGH SS 33.2, 23, cf. 42, 53, cf. MGH SS 6, 213, 217, 220, trans. McCarthy, 146: ‘occidentem, qui iam ex integro Christiana professione censeretur’. The use of the west in Liège, an anti-Gregorian hotbed, and by Frutolf, could suggest that this language was used to qualify the papacy’s involvement and to connect the crusade to a Roman unity in the west by recalling the Western Empire.111On Liège, see Kupper, Liège et l’Église, pt. 3. Unfortunately, this evidence is too partial to draw any determinate conclusion.

There are a few other scattered examples of heavenly signs linking the events of the First Crusade with the west. The Annals of Seligenstadt, from the diocese of Mainz, and the Annals of Montecassino both record the meteor shower of 1095, each adding that it was in the western region of the sky.112Annales Seligenstadenses 1095, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH SS 17 (Hannover: Hahn, 1861), 31; Annales Casinenses ex annalibus antiquis 1095, ed. Guilelmus Smidt, MGH SS 30.2 (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1934), 1426; cf. Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 171n14, for a list of other references to this meteor shower. There may be a direct link between Seligenstadt and Montecassino, given the textual similarity between the two annals. Pertz suggests that the Annals of Seligenstadt were present in Rome for a certain time, although given that they go on to 1138 in the first recension it is difficult to see how they can be the source of a comment in the Montecassino annals completed in 1098 (MGH SS 17, 31n1). The Chronicle of Montecassino takes the further step of drawing an explicit parallel with the crusade: ‘Innumerable stars were everywhere seen to fall from the sky against the western region. At the same time a movement of an innumerable and inestimable multitude of western peoples occurred …’.113Chronica monasterii Casinensis 4.11, MGH SS 34, 475: ‘stelle innumerabiles de celo versus occidentalem plagam ubique terrarum cadere vise sunt. Eodem tempore innumerabilis et inestimabilis multitudinis occidentalium gentium facta est motio …’. The Annals of Harsefeld, in the diocese of Bremen, and the Annals of Magdeburg explain that ‘it was judged that [the heavenly sign] was not fire but angelic powers, signifying by their wandering that movement, which afterwards seized almost the entire western world’.114Annales Rosenveldenses 40, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 16 (Hannover: Hahn, 1859), 101: ‘Quod non ignem set angelicas fuisse potestates, animadversum est, vagacione sua eam, que postea totum pene mundum corripuit occidentem, significantes mocionem’. Cf. Annales Magdeburgenses 40, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 16 (Hannover: Hahn, 1859), 179. On the heavenly signs around 1095, see Riley-Smith, First Crusade, 31–4. Thus, in one way or another, the memory of the First Crusade was rapidly and widely linked with the idea of the west as a region divinely charged with providential activity.

The crusade and its connection to the west also resonate through Anglo-Norman historiography of the early twelfth century. Both William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis make a particularly explicit point of including the crusade in their general histories and describe the significance, and difficulty, of recounting the events.115WM, GR 4.343, ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 592–3; OV, 9.1, ed. Chibnall, 5:4–9. Cf. Rod Thomson, ‘William of Malmesbury, Historian of the Crusade’, Reading Medieval Studies 23 (1997): 121–2. Despite major differences in their accounts, both construct the west as a space of joint moral and political activity through the crusade.116On the moral function of historiography, see Sønnesyn, William of Malmesbury. William’s account of the crusade is better known for its prominent framing of the crusades as a conflict between Europe and Asia.117Oschema, ‘L’Idée d’Europe’, 61–5; Oschema, Bilder von Europa, 268–9; Thomson, ‘William of Malmesbury’, 127–9; John Gillingham, ‘Civilizing the English? The English histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume’, Historical Research 74, no. 183 (2001): 30–1. This is not for nothing, as this vocabulary does indeed play a significant role in his account, but it goes hand in hand with an east-west opposition as well. As in Guibert, Urban’s sermon evokes a world near devoid of Christianity but for Europe, ‘and how small a part of that do we Christians live in!’.118WM, GR 4.347.6, ed. and trans. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 600–1: ‘cuius quantulam partem inhabitamus Christiani!’. To emphasise the threat they pose, William has Urban describe the peoples of Asia according to climatic characteristics through an extended paraphrase of Vegetius interspersed with additions drawn verbatim from Lucan:

