ABSTRACT
This paper argues that Ernoul's account of the events of 1187 was composed as a direct rebuttal of some of the stories the author had heard circulating among the Westerners who arrived in the East on the Third Crusade. It is proposed that the text was largely conceived as an apologia for Balian of Ibelin, particularly regarding his political alliance with Raymond of Tripoli and his role as the chief negotiator in the surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin.
When I was a graduate student my mentor, Jonathan Riley-Smith, warned me against piling hypothesis on hypothesis and thus building a house of cards that can all-too-easily collapse. Another foible that examiners of theses for higher degrees will pounce on given half a chance is advancing a plausible, if unverifiable theory in the most hesitant manner possible, only to speak of this same theory a few pages later as if it were a firmly established orthodoxy. But there does come a moment when one has to throw caution to the wind. What follows is my own reading of the history written by Ernoul, the squire of that celebrated nobleman Balian of Ibelin. What is being offered here can never be more than a hypothesis – or, to be more precise, a series of hypotheses – and so they need to be approached with an appropriate measure of scepticism.
A new edition of the anonymous text that was edited in the nineteenth century with the title La Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier has recently appeared.Footnote1 In the form in which it has been transmitted to posterity, the Chronique was completed in the early 1230s. It is written in French and deals with the history of the crusades and the Latin East from 1099 until 1231. It originated in northern France, quite likely at or near the abbey of Corbie not far from Amiens. In the description of the events of May 1187, there is an incident in which Balian of Ibelin sends his squire – or more properly his varlet or servant – Ernoul into a castle to gather news, and the anonymous author says: ‘it was he who had this story put into writing’ (‘ce fu cil qui cest conte fist metre en escript’).Footnote2 (Note that the phrasing may well imply that Ernoul employed an amanuensis.) So what exactly did Ernoul or his amanuensis write? His original narrative has not survived, but a reasonable idea of what it comprised can be gained from a close reading of the Chronique. Ernoul could, of course, have done no more than record what happened on that particular day, but an examination of the extant text suggests that he wrote far more, and that the author of the Chronique, working some forty years after this incident, drew on this narrative extensively in composing his own history. It is my contention that Ernoul told the story of the events leading up to and surrounding the battle of Hattin and the surrender and evacuation of Jerusalem in some considerable detail, and that he did so in a way that presented his own master in a favourable light – indeed making out that Balian of Ibelin was a heroic figure, the one man who emerged from the catastrophes of 1187 with his reputation for wisdom and integrity intact.Footnote3 What is preserved in the Chronique is a detailed, if contentious, narrative, and it was pointed out long ago by John Gillingham that with the evacuation of Jerusalem in the closing weeks of 1187 the tenor of the narrative changes completely: for the Third Crusade and events later in the 1190s it becomes far more sketchy, and it is self-evidently far less well informed; what is more, Balian of Ibelin, who up to now has held centre stage, almost entirely disappears.Footnote4 So I would agree with Gillingham that Ernoul’s account ended there. That hypothesis would seem on balance to be more likely than the alternative, which is that Ernoul’s history continued but the anonymous author of the Chronique ceased using it.
