6

Outremer Objects

A Documentary Archaeology of Crusader Possessions

Whereas the account that makes up most of Roll A lists individuals in Eudes’s household and tracks when knights and servants were paid for services, the inventories that form Rolls B and C reveal the workings of the household itself and the religious houses and individuals in Acre that received the count’s goods as they were given out after his death. To read these rolls is to move through the domestic spaces of Eudes’s lodgings and out into the religious and charitable landscape of French Acre. In this way we can see Acre through the eyes of a French crusader. Geographically, Eudes’s inventory is oriented toward Outremer and its holy sites. The only religious house mentioned outside of Acre is Cîteaux, the Cistercian monastery in Burgundy where Eudes’s heart was sent and where he was commemorated, alongside generations of the crusader-counts of Burgundy and Nevers.¹ The inventory links places—descriptively, relationally, and personally—to and with objects; in doing so, it represents networks that once existed in space and time. Rolls B and C list items in the spaces where they were kept and used. In this way, the inventory seems to follow the movement of its scribes as they progressed through rooms filled with things that were themselves afforded values, histories, associations, and future trajectories as they were enumerated, given over, sold off, and distributed in turn.

Those who have studied the rouleaux or used them to illuminate the crusading histories of the counts of Burgundy and Nevers have been awed by the sheer abundance of things listed and by what we learn of the intimate and opulent details of Eudes’s life and domestic setting in the East. Chazaud, the text’s first editor, as well as Ernst Petit, René Lespinasse, Jaroslav Folda, and Jonathan Riley-Smith have all noted the vivid qualities of the inventory and its evocation of the seemingly everyday details of life in Acre. In Petit’s words, “we find in this precious document the exact descriptions of all the baggage and matériel that a knight of this stature would need in the later thirteenth century for such an expedition.”² Something of the richness of quotidian life seeps through the text, leaving most readers with a sense that they have glimpsed into the personal world of a noble crusader in Acre. Overflowing with Eudes’s “stuff,” his surroundings seem almost tangible.³

Roll B, in particular, gets us as close as we can come to the voice of Eudes himself. Drawn up on “the day he went from life to death [au jor quil ala de vie amort],” it reflects Eudes’s final wishes and directives as he assigned specific objects to precise people either to keep for themselves, to hold until a final sale or compensation could be made, or—in ways that lie beyond the limits of our text—to give away at another point in time.⁴ The inventory begins in what must be Eudes’s own intimate chambers, with objects known to him in quantity, value, history, and provenance. And it begins with those things of greatest value. Eudes’s servant Robet takes in hand eight rings, two sapphires, one cameo, twelve small rings from Puy (most likely, Le Puy), two small crosses of gold, a gold belt with pearls, a chapel of gold with stones and pearls, yet more plate including two silver basins to hold water, one silver goblet set with stones and enamels, which is believed to be of gold, additional pots, goblets, and silver spoons (see for examples figures 16–17 and 25). Robet must have been charged with distributing these items, for all of them surface again in later rolls when they were sold, purchased, or in some cases given away as a form of salary compensation or personal remembrance.⁵ While still in the same space, two other servants, Odet le decannat, a squire, and Afetie, a page, received into their hands additional stores of silver including pitchers, basins, containers, pots, goblets, saucers, and spoons. Some of these items were weighed and valued and were later purchased by the Temple (see figures 16 and 27.1 and 27.2).⁶ Through the late nineteenth century, silver objects, especially tablewares like pitchers, cups, and plates, were a common way to store and keep wealth for those who had it. For those objects that passed to friends, family, or religious institutions, they carried the memory and marks of their donors.⁷

The scribes then move to record the vast troves of cloth in the count’s possession. Eudes or his executors again charged Robet with taking these in hand (par la main). There are ten measures of cloth purchased in Troyes, which Simon Ysanbars bought, ten measures of linen cloth from the duchesses of Burgundy, two measures of striped cloth from Provins, and dozens more ells or measures of cloth, some plain, some worked, some embroidered and used for tablecloths or wall hangings.⁸ Then dozens of hand towels are listed, old and new, small and large, as well as twenty-nine head coverings (cuevrechies) (most likely pieces of cloth to be wrapped around the head as a shield to the sun), ten pairs of small gloves, three pairs of deerskin gloves, daggers, leggings, and four pairs of shoes. There are also fur pieces—vair (grey squirrel), and miniver (white squirrel)—camel hair cloth, or camlet, as well as Boukhara cloth, Tartar cloth, quilts, hangings, coverlets, and four silk cushions, an embroidered coverlet of red taffeta and two whistles (see figures 19.1–19.3, 20, and 21).⁹ And finally there are items that must come from what we can only call Eudes’s toilet or medicine chest, including “1 shaving basin, 2 beaver’s testicles, one serpent’s tongue; a vial of balm [i bacin arere; ii coilles de bievre une langue de serpent une fiolete de baume]” (see figures 22 and 23).¹⁰

