The Emotive Underpinnings of Religious Violence

The narrative impetus of The Siege is given when Titus, afflicted with cancer of the mouth, is healed upon lamenting Christ’s Passion at the hands of the Jews (173–76). His newfound health, both physical and spiritual, is predicated on the connection between emotion and action: “A, corteys Crist! … / Was neuer worke þat Y wroȝt worþy þe + t[i]lle, / Ne dede þat Y [d]on haue bot þy deþ mened” (181–83). Titus pledges “to stire Nero with noye and newen his sorowe” so that he may be granted permission to set off to Jerusalem “to do the develes of dawe and þy [Christ’s] deþ venge” (186–88). Sorrow stands as a physiological manifestation of injury and thus an essential buttress for retributive violence. The perspective then shifts to Titus’s father, Vespasian, who, also severely ill (with leprosy), swears to avenge Christ’s death if he is granted good health (201–4). Vespasian is effectively cured when, on the advice of St. Peter, he sends for a veil upon which Jesus had left his image and invested with healing powers (the Veil of Veronica); he is restored to health through Christ’s “bitter woundis,” a devotional setting that gives rise to collective “wepyng and wo and wryngyng of hondis / With loude dyn and dit for doil of hym one” (251–52). The spiritual healing of humankind, effected through the crucifixion of Christ and marked here by the Roman leaders’ conversion to Christianity, is manifested in physical terms, drawing on medieval medical notions of interdependence between moral state and physical symptoms. Sickness of the body was understood to correlate with moral failure, and could thus be remedied through penitence according to the precepts of Christ the physician.²⁹ The spiritual and physical regeneration of the two Roman leaders takes the form of a penitential crusade to avenge Christ, whom they “mychel … loued” (277): they are reborn as Christian kings “þat for Crist werred” (194, 954).

The theme of affective vengeance has received little attention among scholars interested in The Siege’s crusade imagery.³⁰ Yet the image of Titus and Vespasian compassionately avenging Christ’s Passion was foundational to the crusading movement. Two sources are particularly illuminating: the eleventh-century pseudoencyclical of Sergius IV, which appears to have been composed by the Cluniac monks of Moissac prior to and in support of the First Crusade;³¹ and the twelfth-century semihistorical narrative of the First Crusade known as the Chanson d’Antioche, which circulated in versions spanning the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.³² The encyclical of Sergius IV grounds its promotion of a passagium to Jerusalem in the crucifixion of Christ on Mount Calvary, “in co nos suo sanavit libore” (where he healed us by his own wounds). The act of retribution that the author calls for in response to the Holy Sepulchre’s destruction – for which “universa aecclesiam vel urbe Roma turbata est et in [im]mensa lamentatione posita est” (the universal church and the city of Rome are deeply troubled and put in a state of great lamentation) – is situated in the line of Titus and Vespasian’s vengeance for Christ’s death: “Spero, credo et certissime teneo qui, per virtutem Domini nostri Jesu-Christi, nostra erit victoriam, sicut fuit in diebus Titi et Vespasiani, qui Dei Filii morte vindicaverunt” (I hope, I believe, and most certainly I hold true that through the virtue of our Lord Jesus Christ victory will be ours as it was in the days of Titus and Vespasian, who avenged the death of the son of God).³³ The Chanson d’Antioche likewise traces the First Crusade back to the Roman generals, cast as embodiments of the crusading ideal. One of its opening scenes is of Christ on the cross prophesying the coming of the crusaders “oltremer” to take “venjement” of his death.³⁴ The author gives further prophetic force to the enterprise by invoking the image of Titus and Vespasian lamenting Christ’s injuries before taking Jerusalem: “Dont fu vengiés Nos Sire et encore sera” (And thus our Lord was avenged, and will be again). The protagonists of the chanson are urged to emulate the Roman leaders’ example if they are to earn the reward of “jovente” (youthful vigor) and a crown in paradise.³⁵ Redemption, enabled by Christ’s Passion and assuming a bodily dimension here, depends on the reciprocation of his sacrifice through compassionate vengeance.

If the theme of affective vengeance is a key component of The Siege’s crusade rhetoric, so too is that of “salutary” violence. In the post-1291 era, connections between crusading and the good health of Christian individuals, the Latin West, and the Holy Land were frequently drawn. Sanudo devised the whole of his monumental treatise as three remedies for the infected body of the Holy Land.³⁶ More relevant to The Siege, however, is Mézières’s notion of the passage of outremer as a medicine for the malady of warfare within Europe, detailed at length in his Epistre au Roi Richart. The author exhorts the English and French kings to present themselves before God, ready “pour vengier son injure” (to avenge His wrongs), lest they be struck down by leprosy, like Miriam.³⁷ The curative power invested in crusading is allegorized in the author’s conception of the Order of the Passion, which he holds responsible for administering a “petite medecine preparative” (simple preparatory medicine): a passagium particulare to pave the way for the passagium generale to follow.³⁸ This order, as spelled out in his Sustance de la chevalerie de la passion de Jhesu Crist, is named thus to “rafressir et renoveler la piteuse memoire de la Passion du doulz Jhesu Crist entre les crestiens” (refresh and renew the piteous memory of the Passion of Jesus Christ among Christians).³⁹ For Mézières, Christian self-destructiveness is a body-political disease that finds remedy in compassionate vengeance for the injuries inflicted on God and Christ.

The Siege mobilizes a similar agenda to that of Mézières. As the siege on Jerusalem is prolonged, Titus and Vespasian receive news from Rome of how Emperor Nero had killed his mother, his wife, and many “Cristen fele þat on Crist leued” (902). Nero opts for suicide over execution when Roman citizens and senators rise up in anger. Intense political turmoil over his succession ensues, as emperors come and go in a series of political coups spurred by hatred, vengeance, and conflicting claims. Eventually, Vespasian is elected to the imperial crown by the senate and must return to Rome. Conforming to legal crusading stipulations, his vow to avenge Christ of his injuries is passed on to his son Titus, who thus bears sole responsibility for the mission.⁴⁰ At this point, Titus’s health suddenly deteriorates when he averts his attention from the external enemy – the Jew – and toward the internal, domestic concerns of Rome, as he expresses joy at his father’s coronation: “And Titus for þe tydyng ha[þ] take [so] mychel ioye / þat in his synwys soudeynly a syknesse is fallen” (1027–28). The only person capable of healing him, Josephus (a Jew), presents him with a Jewish man whom Titus hates with such intensity that the “hote yre” that so quickly rises upon seeing him makes the blood spread in his veins, and his sinews return to their proper state:⁴¹