How far back in time Ernoul’s account stretched is more difficult to ascertain; there are pro-Ibelin elements in the narrative for 1177 when Balian and his brother Baldwin’s prowess in the battle of Montgisard is compared favourably to that of Roland and Oliver at Roncevaux,Footnote5 and it well could be that Ernoul was responsible for much of the other material from the 1170s and early 1180s that, arguably, was providing the necessary background for the events of 1186 and 1187. Indeed, the Chronique’s opening sentence, ‘Hear and learn how the land of Jerusalem and the Holy Cross was conquered by the Saracens from Christians’ (‘Oïés et entendés comment la tiere de Jherusalem et la Sainte Crois fu conquise de Sarrasins sour Crestiens’), which describes the narrative that Ernoul is thought to have written rather than the whole work which continues to 1231, could well have been Ernoul’s.Footnote6
But there are other strands in the early pages of the text that cannot have been part of his narrative. Here of course I am skating on very thin ice because what I want to do is attribute to Balian’s varlet those passages that fit my theories and exclude those that do not. In other words, the argument is both subjective and circular. However, there are some sections that can be confidently identified as not having been part of the original account, chief among them a description of the sacred geography of the Holy Land and a detailed description of the topography of Jerusalem both of which have every appearance of having been pre-existing texts that our author incorporated into his final account.Footnote7 There is also information about the Byzantine world which clearly foreshadows the acquisition of the imperial throne by a member of the comital dynasty of Flanders in 1204.Footnote8 In addition, there are self-evidently fictive stories about Roger II of Sicily, the Second Crusade, and Saladin’s rise to power in Egypt which evidently represent much later tales, but whether they were recorded by Ernoul or were only introduced into the text by the author of the Chronique is impossible to say.Footnote9 However, to get a sense of the likely scale of Ernoul’s narrative, let me offer some statistics: the Chronique d’Ernoul is in total about 90,000 words long. The narrative for the two years 1186–1187 occupies almost exactly the entire second quarter of the whole book, so that the story of the evacuation of Jerusalem late in 1187 comes at the mid-point in the text. Not everything in the account of 1186 and 1187 is by Ernoul, but we are still looking at a narrative of at least 15,000 words – a substantial piece of history writing in its own right.
There is, however, an obvious problem. Although I believe we can get some idea of the scope of the history that Ernoul wrote, what we cannot know is how far the author, working in northern France around 1230, was content to copy his narrative more or less as he found it and how far he adapted it. I should like to believe that he did not make any substantial changes, but is this just wishful thinking? All I can do is assert that what I shall refer to as the ‘Ernoul material’ displays a coherence and purpose, and also a linguistic consistency, that suggests that it has not been altered too much. In support of this view, I can only say that the ‘Ernoul material’ does not allude to later events and so is self-contained, and, apart from the isolated instance, referred to above, of the identification of Ernoul as the author, there is nothing in it that reads as if it is an editorial aside.
The next question has to be: when and where was it written? This brings me to the central point in this paper. I should like to suggest that Ernoul was writing in the East during the Third Crusade, and, as the title of this paper indicates, that he was trying to correct what he saw as misunderstandings about what had happened in 1187 that were widespread among the crusaders from the West; in particular he set out to rebut various accusations that were almost certainly being levelled at his master, Balian of Ibelin. Here again, the absence of references forward to later events is, I think, suggestive. In other parts of the Chronique there are remarks that indicate that the author was writing with hindsight, but not here.Footnote10 Thus, for example, there is no suggestion that Balian was dead – he appears to have died late in 1193 or early in 1194Footnote11 – nor is there any mention of his son, the equally celebrated John of Ibelin lord of Beirut.
So could Ernoul’s history have been written during the crusade? Other texts certainly were. It has recently been claimed that the anonymous history that, for better or for worse, is usually known as IP1 was written in the East in or just after the closing weeks of 1190,Footnote12 and another recent claim is that the text known since the end of the nineteenth century as the Historia regum Hierusalem Latinorum ad deplorationem perditionis Terrae Sanctae accommadata was also written in the East during the Third Crusade or very soon after.Footnote13 Another narrative that may perhaps have been written before or during the crusaders’ siege of Acre is the main section of the anonymous account of the fall of Jerusalem known as the Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum.Footnote14 If that dating is correct – and the recent editors, Kane and Brewer, admit to a certain uncertainty – that would be highly significant, because this text is, to my knowledge, the earliest which predates the appearance of the Chronique in the 1230s in which an author indicates knowledge of the ‘Ernoul material’.Footnote15 The Libellus de expugnatione does not make extensive use of it, but there are some notable parallels, enough to support the belief that the author of the Libellus had read Ernoul’s history, or had heard it read, but perhaps did not have a copy to hand when writing.Footnote16 In short, if the Libellus is early, Ernoul is even earlier.Footnote17 These arguments for an early date are certainly not watertight, but when put alongside the proposition that the work as a whole was conceived as an apologia for Balian – this is the principal thrust of this paper as set out in the pages that follow – they all point to the same conclusion.