Eudes’s personal rooms were opulent spaces, covered in cloth, and decorated with gold and silver objects, wall hangings, and silk cushions. Even if all of this cloth and plate was not used, it was clearly on hand. We can infer Eudes’s role here because the details used to describe the objects were drawn from memories and known associations or attributions that reflected the provenance of cloth, whether from the East (Tartar or Boukhara) or the West (Troyes, Provins, Burgundy). Likewise, knowledge of who purchased or gave certain items to the count was still associated with some of the objects when the list was drawn up.¹¹ We can envision a bed with multiple coverlets, some silk and decorated, some plain; towels in abundance with which to wash and wipe; and medicines and tinctures for promoting health or in healing wounds. Beaver testicles were used for the oil they contained, castor oil, which may have aided in digestion. Or—as some bestiaries conveyed—beaver testicles were also thought to have a stimulant effect, sometimes called a medieval Viagra.¹² Serpent’s tongue is harder to identify with precision. This may have been an herb believed to function as an antidote in case of poisoning or to stanch bleeding. But serpent’s tongue could also refer to petrified sharks’ teeth, ornamented and used—often by servants or pages—to test food and drink for “toxic contamination” or poison.¹³ Some late medieval “serpent’s tongues” still exist in museum collections, like the stunning example held today in the treasury of the Viennese chapter of the Teutonic order (see figure 23). Finally, balm may have been used to treat any number of ailments from aches to wounds to irritants.

From the intimacies of Eudes’s rooms, the scribes moved into the armory. Eudes possessed four coats of armor, three banners, as well as leg protectors, a helmet and iron neck cover, a pair of white horse blankets, reins, and eight pairs of spurs, among other items for horses, two knives, four iron blades, and two new axes (see figure 24). Save for swords and lances, bows and arrows, which one might expect, the count was well equipped for the skirmishes and raids that had come to characterize crusading warfare by the late 1260s.¹⁴ In addition, payments were made to one Jehan de Dijon “for the count’s armor,” implying that Jehan had either made pieces of armor at Eudes’s request or repaired armor; either way, Jehan was part of Eudes’s local, Acre-based, network.¹⁵ Those inventorying then went on to the chamber where they recorded trunks and chests of many sizes and shapes, presumably used to store and move the objects detailed above (see figures 16 and 24–25).¹⁶ The pantry came next, and the scribes list yet more trunks, alongside a tent, given to the count from “the castellan of Château Pèlerin [une tante que li chastelains de Chastiaupelerin dona le conte],” that is, the nearby Templar stronghold (see figure 26).¹⁷ This detail of provenance suggests a personal knowledge of this object and its history, which itself created a shared space for life on campaign or on the move.¹⁸

Through the hands of the scribes, the inventory moves next into the cellar, where wooden barrels, flasks, and casks are accounted for; then to the kitchen where copper pots, large and small, cauldrons, pans, grills, iron pans, perforated pans, and forks are listed.¹⁹ Then, perhaps just adjacent in space, the inventory moves into the stables, where the scribes enumerated the animals Eudes possessed including the large grey war horse that belonged to Jaque Vidaut, a large palfrey, three pack animals, and “a mule used for carrying water [et i asne qui aportoit laigue]” (see figure 21).²⁰ Again, the attributed genealogy of ownership personalized even the animals, and the inventory makes clear that Jaques and Eudes must have known, or at the very least known of, each other. Finally, we learn of the “supply for the lodging [la garnison de lostel],” that is, the provisions in the cellar and the larder that included significant stores of food: three dozen butts of wine, fifty sides of salted meat, 195 chickens, one sheep, and 170 measures of wheat and 200 of barley.²¹ Enough food stuff to maintain a retinue of knights for several months.²²

Although none of these details is especially surprising, the objects are organized and listed in a telling manner. The inventory text was clearly ordered in a way that reflected Eudes’s living spaces. As we read, we move through the rooms of Eudes’s residence—from the intimacy of his personal wardrobe and chambers, to the pantry, the cellar, the kitchen, and then outside among the animals and the stores of food. Daniel Lord Smail has shown that this sort of spatial recording of possessions was a common way of creating an inventory, of transferring physical objects and spaces onto a written list, rendering them in textual form. Such descriptions and movement through space was a common way of recording and then unfurling the contents of a life.²³ This process was “something more akin to an act of translation,” of tagging the charismatic three-dimensional things in the world to descriptive phrases that would stand in and be pressed to re-create on the flat page what was once very much alive.²⁴