Titus’s misdirected joy creates an imbalance of his bodily humors, which manifests in coldness (1030) and lethargy (1032), in accordance with medieval humoral theory. Medieval medicine ascribed to emotions the ability to both cause and cure imbalanced humoral states; Titus’s anger causes the vital spirit and natural heat to move from his heart to his extremes, thus rectifying the imbalance.⁴² The proliferation of works on the influence of emotions on disease and recovery would have ensured the rhetorical efficacy and ideological potency of this image. It is significant, moreover, that Titus’s recovery is made possible by a combination of anger and hate, an emotion with strong connotations of durability. Richard Lavynham’s treatise on the sins defines “hate of herte” as a subcategory of anger that endures in silence and bides its time.⁴³ Thomas Aquinas opposes hatred, a stable desire for another’s evil, with anger, which can be harnessed in the service of justice and assuaged by revenge.⁴⁴ This opposition between the release that vengeance provides for anger and the resilience of hatred is also highlighted by the author of the anonymous Fasciculus morum, a fourteenth-century preacher’s book that circulated in England, and by Giles of Rome in his De regimine principum.⁴⁵ Giles, moreover, distinguishes the two emotions in terms of their scope: hate can be cultivated toward an entire group of people, whereas anger has a more limited reach.⁴⁶ Thus, what The Siege seems to be suggesting is that, for the good health of Christians – and by extension, Christendom – a perennial “external” enemy upon which to focus violent energy is needed. Invoking both contemporary and earlier ideas about emotions and holy war, The Siege grounds its narrative in a logic of curative, salvific crusade, underpinned morally and rhetorically by the compassion its protagonists and readers are invited to partake in for Christ’s Passion.

Christian Brutality, Self-Inflicted Death, and the Compassionate Voices of the Enemy

Despite the carefully crafted moral, ideological, and diegetic structures set up by The Siege to exalt the necessities of Christian religious violence, the narrative makes an unexpected shift in its ambivalent rendering of the realities of war. Through increasingly complex and nuanced aesthetics of violence, the romance poses probing questions about the morality and effects of religious violence. The notion that the horrors inherent in even the most doctrinally sanctioned type of warfare should be deplored with anguish of soul (animi dolore) stems from the origins of just war theory, with Augustine’s De civitate dei:

For Augustine, just wars are necessary in the face of iniquity, and yet the evils within them are to be condemned, lest we devolve into a subhuman state. It is likewise the humanity of Christians, and thus their inherent sinfulness, that forms the premise for an analogous position upheld by the anonymous chronicler of the siege of Lisbon during the Second Crusade. Christians are enjoined to feel sorrow and pity for the enemy because they too are sinners, also exposed to the scourge of divine vengeance.⁴⁸ Thus, “Dolendum et gaudendum est. Nam cum perversos quosque Deus omnipotens percutit, pereuntium miserie condolendum et iusticie iudicis congaudendum” (There is a necessity for both sorrow and rejoicing. For when the omnipotent God strikes down sinners, whoever they be, one must grieve for the sufferings of the perishing yet rejoice at the justice of the judge).⁴⁹

Similar tensions transpire in Sanudo’s and Mézières’s treatments of the siege of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian, testifying to the currency of such questions in the context of the events of 70 CE. Drawing on Josephus’s De bello Iudaico, Sanudo presents the destruction of the holy city as an act of divinely ordained vengeance for Christ’s injuries in the same light as the crusaders’ massacre of the inhabitants of Jerusalem in 1099.⁵⁰ Yet after describing in highly affective terms the suffering of the Jews – “ubique pauor, morientium gemitus, viventium desperation” (everywhere there was terror, the groans of the dying, the desperation of the living) – the author has Titus decrying the enterprise’s human costs: “Proiecta tandem multitudine cadaverum per muros Ciuitatis, Titus alte ingemuit; & manum ad coelum elevans, protectabatur illud nunquam sibi ascribi: quia veniam dare voluit, si assuisset deditio, & armorum deposition” (At last with many of the corpses thrown from the city walls, Titus groaned aloud and raised his hand to heaven, he protested that this should never be ascribed to him since he had wished to show lenience if surrender and the surrender of arms had been agreed).⁵¹ The violence, required by God, is bemoaned as lamentably excessive. A comparable image of Titus, a “large et piteux” (magnanimous and pitiful) leader, having great “compassion des mors” (compassion for those who died), is given by Mézières:

It is noteworthy that for Mézières, the object of Titus’s campaign, to confront the “anemis de sa loy,” does not conflict with the purpose for which the episode is invoked: to warn of the moral dangers of war and spur compassion for the slain.⁵³

The prescribed response to the atrocities of war, as illustrated by Sanudo’s and Mézières’s accounts, is compassionate grief.⁵⁴ In both texts, Titus laments the human toll of the slaughter that he, as agent of divine judgment, had no choice but to commit. The Siege-poet’s choices when depicting Titus and Vespasian during and after the scenes of graphic violence are, however, different: their actions are invested less with a sense of grievous necessity than with one of unsettling brutality. The audience’s compassion for the Jews is therefore not achieved through emulation of the Christian protagonists’ emotions, but instead though a moral evaluation of their lack of restraint, which crystallizes in the suffering of the besieged. The emerging representational aesthetic is best understood, as we will see, in relation to more critical historical accounts of the harms of war and crusading. While the final stages of the siege see Titus proffering mercy to the Jews, a comparison with The Siege’s sources – Josephus’s De bello Iudaico and Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, for these passages – reveals that his merciful intentions are downplayed, and are promptly reneged on as he vehemently resolves “neuer pyte ne pees profre hem more / Ne gome þat he gete may to no grace taken” (1179–80).⁵⁵ In fact, not only does the Siege-author omit numerous instances of virtuous pity, which feature in Josephus’s and Higden’s narratives, but he or she also foregrounds the Christians’ lack thereof, particularly when confronted with the possibility of plunder.⁵⁶ In a similar effort, the poet heightens the unbridled passions at play in the enactment of divine vengeance on the battlefield. As noted by Elisa Narin van Court, the romance proceeds to a key inversion in reworking its sources: it is no longer the Jews who are spurred by immoderate rage, but Vespasian who is depicted as “neuer … so wroþe” (375), “wode we[ll]ande wroþ” (385), and “wroþ as a wode bore” (785), repeatedly cursing his enemies to the devil.⁵⁷ The Jews, on the other hand, are described as brave, valiant, and noble (621, 625, 867).