If Ernoul’s original history was indeed as early as is being claimed and was a French prose narrative – and there are none of the tell-tale signs that would suggest that it has been translated from Latin or was originally written in verse – there is also a significant literary implication: it would have had to have been an extremely early example of history-writing in that genre, predating both Villehardouin (c. 1209) and the earliest form of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle (mid – to late 1190s) – a genre that would have appealed to a wider audience than previously.Footnote18 But even if it was rather later than is suggested here, it can be still be seen as marking the beginning of a tradition of langue d’oïl history-writing in the Latin East which attracted both lay and clerical authors and which in the thirteenth century largely eclipsed the use of Latin.Footnote19
So, let’s explore the idea that Ernoul was setting out to explain to the crusaders from the West what had really happened – or at least give his version of events – and at the same time deflect criticism from Balian. The crusaders, naturally enough, would have wanted to know how it was that the Latin possessions in the East, and in particular Jerusalem, had been lost, and no doubt there were many stories and explanations about what had happened in circulation. The official, clerical interpretation emphasised sin as the underlying cause of the loss of Jerusalem, but that still left the specific causes of the disasters of 1187 wide open to all sorts of rumour, misinformation, and speculation.
We have to bear in mind that the Chronique d’Ernoul and the later re-working and expansion of this text that is variously known as Eracles, or the ‘Colbert-Fontainebleau’ text of the Old French Continuations of William of Tyre,Footnote20 provide the fullest account from a Christian standpoint of the events of 1186 and 1187, and as a result they have to a considerable degree influenced historians’ perceptions with which we are all familiar. So, for example, Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume A History of the Crusades appeared in the early 1950s and enjoyed an unsurpassed dominance in the field, at least in the English-speaking world, for the next thirty years, made extensive and largely uncritical use of these two histories for the period from the death of Baldwin IV in 1185 to the surrender of Jerusalem.Footnote21
Although a careful comparison of the two histories shows that Ernoul is far less polemical than Eracles when it comes to apportioning blame,Footnote22 Ernoul nevertheless highlights the political divisions in the kingdom that led directly to the tactical error which resulted in the defeat at Hattin, and he places the onus for these divisions on Guy of Lusignan and his circle whose seizure of power on the death of the child king, Baldwin V, in 1186 was the defining event. He also accepts sin as the explanation for the loss of Jerusalem, specifying that it was the sin of the clergy under the leadership of Patriarch Eraclius that was to blame, thus giving this familiar topos an anti-clerical twist.Footnote23
Balian, on the other hand, can do no wrong. An accomplished warrior and military leader, he proved himself wise and persistent. It was a not a view that was universally accepted. The Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi has a vicious attack on Balian and his wife, Maria Komnene, apropos the divorce of Isabella and Humphrey of Toron in 1190.Footnote24 Writing of the events of 1192, Ambroise, in a celebrated couplet, described Balian as ‘more false than a goblin’:
So far as the events of 1187 are concerned, it would seem that there were two potential accusations in particular against Balian that Ernoul wanted to counter. One was that as a political ally of Raymond of Tripoli, he shared Raymond’s guilt; Raymond had done his utmost to undermine Guy of Lusignan’s authority and had consorted treasonably with Saladin to the extent of allowing Muslim troops to join the garrison of Tiberias; he had then fled the field of battle at Hattin.Footnote26 The other accusation arose from Balian’s role as the chief negotiator in the surrender of Jerusalem in October 1187. Although the popes and the authorised preachers of the crusade seem to have been careful to avoid saying so, it was widely held that it had been the sin of the inhabitants that had led directly to the fall of Jerusalem.Footnote27 It would have been a short step from there to seeing Balian, the spokesman for these sinful citizens, as sharing in their culpability. The Libellus de expugnatione, which, apart from Ernoul, gives by far the most detailed account of the siege from the Christian standpoint, laments the fact that the city surrendered on terms.Footnote28 The unstated implication is that the admittedly hard-pressed defenders should have kept going and, if necessary, should have been prepared to die. Whether the author, who tells us that he was in Jerusalem at the time, would have preferred the siege to end in a huge bloodbath is unclear. Another issue was the fate of the inhabitants. Those who could not ransom themselves were to be enslaved. The Muslim sources speak of 15,000 or 16,000 people enslaved;Footnote29 Ernoul puts the figure at 11,000.Footnote30 Presumably they were drawn from the poorest strata of society, and Balian, who had negotiated the terms, would be open to the accusations that he had sacrificed the poor to rescue the better off.
