The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean

INTRODUCTION

Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul

The French of Outremer is a title replete with ambiguity, one that plays on the multiple medieval resonances and modern historiographic traditions of two terms. French can designate a language, a literary tradition, or a cultural identity. In the central Middle Ages franceis invoked place and people in only the most general sense: the douce France that, to the heroes of the Chanson de Roland, was the opposite of Islamic Spain.¹ Although, for the Roland’s readers, Francia was an increasingly mythic empire of memory, it was in the guise of фραγγοζ (Frangos) and الافرنج (al-Ifranj) that the great diversity of Latin Christian peoples who took part in crusades appeared to observers in the Levant.² Outremer has been used for centuries to designate various overseas territories, and to this day outre-mer is associated with a variety of legal, administrative, and cultural relationships between France and its former colonies throughout the world. In the francophone West of the central and later Middle Ages, la terre d’outremer designated a similarly complex patchwork of principalities forged in the eastern Mediterranean in the context of the First Crusade in the decade from 1098–1109 and lasting until the fall of the last bastions of Frankish dynastic power in Cyprus and mainland Greece in the late fifteenth century. These principalities, whose borders and populations waxed and waned with the fortunes of the crusading movement, are variously known to modern scholarship as the Crusader States, the Latin East, The Frankish Levant, and, still, Outremer.³

The lands of Outremer had in common an eastern Mediterranean context and origins rooted in the crusades, but all were also dominated by a Latin Christian European elite who participated in a francophone culture. For this reason, our juxtaposition of French with Outremer might seem unnecessary or even redundant. In fact, however, we believe the joining of the two to be instructive and critically important. Since the late nineteenth century, both French and Outremer have remained principally the property of separate scholarly disciplines, the former residing in the literary and linguistic realm of French language studies and the latter within the purview of historians of the crusades. Until relatively recently, there seemed to be little that the one group of scholars might say to the other.⁴ When aspects of French-language culture of Outremer have been brought to the fore, moreover, the Frankish culture of the Levant has been seen as subordinated to the metropole of the Capetian Kingdom of France—the crusading East a curious dead end in the otherwise glorious march of the French nation.

In designating the essays collected here as studies in The French of Outremer, we owe a clear debt to our colleagues Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Thelma Fenster. Their innovative approach to French language in the British Isles as the French of England did much to expand scholarly appreciation of what were once marginal areas of French language studies.⁵ Their emphasis, moreover, on the importance of French in the multilingual culture of the medieval British Isles and their championing of the rich corpus of surviving of French-language texts created there has provided both inspiration and direction to our own inquiry into the uses of French in the eastern Mediterranean. Like the scholars currently at work on the French of England, we are interested in language, society, and culture; like them we want to bring to the fore a relatively neglected corpus: the extraordinary textual and artistic output of the French-speaking people of la terre d’outremer.

The few scholars to have addressed the larger questions of the significance of French in Outremer have often done so in strictly pragmatic terms. They have asked, for instance, whether the language served as a unifying force among Westerners in the Crusader States or if French-language use perpetuated divisions among those who came to settle in the East and who brought their own linguistic competencies with them. David Jacoby’s early work on French literature in the Latin East, for example, argued emphatically for a common and unified literary culture where the language served to transmit courtly and chivalric values to an audience of strictly elite consumers.⁶ Jacoby concluded that crusader-era members of the Levantine nobility read and enjoyed French-language works produced in the Holy Land and actively sought out new texts coming from the West. The importation of Western texts for the consumption of Eastern nobles in turn reinforced Western values in the new settlements and maintained cultural ties with the whole of Christian society. Other scholars claimed that francophone residents of the Latin East felt such a strong connection to the West that they considered themselves and their written products integral rather than marginal to the literary culture of the rest of Christendom, a view that few modern historians of the French language would have embraced.⁷

More recent assessments have qualified the characterization of a unified and restricted group of French-language users in the East, in part by widening the focus of inquiry to encompass non-elite users of the language and to include written texts that were not strictly literary in nature. Alan Murray, for example, has suggested that at the time of the First Crusade, the French language was ineffective as a unifying force since it was largely incomprehensible to members of the multiple linguistic groups who came east to fight, including speakers of Occitan, Franco-Provençale, Flemish, Low and High German, Norman French, and various Italian dialects.⁸ It was only after the crusaders had been well-established in their eastern territories, he maintains, that French served as a common language among Christian settlers. Similarly, scholars who have examined linguistic practices among members of the military orders have been skeptical of claims that members shared a uniform knowledge of French, since new recruits arrived from locales throughout the West where different vernacular traditions were the norm.⁹ Users of French in Outremer therefore appear as either a tightly knit group who communicated only among themselves and eagerly followed literary developments from the West or as a fragmented assemblage who over time came to use the language as a convenient middle ground, a mutually intelligible means of ad hoc communication.