Anxieties about the morality of violence are most palpable in the romance’s treatment of Jewish suffering and grief. After an initial battle that leaves the field drenched in blood, judgment is rendered on the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, held responsible for Christ’s death, and his twelve clerks.⁵⁸ Caiaphas’s fate is staged as a grotesque, distorted reproduction of the suffering and crucifixion of Christ. Flayed alive, dragged behind horses, and hung upside down on high gallows with wild animals shredding his flesh, Caiaphas is pierced and tortured to death (697–708). His torment is heightened through the accretion of details absent from the poem’s source (here, Roger d’Argenteuil’s Bible en françois), as is the reaction of the Jewish onlookers – one of empathic sorrow, leading to collective suicide:⁵⁹

Caiaphas’s execution marks the culmination of the Christian collaborative endeavor to avenge Christ’s death. Yet the narrative conveys trauma and intolerable pain, rather than triumph. Acts of self-sacrifice spurred by despair had special resonance in crusade history, recalling pogroms against Europe’s Jewish communities that accompanied the First, Second, and Third Crusades, but also, as discussed below, large-scale suicides of Muslims during the siege of Jerusalem in 1099. The pogroms, although subsumed into a crusading logic of revenge against God’s enemies,⁶⁰ were condemned by many contemporaries as manifestations of the worst excesses of militant Christian fervor. Both Jewish and Christian authors stressed the unbridled passions, brutality, and greed of the crusaders responsible for the massacres of 1096 in the Rhineland and 1190 at York, while deploying similar discursive dynamics as The Siege to frame the collective suicides provoked by these attacks. In his report of the slaughters of 1096 at the inception of the First Crusade, Albert of Aachen foregrounds the anger, brutality, and mercilessness of the crusaders, which he contrasts with the anguish of the Jews, as men, women, and children opt for death at each other’s hands over the ruthless treatment of the assailants: “Matres pueris lactentibus, quod dictu nefas est, guttura ferro secabant, alios transforabant, uolentes pocius sic propriis manibus perire, quam incircumcisorum armis extingui” (Mothers with children at the breast – how horrible to relate – would cut their throats with knives, would stab others, preferring that they should die thus at their own hands, rather than be killed by the weapons of the uncircumcised).⁶¹ The Christians’ bloodthirstiness is similarly set against the Jews’ extreme suffering, culminating in collective suicide and infanticide, in Hebrew chronicler Eliezer bar Nathan’s report of the same events.⁶² This is also the case in William of Newburgh’s account of the massacres of 1190 at the outset of the Third Crusade; inflamed by fury (furor), the mob is portrayed as raging against the Jews of Lynn, Stamford, and York, who are driven to respond to Christian violence with self-inflicted death.⁶³

What is particularly striking about The Siege’s treatment of crusade warfare is that, like Albert of Aachen’s report of the events of 1096, the narrative is punctuated by empathic authorial pronouncements such as “was deil to byholde” (645), “was pite to byholde” (1247), “þat deil was to hure” (1101), “were [tore] forto telle” (1069), or “bot alle was boteles bale” (1145). These interjections, by which the author inserts himself or herself in the narrative to elicit compassion for the Jewish victims, feature prominently around the infamous episode of infanticide and cannibalism. The scene directly follows Titus’s healing from sickness through “hate” and “hote yre,” offering an immediate counterpoint to the poem’s endorsement of restorative violence. The force of the cure-through-anger metaphor is juxtaposed with equally potent imagery invoked to convey the emotional and physical distress of the Jews. In the Siege-poet’s version, the troubles of the town become “[tore] forto telle” (1069), as the besieged are afflicted with sorrow (1079), having neither food to eat nor water to drink, except for the tears they wept (1074). In line with the romance’s general concern with the suffering of Jewish women,⁶⁴ Mary’s act of cannibalistic infanticide is no longer decried as horrid, unnatural, and spurred by fury, as in Higden and Josephus’s accounts,⁶⁵ but is transformed into one of piteous grief, performed in despair by a “myld” and “worþi” mother (1081 and 1093):

The infanticidal mother responds to extreme conditions with equally extreme actions, similar in scope and tenor to those in Eliezer bar Nathan’s report of the massacres of 1096: “The most gentle and tender of women slaughtered the child of her delight.”⁶⁶ In both accounts, the performance of infanticide reflects negatively not on the Jewish community but on the Christian violence and horrific circumstances to which its members respond. Eliezer’s sorrow – “It is for them that I weep, that tears drop from my eye”⁶⁷ – is paralleled in The Siege by that of the Jewish witnesses to the scene:

In the cognate passages of the Siege-poet’s sources, the onlookers’ stupefaction and horror convey outright condemnation of an unspeakable crime, branded as heinous and abhorrent.⁶⁸ Here, their sorrow and the act itself operate in a different register, as comments on the direness of their fate at the hands of merciless Christians. The crusade has become a force of destruction and a source of unbearable misery.

Acts of infanticide and cannibalism, when they occurred (or were believed to have occurred), were often framed by medieval authors in such a way as to convey moral evaluation of the persons or conditions that provoked them. Marino Sanudo, for instance, tells of a Christian woman who, following Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1187, kills her own son in despair upon arriving in Tripoli and being stripped of her vital belongings by fellow coreligionists: “Supra modum animo perturbate, & spiritu tristitiae & desperationis absorpta, in marinas iecit undas filium ex se natum” (After this treatment, with mind disturbed, in a spirit of sadness, and oppressed by desperation she threw her own son into the sea). Infanticide is presented as an extreme physical manifestation of emotional agony, triggered by the “crudelitatis excessum” (excessive cruelty) of the men of Tripoli.⁶⁹ Cannibalism was also an act that demanded moral assessment, with some authors directing censure at the perpetrators and others at those who prompted the act. For example, when Guillaume le Breton relates the cannibalism of the besieged at Château Gaillard, a Norman fortress captured by Philip II of France in 1204, the perpetrators are portrayed as pitiful victims of the cruelty and inhumanity of the French besiegers.⁷⁰ If Josephus’s and Higden’s narratives present Mary’s cannibalism as evidence of the monstrosity of the Jews, thus justifying their final destruction in the eyes of the Romans,⁷¹ The Siege instead imbues the act with pathos and humanity, causing it to reflect critically on the unbridled rage and violence of the crusaders.

Moral Discomfort and the Jerusalem Massacres of 1099

The event that would have immediately come to mind for readers and listeners of The Siege is the Christian siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. As Akbari has noted, the Roman siege of 70 CE and the crusader siege of 1099 were intertwined, not only in chronicles, but also in integrated chronologies such as Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Liber floridus, and through the homonymous relationship they shared, where vernacular texts with the same title could refer to either of the two events.⁷² The history of the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 was well known through such popular chronicles as those of Robert of Reims and William of Tyre, which circulated widely in vernacular translations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.⁷³ Marcus Bull and Damien Kempf observe that “no other event in the Middle Ages stimulated such a large burst of historical writing.”⁷⁴ That the massacres of Jerusalem – which most claimed were unprecedented⁷⁵ – raised moral questions for European chroniclers is evinced by just how variegated their accounts were when it came to the tone they employed and the details they included or omitted.⁷⁶ Akbari has drawn attention to important resemblances between the depiction of Jews in The Siege and that of Muslims in First Crusade chronicles: scenes where both are reduced to faceless, nameless bodies, are ascribed opulent wealth, and are characterized as misbelievers.⁷⁷ But while Akbari sees a transfer of identity occurring in The Siege’s scenes of compassion-arousing Jewish suffering, whereby the Jews are momentarily likened to Christians rather than Muslims,⁷⁸ I instead argue that the dominant representational economy is maintained. Indeed, a number of First Crusade narratives express ambivalence similar to The Siege toward Christian displays of excessive violence, also by dwelling compassionately on the suffering and human costs involved. The Jews of The Siege preserve their status as non-Christian enemies of the crusaders, even when portrayed sympathetically, and as such, they continue to illuminate the romance’s crusade rhetoric.