It has to be emphasised that no source explicitly accuses Balian of being guilty of these charges. What I am suggesting, however, is that Ernoul’s narrative was deliberately constructed to counter them, and that reading his account in this light makes perfect sense. Ernoul freely admits that Balian had been a political ally of Raymond of Tripoli and rightly so, because Guy of Lusignan’s seizure of power negated the succession arrangements drawn up by the dying Baldwin IV which all the leading figures in the kingdom had sworn to uphold.Footnote31 Yes – Raymond’s continued refusal to accept Guy as king and his involvement with Saladin were treasonable,Footnote32 but Balian, who accepted that he had been outmanoeuvred by Guy’s party and so did homage to Guy, distanced himself from Raymond and sought to effect a reconciliation.Footnote33 There was no suggestion in the narrative that he himself had had any dealings with Saladin,Footnote34 and then in May 1187, thanks in large measure to Balian’s mediation, Guy and Raymond were indeed reconciled.Footnote35 So, far from being implicated in Raymond’s treachery, Balian should take the credit for minimising the damage done and seeking to stabilise the situation.
At Hattin Balian was in command of the rear guard,Footnote36 and the implication is that he never reached the hill familiar to historians as the ‘Horns of Hattin’ or took part in Raymond’s final charge through the Muslim lines. So Balian is not mentioned in connection with what the hostile accounts saw as Raymond’s flight; and in any case, according to Ernoul, the charge in which Raymond and his squadron broke through the Muslim ranks and so escaped the field of battle took place in obedience to a specific royal command.Footnote37
The narrative of the siege and surrender of Jerusalem makes it clear that initially there were a series of engagements with the Muslims – this is confirmed by the Muslim sourcesFootnote38 – but it then became evident that the Muslims were going to breach the defences, and Balian was given the task of negotiating a surrender.Footnote39 The suggestion that the defenders should mount a suicidal attack on the Muslim camp was countered by the patriarch who pointed out that their wives and children would then be taken captive and forced to convert to Islam.Footnote40 So Balian, from an exceptionally weak bargaining position, was able to beat down Saladin’s initial demand and secure reasonable ransom terms – a process that is recounted in considerable detail.Footnote41 True there were still 11,000 who could not be ransomed, but Balian’s offer that he and the patriarch should surrender themselves as hostages and so stand surety for them was rejected.Footnote42 What then happened was that Saladin implemented the terms of the surrender agreement completely, thus proving that the faith that the people of Jerusalem had put in Balian was fully justified.Footnote43 Of course, the loss of Jerusalem was deplorable, but Balian’s success in saving the majority of the population from death or enslavement was nevertheless extraordinary. It is a dramatic narrative persuasively told. If its effect on its original target audience was negligible, its influence on more modern historiography has been considerable.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The Chronique d’Ernoul and the Colbert-Fontainebleau Continuation of William of Tyre, ed. Peter Edbury and Massimiliano Gaggero, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2023), vol. 1 [hereafter cited as Ernoul]. This is intended to supersede La Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier, ed. Louis de Mas Latrie (Paris, 1871). Note that Bernard the Treasurer’s name does not appear in the title of the new edition. It is our belief that he was not the author of some or all of this text, but either, intriguingly, was the patron who commissioned it, or, more prosaically, the man who commissioned a copy of the text that is the ancestor of two of the extant manuscripts. See Ernoul, 25–9.