Equally revealing is what was not inventoried.²⁵ Furniture is never mentioned. We hear nothing of chairs, tables, bed frames, or mattresses.²⁶ If they were in the lodgings Eudes rented, they were not his to give away. Swords and other weapons of war are also conspicuously absent, a surprising omission for a crusader’s household. And although some objects make reference to women, there is nothing inventoried that was evidently or descriptively gendered female or intended for use by women. Eudes’s was a decidedly masculine space, in which male solidarities were reinforced through naming, gifts, and personal memories.²⁷ Present, however, is luggage—dozens of trunks, chests, caskets, barrels, casks, and the like—and what they contained. We are among the goods of a traveler, someone with a temporary house and a store of valued and mundane objects, some of which were saved and treasured, and others that had to be consumed, as we shall see.²⁸

Without doubt the two most opulent spaces in Eudes’s ostel were the chapel and the wardrobe. They were inventoried last and reflect the vast quantity and quality of what they held. The chapel—whether a dedicated room, consecrated space, or corner of a hall made sacred though the things with which it was furnished—had on hand all that was needed for a priest or chaplain to perform the Mass and to say the hours. Although no altar is specifically mentioned, the count did have a chalice, a small cross with a relic of the True Cross (see figure 28), and what is called “the sanctuary [le saintuaire]” that the patriarchs gave to the count. We take this to be a portable altar, or possibly a reliquary that was given to the count by a bishop or archbishop, even the archbishop of Tyre himself or the patriarch of Jerusalem.²⁹ There were numerous altar cloths, some for the front of the altar and some for the back, and sets of old and new liturgical vestments—chasubles, albs, tunics, dalmatics, cloaks, amices, rochets, stoles, and maniples.³⁰ The scribes also list an ivory box, linen hand cloths, a corporal and a monstrance, two decorated pyxes (see figure 29), as well as a missal and breviary. Eudes possessed everything needed for a chaplain, presumably Guillaume le Chaplain, to say Mass on the move.³¹ Interestingly, for a world obsessed with conversion and baptism in the East, no baptismal basin is listed.³² Eudes, of course, could have had recourse to his two silver basins in his chamber, if needed, but this was not the space for a public ceremony. Rather, this was an aristocratic chapel, equipped for domestic devotion, for confession, contrition, prayer—both and communal—and for the Mass. Such portable objects would also have been useful as Eudes lay dying, and if and when he took the Eucharist in his final moments.³³

Whether by association with vestiture and vestments or proximity in Eudes’s lodgings, the scribes moved next to record the contents of Eudes’s “old wardrobe [la robe viez].”³⁴ What the term viez, or old, means here is not clear. It may be that these are the items of clothing Eudes had carried with him to Acre, implying that they were already made, stitched, and ready to wear, or had been used, and hence old, in contrast to the ells of cloth itemized in the account that appear to be unfinished, that is, that could be made into clothing, vestments, and livery, as needed. The old wardrobe contained over three dozen articles of clothing, some in matching sets. The scribes record a tunic (cote), with overcoat (serecot) and corset (corset) of brown tiretaine (tireteinne), for example, and a tunic, two overcoats, and a mantel (mantel) of red serge trimmed with beaver and miniver, or vair—clearly garments all made from the same cloth.³⁵ Many of the robes were opulent, like the tunic and bright iridescent red corset trimmed with miniver, or the indigo tunic and overcoat made of camelin and lined with black taffeta. Indigo, aquamarine, and black were favored colors for wool blends and camelin, whereas green, vermillion, and black were used for silk blends and taffeta linings (see figures 19.1–19.3).³⁶ A variety of furs were favored for linings and trim ranging from grosvair (grey squirrel), to menuvair or miniver (white squirrel), to lynx and beaver fur (see figures 16 and 21). The types of clothing varied too. We hear little of undershirts or chemises of cotton or linen, like those kept from among Saint Louis’s garments as relics.³⁷ Rather it is the outerwear that is listed: overcoats, tunics, and what were called corsets, which were akin to long wool-blend vests rather than the women’s undergarments from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a similar name.³⁸ Eudes also had a number of garnaiche, later known as garde-corps, or houppelandes, also an outer garment, perhaps worn in more formal settings.³⁹ These garments could also be used as portable stores of wealth, an affordance of their material and function (see figure 15).

After they were inventoried on Roll B in the spatial context of Eudes’s chambers on the day he died, the scribes then created a corresponding list of the count’s garments copied on Roll C that recorded an appraisal of the monetary value of each garment. Roll C then lists the religious house or person who received each piece as part of Eudes’s final charitable bequest.⁴⁰ Whether Eudes indicated who was to receive which garment, we cannot know.⁴¹ The appraisal and recipient list copied in Roll C is the only undated roll of the five parchments. Smaller gifts, like the gift of a fur hood and small fur corset for two hermits, or the single dress-doublet given to a beguine, and the four doublets and leggings for four of the poor, are tantalizing references to individuals whom the count may have seen or known. But there is no confirmation of this.

