When Robert ‘Curthose’, duke of Normandy, set off on crusade in the autumn of 1096, he was evidently considered one of the major leaders of the expedition. Of the sixteen or so Latin texts which give a full history of the crusade, not one denies him a rank among the foremost figures on the road to Jerusalem, and his role only grew in subsequent refinements of crusade narrative. Although the contemporary sources make no mention of it, Robert's supposed heroic defeat in single combat of the leader of the enemy forces at Antioch, Kerbogha, made its way into the accounts of Chanson d'Antioche, William of Malmesbury, Geoffrey Gaimar, and Wace. It is his crusading military activity, above that of other participants, which was commemorated in the crusading windows of Saint-Denis in the later 1140s. Yet scholars of Normandy, the Anglo-Norman realms, and the three sons of the Conqueror have largely viewed Robert's crusading participation as firmly removed from his activities in Normandy. Previously, historians have argued that Robert sought to run away from his responsibilities, and the difficult situation he found himself in with regard to his brothers in 1095; the crusade was a convenient excuse, and Curthose threw away his domination over the duchy in order to escape. Yet more recent scholarship has shown that Robert was actually in a strong position immediately before the First Crusade, had held off encroachments from his brothers multiple times, and retained his duchy. In part, this separation of Curthose's crusade activity and his activities as duke stems from the medieval sources themselves: Robert's commendable crusading behaviour was, even at the time, seen as diametrically opposed to his negligent and flawed ducal rule. Yet I will argue here that the way Robert set about participating in the crusade was deeply rooted in the regional politics of the time. By supplementing the evidence of the Latin texts with two Anglo-Norman, barely studied, vernacular histories of the First Crusade dated to c. 1175–1250, this article argues that analysis of Curthose's retinue on the crusade provides a new understanding of the priorities which underlay crusade recruitment. It also suggests that Curthose selected his companions with an eye to maintaining a status quo in Normandy and its borderlands, whereby he could easily regain control on his return.

Since the publication of Heinrich von Sybel's Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzugs in 1841, partially translated into English by Lady Duff Gordon in 1861 within her compilation The History and Literature of the Crusades, the critical interrogation of literary texts has been at the heart of scholarly approaches to the crusading movement. This stems from the prevalence of ‘crusade texts’ in the medieval world; the expeditions associated with the crusading movement, particularly those to the East, are among the best evidenced events in the Middle Ages. For contemporaries, the cultural phenomenon of crusading, constantly adapting and shifting in definition and scope, was an attractive subject for oral, poetic, and literary composition. Thus, modern scholars of the crusades, following in the disciplinary footsteps of von Sybel, have been forced to engage with a daunting corpus of diverse accounts and responses to the blend of pilgrimage, holy war, and penitential activity which characterized the medieval crusading movement. But in the process of this, historians have often been guilty of inheriting elements of the same mid-nineteenth century theoretical approach – grounded in a dedication to empirical objectivity – determined to disregard elements of the text which are seemingly less useful for establishing the past, in von Sybel's mentor Leopold von Ranke's words, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, ‘as it essentially was’. Whole texts have been misguidedly excluded from the historiographical mainstream for decades on grounds of being ‘unreliable’. For this reason, an arbitrary methodological divide between ‘history’ and ‘literature’ has often been evident. Literary scholars have enthusiastically taken up the challenge of analyzing less prosaic texts neglected by historians, but, with some exceptions, their findings have been slow to be reincorporated into historical understanding of the crusading movement and its cultural significance. A further contributing factor in this process has been the divide imposed by the disciplinary categorization of vernacular languages into ‘national’ literatures, whilst Latin texts have been conceptually distanced from their context of vernacular accounts, with which they clearly interacted. This volume is, in large part, intended to redress these shortcomings.

It is not alone in so doing. Recent years have seen a significant growth in research which makes innovative inquiries of this extensive corpus of texts, poems, and songs as works of literature, with their own artistic and semiotic rationale, rather than as repositories of defective source material representing an external historical reality.

The last few years have seen a flourishing of academic activity on the medieval historiographical tradition of the First Crusade. New editions and accompanying studies of many of the key Latin texts have emerged, with more to appear in the near future. In spite of this, the relationship between the various accounts of the First Crusade in the two centuries after the expedition, in Latin and French, confounds easy comprehension. The crusade texts fail to exhibit any simple hierarchical relationship of copying material. The variance of these texts is, in fact, much better suited to a more fluid model of understanding textual transmission, and the question of whether it might not be profitable to view the corpus of material in the crusade texts in light of Zumthor's mouvance is increasingly being raised.

Moving away from considering texts as discrete, archetypal artefacts, and instead viewing them as manifestations of a wider underlying tradition, has the side effect of rendering null the earlier dismissal of texts as ‘derivative’. Nineteenth-century textual categorization, with a formal approach to compositional hierarchies, saw some texts as reworked versions of others, and therefore less unique, or valuable: for example, the previous titling of the Gesta Francorum ‘Tudebodus abbreviatus’. Famously, the Chanson d'Antioche, recently translated and comprehensively studied by Edgington and Sweetenham, contains no ‘historical’ information which could not already be established from the Latin texts. It does not follow, however, that this text, and others like it, have nothing to contribute to knowledge of the textual memorialization, historiography, and wider social conception of the First Crusade. This is especially pertinent since it is now near-unanimously agreed that a reservoir of popular, possibly oral, material predated the Antioche, and was utilized in other vernacular and Latin texts.

The text which is the subject of this chapter, the unedited-in-full Siege d'Antioche, is one which has been, since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth-century, largely neglected in terms of its potential to add useful historical information to our understanding of the First Crusade. However, this lengthy work is testament to the developing social narrative of that crusade, as the cultural habit of crusading itself underwent revision and revivification in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.