“Go, Sirventoys, Swiftly as an Arrow”: The Unbound Transmission of Song in Crusading Contexts

ABSTRACT

Available documentation of medieval music is almost exclusively limited to bound codices. Against this backdrop, this article explores how musical information was also communicated via more easily transportable, inexpensive material forms during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with an emphasis on leaflets that circulated independently of codices. I shall focus on three song genres that can be found in the context of the crusading enterprise: the Old French political song; the Latin liturgical prosa; and the Latin secular lament. Transmission across long distances was especially relevant in this crusading context – between the east and west of the Mediterranean as well as within the so-called crusader states. By integrating textual, musical, musico-palaeographical, and codicological methods of analysis, this article assesses the social and political significance of these songs and uncovers the motivations to disseminate them using such patterns of communication among crusader communities.

KEYWORDS:

• communication
• crusades
• manuscript fragments
• liturgy
• Latin song
• medieval music

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am grateful to Mary Channen Caldwell, Aviya Doron, James Grier, Anna Gutgarts, Tamar Kojman, Shulamit Sarid, and the anonymous reviewers for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper and to Tzafrir Barzilay, Francesco Carrapezza, John Haines, Kate Helsen, Brayden Olson, Jonathan Rubin, and Iris Shagrir for their valuable comments on pertinent topics. For two seminal monographs on the crusader states, with an emphasis on their connection to Western authorities, communities, and individuals, see Joshua Prawer, Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem, volumes I–II (Paris: CNRS, 1969–71); idem, Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972). The Eurocentrism inherent to the term “crusader states” and its usefulness for modern historians have recently been the topic of lively scholarly debate. See especially Christopher MacEvitt, “Colonialism and the Multicultural Turn in the Study of the Crusades”, Viator 30/3 (2019): 49–78; Andrew D. Buck, “Settlement, Identity, and Memory in the Latin East: An Examination of the Term ‘Crusader States’”, English Historical Review 135/573 (2020): 271–302.

2 This has been pointed out in scholarship, first and foremost by Sophia Menache; see her The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 98–123; eadem, “The Crusades and Their Impact on the Development of Medieval Communication”, in Komminikation zwischen Orient und Okzident: Alltag und Sachkultur, Internationaler Kongress Krems an der Donau 6. bis 9. Oktober 1992, ed. Harry Kühnel (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1994), pp. 69–90; eadem, “Communication Challenge of the Early Crusades, 1099–1187”, in Autour de la première croisade: Actes du colloque de la Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East (Clermont-Ferrand, 22–25 juin 1995), ed. Michel Balard (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1996), pp. 293–314; eadem, “The Challenges of Medieval Communication: The Military Orders”, Ordines Militares 25 (2020): 9–32. See also Helen Birkett, “News in the Middle Ages: News, Communications, and the Launch of the Third Crusade in 1187–1188”, Viator 49/3 (2018): 23–61; On literacy among crusader communities, see Anthony Bale, “Reading and Writing in Outremer”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades, ed. Anthony Bale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 85–101; Julian Yolles, Making the East Latin: The Latin Literature of the Levant in the Era of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022).

3 A photograph of the manuscript can be consulted in Benjamin Z. Kedar and Denys Pringle, “1099–1187: The Lord’s Temple (Templum Domini) and Solomon’s Palace (Palatium Salomonis)”, in Where Heaven and Earth Meet: Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade, eds. Oleg Grabar and Benjamin Z. Kedar (Austin: Texas University Press, 2009), pp. 132–49, p. 147. See also Benjamin Z. Kedar, “Vestiges of Templar Presence in the Aqsa Mosque”, in The Templars and Their Sources, eds. Karl Borchardt, Karoline Döring, Philippe Josserand, and Helen Nicholson (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 3–24, pp. 7–8.

4 Iris Shagrir, “The Guide of MS Beinecke 481.77 and the Intertwining of Christian, Jewish and Muslim Traditions in Twelfth-Century Jerusalem”, Crusades 10 (2011): 1–22.