If we read the inventory of the old wardrobe with Roll C—the appraisal and bestowal of the same items—we can follow the count or his executors through the space of Acre itself. As the inventory and appraisal proceeds, the scribes appear to move in concentric circles within the northern quarters of the city, the area most familiar to the French and where a higher proportion of French-affiliated religious houses and associated monastic orders were located. No clear pattern is discernable, but it is possible the gifts correspond to known routes in the city or to a sequence of institutions and individuals Eudes preferred or visited. It is likewise hard to know why specific garments were given to specific institutions (see map 2). Most, as noted above, were probably reused, remade into altar cloths or vestments, or given to residents of the hospitals or religious foundations.⁴² In doing so—in divesting himself of his worldly possessions—as Rutebeuf reminds his listeners, Eudes died “as one with the very poor [quavec les plus povres samort],” hoping “to be counted among the poorest [Des plus povres vot estre el conte].”⁴³

In terms of documentation and documentary practice there is a notable redundancy between Rolls B and C. Why recopy information about clothing in such detail? Why not rework the inventory and add to it the objects’ appraised values? Perhaps Roll C was used as a walking text, that is, a useful list that Hugh or Érard or Geoffrey the younger, or more likely Robet the servant, had on hand while giving out these final charitable donations. In its preservation, however, it is also a quasi-religious text, a sort of testament that carries out Eudes’s plans after his death. And it is, or becomes, a way for institutions and individuals to recall his generosity. A roll in this fashion works well. It functions as “an instrument of performance”; unfurled, it presents the full extent of Eudes’s largesse.⁴⁴ Moreover, by the mid-thirteenth century, the public performance of last bequests, especially gifts of alms and objects for the poor, often required executors to bestow such donations personally with their own hands, in the name of the testator (see figure 21).⁴⁵ Such performed piety and penance mattered, for after his death miracles were reported to have occurred at Eudes’s tomb in the cemetery of St. Nicholas in Acre.⁴⁶ The text authored by the Templar of Tyre is even more explicit about Eudes’s holiness. In the short note recounting the count’s expedition, the author states—in a manner that is almost an echo of Rutebeuf—that

it was the will of Our Lord that this prud’homme, that count of Nevers, should die at Acre. In his will he stipulated that everything that was found to belong to him, whether money or equipment, should all be given to the poor, for the sake of God. Know that Our Lord worked miracles for him, for any sick persons who touched his bequests were immediately healed of their ailments [Et plost a Nostre Seignor que se prodome conte de [Ne]veres morut a Acre et fist son testament de tout ce qui se trova dous sien, de monoie et de harneis, douner tout pour Dieu as povres gens, et sachés que Nostre Seignor fist pour luy miracles, car tous maladies quy atouchoi[en]t a son monyment estoient tant tost guaris de lor maladie].⁴⁷

Might Roll C have been copied in preparation for a hagiographic dossier to make an argument for Eudes’s possible canonization? Perhaps, but we cannot know.

Rolls B and C both preserve one other shared list, an addition to the inventory of Eudes’s things. On the reverse, that is, on the dorsal side of both rolls, the scribes recorded a nearly identical, and therefore repetitive, list of the rings, jewels, and relics that the count gave to his closest companions (see figure 2).⁴⁸ This list—copied on the back of the roll and positioned almost on its own—offers a suggestion of how and by whom Eudes was to be remembered through and within specific small objects, some of which, like his clothes, were connected to specific individuals and previous crusading experiences.⁴⁹ These objects are crusader heirlooms, or heirlooms in the making.⁵⁰ The action here and the list itself is jumbled and requires careful parsing. It begins by stating simply “the count’s good sapphire has been sent to the lord of Bourbon [Li boens saffirs le conte fu envoiez au segnor de Borbon]”; this was his brother Jean, lord of Bourbon (for example, figure 17). Then, as if a paused afterthought, as if the scribe realized what was to come next, a note is made: “These are the things that were given away [fu departie] from among the count’s possessions.”⁵¹ This is only the second instance of the phrase fu departie. All the other objects listed before were simply put “in the hand of,” or listed but not let go of, purposefully bestowed, or given away. One exception is the note that ends Roll B recto explaining that “everything that is in the old wardrobe mentioned above was given [fu departie] to the poor hospitals of Acre and to the poor religious houses.”⁵² The dorsal list of personal bequests continues: My lord (messire) Geoffrey of Sergines, the father, that is, the elder, has or is to have the one sapphire that the count wears around his neck; messire Reynaud of Précigné one cameo; “the Boichiers,” his brother (not Eudes’s brother, but Reynaud’s perhaps, or is this Bossu? It is unclear) received the emerald that the count wore on his finger; messire Geoffrey of Sergines the younger, another emerald. Then in turn, messire Robert of Juennesses, messires Gaucher de Merry, messires Gui de Chantenai and messires Hervé de Chantenai, messire Copin, and messires Hugh of Augerant, each received a ring (i anel). In addition, Hugh received “the ring that the duke [of Burgundy] had given the count and the ring that should be [given] to the heirs of Nevers” (that is, to Jean Tristan, son of the king of France, and to the heirs he was presumed to have with Eudes’s daughter Yolande). Messire Érard of Vallery is given the two small crosses of gold and the small case of silver (vaisselet) that holds the relic that the patriarch gave the count. Finally, there are additional panels of cloth and furs given to the knights. The count’s chaplain was to have the breviary, the chapel, and one new surplice, and one surplice was to go to Étienne le Clerc as well. And the Hospital of St. John received the two large copper pots from the kitchen.⁵³