The most emblematic scene of the crusader conquest of 1099 was likely that of the crusaders wading in streams of Muslim blood up to their horses’ knees, disseminated in the high and later Middle Ages in such influential works as the chronicles of Siegebert of Gembloux and Otto of Freising, and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale.⁷⁹ In Siegebert’s version, which spawned numerous continuations, the paraphrase includes a portrayal of the crusaders raging uncontrollably.⁸⁰ The Siege uses the same imagery when relating the initial battle in front of the city. It describes the Christians as “gre[m]ed griffouns” (556), hacking down thousands of “heþen,” so that “baches [streams] woxen ablode about in þe vale” (563) and “kne-depe in þe dale dascheden stedes” (576),⁸¹ and the survivors as retreating to Jerusalem “with mychel wo” (616). As in The Siege, the moral implications of slaughter on such a scale were not lost on many chroniclers of the First Crusade. Significantly, they conveyed ambivalence through the same representational means as The Siege: authorial interjections of shock, horror, and empathy; unrestrained, violent emotions pitted against extreme, poignant distress; the translation of impotence and emotional agony into self-inflicted death; and the suffering and killing of noncombatants, women especially.

The anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum, for example, relates the crusaders’ frenzy upon breaching Jerusalem’s defenses, inflicting a massacre such (talis occisio) that the blood in Solomon’s Temple was up to their ankles. The tone is uncritical at first, but when the crusaders’ bloodthirstiness prompts them to ignore the protection their leaders had granted the survivors, sneaking up to the temple’s roof and cutting down men and women so that many are driven to throw themselves headlong to the earth, the author has Tancred rebuke them.⁸² The episode is also recorded by Gilo of Paris, who contrasts Tancred’s and Gaston of Béarn’s feelings of mercy with the crusaders’ insatiable lust for blood: “Mane dato non plenus adhuc tot cladibus ultor / Miles id exiguum quod adhuc superesse sciebat / Sanguinis in paucis furatur” (When morning came, the knights’ vengeance was still not sated by the downfall of so many, and in slaughtering a few they stole what little amount of blood they knew still remained to be shed).⁸³ The author elaborates on the fate of the Muslims trapped on the temple’s roof, impelled with manly courage (animoque uirili) to run upon each other’s swords. The survivors’ sorrow is foregrounded as they collect and pile up the bodies of the dead: “Gentiles nondum dampnati flendo legebant / Et congesta simul ducebant montis ad instar” (the heathens who had not yet been destroyed wept as they picked them up and collected them together, heaping them up like a mountain).⁸⁴ Nowhere else in Gilo of Paris’s narrative is the Muslims’ distress given such prominence as in this instance of rampant and unsanctioned vindictiveness.

If these two authors’ opinions of the massacres remain somewhat conjectural in the absence of more explicit markers of ambivalence, the same cannot be said of the accounts of Albert of Aachen (who appears to have relied on the oral reports of crusaders upon their return to Europe) and William of Tyre (who wrote at the request of King Amaury of Jerusalem).⁸⁵ While vindicating the capture of Jerusalem as God’s righteous judgment, William betrays clear moral reservations about the magnitude of the slaughter.⁸⁶ His disapproval of the crusaders – at the outset portrayed as “infidelium cruorem sitiens, et ad caedem omnino proclivis” (athirst for the blood of the enemy and wholly intent upon destruction)⁸⁷ – crystallizes in the following description, which wraps up his report of the initial carnage: “Tanta autem per urbem erat strages hostium, tantaque sanguinis effusio, ut etiam victoribus posset taedium et horrorem ingerere” (So frightful was the massacre throughout the city, so terrible the shedding of blood, that even the victors experienced sensations of horror and loathing).⁸⁸ William’s picture of the crusaders’ horror and disgust was replicated in important later works, such as Roger of Wendover’s Flores historiarum and Matthew Paris’s Chronica majora.⁸⁹ William invokes the term strages (massacre) throughout his account, vividly describing headless bodies, mutilated limbs, and the cold-blooded extermination of men, women, and children. His perspective merges with that of the victims: “Verum et ipsos victores a planta pedis usque ad verticem cruore madentes peridulosum erat conspicere, et horrorem quemdam inferebant occurentibus” (Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them).⁹⁰ As in The Siege, this transferal of authorial sympathy, the extent of the slaughter, the mercilessness of the crusaders, and the anguish of the victims forbid acceptance of the depicted violence as normatively meritorious.

Albert of Aachen’s account is even more explicitly critical of the crusaders. In a lengthy report colored by emotive contrasts and mostly narrated from the victims’ viewpoint, Albert tells of a massacre that took place on the third day after the capture of the city. The crusaders are cast as pitiless in their anger, “puellas uero, mulieres, matronas nobiles, et foetas, cum pueris tenellis detruncantes aut lapidibus obruentes” (beheading or striking down with stones girls, women, noble ladies, even pregnant women, and very young children).⁹¹ This depiction recalls The Siege’s horrific portrayal of a pregnant woman hit on the womb by a stone during an attack spurred by Christian wrath.⁹² Albert notes that the massacre is officially sanctioned by the expedition’s leaders, yet his tone suggests lamentable excess and a transgression of the boundaries of acceptable human conduct:

What William’s and Albert’s accounts both vividly and troublingly capture, as does The Siege, is the degeneration of righteous vengeance into ferocious bloodlust. Like The Siege, their reports register profound anxieties about the bloodthirstiness of crusaders, the harms of unbridled violence, and war’s capacity for horror.

In its evocation of the events of 1099, The Siege turns to a historical moment when the ideology of crusade as vengeance was being put to the test for the first time. The taking of Jerusalem in 1099 was certainly a triumph that Christendom would strive to relive for centuries. During the later Middle Ages, this aspiration was endowed with a curative dimension, representing the way to restore Christendom to “good health.” Yet the siege of 1099 also went down in history as an unprecedented massacre, epitomized by the horrific image of the crusaders riding up to their horses’ knees in the blood of the slain. Accordingly, chroniclers dealt with the event in different ways: some with adamant vindication and others with discomfort and disapproval. The Siege, I have argued, comes closer in tone to the latter group. If the Christian characters of The Siege are certainly at odds with Augustinian precepts of compassionate suffering with the enemy, the romance’s audience, on the other hand, is invited to acknowledge the horror, cruelty, and misery of war, and to lament the Jews’ fate with “animi dolore” (anguish of soul).