The idea of western knights as champions of Christendom also builds into a broader ethnic spatialisation that creeps into the work more broadly. When William describes Ecgberht’s exile from Britain, he casts this as an act of divine providence, so that he could learn ‘the art of government from the Franks; for in both martial exercises and in polish of manners the men of France are easily first among the nations of the west’.122WM, GR 2.106.2, ed. and trans. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 152–3: ‘regnandi disciplinam a Francis acciperet. Est enim gens illa et exercitione uirum et comitate morum cunctarum occidentalium facile princeps’. Gillingham rightly emphases the use of the present tense in William’s description of the Franks and Thomson notes how William projects present notions of chivalry into the past, but we can take this a step further.123Gillingham, ‘Civilizing the English’, 37; Thompson and Winterbottom in WM, GR, vol. 2, 76. This is cast as a specifically civilising event, as Ecgberht is able to acquire ‘a civility of manners very different from the barbarity of his native land’.124WM, GR 2.106.2, ed. and trans. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 152–3: ‘mores longe a gentilitatia barbarie alienos indueret’. Gillingham, ‘Civilizing the English’, 37. What is more, the entry of Britain into a community of western nations is dated to Charlemagne’s reign, folding this event into a broader nexus of ideas about Christianity in general and the crusade specifically.125Gabriele, Empire of Memory, ch. 5; cf. WM, GR 4.367.3, 373.1, ed. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 642–3, 654–7. In this way the west assumes a transhistorical significance as a locus of identification. It is this martial and moral prowess, exemplified in the Franks, that unifies Europe and the west. Indeed, William looks forward to this in the first book when, describing how God aroused the Franks’ ‘native might’ to prevent the Muslims from overwhelming Europe, he explains that ‘in our time’ the ‘Franks and other Christian peoples of Europe’ have retaken a great part of Asia.126WM, GR 1.92, ed. and trans. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 134–7: ‘ingenitum robur’; ‘nostros diebus … per Francos et omnis generis ex Europa Christianos’. Note the distinction between the Franks and other peoples as well as his previous distinction between Franks and French (1.68.8). The Franks serve here as the vanguard of the west, just like in Urban’s exhortation: ‘Let the celebrated valour of the Franks, with the nations under their sway, advance, and the mere terror of their name will shake the whole earth’.127WM, GR 4.347.10, ed. and trans. Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom, 602–3: ‘Eat famosa Francorum uirtus cum appenditiis sibi gentibus, solo sui nominis terrore totum orbem motura’. Thus, for William, we can draw an important distinction between Europe and the west. Europe serves as a community of religio-political cooperation, it is the stage of politics; the west is the locus of moral activity and ethnic characteristics, the community of nations. The Franks are therefore the preeminent gens among western peoples, but defenders of Europe.

Writing from the other side of the channel, around a decade later, Orderic Vitalis also viewed the crusade as an epochal moment in history. Its significance and providential character are unambiguously established in the opening sentence of book nine.128OV, 9.1, ed. Chibnall, 5:4–5, quoted at p. 000 above. The crusades are a moment of moral clarity within the uncertainty of the created order, a point which Orderic continues to affirm by stressing the divine ordination by which the crusades were assembled and conducted.129Cf. Shopkow, History, 97–105, esp. 104. Largely copying Baudri’s history, Orderic does not include much language of east and west within his account of the crusade itself, but it is consistently framed this way both in book nine and throughout the history. In the introduction, he describes how ‘a single company is marvellously assembled from many western peoples and one army is led against the infidels in the eastern regions (Eoas partes)’ and how these ‘western faithful’ were inspired to do so by God’s miracles.130OV, 9.1, ed. and trans. Chibnall, 5:4–7: ‘a multis occidentalium populis unus grex miro modo congeritur, et contra ethnicos in Eoas partes unus exercitus conducitur’; ‘occiduos fideles’. This use of west makes sense in the broader context of its function as a space of moral and religious activity within the Ecclesiastical History. We see this conjunction particularly in the fame of Bohemond, which ‘resounded everywhere as the peoples of the west acclaimed the noble standard-bearer of the armies of Christendom’.131OV, 8.20, ed. and trans. Chibnall, 4:264–5: ‘ab occidentalibus populis utpote precipuus christiani exercitus signifer susceptus ubique claruit’. Bohemond goes on to lead thousands of westerners (occidentalium) on crusade against the east (in Eoas partes).