Many arguments about the use of French in Outremer have been informed, sometimes innocently, by a much larger debate about whether or not to characterize the Latin East as a very early manifestation of European colonialism.¹⁰ This debate, which has raged since the 1970s, has always had a cultural component, as historians queried whether the Latin East was a place of cultural and intellectual production or totally dependent on a French cultural metropole. In 2004, for example, the editors of an otherwise extremely valuable collection of essays about the culture of the Frankish Levant wrote that the majority of settlers were French and the art and culture of Paris was of abiding interest to them. This assumption of a straightforwardly colonial relationship between the Frankish Levant and Capetian France (or, as here, just the capital of Paris), has enormous implications for the study of French-language texts produced in the East. Fortunately, a renewed attention to the texts themselves has encouraged an uncoupling of language and identity with regard to the French of Outremer. Most recently, for example, sociolinguist Cyril Aslanov has written that the French identity and the Old French language played a central and unifying role in the mosaic of people who settled in Syria-Palestine after 1098, in Cyprus after 1191, and in other Greek-speaking countries after 1204.¹¹ Even as Aslanov’s statement argues for the unifying role of the language, he upsets the presumption that the uses of French and French identity were one and the same in Outremer. The French identity is one assumed by the Westerners in the East and not one originating in a French mother country.

Perhaps the most substantive argument in favor of a reassessment of the Old French works created, elaborated, and circulated in Outremer comes from the texts themselves. The sheer variety, quantity, and originality of the corpus would defy attempts to label this material or its creators as derivative from or in any way peripheral to the medieval francophone world. Not only was French the idiom chosen for a range of different types of literate projects in the East, several of these projects represent very early, if not the earliest, examples of that kind of text first produced in French. It was in the Frankish Levant that writers produced one of the earliest vernacular legal treatises (Livre au roi), the earliest vernacular prose history (Chronique d’Ernoul), a major chanson de geste (Chétifs), and probably one of the earliest Arthurian romances (the Estoire dou Graal of Robert de Boron).¹² In addition to these types of works and the letters, memoirs, devotional manuals, and funerary inscriptions, we also have fragments of the earliest vernacular knightly autobiography; we hear snatches of the French lyrics sung in Syria and Cyprus, and we hear of vernacular falconry treatises. Many of these Eastern works, such as Ernoul, Chétifs, and the Estoire dou Graal, made their way to western Europe and were consumed voraciously by Western readers, as was the guide to aristocratic conduct written by the Cypriot knight Philip of Novara.¹³ Literary consumption certainly went in both directions across the Mediterranean, but the evidence of the surviving manuscripts, which bear witness to Outremer texts copied and distributed widely throughout the West, strongly suggests the place of Outremer as a producer, rather than simply a consumer, of French-language culture.

Happily, this impressive and long-overlooked literary culture now has its champions. Within the last decade, specialists in the study of French and Outremer have turned to face each other and found that each has much to contribute to the other.¹⁴ Scholars of the French language are increasingly eager to look beyond more traditional approaches, to fully engage with works from outside the boundaries of modern France, and to question the role of the eastern settlements in the story of the language.¹⁵ Historians of the crusades, having mined French-language texts for centuries to reconstruct and comprehend a political narrative, now fully acknowledge the creation of those texts as monuments and tools in the shaping and ordering of political communities.

OVERVIEW OF THE ESSAYS

This collection brings together these champions, historians of language, literature, crusader society, and material culture to offer a completely new consideration of the francophone world of the eastern Mediterranean that is decidedly interdisciplinary in its approach. While striving for clarity and cohesion, we also believe that true interdisciplinarity acknowledges a variety of research methods and perspectives. Indeed, to be truly inclusive of fields as dynamic as crusade history and Mediterranean multilingualism, we sought out scholars at different stages in their professional careers, working in various languages and within diverse scholarly traditions, as contributors to this volume. In the context of the emerging nature of this topic, we see the contributions of all of our essayists as complementary and critically important as we test the boundaries of our inquiry.