5 As chronicler Baudri of Bourgeuil attests in his Historia Jerosolimitana, for example, “I was not a part of this blessed army I am talking about, nor did I see what I tell. But some scavenger – I don’t know who, because he concealed his name – published an extremely coarse booklet on this topic” (“Non tamen huic beatæ interesse promueri militiæ, neque via narravi; sed nescio quis compilator, nomine suo suppresso, libellum super hac re nimis rusticanum ediderat”), upon which Baudri relied while writing his own account of the First Crusade (1096–1099). See Carol Symes, “Popular Literacies and the First Historians of the First Crusade”, Past & Present 235 (2017): 36–67, pp. 40–1.

6 Philippe de Novare, Mémoires, 1218–1243, ed. Charles Kohler (Paris: Champion, 1913), p. 37. for a discussion of this passage as well as the following passages by Filippo to be investigated here, see John Haines, “Aristocratic Patronage and the Cosmopolitan Vernacular Songbook: The chansonnier du roi (M-trouv.) and the French Mediterranean”, in Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle, ed. Jennifer Saltzstein (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 95–120, esp. 110–11.

7 Philippe de Novare, Mémoires, 30.

8 On the widespread role of Old French as a spoken and written language in crusader society, see especially The French of Outremer Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, eds. Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).

9 Adam J. Silverstein, Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 77–88.

10 Menache, “Crusades and Their Impact”, 87–8. See also note 2 above.

11 The sirventois or sirventoys is a trouvère genre of political and topical songs, an equivalent of the troubadour sirventes. See Martin Aurell, “Chanson et propagande politique: Les troubadours gibelins (1255–1285)”, in Forme della propaganda politica nel Due e nel Trecento, ed. Paolo Cammarosano (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1994), pp. 183–202. On the participation of vernacular poets in political endeavours – whether by song or by sword – particularly against the backdrop of the Albigensian Crusade as well as more generally, see Stefano Asperti, “Testi poetici volgari di propaganda politica (secoli XII e XIII)”, in La propaganda politica nel basso Medioevo: Atti del XXXVIII Convegno storico internazionale,Todi, 14–17 ottobre 2001 (Spoleto: CISAM, 2002), pp. 533–59.

12 See Lucca Barbieri’s translation of the song in the “Troubadours, Trouvères and the Crusades” online database (project director: Linda M. Paterson, accessed 25 August, 2022): https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/crusades/texts/of/rs184a/#page1.

13 Given that such trouvère lyrics were typically sung (as opposed to read aloud or silently), an oral transmission of the song would likely require hiring the services of a messenger who was also a trained singer, namely a jongleur, a kind of training that we have no reason to posit was usually required from professional messengers and envoys. An oral transmission of the song by a messenger is therefore a less likely scenario in this case.

14 Haines, “Aristocratic Patronage”, 110–11.

15 As recent scholarship demonstrates, the extant notated manuscripts that were produced and edited for the use of specific crusader communities exemplify this wider tendency. See, for example, the mid-thirteenth-century cases of the Acre breviary discussed in Sebastián Ernesto Salvadó, “The Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre and the Templar Rite: Edition and Analysis of the Jerusalem Ordinal (Rome, Bib. Vat., Barb. Lat. 659) with a Comparative Study of the Acre Breviary (Paris, Bib. Nat., Ms. Latin 10478)”, PhD Thesis, Stanford University, 2011, and of the Manuscrit du Roi, a monumental chansonnier discussed in John Haines, “The Songbook of William of Villehardouin, Prince of Morea (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 844): A Crucial Case in the History of Vernacular Song Collections”, in Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval Peloponnese, ed. Sharon E.J. Gerstel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 57–109.

16 On the documentation of songs on blank folios within such already existing codices, especially in medieval England, see the series of articles by Helen Deeming from the past 15 years or so, including her “Isolated Jottings? The Compilation, Preparation, and Use of Song Sources from Thirteenth-Century Britain”, Journal of the Alamire Foundation 6 (2014): 139–52.

