"LA TERRE DES SARAZINS": THE SUMMARY VERSION

Abstract

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in an intriguing crusade-era work called the Relatio tripartitaThe brief begins with an account of the Ayyubid sultan al-'Adil (Saphadin),2 his sons and wives, and continues with gazetteers of Egypt and the Holy Land. An incipit identifies the piece as a letter to Pope Innocent by an unnamed patriarch of Jerusalem regarding the Muslim princes and the status of those regions.3 Innocent III launched two major crusades to recover the Holy Land, and his double initiative has created uncertainty about the date of the Latin work.4 Laying aside any suspicion that the report's stated context is a fiction, we may ask, was the dossier compiled in 1199, toward the beginning of Innocent Ill's reign and during the run-up to the Fourth Crusade; about 1217, as the armies of the Fifth Crusade set sail for Acre; or at an intermediate date? This essay examines and discusses pertinent texts of La Terre des Sara^ins (LI'S) and throws new light upon the Anglo-Norman (AN) work by publishing, for the first time, a critical edition of the summary version.1. The Relatio tripartita'The literary tradition of the Relatio is quite involved.5 As an heirloom text passed among numerous authors and works, the Relatio reached several generations of medieval readers of history. Filling multiple pages of wellknown thirteenth-century chronicles, the Relatio and its vernacular, successor texts found copyists and readers even as Fidenzio of Padua, Marino Sanudo, and others were advocating a renewed assault on the Holy Land.6 The germ of the Relatio's descriptions of Egypt and the Holy Land had appeared in Burchard of Strasbourg's De statu Egypti vel Babylonie a generation before the reign of Innocent 111. The Relatio was then inscribed in at least ten longer, early and mid-thirteenth-century Latin works, as historians mulled past crusades and as schemes for new ones were hatched. Besides the Latin text in Gray's Inn MS 14, a manuscript from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,8 the earliest witnesses of the Relatio survive as insertions in the Chronica of Richard de San Germano, who places it sub 1214;9 and in book III of Jacques de Vitry's Historia orientalis (1219-21).111 The Relatio then resurfaces in Roger of Wendover (d. 1237), Flores historiarum; Albericus Trium Fontium, Chronicon (01241);12 Vincent de Beauvais, Speculum historiale [c. 1240- 1259/60);13 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora;14 the Rothelin continuation of Guillaume de Tyr;13 Guillaume de Nangis (d. 1300), Chronique francaise-^ Jean de Vignay's Miroir historial {c. 133o);17 and in a work called the Relatio Ierosolimitani patriarche.18 Some manuscripts contain both the Relatio (or ITS) and a 'trailer' text, the Tractatus de locis et statu sanete terre ierosolimitane, a description of the Holy Land that is more detailed than the Relatio''s.19Authorship of the Relatio was formerly assigned routinely to Haymarus Monachus and dated 1199, and circumstantial evidence supports these claims. According to this view, Innocent III ordered the report in autumn 1199 and received the patriarch's reply by December of that year.20 Until lately, most scholars have accepted that Innocent made his request as preparations for the Fourth Crusade were afoot,21 and that Haymarus, as patriarch of Jerusalem, promptly wrote the Relatio in response. With the word frequenter, however, Innocent was ordering not a single report, once and for all, but a stream of briefs on conditions in the Latin kingdom.22 This raises the possibility that, although it was apparently ordered in 1199, the Relatio we know arrived years later in the series of updates from various leaders in the East, including the patriarch. Unfortunately, the registers of Innocent's letters for some years are lost.23 Haymarus seems to have answered Innocent's request quickly by sending information about the Muslim hierarchy, including also a description of the Holy Land and a geography of Egypt.24 As far as it goes, the summary recorded by Rohricht corresponds to the contents of the Relatio, although the date and the author's identity are now under review. …