As is clear from this list and what is known from other examples, crusader rings and jewels were a transmissible mode of participation in the knightly culture of Outremer. Eudes gave away objects—emeralds, cameos, and rings—that had belonged to his father and father-in-law, both crusaders in their own right.⁵⁴ Moreover, he gives them to specific family members from his own family lines: the good sapphire to the lord of Bourbon (Eudes’s brother) (“li boens saffirs le conte fu envoiez au segnor de Borbon”) and the ring for the heirs of Nevers (his son-in-law, Jean Tristan) (“lenel qui doit estre as oirs de Neverz”). Hugh of Augerant received and perhaps first wore these objects when he was charged with carrying them back to France and to Eudes’s heirs. The other single rings—given to the knights (messires) Eudes has assembled close to him—went forward as objects tied to Eudes’s expedition in 1265, to his death in Acre, and to the material world of Outremer.⁵⁵ That Érard of Vallery was not among those who received rings may be explained by the fact that he was not personally present at the time of Eudes’s death and was represented in these earlier transactions by Geoffrey of Sergines the younger. Nevertheless, objects set aside for him, and other items he purchased later or received as compensation, were equally significant and personalized, including the reliquary and gold crosses and the three vernacular manuscript volumes, which passed to him in part as payment and in part as a sign of shared closeness with the count.⁵⁶ Evident in these short lists is not only the transfer of wealth but also the transfer of a set of ideas, memories, experiences, and ideals: the transfer of an ideology of aristocratic crusading embedded within things.

To have been present when a crusader-baron like Eudes of Nevers passed from life to death in his apartment in Acre, sick from illness perhaps or wounded but not recognized for valiant deeds performed on the battlefield, was also an experience carried in these small objects. Eudes’s private death, if that was in fact what occurred, paralleled the deaths of many crusaders who died of disease, languishing, penitent, but not victorious in battle as a martyr for the faith. This is how Louis IX would die in August 1270, on the floor of his tent in Tunis, in a circle of ash, as a penitent.⁵⁷ We can see in these relics and rings the possibility for the circulation of a whole set of vernacular crusade ideas and experiences all of which lie outside of texts strictly speaking even if we can hear echoes of them in Rutebeuf’s “Complaintes” and Joinville’s reminiscences. In Eudes’s case, we can sense that the bestowal of such objects meant a great deal, for the items and their recipients were copied twice on the reverse or dorsal side of two different rolls of parchment. There is a commitment to remembering these details. Finally, the repeated refrain in these lists—“messires … messires … messires”—echoes Rutebeuf’s poetic cadence, and one can hear the spoken text performed, recorded on a roll almost like a pseudo-play script, possibly to be read again, aloud, before other audiences of family and kin in the West.

Different people remembered and commemorated Eudes through his objects and through the material experiences of Outremer. For the poor and sick of Acre and especially for those cured after touching his bequests, he must have seemed a saint, or saintly. The Templar of Tyre was clear, moreover, that Eudes’s holiness moved through his things. In France, such objects carried other layers of associations. Memories of a young father must have been passed down and glossed orally by those who knew Eudes. His brothers and father surely shared in cultivating his memory as would his daughters, especially Marguerite, who returned to Burgundy at the end of her life and built a lavish hospital complex at Tonnerre, an act that was a formal recognition of the ways that charity, service, and crusading were intertwined and that echoed her father’s actions and spiritual commitments.⁵⁸

1. See the obituary from Cîteaux in appendix 3 of Ernst Petit, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne de la race capétienne (Dijon: Darantière, 1885–1905), 5:396–411, at 403. It is notable that between the 2 nones and 8 ides of August, that is, August 3–25, three successive counts of Burgundy and Nevers who died while on crusade were commemorated at Cîteaux, which functioned as the necropolis for the dukes of Burgundy. Hugh III of Burgundy (Eudes’s grandfather) died in Acre on August 25, 1192, after having taken part in the Third Crusade. Jean Tristan, count of Nevers through marriage (Eudes’s son-in-law), died on August 3, 1270, in Tunis. And Eudes, who like his grandfather died in Acre, was partially buried at Cîteaux. A large tomb was constructed at Cîteaux for Hugh III that was subsequently destroyed in 1552 during the Wars of Religion. Eudes’s brother Robert II of Burgundy stipulated in his will from 1297 that he wished to have his heart buried at Cîteaux and his body deça mer, in Acre, in both cases next to his brother (“delès … mon frere”). See Bastin and Faral, Onze poèmes, 65n8. For Robert II’s testament, see Urbain Plancher, Histoire générale et particulière du duché de Bourgogne (Dijon: A. de Fay, 1739–81), 2: Preuves, xci–xcvi, no. 145, at xcii.