2 Ernoul, 211.
3 Peter Edbury, ‘Ernoul, Eracles, and the Collapse of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’, in The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, ed. Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul (New York, 2018), 44–67; Ernoul, 6–10.
4 John Gillingham, ‘Roger of Howden on Crusade’, in Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds, ed. David O. Morgan (London, 1982), 60–75, at 72 n. 33; repr. John Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century (London and Rio Grande, 1994), 147 n. 33.
5 Ernoul, 101.
6 Ernoul, 10–11, 64
7 Ernoul, 120–41, 251–71. English translation: Denys Pringle, Pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Land, 1187–1291 (Farnham, 2012), 135–63, and see 29–34. See also Daniele Battistelli, ‘“Coment Jherusalem siet et l’estat de li”: La descrizione di Gerusalmme nella Cronaca di Ernoul (XII-XIII secolo)’, Eurostudium3W 59 (2022), https://rosa.uniroma1.it/rosa01/eurostudium/article/view/2707 (accessed November 10, 2023).
8 Ernoul, 68, 72–3, 143, 149–56.
9 Ernoul, 68–70, 91–8.
10 The clearest example is a reference embedded in the narrative for 1190 that looks forward to 1229 and the Treaty of Paris at the end of Albigensian Wars: Ernoul, 334.
11 Ernoul, 13.
12 Helen J. Nicholson, ‘The Construction of a Primary Source: The Creation of Itinerarium Peregrinorum 1’, Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes / Journal of Medieval and Humanistic Studies 37 (2019): 143–65, at 160.
13 Andrew D. Buck and Susan B. Edgington, ‘The Anonymous Historia regum Hierusalem Latinorum ad deplorationem perditionis Terrae Sanctae accommodata: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary’, Crusades 22, no. 2 (2023): 141–90, at 147–59.
14 The Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Anonymous Libellus de Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, ed. and trans. Keagan Brewer and James H. Kane (Abingdon, 2019), 10, 96–7.
15 For a recent suggestion that Ernoul may perhaps have influenced both Ambroise and Arnold of Lübeck, see Buck and Edgington, ‘The Anonymous Historia regum’, 151–2. It is a suggestion that implicitly discounts memory and oral tradition.
16 The Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, 36–44, 50. See also, James H. Kane, ‘Wolf’s Hair, Exposed Digits, and Muslim Holy Men: The Libellus de expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum and the Conte of Ernoul’, Viator 47, no. 2 (2016): 95–112.
17 For a further argument for an earlier date on the basis of the text’s hostile treatment of Renaud of Sidon who by 1191 was an associate of Balian, see Ernoul, 14–5.
18 Ernoul, 13–4. Three of the eight extant manuscripts of the Chronique also contain a version of Pseudo-Turpin: Ernoul, 34–5, 37.
19 Peter W. Edbury, ‘Writing and Copying History at Acre, c.1230–1291’ in Crusade, Settlement and Historical Writing in the Latin East and Latin West c.1100-c.1300, ed. Andrew D. Buck, James H. Kane, and Stephen J. Spencer (Woodbridge, 2024), 277–88.
20 Now re-edited as volume 2 of The Chronique d’Ernoul and the Colbert-Fontainebleau Continuation of William of Tyre, ed. Peter Edbury and Massimiliano Gaggero, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2023) [vol. 2 hereafter cited as Colbert-Fontainebleau], superseding L’estoire de Eracles empereur et la conqueste de la Terre d’Outremer: c’est la continuation de l’Estoire de Guillaume arcevesque de Sur, in RHC Oc 2 (Paris, 1859), 1–481. Completed in the 1240s, Colbert-Fontainebleau, 77–259, represents a re-working of Ernoul, 177–482, for the years 1184–1218.
21 Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1951–1954), 2: 444–68.