Many of the essays included here emerge from longstanding and entrenched disciplinary traditions. In the interest of providing pathways for cross-disciplinary readers, we offer some preliminary remarks on two debates that inform a number of the essays. The first addresses the complex family of Old French historical narrative texts that has formed the basis for our understanding of the timeline of events in the crusading Mediterranean, and the second concerns the tradition of nationally oriented philologies that have shaped how scholars recount the story of French and other European vernaculars.

Among the types of evidence scrutinized by historians for the life and histoire evenementielle of the Latin East are the narratives. Beginning with the major twelfth-century Latin chronicles of Fulcher of Chartres and William of Tyre, after around 1200 the narratives concerned with the Frankish Levant were composed almost entirely in the French vernacular. Manuscript compilations and redactions of these works from the thirteenth century onward give the erroneous impression that these works all emerge from a single tradition or practice of continuing the masterwork of William of Tyre. Despite nineteenth-century editorial projects intended to disentangle them, that impression proves difficult to dislodge. A sequence of chapters in this book demonstrates the true complexity and dynamism of the narratives of Outremer. The subjects for analysis here include a Latin chronicle written in the East translated into French in the West (Handyside); an independent Old French chronicle composed in the West drawing upon vernacular Eastern material (Gaggero); comparisons of this second chronicle with continuations of the first (Edbury); and literary interpolations within the Eastern Old French text (Shachar). The linguistic boundaries of the narrative corpus are pushed outward by a comparison between these types of works and a Greek narrative composed in the context of crusader Cyprus (Konnari).

Chapters that address linguistic aspects of the Outremer corpus rest on a tradition of philological study that emphasized locating texts, often in decontextualized samplings, based largely on graphic patterns and established linguistic norms. While some of our authors rely on this methodology (Minervini, Zinelli), they also acknowledge that these texts and their creators traveled from place to place, so that the linguistic evidence cannot stand alone as a final determinant of textual origin. Their careful layering of philological, codicological, and historical evidence encourages us all to take what we can from older methodologies and embrace the contributions of related disciplines.

Our first essay, by Laura Minervini, establishes a basis for our inquiry, setting out the state of research into the language that was written and spoken in Outremer. The evidence used in linguistic studies is broad but must usually rely on textual sources. Another extremely important but less often consulted site for the articulation of collective identity is coinage. It is to the most common coin of the eastern realms, the silver denier, that Alan Stahl turns in our second essay. Whether it was on the eastern Mediterranean mainland, in Cyprus, or in Greece, the denier coin type referred, textually yet wordlessly, to a broader French-speaking world. Much more than a simple imitation, the denier represented a platform on which the eastern principalities could add their own distinctive elements.

Political legitimacy and status depended not just on representations of power in the present, but also on control of the collective understanding of the past. As Peter Edbury demonstrates here, the memory of the events leading up to the decisive Battle of Ḥaṭṭīn (July 4, 1187), where the combined armies of the Kingdom of Jerusalem were defeated by Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī (Saladin) was still of central importance for the inhabitants of the Latin East in the 1250s. The stories told by survivors of Hittin, mediated through the sympathetic early memories of their families and supporters, led to a further revision of the Old French narrative tradition we know as the Continuations of the twelfth-century chronicle of William of Tyre. William of Tyre’s narrative invited vernacular continuations because it had been translated into Old French at some point in the 1220s. How exactly was this landmark project of Latin to Old French prose translation undertaken, and how did the perspective of the translator (who was working not in Palestine, but northern France) change the perspective of the narrative? These are the questions animating the essay by Philip Handyside, who reveals some of the changes introduced by the translator to make the work more comprehensible to a Western audience. His efforts were spectacularly successful, and his translation succeeded not only in the West but also on its return to the Latin East.

