The Deeds of God Through the Franks

From the opening

The four-year period (1095-1099) between the call for crusade by Pope Urban II at the Council of Claremont and the capture of Jerusalem produced a remarkable amount of historiography, both in Western Europe and in Asia Minor. Three accounts by western European eye-witnesses--an anonymous soldier or priest in Bohemund's army, Fulker of Chartres, and Raymond of Aguilers--provoked later twelfth-century Latin writers from various parts of what are now France, Germany, England, Italy, and the Near East, to take up the task of providing more accurate, more thorough, more interpretive, and better written versions of the events.

Very little is known about most of the earliest rewriters; Albert of Aix, Robert the Monk, and Raoul of Caen are little more than names, while Baldric of Dole is known to have occupied a significant ecclesiastical position, and to have composed other literary works. Guibert of Nogent, on the other hand, is better known than any other historian of the First Crusade, in spite of the fact that The Deeds of God Through the Franks, composed in the first decade of the twelfth century (1106-1109), did not circulate widely in the middle ages, and no writer of his own time mentions him. Guibert himself, in the course of the autobiographical work he composed in the second decade of the twelfth century (1114-1117), never mentions the Deeds, and it has never been translated into English.[1] What measure of fame he currently has is based mostly on his autobiography, the Monodiae, or Memoirs, an apparently more personal document, which has been translated into both French and English.[2]

Although the Memoirs contain a strong historical component--the third book, in particular, if used with discretion, offers rich material for a study of the civil disorder that took place in Laon 1112-111-- the first book has attracted the attention of most recent scholars and critics because it offers more autobiographical elements. However, Guibert did not include among those elements the exact date and place of his birth.

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