Ambivalence in the Interpolations

The episodes of cannibalism emerged in RCL’s manuscript history in the late fourteenth century alongside the interpolation of approximately 1,200 lines to the beginning of the romance, relating the king’s demonic heritage, the tournament in which he contends disguised, and his preparatory crusade and imprisonment in Germany. These additions, which first appear in London, British Library, MS Egerton 2862 (c. 1390) and Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 175 (c. 1400), exhibit concern with unsettling aspects of Richard’s background and behavior.¹⁰² The narrative’s focal point of emotional response is established early on in Richard’s demonic origins. In search of “þe ffeyrest wymman þat wore on liff” (51) for Richard’s father, Henry, to marry, the messengers who are sent out happen upon a ship of fabulous yet distressing powers, belonging to Cassodorien’s father, Corbaryng, king of Antioch. The initial reaction of these Christian knights is, significantly, intense anguish (58). The sentiment of uneasiness that the narrative pins on the demonic queen is reinforced when, on the morning following her wedding with Henry, she reveals her physical inability to witness the Eucharist and faints: “þe qwene fel in swowne adoun; / þe folk wondryd and were adrad” (190–91). Her unorthodox response to the holy sacrament – aligning her with other alleged slanderers of the Eucharist, notably witches¹⁰³ – is reiterated when, fifteen years later (but only a few lines later in the narrative), upon being prevented from withdrawing from mass, she yet again succeeds in escaping the imposed outcome, this time flying out of a window in the church’s roof (227–34). These events would have evoked for contemporary audiences the legend of the Angevin dynasty’s descent from the devil, disseminated, for example, by Higden’s Polychronicon. Like others, Higden used the legend as ammunition for critique: to support charges of royal tyranny and cruelty.¹⁰⁴ Yet the introduction of Cassodorien in the A-version manuscripts does more than construct Richard’s identity as demonic. It ascribes to him Muslim ancestry: Corbaryng, Cassodorien’s father and king of Antioch, is a name the text appropriates from the Muslim leader of the Chanson d’Antioche, whose conversion to Christianity is recounted by the Chrétienté Corbaran.¹⁰⁵

The connection between Richard’s demonic origins and his violent temperament is established when he fights anonymously in a tournament before embarking on a preparatory crusade to the Holy Land.¹⁰⁶ Richard’s feats of arms are presented as heroic yet harmful to the chivalric community of which he is a member. Here and elsewhere in the A-version interpolations, Richard’s actions are placed under close moral scrutiny through a consistent mode of narration: they are first recounted by the narrator, and then again by members of the injured parties. Richard, dressed in black, riding “as he were wood” (463) and charging “full egerly” (290), leaves the first knight who challenges him “nye deed” (294) – which generates, according to Sir Thomas of Moulton’s recounting of events, dread on the part of the onlookers (482). Richard’s second contender is less fortunate. The king, described as “stout and sauage” (485), wielding his shaft “wiþ gret rage” (486), kills both man and horse: “His necke he brake there a two: / His horse and he fell to grounde, / And dyed bothe in that stounde” (298–300). In response to this, a third knight, who will thereafter rise to the challenge, decries the damage inflicted on the knightly fellowship: “þis is a deuyl, and no man, / þat oure folk felles and sleth!” (500–1).¹⁰⁷ Finally, when Richard unhorses this third contestant, a “hardy and good” knight (305), all others remain paralyzed, fearing for their lives: “Off hym þey were adred ful sore / þat non durste jouste wiþ hym efft: / Lest he hadde hem here lyf bereft” (514–16). Sir Thomas and Sir Fulk repeatedly describe Richard as “woode,” “wroþ,” “egre,” “grym,” and “sterne,” compounding these characterizations with accusations of devilishness (500, 529–30, 574). At the close of the episode, the king attempts to mitigate Thomas’s and Fulk’s righteous indignation by revealing his previously concealed identity: “Takes nouȝt to greef, for it was j” (586).

Ascribing excessive, objectionable knightly anger and bloodshed to Satan’s influence was a common authorial practice, as Kate McGrath has shown in analyzing eleventh- and twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historical accounts. The purpose of such analogies was to signal the emotion’s status not as bona ira (good anger) but as a deadly sin.¹⁰⁸ This narrative strategy was also deployed in crusade accounts to condemn wrathful dissension among Christians. The eyewitness report of the siege of Lisbon (1147), for instance, imputes outbreaks of anger that threaten to destroy the Christian army from the inside to the poison of the devil’s malice (malitie virus).¹⁰⁹ Infighting that permeates chronicles of the Third Crusade was also perceived as the devil’s work.¹¹⁰ In his mid fourteenth-century De itinere Terrae Sanctae liber, Ludolph of Suchem ascribes the fall of crusader Acre to the citizens’ “odiosam discordiam” (hateful quarrels), which, instigated by Satan, result in considerable Christian bloodshed.¹¹¹ Richard’s displays of wrathful violence against fellow Christians precede his crusade expedition, yet imputing them to the devil produces an effect that is similar to the scenarios above. It highlights the prejudicial impact of inwardly directed violence on the Christian collective.

Upon returning from his scouting expedition to the Holy Land, Richard ungraciously rebuffs a minstrel, finds himself accused of spying on King Modard’s land, and is thrown into prison.¹¹² The arrest is certainly presented as unfair, but so too is Richard’s treatment of Modard’s son, Ardour, who challenges the English king to a contest of strength: each man is allowed to give the other a single barehanded blow. After receiving “an eere cloute” delivered in conformity with their agreement, Richard deems that Ardour “dyde hym wronge” and wrathfully swears vengeance (760–64). At this point, however, the narrative emphasizes Ardour’s goodwill, courtesy, and desire for a fair fight:

Despite this honorable treatment, Richard, concealed in the privacy of his cell, applies a layer “thycke and more” (781) of hard beeswax over his fist to inflict as much harm as possible. Ardour, described as “a trewe man” (786), faces the king and receives his blow without flinching but is struck “ded as ony ston” (798). Richard’s urge to consummate his vengeance (763–64, 783–84), the lethal consequence of such spite, and the inequitable nature of the blow expose him as prone to excess and deceitful.¹¹³ The episode makes clear that “curtese,” Ardour’s defining attribute, is lacking in Richard.