17 Nineteenth-century research indicates this was a more common form of transmission than extant archival evidence suggests. See Wilhelm Wattenbach, Das Schriftwesen im Mittelalter (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1875), pp. 169–70; Gustav Gröber, “Die Liedersammlungen der Troubadours”, Romanische Studien 2 (1877): 337–670, pp. 337–57. For a more recent account on this topic, see John Haines, Satire in the Songs of Renart le nouvel (Geneva: Droz, 2010), pp. 90–102.

18 Michel Huglo, Les livres de chant liturgique (Turnhout: Brepols 1988), pp. 64–75; James Grier, “Some Codicological Observations on the Aquitanian Versaria”, Musica Disciplina 44 (1990): 5–56, pp. 14–23 and 37–48; Susan Rankin, “Ways of Telling Stories”, in Essays on Medieval Music in Honor of David G. Hughes, ed. Graeme Boone (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 371–94, pp. 386–9.

19 The Later Cambridge Songs: An English Collection of the Twelfth Century, ed. John Stevens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Gröber. “Die Liedersammlungen”, 337–57.

20 William Paden, “Lyrics on Rolls”, in Li premerains vers: Essays in Honor of Keith Busby, eds. Catherine M. Jones and Logan E. Whalen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 325–40; Jenna Phillips, “Singers without Borders: A Performer’s rotulus and the Transmission of jeux partis”, Journal of Medieval History 45/1 (2019): 55–79; Karen Desmond, “W. de Wicumbe’s Rolls and Singing the Alleluya ca. 1250”, Journal of the American Musicological Society 73 (2020): 639–709. On the documentation of music in scrolls more generally, see Thomas Forrest Kelly, The Exultet in Southern Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Margaret Bent, Jarred C. Hartt, and Peter M. Lefferts, The Dorset Rotulus: Contextualizing and Reconstructing the Early English Motet (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021), chap. 8.

21 Haines, “Aristocratic Patronage”, 105–6.

22 It was however possible to include a message as a poem alone during this period, with the assumption that the recipient might be able to contribute a melody using the method of contrafact. On this phenomenon, see Mary Channen Caldwell, “‘To His Beloved Friends … ’: The Epistolary Art of Song in Medieval France”, Textus & Musica 5 (2022). Available via open access at https://textus-et-musica.edel.univ-poitiers.fr/index.php?id=2504.

23 Such a perspective is demonstrated by the articles included in Disiecta membra musicae: Studies in Musical Fragmentology, ed. Giovanni Varelli (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020). This tendency can be understood against the backdrop of the recent scholarly aim of providing an integrated examination of the widest range of contents included in specific manuscripts with musical information from medieval times. For such a perspective, see especially Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, eds. Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

24 For a recent monograph on crusader liturgy, also summarising former scholarly trends, see M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017). On the diversity of backgrounds among crusader communities, see for example the account on this topic by Fulcher of Chartres translated in Frances Rita Ryan, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967), pp. 271–2.

25 For a survey and a description of the extant manuscripts of the so-called Liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre that were in crusader use, see Cristina Dondi, The Liturgy of the Canons Regular of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem: A Study and a Catalogue of the Manuscript Sources (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).

26 See, for example, Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons, 57, 63, 154–5, and 175.

27 “Prosas” refer here to the liturgical tropes sung at the end of great responsories, as part of an ensemble of chants frequently serving as a musical highpoint in the Office ritual. Thus, I distinguish between this liturgical genre and sequences that are typically sung after the Alleluia of the Mass. Specifically appearing right after the responsory Ex eius tumba in liturgical books, Sospitati is a foremost representative of the final stage in the development of prosas as an Office genre during the twelfth century, when their texts were formed in metered and rhymed verses. On the place of Sospitai within the genre of Office prosa see Thomas Forest Kelly, “New Music from Old: The Structuring of Responsory Prosas”, Journal of the American Musicological Society 50 (1977): 366–90, pp. 387–9; idem, “Poetry for Music: The Art of the Medieval Prosula”, Speculum 86 (2011): 361–86, pp. 384–5; Alba Scotti, Transalpine Hintergründe der liturgischen Musikpraxis im mittelalterlichen Patriarchat Aquileia: Untersuchungen zu den Responsoriumstropen (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2006), pp. 196–227.