2. “On trouve dans ce précieux document des indications exactes sur les bagages et le matériel, dont se faisait suivre au XIIIe siècle un chevalier de cette importance partant pour une telle expédition.” Petit, Histoire des ducs de Bourgogne, 5:74–76, at 76; and Réne de Lespinasse, Le Nivernais et les contes de Nevers (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909–14), 2:270–86.

3. On what we can and cannot see, “glance,” or “gaze” at in these texts, see Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). On empiricism and its limits, see Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “The Limits of Empiricism: The Utility of Theory in Historical Thought and Writing,” Medieval History Journal 22 (2019): 1–22.

4. Edition, Roll B Front.

5. Edition, Roll B Front. This is the case with Érard of Vallery, who was paid in part with objects that belonged to Eudes, including the gold chapel with stones and pearls, and the decorations for the new chapel, two new cloth hangings, the nine Tartar cloths, and the cloth of gold threaded through or around the count’s heart, two large romances, and one chansonnier, all of which was valued at 206 lb. t. 13 s. 4 d. t. See Edition, Roll A Front, Part 2.

6. See Roll B Front.

7. Laurence Delobette, “ ‘Faites ceci en mémoire de moi’: Calices et testaments du diocèse de Besançon XIIIe–XVe siècles,” in Le miracle de Faverney (1608) l’eucharistie: Environnement et temps de l’histoire, ed. Corinne Marchal and Manuel Tramaux (Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2010), 95–125; and Brigitte Buettner, “Le système des objets dans le testament de Blanche de Navarre,” Clio, no. 19 (2004), https://doi.org/10.4000/clio.644. For later resonances of silver and plate in this way, see for example, Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War (New York: Liverlight, 2020), 202–29.

8. Edition, Roll B Front. For the use of cloth in similar spaces, see Frédérique Lachaud, “Documents financiers et histoire de la culture matérielle: Les textiles dans les comptes des hôtels royaux et nobiliaires (France et Angleterre, XXIe–XVe siècle),” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes 164 (2006): 71–96; Lachaud, “Les tentes et l’activité militaire: Les guerres d’Edouard Ier Plantagenet (1272–1307),” Mélanges d l’École française de Rome: Moyen-Âge 111 (1999): 443–61; and Françoise Piponnier, “Linge de corps et linge de maison au Moyen Âge d’après les inventaires bourguignons,” Ethnologie française 16 (1986): 239–48.

9. Edition, Roll B Front. For the cloth described here, see the essay by Sharon Farmer in this volume, below.

10. Edition, Roll B Front.

11. For a well-known parallel, see Joinville, VSL, para. 323, where he describes the blanket made of scarlet and lined with fine vair that had been given to him by his mother. On Eastern cloth and its use and meaning, see E. Jane Burns, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); and for connections beyond the Mediterranean, see Sharon Farmer, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Farmer, “Global and Gendered Perspectives on the Production of a Parisian Alms Purse, c. 1340,” Journal of Medieval Worlds 1 (2019): 45–85; and Anne E. Lester, “Intimacy and Abundance: Textile Relics, the Veronica, and Christian Devotion in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade,” in “Material Religion in the Crusading World,” ed. William Purkis, special issue, Material Religion 14 (2018): 533–44.

12. See Ranya Halbouni, “The Treasured Testicles of the Medieval Beaver,” The Iris (blog), Getty, May 7, 2018, https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/the-treasured-testicles-of-the-medieval-beaver/; Melissa Lo, “Recasting the Castor: From The Book of Beasts to Albertus Magnus’s On Animals,” Thresholds 35 (2009): 92–95; Efraim Lev, “Healing with Animals in the Levant from the 10th to the 18th Century,” Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 2 (2006): https://doi.org/10.1186/1746-4269-2-11; and Kenneth Gouwens, “Emasculation as Empowerment: Lessons of Beaver Lore for Two Italian Humanists,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 22 (2015): 536–62. According to Christian tradition, the beaver’s willingness to sacrifice part of himself was a sign of his devotion to Christ. Such self-sacrifice paralleled the sacrifices that crusaders were asked to take up.

