Two Wars and a Song
By: Andrew Thornebrooke
Tags: Poetry, France, Teaching, History, Medieval

Two Wars and a Song

A Brief History of Guilhem de Tudela’s Crusade Song

written by Andrew Thornebrooke

Guilhem de Tudela’s Canso de la Crozada, more commonly referred to by its French title, Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, is an epic poem written in Old Occitan which follows the events of the Albigensian Crusades. Written in two parts, first by Tudela during the war, and later by an anonymous continuator in the thirteenth century, the poem offers a rich narrative for the historical events of the conflict and how it was perceived.

Tudela’s poem is written in verse, reflecting the form and content of many northern French works of the chanson de geste genre, and is 9,572 lines in length. Structurally, the first section of the canso is based on the Chanson de Antioch, which Guilhem cites in the second laisse, writing “this song is modelled on that of Antioch and has the same verse structure and, for those who can use it, melody.” The narrative frame of the canso is interestingly divided in scope and intent, with Tudela’s contribution, forming the first third of the work, presenting a sweeping and heroic narrative of the French army up until Tudela’s death in 1214, while the anonymously-written second portion of the text presents an uncommon and quite sombre telling of the remainder of the conflicts up through 1219.

The ending point of the poem in 1219, shortly after the siege of Toulouse and the death of Simon de Montfort, offers an interesting question as to the purpose of the anonymous author’s contribution. Considering that the Occitan campaign ended a decade later, in 1229, and that the second author likely finished the work in the latter half of the thirteenth century, the ending of the story may suggest that the later campaigns in the 1220’s were seen as a separate conflict, or that, perhaps, the narrative was employed in a semi-biographical nature around the lords of Toulouse and Montfort and Pope Innocent III, who had all died by 1219.

There is a single surviving manuscript of Tudela’s work in its entirety, preserved at the Biblitheque nationale de France. Most likely written in Toulouse around 1275, it has served as the basis of every critical edition of the work, and to date, there has been no attempt to compile an edition which incorporates other manuscript fragments. Additionally, such a path of transmission makes it quite difficult to determine the popularity of the text or its use with contemporaries, despite its being one of only three narrative accounts of the Albigensian Crusades.

The first published edition of the work was Claude Fauriel’s 1837 French translation, and the first critical edition, published in two volumes in 1875 and 1879 by Paul Meyer, also contained a French translation. Further editions consist of a three-volume version by Eugene Martin-Chabot, published in 1973; a bilingual (French and Occitan) edition with a full facsimile of the original manuscript, compiled by Henri Gougaud and published in 1984; and, most recently, an English Translation by Janet Shirley in 1996.

Tudela’s epic offers invaluable insight into one of the most significant wars of French history

Canso de la Crozada is an invaluably significant work for the study of the later crusades, and particularly of the European campaigns. Its value stems from the fact that there are so few other sources documenting the Albigensian Crusades, that it offers accounts of narrators from both sides of the conflict, and offers both a panegyric and narrative basis for one of the first instance of military contact in a crusading context between Latin Christians. Additionally, the text can be mined for small gems which relate to the study of material history, as well as the field of military history, as it offers detailed account of the movement of troops, their routes for supplies, and the manner in which spoils of war were divided up and for what purposes, such as in its depiction of the siege of Carcassonne.

Pedagogically, Canso de la Crozada could most effectively be used to teach the later crusades within the context of intra-European Christian violence and the institutional development of instrument for holy war developed by the pontificate of Innocent III, which are frequently referred to in the work. Tudela’s account also serves as a wonderful tool for prosopographic inquiry, as it finely details the movements, locations, relationships, and agreements of the major players of the Occitan campaigns, including the lords of Aragon, France, and Occitania. Finally, it may be particularly well received when divided into two by author, and studied in comparison for the purposes of navigating the nuances of how drastically different perceptions of a crusade could be between persons within a region.

Overall, Guilhem de Tudela’s poem is a rich and powerful narrative source, which offers a keen insight into the lived experiences of crusade in the thirteenth century, as well as the ideology of crusading. The limited manuscript tradition, while hampering to the study of the poem’s transmission, is nonetheless useful for winnowing out the potential of multiple versions being confused. Both the form and content of the work, and its editions, make the canso an invaluable resource to the teaching of the later crusades.