Law and History in the Latin East by Peter W. Edbury;

Author:Peter W. Edbury;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

XIII Gerard of Ridefort and the Battle of Le Cresson (1 May 1187): The Developing Narrative Tradition

At the Military Orders Conference held in London in 2005, Malcolm Barber read a characteristically robust essay entitled “The Reputation of Gerard of Ridefort”.1 In it he surveyed what can be known of Gerard’s career from the surviving sources, pointing out inter alia how historians have had to come to terms with the contentious evidence presented by the various surviving versions of the narrative that came originally from the pen of Ernoul, a squire of Balian of Ibelin. As is well known, Gerard had a meteoric rise within the Templar Order: he had entered it at some point between the end of 1179 and 1183 and was elected master in 1185. He died fighting at the siege of Acre on 4 October 1189. A controversial figure in his own day, he has generally been seen in a negative light. In particular, he is remembered as the man who in 1187 used his position as a close adviser to King Guy of Lusignan to persuade the king to undertake the fatal attempt to relieve Tiberias and so precipitated the Christian defeat at Hattin.2

Ernoul’s original narrative, which seems to have concentrated on the middle years of the 1180s and extended as far as the end of 1187, does not survive. It described the collapse of the kingdom of Jerusalem while at the same time extolling the reputation of his master, Balian of Ibelin, together with that of Balian’s brother, Baldwin of Ramla. Eventually it was incorporated alongside other material into the anonymous text that since the nineteenth century has been known as La Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier. This work exists in three recensions, which close with the events of 1227, 1229 and 1231 respectively, and which all appear to date from the early 1230s. What then happened was that someone shaved off the pre-1184 sections of this work and stuck the remainder – about three-quarters of the whole – (plus a few earlier passages that were repositioned later in the narrative) on the end of the French translation of William of Tyre’s celebrated history. This development should probably be dated to the mid or late 1230s. The “Continuation of William of Tyre”, as this work had now become, was subsequently expanded and reworked by redactors in both western Europe and the Holy Land to provide us with the complex array of versions that survive to this day. Two particularly important later versions, the Colbert-Fontainebleau text which in the nineteenth century served as the base for the Recueil edition and the Lyon text, edited for the period 1184–97 by M.R. Morgan in 1982, originated in the Holy Land and would appear to date from the 1240s.3 It is important to establish how the various recensions relate to each other, since an understanding of their relationships should affect our approach to them and the stories they tell.

In the medieval centuries the copyists of French vernacular

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