13. See the discussion in Brigitte Buettner, The Mineral and the Visual: Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 116–17; and George Zammit-Maempel, “Fossil Sharks’ Teeth: A Medieval Safeguard against Poisoning,” Melita Historica 6 (1975): 391–410.

14. Edition, Roll B Front.

15. Edition, Roll A Front, Part 1 and Back. Eudes paid Jehan de Dijon presumably to make or repair armor and weapons. But it is surprising that no store of weapons of war is listed, especially swords, nor are they exchanged, passed on, or sold, or specifically mentioned in the inventory. This absence may indicate that there were additional rolls that are no longer extant where such information could have been recorded.

16. Edition, Roll B Front.

17. Edition, Roll B Front. Also known as Pilgrim Castle or ‘Atlit Castle, today on the northern coast of Israel, not far (13 km south) from Haifa. Baybars’s forces had raided as far north as Caesarea and were at Château Pèlerin between 1264 and 1265. It may be that this tent was recovered and given to Eudes after one of these skirmishes. See Michael Lower, The Tunis Crusade of 1270: A Mediterranean History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 26–28. For maintenance and the fall of Château Pèlerin, see Pierre-Vincent Claverie, “Un nouvel éclairage sur le financement de la première croisade de saint Louis,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Moyen-Age 113 (2001): 621–35.

18. Joinville describes the painted chapel tent that Louis IX had made and sent to the Mongols in the hopes of their conversion; Joinville, VSL, para. 471. And tents are depicted throughout the lavish imagery of the Morgan Picture Bible, especially in scenes of warfare. See New York, Morgan Library, MS M 638: https://www.themorgan.org/collection/Crusader-Bible. Tents were certainly part of the shared and mobile aristocratic spaces that formed the material Outremer.

19. Edition, Roll B Front.

20. Edition, Roll B Front.

21. As Jordan notes, Joinville discusses salted meat (pork, which would have been difficult to obtain from Muslim traders), grain, and wine and the work of provisioning an army on the move. See William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 76–78; and Joinville, VSL, para. 130. In contrast, Joinville also notes the foods eaten locally supplied by the Nile; see paras. 187–90. Later, Joinville comments that when the army was captured the Muslim forces made two piles, “one of the salted pork and one of the bodies of the Christian dead [un lit de bacons et un autre de gens mors],” “which they were meant to look after since they do not eat pork [et les chairs salees que il devoient garder, pour ce que il ne manjurent point de porc],” and “they set fire to both; there was such a blaze that it lasted throughout Friday, Saturday and Sunday [et mistrent le feu dedans; et y ot si grant feu que il dura le vendredi, le samedi, et le dymanche]” (para. 370).

22. While living in Acre, Joinville provisioned his own retinue in almost exactly the same fashion; Joinville, VSL, paras. 502–3. He notes that after the feast of Saint Remy he had foodstuffs (garnison de l’ostel) (the same term used in the inventory), readied for the winter because “supplies became more expensive in winter due to the sea, which is more treacherous than in summer [ce fesoi je pour ce que les danrees enchierissent en yver, pour la mer qui est plus felonnesce en yver que en esté]” (para. 502).

23. Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); see his analysis of inventorying as a process, 31–35. Smail notes that “the contents of a life unfurl as you move from room to room” (31).

24. Smail, Legal Plunder, 67.

25. Smail, Legal Plunder, 76–88.

26. See Benjamin Z. Kedar, Cultures of the Medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem: Frontier Inventiveness in the Age of the Crusades (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025).

27. We thank Sarah McNamer for pointing this out.

28. Elizabeth Lambourn makes this point beautifully in her evocative analysis of a merchant-traveler’s list found in the Geniza records. See Lambourn, Abraham’s Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

29. William II of Agen was the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem from 1261 to 1270, and the relics could have been a gift from him or perhaps his predecessor, Jacques Panthaléon, who became Pope Urban IV in 1261. A portable altar such as this was not uncommon. As noted above, Geoffrey of Sergines the elder was given permission by Pope Urban IV to have and to use a portable altar as needed. See above, chapter 5, n. 36. See the comments in Denys Pringle, The Churches of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem: A Corpus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993–2009), 4:46; and the essay by Maureen Miller below.

30. Edition, Roll B Front. Concerning ecclesiastical vestiture, see Maureen C. Miller, Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800–1200 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

31. Again, Eudes’s lordly chapel can be compared to Joinville’s situation in Acre, where the latter had two chaplains to say the Mass every day. Joinville, VSL, para. 501.

32. On conversion and baptism in the East and specifically during the reign of Louis IX, see William Chester Jordan, The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 56–57. Jordan also speculates that in the period after the king had departed Acre, Geoffrey of Sergines the elder may have overseen and facilitated the conversion and baptism of Muslims seeking to convert to Christianity (see 50–51).