22 Edbury, ‘Ernoul, Eracles, and the Collapse of the Kingdom’, 56–61; Colbert-Fontainebleau, 10–12.
23 Ernoul, 144–9, 162. See also Ernoul, 85–7, for a further anti-clerical anecdote, which, if true, would have damaged the ability of the kingdom to defend itself. Whether this was in Ernoul’s original narrative is uncertain. See Peter W. Edbury, ‘Thoros of Armenia and the Kingdom of Jerusalem’, in Crusading and Warfare in the Middle Ages: Realities and Representations. Essays in Honour of John France, ed. Simon John and Nicholas Morton (Farnham, 2014), 181–90; Ernoul, 19–21.
24 Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, ed. William Stubbs, RS 38 (London, 1864), 121.
25 The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la Guerre Sainte, ed. Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber, 2 vols. (Woodbridge, 2003), 1: 141, lines 8688–9.
26 These accusations are expressed most stridently by English writers: The History of the Holy War, 1: 39, 40–41, 42, lines 2444–50, 2502–15, 2536–49, 2618–31; [Roger of Howden], Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi Benedicti Abbatis, ed. William Stubbs, RS 49, 2 vols. (London, 1869), 1: 359–60, cf. 2: 20–1; Itinerarium Peregrinorum, 13, 14–5, 121; Ralph of Diceto, Radulfi de Diceto Decani Londiniensis Opera Historica, ed. William Stubbs, RS 68, 2 vols. (London, 1876) 2: 56; William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglorum, ed. Richard Howlett in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, RS 82, 4 vols. (London, 1884), 1: 256, 258. See also, Jean Richard, ‘An Account of the Battle of Hattin Referring to the Frankish Mercenaries in Oriental Moslem States’, Speculum 27 (1952): 168–77, at 175–6. For similar, if more muted accusations in German sources, see Graham A. Loud, The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa (Farnham, 2010), 139, 174; The Chronicle of Arnold of Lübeck, trans. Graham A. Loud (Abingdon, 2019), 135–41. More generally on Raymond’s ‘treason’ and citing some sources not listed here, see Kevin James Lewis, The Counts of Tripoli and Lebanon in the Twelfth Century: Sons of Saint-Gilles (Abingdon, 2017), 264–7, 274–5.
27 Sylvia Schein, Gateway to the Heavenly City: Crusader Jerusalem and the Catholic West (1099-1187) (Aldershot, 2005), 172–5.
28 The Conquest of the Holy Land by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn, 209–13.
29 The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr for the Crusading Period from al-Kāmil fiʾl-taʾrīkh, trans. Donald S. Richards, 3 vols. (Aldershot, 2006–2008), 2: 332–3 (16,000 out of an estimated population of 60,000); Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, trans E.J. Costello (London, 1969), 162–3 (ʿImād al-Dīn al-Isfahānī: 15,000).
30 Ernoul, 292.
31 Ernoul, 176–8, 180, 183–4, 189–95.
32 Ernoul, 195–6, 205–7, 210.
33 Ernoul, 197–203.
34 But note Ernoul, 237, 249, where Saladin shows a readiness to let Balian return to Jerusalem after Hattin and then allows his wife and children to leave despite Balian breaking his promise to him not to stay in the city. Does this imply that there had been pre-existing amicable contacts between them?
35 Ernoul, 203–5, 215–6.
36 Ernoul, 226, 232–3.
37 Ernoul, 231–3.
38 The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athīr, 2: 330–1; ʿImād al-Dīn in Gabrieli, Arab Historians, 154.
39 Ernoul, 271–5.
40 Ernoul, 275–6.
41 Ernoul, 276–7, 279–87.
42 Ernoul, 292.
43 Ernoul, 287–96. Saladin’s adhesion to the agreement as portrayed by Ernoul marked a key moment in the development of the Western ‘Saladin legend’: Margaret Jubb, The Legend of Saladin in Western Literature and Historiography (Lewiston, 2000); Anne-Marie Eddé, Saladin, trans Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 465–91.