28 See the photograph of this leaf at the online website of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, which includes a digitisation of the Simulata orientalia collection that contains hundreds of photographs of Qubba documents: https://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN685013049&PHYSID=PHYS_0099&DMDID=DMDLOG_0001&view=picture-single (accessed 25 September 2023). For the first report on this finding, see Adolph Tobler, “Bruchstücke alfranzösischer Dichtung aus den in der Kubbet in Damaskusgefundenen Handschriften”, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 43 (1903): 960–76, p. 969.

29 The notated missal Naples, Biblioteca nazionale, VI. G. 11, for example, was probably in crusader use in Acre from around 1200, but its liturgical content suggests a Rouen rather than a Holy Land origin. See Dondi, Liturgy, 72–3, 176–80.

30 See the discussion of the appearance of the Sospitati copy in the context of this booklet in Gabriele Giannini and Laura Minervini, “The Old French Texts of the Damascus Qubba”, in The Damascus Fragments: Towards a History of the Qubbat al-Khazna Corpus of Manuscripts and Documents, eds. Arianna D’Ottone Rambach, Konrad Hirschler, and Ronny Vollandt (Beirut: Ergon, 2020), pp. 331–62, esp. 334. On the multilingual aspect of the Qubba, see the introduction as well as many of the chapters contained in the same volume.

31 Cambridge, University Library, Ff.1.17.1 can be consulted online at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-FF-00001-00017-00001/19 (accessed 25 September 2023).

32 Greek texts, both in Greek script and transliterated into Latin, do indeed occasionally show up in manuscripts produced and used in the West, but still the acquaintance of Eastern Latins with Byzantine culture – and, consequently, with Greek texts – was significantly more frequent than among their Western counterparts.

33 See the survey of concordances in Helma Hofmann-Brandt, “Die Tropen zu den Responsorien des Officiums”, volumes I–II, PhD Thesis, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1971, II: 126–7.

34 The translation is from Kelly, “Poetry for Music”, 384–5. An examination of the musical aspects of this cult alone demonstrates the popularity of this saint in high medieval times. See Mary Channen Caldwell, “Musical Hagiography in Western Europe with Reference to the Cult of St Nicholas of Myra”, in “Holy Persons”, in Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages, eds. Aaron Hollander and Massimo A. Rondolino (Bloomsbury: ARC-Humanities Press, 2021), https://www.bloomsburymedievalstudies.com/encyclopedia-chapter?docid=b-9781350990005&tocid=b-9781350990005-068-0000001&st= (accessed 25 September 2023). Nicholas’s cult was an integral part of the liturgy practised by local Christians of Eastern origin. For Nicholas as a saint representing the coming together of (and occasionally also the friction between) East and West, see Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 45–83. There are also many discussions of Nicholas’s patronage of pilgrims and crusaders throughout the same monograph.

35 The Damascus version of the third verse also differs from the conventionalised version found in Western versions, perhaps resulting from a copying error: instead of the “Relevavit a defunctis defunctum in bivio” (“He raised a dead man at the crossroads”) typically found in the latter, at Damascus we read “Revelavit ad defunctum iudeus in biuio” (“The Jew revealed to the dead man at the crossroads”), where “iudeus” must be the subject of “revelavit”; but there is no direct object of “revelavit”.

36 In Ex. 1, empty rhombus note-shapes denote reconstructed pitches. The text parts appearing within square parentheses denotes reconstructed textual information.

37 The earliest concordance known to me that is opened with the d-a'-b'-g gesture is in the eleventh-century Aquitanian gradual/troper/proser Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 903 from Saint Yrieux.

38 See the information on the concordances of Sospitati as well as transcriptions and links to digitised manuscript attestations in the Cantus Index online database at https://cantusdatabase.org/id/006679Pa (accessed 25 September 2023). A fuller list of concordances is found in Hofmann-Brandt, “Die Tropen”, II: 126–8.

