The Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk

The First Crusade (1095–99) was the stimulus for a remarkable burst of historical writing in the early decades of the twelfth century, beginning with the so-called ‘eyewitness’ accounts by participants and extending to numerous second-generation treatments that drew upon the eyewitness narratives, each other, and the memories of veterans of the crusade. Perhaps the closest pre-modern analogue to this thematically tightly focused body of historical writing is the corpus of works that chronicled the campaigns of Alexander the Great in the 330s and 320s bc. There is also the fundamental difference, however, that the contemporary or near-contemporary Alexander narratives are now lost, and our knowledge of them must derive from very late and incomplete reworkings, whereas we can be reasonably confident that the greater part of the Latin narrative corpus generated by the First Crusade survives, if not always in versions that fully preserve their original forms. This survival rate permits us to make comparative judgements not only about the genesis of each text, its sources and influences, but also about its reception and impact.

The history of the crusade now known as the Historia Ihero-solimitana was, by some margin, the most successful of these narratives, if success is measured by the number of extant manuscripts that preserve copies of it. Over 80 such manuscripts, from a wide range of places, survive from between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries (and there are references to some others since lost or destroyed).