While we do not know precisely where in the francophone West Handyside’s translator was at work, Massimiliano Gaggero suggests that we may be able to locate a cultural center for the dissemination of the model of Old French prose historiography at the Abbey of Corbie. It was at Corbie that two Old French texts associated with events in Outremer, Robert of Clari’s Conquête de Constantinople and the Ernoul-Bernard chronicle, most likely assumed the shape in which we know them today. Both texts ostensibly composed by lay noblemen, Clari’s Conquête and Ernoul-Bernard demonstrate the innovation in form and authorship for French-language texts that we can now increasingly associate with Outremer and the crusades. Two other essays, by Angel Nicolaou-Konnari and Uri Shachar, explore additional aspects of the creative potential of the frontier zone, a place where the use of Old French highlights the permeability of ethnic and religious boundaries. The work at the center of Nicolaou-Konnari’s essay, Leontios Makhairas’s Recital Concerning the Sweet Land of Cyprus, was written in Cypriot Greek but, as she demonstrates, betrays influences from the Old French historiographical traditions of Outremer. Similarly, although the Estoires d’Outremer, the focus of Uri Zvi Shachar’s essay, was written in Old French, the story it tells about Saladin agrees with narrative traditions that were circulating in Arabic far beyond the borders of the Frankish East. The power of the work for the Outremer nobility, Shachar suggests, lies in the combination of Old French chivalric modus with the Arabic materia.

The issue of translation, raised indirectly by Shachar and Nicolaou-Konnari’s work on the movement of narrative influences across languages, is squarely at the center of the essays by Anne E. Lester and Zrinka Stahuljak. Each, however, handles the question of translation differently. Lester invokes the concept of linguistic translation to understand the process by which the material culture of the Byzantine Empire, taken from Byzantine churches and palaces following the conquest of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, was interpreted in new environments in the Latin West. This was a process, as Lester explains, that required both people and artworks in the form of new reliquaries. Stahuljak examines the market for translators that served European pilgrims to the Holy Land after the fall of the last stronghold of Frankish political power in the East in 1291. While Outremer as a political force had ceased to exist on the mainland, Stahuljak finds something more than a memory of the Frankish culture in the peculiar invocation of the term courtoisie in the context of hiring translators.

If we consider how one term like courtoisie would be understood by speakers and writers traveling across the medieval francophone world, it becomes immediately apparent that Italy, so often the point of transit between Latin West and Latin East, could also play a critical role as cultural mediator. There is no better evidence of Italian communities playing this role than that presented by Fabio Zinelli, who finds the scripta of Outremer French (to use Minervini’s term) in texts written in Italy both before and after 1291. More than just a scribal habit or foreign accent, Zinelli argues that Outremer French had clear political connotations for the Italian writers and copyists who invoked it in their texts.

Even as Zinelli’s Italian chroniclers and copyists gestured lightly but meaningfully toward the East with their adoption of the Outremer scripta, a more forceful statement of intention with regard to the European past and future of the Levant was in preparation in the Kingdom of France itself. The Norman lawyer Pierre Dubois and the royal advisor and diplomat Philippe de Mézières both wrote treatises, each about a century apart, in which they proposed plans for the reconquest of the Holy Land. Strikingly, as Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski explains, both advised that women should play important roles. Looking closely at what these two strategists had to say about the place of women in future crusading conquests, Blumenfeld-Kosinski shows that the fantasy of a new terre d’outremer looks less like fantasy and the high medieval past, resembling more and more the colonial future.

FIVE THEMATIC STRANDS

Hybridity and Innovation

What we have just presented is one way of following the sequence of essays in this volume. In fact, however, we encourage readers to see the many topical threads that run through these essays and that ultimately intertwine. Many of the essays, for instance, but particularly those of Minervini, Nicolaou-Konnari, and Shachar, treat the construction or emergence of new, hybrid forms of language and written expression. These forms resulted both from the introduction of the French language into eastern territories and from the creation of a new, separate francophone space (Outremer) in which textual traditions evolved in their own right while coming repeatedly into contact both with other linguistic and cultural worlds (Cypriot Greek and Ayyubid Arabic) and with contemporary francophone cultures (such as chivalric romance and biography).

Translation and Transportation

Other essays, as signaled previously, engage with themes of translation and transportation. While some of these essays (for instance, Handyside and Stahuljak) speak directly to the process of translating between other languages and French, others tease out less discernable acts of translation that work to convey linguistic (Zinelli) or literary norms (Shachar, Gaggero) from Outremer to another tradition or locale. Other essays explore the mechanics of transporting French-language practices and practitioners from Outremer to the West (Zinelli, Stahuljak) as well as totems of Eastern religious identity (Lester) from an Eastern to a Western context. In some way, all of these essays begin with an idea, narrative, object, custom, or person originating from Outremer and describe how their removal from the context of the Latin East may have altered them in some way.