39 https://cantusindex.org/id/008272 (accessed 25 September 2023). On the role of “Ave maris stella” in pilgrimage and crusading contexts see Amy G. Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-Confessional Mediterranean: Ships, Shrines, and Sailors”, in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, eds. Nikolas Jaspert, Christian A. Neumann, and Marco di Branco (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 299–326.

40 The similarity between “Ave maris stella” and “Ierusalem mirabilis” has already been pointed out in Nicole Sevestre, “Jérusalem mirabilis”, in Jérusalem, Rome, Constantinople: L’image et le mythe de la ville au Moyen Age, ed. Daniel Poirion (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1987), pp. 3–15.

41 See the edition of the letter and the poem therein in Liber epistularum Guidonis de Basochis, ed. Herbert Adolfsson (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 1969), p. 154.

42 The only extant concordance is within a large codex containing many letters by Gui as well as other miscellaneous material: Luxembourg, Bibliothèque nationale 27, fol. 136r.

43 Caldwell, “To His Beloved Friends”; Mark Everist, Discovering Medieval Song: Latin Poetry and Music in the Conductus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 54–5.

44 See Birkett, “News”, 35, 50, 55, 56; Elizabeth Siberry, “Troubadours, Trouvères, Minnesingers and the Crusades”, Studi Medievali 29 (1988): 19–43, pp. 35–7. On such crusade-related lyrics more broadly, see especially Linda M. Paterson, Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137–1336 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018); Goswin Spreckelmeyer, Das Kreuzzugslied des lateinischen Mittelalters (Munich: Fink, 1974).

45 See Lucca Barbieri’s translation of the song in the “Troubadours, Trouvères and the Crusades” online database: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/research/french/crusades/texts/of/rs184a/#page1.

46 Peter W. Edbury, John of Ibelin and the Kingdom of Jerusalem (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), p. 48.

47 See an edition of the song in Mittellateinische Kreuzzugslieder: Texte und Melodien, ed. Goswin Spreckelmeyer (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1987), pp. 20–2 and the discussions in Rudolf Hiestand, “Plange, Syon et Iudea: Historische Aussage und Verfassersfrage”, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 23 (1988): 126–42; Julian Yolles, “Latin Literature and Frankish Culture in the Crusader States (1098–1187)”, PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 2015, pp. 124–9. See Yolles, Making the East Latin, 234 n 58 for an up-to-date bibliography.

48 On the documentation of songs on such pastedowns and endpapers within otherwise non-musical codices, see Deeming, “Isolated Jottings?”.

49 Hiestand, “Plange”; Yolles, “Latin Literature”, 124–9.

50 Reinhold Röhricht, “Amalrich I., König von Jerusalem (1162–1174)”, Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung 12 (1891): 432–93, pp. 484–5. Translation in Yolles, “Latin Literature”, 125. On the life and figure of Albert, see Rudolf Hiestand, “Un centre intellectuel en Syrie du Nord? Notes sur la personnalité d’Aimer d’Antioche, Albert de Tarse et Rorgo Fretellus”, Le Moyen Âge 101 (1994): 7–36, pp. 16–19.

51 As was recently demonstrated by Fabio Zinelli, the presence of linguistic as well as literary elements specific to the crusader states in Italian manuscripts further attests to such cultural exchange in this period. See especially Fabio Zinelli, “The French Outremer beyond the Holy Land”, in The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, eds. Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), pp. 221–46.

52 The specific intrastrophic scheme is ABABCCDE.

53 On strophic songs similarly notated throughout, see Wulf Arlt, “Nova cantica: Grundsatzliches und Spezielles zur Interpretation musikalischer Texte des Mittelalters”, Basler Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis 10 (1986): 13–62, pp. 28–31.

54 See the discussions of crusader aspects in the songs numbered 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 16, and 23 in Spreckelmeyer, Das Kreuzzugslied.

55 Charlotte Ziegler, Zisterzienserstift Zwettl: Katalog der Handschriften des Mittelalters, volumes I–IV(Vienna: Schroll, 1989), III: 185.