Informed of the death of his son, Modard exclaims, “Allas … now haue j non!” (802), a conventional formula used in medieval laments for the dead to elicit compassion.¹¹⁴ But Modard is unable to say more and falls to the ground “as man þat was jn woo jbounde” (804). Fuller exploitation of the compassion-arousing potential of the situation occurs with the arrival of Modard’s wife:

The passage’s rhetorical effectiveness is achieved through the intensification of the verbal and somatic manifestations of grief (from swooning and threats of suicide to self-laceration), dramatic interplay between bereaved husband and wife, repetition of the conventional “Alas,” parallel phrases (such as “As man þat was jn woo jbounde” and “As a wymman þat was in rage”), and sibilance, which enhances the tone of frenzy and despair. Parental sorrow gives grounds for corrective action, which the romance’s audience can only construe as legitimate in view of Richard’s immoral deeds – his “dedes þat aren vnwrest,” as put by Modard (874). At this point, Modard is presented as giving Richard’s fate a great deal of thought, acting rationally rather than impulsively. He summons his wisest advisors (936–37) – figures of utmost importance to the virtuous governance of kings¹¹⁵ – and together, they spend long hours pondering the most adequate “iugement” to administer for this “gret tresoun” (950–51). After three days of juridical deliberation, one of these men, Sir Eldrys, urges Modard to “doo, be my resoun” (1001) and choose a fierce lion, abstain from feeding it – and from feeding Richard – for three days, and release it into the king’s cell. But in a scene that supplies the king with his famous epithet, Richard tears the lion’s heart out, carries it into the hall, seasons it with salt, and eats it in front of the stunned and horrified Modard. At yet another key moment, the king’s violence is imputed to his devilish disposition: “Iwis, as j vnyrstonde can, / þis is a deuyl and no man” (1111–12). Richard’s escape is triumphant. Yet the means by which it is achieved – trickery and calculated brutality in dealing with Ardour – and the consequence of his actions – the agony of parents deprived of their only son – do not rest easily with the romance’s audience. The question of what means are morally permissible to achieve victory will again be raised in the cannibalism episodes, but in a context of crusade.

Cannibalism in Crusade Historiography and Literature

The most extensive scholarly treatment of the cultural legacy and literary repercussions of the acts of cannibalism perpetrated by Christian soldiers during the First Crusade is found in Geraldine Heng’s Empire of Magic. Heng situates the crusaders’ cannibalism at the siege of Ma‘arra in 1098 as a point of cultural neurosis, of such traumatic tenor as to produce centuries of fiction of collective repression.¹¹⁶ The chronicle reports of the episode certainly exhibit the linguistic features that modern theorists assign to the narration of trauma.¹¹⁷ The quasi-inexpressibility of the event, induced by famine, is conveyed through verbal constructions such as “dicere perhorreo” (I shudder to say), “Pudet referre” (It is shameful to report), “quod etiam dictu horribile” (a horrible thing to have to describe), “Mirabile dictu et auribus horrendum” (It is extraordinary to relate and horrifying to the ears), “quod nefas est dicere nedum facere” (it is wicked to tell, let alone to do), and “Proh pudor! heu facinus!” (For shame, the dreadful deed!).¹¹⁸ These interjections suggest an experience so revolting as to demand explicit moral qualification. Unlike Mary’s anthropophagy in The Siege, hardly any attempt is made to alleviate the culpability of the crusaders. The juridical grounds for the distress elicited by the act are clearly articulated in the account of Gilo of Paris: “Tendit in illicitum, facit hoc quod ius prohibebat” (They veered toward what was not right, and did what common law forbids).¹¹⁹ In preparing and consuming what some referred to as “banquets of men,”¹²⁰ the crusaders regressed to an animal-like state; as put by Ralph of Caen, “Vorando aemulati sunt feras, torrendo homines, sed caninos” (In devouring them, the Christians looked like beasts, like dogs roasting men).¹²¹ The sight of crusaders feasting on Muslim corpses was so appalling that it was even said to have prompted Christian desertions from the campaign.¹²²

Yet despite its traumatic resonance, the incident was not repressed, as Heng suggests, but was told at length in various forms throughout the high and later Middle Ages.¹²³ Some of the earliest chronicles to comment on the incident paved the way for subsequent understandings of cannibalism as ideologically double-edged. Raymond of Aguilers conjectures the psychological impact of the crusaders’ anthropophagy on Muslim witnesses, framing it as an extreme act of cruelty and yet fiercely effective in military terms: “Et quis poterit sustinere hanc gentem que tam obstinata atque crudelis est, ut per annum non poterit revocari ab obsidione Antiochie, fame, vel gladio, vel aliquibus periculis, et nunc carnibus humanis vescitur?” (And who can stand against a people so resolute and cruel that, after a year of not backing away from the siege of Antioch, neither through hunger, sword, nor any other danger, they now eat human flesh?).¹²⁴ The notion of cannibalism as a tactic of intimidation is further attested by the account of William of Tyre, though the author is careful to specify that the act is not literal but staged. Conceived as a remedy for the “malady” of Muslim spies within the Christian camp, the roasting and make-believe consumption of Muslim flesh establishes the Franks’ reputation as a nation of unrivaled, beast-like cruelty: “His qui eos miserant dicentes quoniam populus hic quarumlibet nationum, sed et feratum exuperat seviciam” (To those who had sent them they reported that this people surpassed every other nation and even beasts in cruelty).¹²⁵ Cannibalism is no longer performed out of necessity but is simulated for political ends as a theatrical maneuver, thus eluding moral condemnation.

Despite this early awareness of the act’s potential to serve as a resource of holy warfare, the literal ingestion of Muslim flesh and its implications of inhumanity never rested easily with authors. Cannibalism came to stand as a symbol for the brutality of crusade: a form of extreme violence that certainly bore fruit, but nonetheless infringed on Christian morality. This duality of perception is evident in the tendency of certain authors to divorce cannibalism from the main body of the crusaders by ascribing it to the Tafurs, a marginalized group of soldiers viewed as barely human, often associated with the devil, and renowned for their ferocity.¹²⁶ The liminal status of this semiautonomous rabble of soldiers allowed for an acknowledgement of the atrocities and excesses of divinely approved warfare that did not incriminate the crusader army as a whole.¹²⁷ In the Chanson d’Antioche, the brutality of the Tafurs, shown at its most extreme in the ingestion of Muslim flesh, is identified by Peter the Hermit as a requirement of war. Yet at the same time, the Turks’ responses of sorrow and protest against this “grande cruelté” (great cruelty) – “Ço ne sont pas François, ançois sont vif malfé” (These are not Frenchmen, they are living devils!) – take the form of legitimate and serious accusations, prompting Bohemond to devolve collective responsibility onto the Tafur king whose hateful impulses, he claims, could not be contained.¹²⁸ In the Conquête de Jérusalem, the Tafurs are likewise both encouraged and shunned. Their military contributions and useful powers of intimidation are underscored, but their “démezure,” “meschanceté,” and the rumors of anthropophagy that surround them set them apart from the rest of the Christian host, associating them with the remote, flesh-eating races that fight alongside the Muslims.¹²⁹

This tendency to call upon the Tafurs to account for the darkest impulses of crusading is borne out in William of Tudela’s rendering of the infamous massacre of Béziers during the Albigensian Crusade. The author downplays the crusaders’ liability for the event by imputing the most atrocious acts of violence to a band of unruly servant boys referred to as “ribauts” and “tafurs.”¹³⁰ This type of wholesale massacre was certainly militarily profitable, as William states, but its human consequences were a source of such discomfort as to require moral dissociation through the assignment of a scapegoat. Here, as in the above texts, the “Tafurs,” and the unbridled violence they incarnate, are both an intrinsic part and an aberration of the ideology of crusade. Their presence within these narratives suggests an acute awareness of the morally transgressive potential of the passions at play in religious warfare. This type of brutality was, however, carefully confined to the margins so as to prevent it from reflecting negatively on the dominant ethos of the movement.