Practicalities

Although fantasy and exoticism played an important role in many of the French texts coming from Outremer, some French-language users confronted the Outremer experience more concretely. Coins in Jerusalem featuring French-language inscriptions formed a part in the quotidian reality of the Latin East (Stahl), and French-language place names marked the neighborhoods where settlers came to live their daily lives (Minervini). Strategies for getting to (Stahuljak) or recapturing (Kosinski) the lands of Outremer required a realistic, not romanticized, approach toward language and communication. These essays often push beyond the strictly literary uses of French to consider how the language served a specific need or community in Outremer.

Negotiating Identity

Texts from and about the Frankish Levant repeatedly assert the existence of a clearly understood ultramarine identity, often associated with the term poulains. Precisely what elements of dress, speech, behavior, and ideology might have constituted grounds for recognition within this group remain an obscure and a relatively unexplored subject. Much light is shed here, however, on the kinds of supports, some material and iconographic (Stahl), others linguistic (Zinelli, Minervini, Stahuljak), cultural (Shachar), and political and commemorative (Edbury, Handyside, Gaggero) around which such an identity could have been constructed. Importantly, and unlike so much of what has been written about European identity in the Middle Ages, the Frankish (poulain) identity that emerges from these essays is not one constructed primarily in opposition to a non-European or non-Christian Other. More often it appears to have been negotiated and even co-opted or imagined (Kosinski) with reference to other Latin European communities, responding forcefully to whatever those communities might say about the poulains (Edbury).

Italy’s Silent Role

The title of this collection naturally privileges interactions with the French vernacular, which is in turn most closely associated with the Kingdom of France. The Italian peninsula was also home to French-language products and practitioners, and the connections that existed between the French of Italy and French of Outremer (Zinelli) remain an open question. Not only were French-language texts exchanged between Italy and Outremer with some frequency, French speakers often traveled through Italy either coming from (Lester) or going to the Holy Land (Stahuljak). Despite the secondary role that the Italian space has traditionally occupied in crusades study, it functioned as a cosmopolitan locale that connected East and West, where people, objects (Stahl), and texts were imported and exported. If we look beyond the temporal scope of the essays found in this collection we see that Italy eventually took on a dominant role in the areas in the East, such as the Morea, that were once francophone and that identified culturally as French.¹⁶

THE DIGITAL ADDENDUM

In opening these new inquiries into hitherto unexamined modes of medieval communications, we aim to harness a range of new modes of scholarly communication. This book is supplemented by a digital addendum allowing greater elaboration and exploration of the questions raised in these printed essays.¹⁷ The digital medium allows the authors in this volume to create an online repository of digital knowledge, as is the case with Philip Handyside’s linked manuscript stemma, or to use new ways of sharing the lived experience of francophone settlers, as with the printable crusader coins from Alan Stahl’s essay. We hope the digital addendum will open new avenues of exploration and knowledge exchange.

NOTES

1. Simon Gaunt, "The Chanson de Roland and the Invention of France," in Rethinking Heritage: Cultures and Politics in Europe, ed. Robert Shannan Peckham (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 90–101; Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 29–31.

2. For the memory of the Franks, see Matthew Gabriele, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem Before the First Crusade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). For Frankish identity in the context of conquest and crusade, see Marcus Bull, Overlapping and Competing Identities in the Frankish First Crusade, in Le Concile de Clermont et l’appel à la croisade (Rome: École française de Rome, 1997), 195–211; Alan V. Murray, Ethnic Identity in the Crusader States: The Frankish Race and the Settlement of Outremer, in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Simon Forde, Lesley Johnson, and Alan V. Murray (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995), 59–73; Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, and Cultural Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 101–5.

3. It is important to note that the ultramarine gaze that designated a far shore as a terre d’outremer extended in both directions. So the residents of the Latin East would commonly refer to the West as outremer.

4. See, for example, Daniel H. Weiss and Lisa J. Mahoney, France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Cyril Aslanov, Le français au Levant, jadis et naguère: À la recherche d’une langue perdue (Paris: H. Champion, 2006); and especially the work of Peter Edbury and Laura Minervini, both of whom have contributed essays to this collection.

5. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, General Introduction: What’s in a Name; The ‘French’ of ‘England,’ in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 1–14.

6. Les contacts entre Occident et Orient, ainsi qu’entre les pays de conquête de la Méditerrané orientale, argues Jacoby, ont été grandement facilités par un facteur linguistique; David Jacoby, La littérature française dans les états latins de la Méditerranée orientale à l’époque des croisades: Diffusion et création, in Essor et fortune de la chanson de geste dans l’Europe et l’Orient latin, Société Roncevalles (Modena: Mucchi, 1984), 619.

7. Aslanov, Le français au Levant, 35.

8. Alan V. Murray, National Identity, Language and Conflict in the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1096–1192, in The Crusades and the Near East: Cultural Histories, ed. C. Kostick (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 115.

9. Anthony Luttrell, The Hospitallers’ Early Written Records, in The Crusades and Their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, ed. J. France and W. Zajac (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 135–54; Joseph M. Brincat, The Languages of the Knights: Legislation, Administration and Diplomacy in a Multilingual State (14th–16th centuries), in Language and Diplomacy, ed. Jovan Kurbalija and Hannah Slavik (Msida, Malta: DiploProjects, Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies, University of Malta, 2001), 261–79.

10. The argument for a colonial character was made most forcefully by Joshua Prawer, The Crusaders’ Kingdom: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (New York: Praeger, 1972). For counter- arguments, see Moses I. Finley, Colonies: An Attempt at a Typology, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th Series 26 (1976): 167–88, and the debate in The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: The First European Colonial Society? A Symposium, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar (London: Variorum, 1992), 341–66. For commentary, see Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 14–19, and Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Oxford: Manchester University Press, 2011), 178.

11. Aslanov, Crusaders’ Old French, in Research on Old French: The State of the Art, ed. Deborah L. Arteaga, Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 88 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 207.

12. For the date of the Livre au Roi, see Livre au Roi, ed. Myriam Greilsammer (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, 1995), 83–86. For the date of Ernoul, see Peter Edbury’s essay in this volume. For Chétifs as a product of the court of Antioch, see Linda M. Paterson, Occitan Literature and the Holy Land, in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), 83–100. For the Eastern context of the Estoire dou Graal, see Helen Nicholson, Love, War, and the Grail: Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights in Medieval Epic and Romance (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 151.

13. On Philip’s popularity, see Roberto Tagliani, un nuovo frammento dei ‘Quatre âges de l’homme’ di Philippe de Novare tra le carte dell’Archivio di Stato di Milano, Critica del Testo (2013): 44–51. Thanks to Christopher Rose for drawing our attention to this essay.

14. For more on this, see Laura Minervini’s essay in this collection.

15. Gaunt, French Literature Abroad: Towards an Alternative History of French Literature, Interfaces 1 (2015), accessed at http://riviste.unimi.it/interfaces/article/view/4938.

16. Thanks go to Zrinka Stahuljak for this keen observation.

17. The digital addendum can be accessed at http://fordham.bepress.com/medieval_pubs/1/.

WHAT WE KNOW AND DON’T YET KNOW ABOUT OUTREMER FRENCH

Laura Minervini

The label Outremer French refers to an Old French dialect used in the Latin East with specific features distinguishing it from other Old French dialects. Its existence is not a new discovery: among the pioneers of this field were Antoine Thomas and Edith Brayer in the early 1920s and ’30s, followed by Gianfranco Folena and Valeria Bertolucci in the following generation.¹ The sources for their study of the language came primarily from texts published in the monumental collection Recueil des historiens des Croisades,² as well as texts they edited themselves. Although Folena never edited an Outremer French text, he made ample use of Jean Richard’s important collection of Cypriot documents,³ and his work with Outremer French was principally the byproduct of his efforts to document the spread of the Venetian dialect in the eastern Mediterranean. On the whole, this group of scholars worked on a relatively limited corpus of texts that were often not carefully edited from a philological point of view. Despite these restrictions, the keen insight of these early scholars is praiseworthy, and their groundbreaking research remains valuable today.

