CRUSADE SONGS/CHANSONS DE
CROISADE
. The twenty-nine extant French crusade songs span the hundred years of the Second to
Seventh Crusades; the thirty-five Occitan pieces include both earlier and later
compositions. The latter, almost all the work of well-known troubadours, from Marcabru
to Guiraut Riquier, belong to the lyric genre of the sirventes and deal with political,
moral, or religious aspects of the Crusades, exhorting or rebuking. The French corpus is
much more varied in form and, especially, in content. While over a third of the pieces are
anonymous, many, most notably four by Thibaut de Champagne, stem from famous
trouvères. In addition to composing polemical and hortatory songs of the Occitan type,
the northern poets were concerned with the impact of the Crusades on their lives as
lovers. Indeed, half of the corpus expresses, usually in the style of the grand chant
courtois, the stress caused by the conflicting demands of love and religious duty, and the
pain of separation from the beloved; two of the songs develop the separation theme from
the woman’s point of view.
Samuel N.Rosenberg
[See also: TROUBADOUR POETRY; TROUVÈRE POETRY]
Bédier, Joseph, and Pierre Aubry, eds. Les chansons de croisade, publiées avec leurs mélodies.
Paris: Champion, 1909.
Jeanroy, Alfred, ed. La poésie lyrique des troubadours. 2 vols. Toulouse: Privat; Paris: Didier,
1934, Vol. 2, pp. 200–12.
Bec, Pierre. La lyrique française au moyen âge (XIIe–XIIIe siècles): contribution à une typologie
des genres poétiques médiévaux. 2 vols. Paris: Picard, 1977–78, Vol. 1: Études, pp. 150–58;
Vol. 2: Textes.
CRUSADER ART AND
ARCHITECTURE
. The term “crusader art” refers to works produced in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
during the Frankish colonial period from 1099 to 1291. Due to the assimilation and
interpretation of artistic elements by westerners within the Latin Kingdom, along with the
fragmentary state of some works of art and architecture, much crusader art escapes
stylistic definition and attribution to workshop and patron. Early approaches to crusader
art involved polarized categories of “eastern” and “western,” which reduced multicultural
works to products of one homogeneous group. Recognition of the many groups in the
Frankish kingdom and inquiries into definitions of ethnicity have recently contributed to
The Encyclopedia 525