The more “comfortable” option, as attested by most chansons de geste, was to impute these anthropophagic practices and their connotations of extreme ferocity to the Muslims of fantasy. These depictions, as noted by Jill Tattersall, take the form of counteraccusations to the events of the First Crusade, similar in nature to the romance motif of the “afflicted Muslim,” which, as discussed in Chapter 1, projected Christian anxieties and insecurities.¹³¹ Representations of Muslim cannibalism were influenced by the so-called “monstrous races” tradition.¹³² Like the cannibals of ancient ethnography, these portrayals went hand in hand with an animal-like propensity for cruelty, mercilessness, and immoderate violence. The Chanson de Guillaume, for instance, inscribes the Muslims’ taste for human flesh, “cun dragun e leppart,” into a general characterization of their bloodthirstiness in battle.¹³³ In the Prise d’Orange, also part of the Guillaume cycle, the threat of being eaten “sanz pain et sanz farine” is used as a shorthand for the merciless treatment that Guillaume is warned to expect if he is taken captive by his Muslim enemies.¹³⁴ The conflation of Muslim cannibalism with other forms of censured brutality is brought to a new level in Floovant, which situates the act alongside threats of dismemberment, quartering, hanging, and death by burning.¹³⁵ These chanson de geste depictions of Muslim cannibalism clearly contribute to a discourse of ethically ambivalent violence. Conforming to wider historiographical formulations, this type of cannibalism of “pleasure,” often combined with animal or devilish imagery, served as a mark of savagery, conveying unregeneracy and excess. In the trajectory mapped out here, the extreme brutality contained in this form of militant anthropophagy is thus at the intersection of two converging perspectives: one that accepted it as a disposition of Christian holy warfare but recognized its morally problematic nature, confining it to the perimeter; and another that deemed it far more suited to Muslims than to Christians.

Cannibalism of Necessity and Pleasure

RCL invokes this tradition in its two episodes of anthropophagy, which, put together, encapsulate the moral tensions in late medieval perceptions of crusader violence. The first of these episodes constructs Richard’s cannibalism as a matter of necessity: the king falls severely ill, collectively bringing “al Crystyndom to mekyl woo” (3028); unable to cater to his craving for roast pork, his men clean, scrape, and cook the body of a Muslim man, which Richard unwittingly consumes, resulting in his restoration to health. His renewed vigor takes the form of incensed (“wood”) martial relish: “Armes me in myn armure, / Ffor loue off Cryst oure creature!” (3131–32). This yearning for home (i.e., English) food, offset only by the tastiness and restorative power of Muslim flesh, reconfigures Richard’s historical illness, which, according to the chronicles, contributed to his truce with Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn and departure from the Third Crusade.¹³⁶ Richard’s withdrawal was synonymous with the resumption of warfare in western Europe; as put by Marino Sanudo, it led to “implacabili odio mutuo” (implacable and mutual hatred) between the English and French kings in their territorial conflicts in Normandy.¹³⁷ This first cannibalism scene would no doubt have resonated with post-1291 perceptions of the ailments of Christendom and the crusade’s healing potential. The substitution of English food with Muslim flesh as the remedy for the king’s affliction and, by extension, that of “al Crystyndom,” appeals to the familiar dilemma of inwardly and outwardly directed royal emotions or, as medieval affective psychology viewed them, “appetites.”¹³⁸ In prescribing the violent sacrifice of a Muslim man and the absorption of his body to heal the king and palliate the lure of home, the romance rectifies the “errors” of history.

The second anthropophagy episode, set in the context of an ambassadorial dinner, is of a different nature. The romance operates a key transition: cannibalism is no longer framed as circumstantially requisite, as necessary for the good health of the king and the Christian community, but is defined as an act of premeditated brutality and pleasure, aligning Richard with the depraved Tafur and Muslim human-eaters of chansons de geste. What is at stake in this second scene, as in The Siege, is not so much the ideological foundation of crusading as the appetite for violence and baser instincts the enterprise could satisfy. As in the Otuel romances considered in Chapter 2, the critique of Christian conduct is effected through the medium of Muslim antagonists.¹³⁹ The narrative emphasizes the ambassadors’ claim to the moral high ground by dwelling at length, and with distinct sympathy, on the emotive impact and familial implications of their loss.

Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s emissaries, at first deceptively welcomed as “frendes” (3444),¹⁴⁰ are then contemptuously seated at “a syde-table” (3446) – an insult in itself¹⁴¹ – containing salt but not bread, water, or wine (3447–48) and presented with the cooked decapitated heads of members of their nearest kin, whose private execution Richard had previously orchestrated. The king had requested that these heads be carefully shaven and displayed on platters, each face identified by a name tag, slanted upward, and molded into a grotesque grin (3427–33). While playing on a recognizable register of militaristic black humor,¹⁴² the romance narrates the ambassadors’ reaction – a mix of wrath, sorrow, and fear – in pitiful terms:

This response, recalling that of Modard and his wife during the imprisonment scene, brings Richard’s behavior into moral focus. Observed by the complacent monarch who proceeds to eat one of the heads “wiþ herte good” (3481), Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s men can only conclude that Richard must be “wood” and that he is “þe deuelys broþir” (3483 and 3484). The king’s acts conjure not only the ethically transgressive cannibalism of the French epic, but also other quasi-cannibalistic rituals of battle imputed in European literature and historiography to cultural Others.¹⁴³ Gerald of Wales, for instance, tells of the exhilarative frenzy of the Irish king Dermot MacMurrough, reveling in triumph as he identifies two hundred decapitated enemy heads laid at his feet: “Unius etiam, quem magis inter ceteros exosum habuerat, capite per aures et comas ad os erecto, crudeli morsu et valde inhumano nares et labra dente corrosit” (He lifted up to his mouth the head of one he particularly loathed, and taking it by the ears and hair, gnawed at the nose and cheeks – a cruel and most inhuman act).¹⁴⁴ Richard’s brutality operates in a similar register of taboo behavioral excess. Despite his status as a romance hero, the protests of his enemies are normative and relatable, demanding moral consideration of the lengths to which his violent “appetites” take him.