The impressive results achieved by Thomas, Brayer, Folena, and Bertolucci in documenting the presence of a French-speaking community in the Latin East, with its own well-documented dialect, was unfortunately disregarded by most authors of Old French handbooks and histories of the French language. It is to the credit of Alain Rey, Frédéric Duval, and Gilles Siouffi to be the first to devote a chapter to the diffusion of French in the eastern Mediterranean in their recent book, Mil ans de langue française.⁴

What changed in the last few years in terms of understanding Outremer French was, on the one hand, a greater availability of reliable editions of the texts produced in Outremer, including Philip of Novara’s Mémoires, the Chronicle of the Templar of Tyre, John of Ibelin’s Law Book, and the Acre Bible.⁵ In addition, historical research on the social and cultural history of Outremer has also advanced, led by scholars such as Joshua Prawer, David Jacoby, Benjamin Z. Kedar, Hans E. Mayer, Jean Richard, Michel Balard, Bernard Hamilton, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and Peter Edbury, to name but a few. Although their works were first published in the 1970s, philologists did not become aware of them until much later due to lack of curiosity, academic habits, or cultural and disciplinary fences. The conditions are now more favorable for the development of research on Outremer French, and initial attempts have been undertaken by Cyril Aslanov, Pierre Nobel, Fabio Zinelli, and myself, from different perspectives and using different methodological tools.⁶ Many other, more junior scholars are now also engaged with this material from various disciplinary perspectives.

What, therefore, is new about Outremer French? What have we discovered that was previously unknown to the founding fathers and mothers of our field of research? I would suggest two main directions. The first concerns the social diffusion of the language, not only in the French ruling class, but also among the lower strata of society. The second attempts to identify the specific linguistic features that distinguish Outremer French from other Old French dialects.

It was previously believed that French in the Latin East, Flanders, and Italy did not give rise to its own literary tradition, nor to a peculiar linguistic variety. In the words of Serge Lusignan, aucune de ces implantations artificielles du français n’a donné naissance à une littérature propre, ni produit un registre original de la langue écrite, ainsi que ce fut le cas en Angleterre.⁷ The question remains open as to whether the situations of Italy and Flanders should be considered instances of artificial implantation of French, and if so, what characteristics these implantations might have shared. In fact, the cultural and political situations within the two regions varied greatly, since southern Italy was home to a French- and Occitan-speaking social elite following the late thirteenth-century arrival of the Angevins, a French-speaking dynasty, while a network of cultural influences was at work in Flanders and other areas to the north. The Latin East, however, was another story: as it is well known, in the wake of a mostly French-speaking ruling class, a stream of settlers from northern and southern France arrived overseas, in the newly founded Crusader States—the Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1291[–1489]),⁸ the Principality of Antioch (1098–1268), the counties of Edessa (1098–1149) and Tripoli (1104–1289). Such a process of migration makes the social situation of the Crusader States comparable—according to some scholars—to that of modern colonies.⁹

The ruling class of the Crusader States, and of Cyprus and Morea from the thirteenth century, was mainly composed of members of the northern- and southern-French aristocracy. Jonathan Riley-Smith has demonstrated that most of the first crusaders—that is, the participants in the military expedition of 1096–1099—left the Holy Land after the conquest.¹⁰ However, their expeditions to the East opened the way to subsequent waves of migrating nobles, along with their attendants. The research of Alan Murray and Thomas Asbridge has demonstrated that the Principality of Antioch, founded by Bohemond de Hauteville after the First Crusade, was largely ruled by Normans in the first thirty years of the twelfth century.¹¹ Jean Richard came to a similar conclusion for the Occitan nobility in the county of Tripoli, founded by Raymond IV de Saint-Gilles.¹² More newcomers arrived from Anjou, Poitou, Champagne, and other French regions over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹³ Other components of Frankish society in Outremer were also native French or Occitan speakers and included officers of the chanceries, the upper ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the core members of the religious orders, most notably the Templars and Hospitallers.¹⁴

It is more difficult to recognize the origin and linguistic competence of members of lower social classes, including settlers residing in the coastal cities or in inland towns and villages. Research on onomastical data, however, shows evidence of the prominent role of the French,¹⁵ and similar conclusions can be drawn from an analysis of new town foundations.¹⁶ But one must acknowledge that much information is still lacking in this field.¹⁷

Demographic data does help to explain the choice of French as opposed to other vernacular forms as a written language for vernacular texts from the thirteenth century on. Occitan might have been a likely competitor, but it ultimately was not: although much of the