This focus on religious community extends beyond the crusade. The west is for Orderic a space of religious activity more generally. In the controversy around the election of Innocent II, Orderic describes how Gregory gained great authority among the westerners (apud occiduos) due to Cluny’s preference for him over Peter. This afforded him pontifical legitimacy in the eyes of the French (in Gallis) and so he was accepted thereafter by the princes and bishops of the west (occiduis principibus et episcopis). After travelling to France (Franciam) and conferring with Emperor Lothar, he summoned a council of all bishops and abbots from the entire west (totius occidentis).132OV, 13.11, ed. Chibnall, 6:420–1. In this story we see how the west serves Orderic as the relevant community of religious organisation, but it could also be a political arena, as in the story of Odo’s aspiration to the papacy. Hearing that Roman soothsayers predicted his ascension, Odo abandoned the wealth and power of the western kingdom (regni occidentalis) and began to lavish gifts upon the Roman aristocracy in the hopes of achieving authority over not only the Latins but the whole world. He invited Hugh, earl of Chester, and, unsatisfied with England and Normandy, they ‘resolved to abandon the great estates that they possessed in the western parts and took an oath to accompany the bishop beyond the Po’.133OV, 7.8, ed. Chibnall, 4:40–1, I have modified Chibnall’s translation: ‘Ingentes quoque fundos quos in occiduis climatibus possidebant deserere decreuerunt, ac ut prefato presuli trans Padum comitarentur per fidem spoponderunt’. Needless to say, this venture was unsuccessful. ‘Wise’ King William immediately stepped onto the scene to voice his disapproval of Odo and to arrest him for abandoning his responsibilities in England as well as drawing men across the Alps who ought to be standing against the Danes and Irish.134OV, 7.8, ed. and trans. Chibnall, 4:40–3: ‘prudens rex’. Orderic presents this as Normans by nature desiring too much, but it also involves a key association of the west with Gaul and Britain, and the abandonment of the west as a morally significant action for Norman actors. This spatial differentiation between Italy and the west also underscores the geographical significance of the Alps in the early twelfth century.135Gautier Dalché, ‘Représentations géographiques de l’Europe’, 70–1. As such, the west is not merely the geographical location of Normandy for Orderic, but it is also the locus of a particular religious and political community of which the Normans are a member.

It is difficult to summarise such a varied collection of material. As noted earlier, the turn of the twelfth century, and particularly its first few decades, was a particularly significant moment in the development of supra-national collective identity in the Latin world. This coincided with a period of relative terminological anarchy, as authors experimented with new vocabularies. From at least the early twelfth century, especially emanating from the memory and histories of the First Crusade, we find a nascent notion of a community of western peoples and kingdoms conflated broadly with the Latin world, but more closely with the Franks. Especially in the theological refinement of the crusading narrative, more developed ideas of the west begin to appear. Here we find the division between Eastern and Western Churches being used to ground a relocation of religious significance to the west. In this context the west becomes a locus of divine activity, with particular reference to the Franks as God’s elect.136Cf. Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’. This development within crusade histories was also reflected in Latin history-writing more broadly, as evidenced across a wide range of chronicle accounts. Historians throughout the Latin world had to negotiate this new relationship of the west with the crusade and the community of Latin kingdoms. It was brought into conversation with the flowering of a medicalised, ethnographic discourse, the contours of which remain deeply unclear in this early period, but which had nevertheless captured the interest of a number of northern French historians.137See Weeda, Ethnicity in Medieval Europe. Anglo-Norman historians in particular grappled increasingly with the west as a category through which to characterise the place of the Normans and English with the community of European, Christian kingdoms. Thus, broadly speaking, the west came to represent more than a mere geographical identifier for these authors. Rather, it served not only as a space for religious and political activity and identification, but also provided a malleable basis from which to impute ethnic or climatic characteristics. Most fundamentally, however, it offered a stage for divine activity in history.