The king’s troubling demeanor is reinforced by the incongruous emotions he exhibits and verbalizes. He assumes a wrathful stance in response to his guests’ anguish and makes an astounding request for them to cheer up, be at ease, and eat their fill of their friends’ and families’ boiled heads:

Richard’s wrathful mercilessness prompts further association of his violence with cruelty, and his position of king with that of devil. The envoys are taunted, treated with derision, and contemptuously insulted – their anger is therefore justified – whereas Richard conveys his wrath with no heed to his terrified victims.¹⁴⁵ Combining humiliation with brutal physical abuse in the context of ambassadorial exchange, the king’s actions clearly violate the boundaries of acceptable royal – or human – prerogative.¹⁴⁶ Eventually, after the ambassadors are again described as crippled by fear (3495–99), Richard orders that the heads be brought away and that proper food and drinks be served – a dinner that his guests, overwhelmed with dread and grief (3634–38), are unable to partake in. In a curious attempt to apologize, Richard asserts that they need not be “squoymous,” that “þis is þe manner off myn hous” (3509–12). He follows this by justifying his alleged ignorance of Muslim culinary customs, resorting to his identity as “kyng, Cristen, and trewe” (3514). He then expresses worry that his good name would be stained by a pejorative reputation on account of him being “so euyl off maneres” (3519). The narrative thus has Richard admitting to a breach of ethics while asserting that among the crusaders of his “hous,” the act is customary. The peripheral practices of chansons de geste are transferred to the center, raising the stakes considerably. In RCL, it is not marginalized “Tafurs” who embody the darkest impulses of crusading, its dehumanizing and morally corruptive potential, but the king and the crusader army as a whole.

The human consequences of Richard’s conduct finally receive closest scrutiny in the lengthy account of these events delivered to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn by the envoys. This report fulfils the same narrative function as those of Sir Thomas and Sir Fulk following the precrusade tournament, and that of Modard after his son’s death: to give voice to aggrieved victims. Exclamations of sorrow – “Ffor sorwe we wende ffor to deye!” and “Ffor sorwe þoo we gan to syke” (3596 and 3604) – punctuate the narrative as one of the emissaries lists the names of the relatives and friends whose heads they were served for consumption by the “sterne” King Richard (3591–604). Pronouncements of grief and dread are juxtaposed with alarming characterizations of the king:¹⁴⁷

Vigorously gnawing the flesh of a human head with cruel, glistening eyes, Richard is likened to a ferocious beast. The speaker’s rhetoric of Christian bestial cruelty and emphatically humanized Muslim response culminates in the narration of Richard’s promise to wage what can only be categorized as inhumane warfare: to “nouȝt lete on lyue / In al þy land, man, chyld, ne wyne” but to “slee alle þat he may fynde, / Seþe þe fflesch, and wiþ teeþ grynde” (3649–52). In the moral economy of the romance, this type of insatiable hunger for martial annihilation operates as a deviation from the violence of necessity and political sustainability contained in the first cannibalistic act. Echoing Richard’s Christian victims, Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn expresses righteous “yre” while his advisors lament: “It is a deuyl wiþout ffayle” (3657, 3664).

That this episode was perceived by English audiences as disturbing, eliciting responses of disapproval and disgust, may well have been the reason that it was omitted from the fifteenth-century B-version manuscripts, only to reemerge in the two early prints made by Wynkyn de Worde (1509 and 1528). Indeed, of the seven extant manuscripts of the romance, only three contain Richard’s anthropophagic feast,¹⁴⁸ which suggests that the passage may have suffered from limited popularity. Along with Caius 175, the most “contaminated,” “romance-like” manuscript containing the episodes of cannibalism is the London Thornton (London, British Library, MS Additional 31042), in which RCL appears alongside The Siege, the second of three romances copied by Robert Thornton featuring acts of anthropophagy. The third is the alliterative Morte Arthure, preserved in Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91. In this poem, the trope of cannibalism also has an evaluative dimension. The Genoese monster of the Morte, cast as a tyrant, giant, cannibal, and rapist, embodies the form of ethically monstrous brutality that Richard’s cannibalism for pleasure would have evoked.¹⁴⁹ In all three romances copied by Thornton, cannibalism is symptomatic of the extreme emotions involved in the performance of, or response to, morally questionable violence.

Thus, The Siege and RCL mobilize a representational aesthetic that is at odds with the triumphant crusading spirit that modern scholars have often assigned to them. Other texts invoking similar discursive dynamics could be cited: Orderic Vitalis’s report of the Harrying of the North; the Canso de la crozada (on the Albigensian Crusade); Froissart’s account of the Sack of Limoges; and the N-Town Plays’ rendering of the Slaughter of the Innocents – all juxtapose unbridled anger with compassion-arousing sorrow to express ambivalence or assign blame.¹⁵⁰ The notion that anger was the root of morally transgressive violence was well established in Middle English literature. Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale associates the “cursed synne of Ire” with manslaughter, while his Knight’s Tale features “crueel Ire, reed as any gleende” and “Woodnesse, laughynge in his rage” as allegorized sponsors for military atrocity.¹⁵¹ Gower defines “wrathe” in terms of heat, asserting “That all a mannes pacience / Is fyred of the violence.”¹⁵² In the C-text of Piers Plowman, Langland has Wrath declare that he “wol gladliche smyte / Both with stone and with staf and stele vppon [his] enemye.”¹⁵³ Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes opposes the benefits of “concord” with the detriments of “ire,” and bemoans the “sorwe lamentable” caused by the Hundred Years War.¹⁵⁴

Scholars have long recognized that criticism of inter-Christian warfare was an important feature of late fourteenth-century English literature.¹⁵⁵ What I hope to have shown is that anxieties about the morality of violence extended to crusade narratives. I close this chapter with an excerpt from the most well-informed account of the Crusade of Nicopolis to have reached us: the chronicle of Michel Pintoin, monk of Saint-Denis. There is no gloss of idealism in Pintoin’s account, only biting criticism of Christian soldiers for their pride and presumption (as seen in Chapter 2), but also anger.¹⁵⁶ When, succumbing to wrath, the crusaders brutally kill the Ottoman prisoners they had taken – executions that are similar in scope to those performed by Richard to stage his cannibal feast – the author condemns the act as antithetical to the tenets of Christianity and decries the human costs:

Pintoin conveys in direct, admonitory language what The Siege and RCL convey implicitly and dramatically, deploying well-established literary strategies and complex intertextual allusions: the degeneration of crusade warfare into violence that exceeds what is morally permissible. These romances partake in the broader, familiar tension between ideals of crusading and the complications involved in their human enactment.