33. For comparison, see the description of the death of Pierre d’Alençon in Xavier Hélary, “La mort de Pierre, comte d’Alençon (1283), fils de Saint Louis, dans la mémoire capétienne,” Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 94 (2008): 5–22.

34. Edition, Roll B Front.

35. On woven cloth, dyes, fabrication, and trim, see Farmer, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris. For what was known as tiretaine specifically, a lightweight cloth made with a linen warp and a weft of wool, produced in Europe and in Paris specifically, see Farmer, “Biffes, Tiretaines, and Aumonières: The Role of Paris in the International Textile Markets of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, ed. Robin Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 2:73–89. The combination of linen and wool may have made it an especially suitable fabric for the climes of Outremer, warm but not too heavy.

36. For similar garments worn in the East, see Joinville, VSL, paras. 467–68, where he outfits his retinue of Champenois knights “in cotes and green herigauts [je leur fiz tailler cotes et hargaus de vert].” During his captivity in Egypt the sultan gave Louis IX clothes made of black samite, lined with vair and grey fur, with a great many buttons made all of gold (“les robes que le soudanc li avoit fet bailler et tailler, qui estoient de samit noir forré de vair et de griz, et y avoit grant foison de noiaus touz d’or,” para. 403). For such opulent textiles, see Lisa Monnas, Merchants, Princes and Painters: Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings, 1300–1500 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Monnas, Renaissance Velvets (London: V&A Publications, 2012); and Monnas, “Silk Cloths Purchased for the Great Wardrobe of the Kings of England, 1325–1462,” Textile History 20 (1989): 283–307. For similar opulent garments but used as livery, see Frédérique Lachaud, “Liveries of Robes in England, ca. 1200–1330,” English Historical Review 111 (1996): 279–98.

37. They do appear among the things sold en masse in Roll D. It seems the Templars were willing to buy Eudes’s remaining things almost in total, either to pay off his debts or because they could be repurposed rather easily and were well suited for the brethren, who were knight-pilgrims, in effect like Eudes himself. On these sorts of intimate textiles kept as relics, see Lester, “Intimacy and Abundance.” See also Tina Anderlini, “The Shirt Attributed to St. Louis,” in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 11, ed. Robin Netherton, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, and Monic L. Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2015), 49–78.

38. Daniel Lord Smail, “A Fur Corset as Daily Wear,” DALME, May 1, 2021, http://dalme.org/features/fur-corset/.

39. On houppelandes, see the discussion in Smail, Legal Plunder, 70–72.

40. Edition, Roll C Front.

41. On reading textiles though and in inventories, see Thomas Ertl and Barbara Karl, eds., Inventories of Textiles—Textiles in Inventories: Studies on Late Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017).

42. On the reuse of such textiles, especially linen in the context of hospitals, see Carole Rawcliffe, “A Marginal Occupation? The Medieval Laundress and Her Work,” Gender and History 21 (2009): 147–69.

43. See Rutebeuf, “La complainte dou conte Hue de Nevers,” below, vv. 74–75.

44. For an excellent discussion of the rotulus as presentation and performance page, see Marina Rustow, The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 381–401.

45. See the example of the will of Gaucher of Châtillon, lord of Donzy: Nevers, AD Niève 43 H 5 (1248), ed. H. de Flamare, “La charte de départ pour La Terre-Sainte de Gaucher de Châtillon,” Bulletin de la Société Nivernaise 13 (1886–89): 174–82; and discussed by William Chester Jordan, “Rituals of War: Departure for Crusade in Thirteenth-Century France,” in The Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan Library’s Medieval Picture Bible, ed. William Noel and Daniel Weiss (London: Third Millennium, 2002), 102; and Anne E. Lester, “Crusading as a Religious Movement: Families, Community, and Lordship in a Vernacular Frame,” in Between Orders and Heresy: Rethinking Medieval Religious Movements, ed. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Anne E. Lester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 151–52. More broadly, on royal gifts to the poor, especially gifts of vestments, see Priscille Aladjidi, Le Roi père des pauvres, France XIIIe–XVe siècle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

46. See “L’Estoire de Eracles,” RHC, 2:455; Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The Crown of France and Acre, 1254–1291,” in France and the Holy Land: Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades, ed. Daniel H. Weiss and Lisa Mahoney (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 51. The cemetery itself was recognized as a special place of holiness: Jonathan Riley-Smith, “The Death and Burial of Latin Christian Pilgrims to Jerusalem and Acre, 1099–1291,” Crusades 7 (2008): 165–79. For the services in commemoration arranged by the lady of Sidon, sister of the Count of Reynel, for Count Walter of Brienne, who was killed in Egypt and whose bones were returned to the French and buried in the same cemetery, see Joinville, VSL, para. 466.

47. TdT, para. 339.

48. Edition, Roll B Back; Roll C Back. Chazaud omitted the repetition of the list between Rolls B and C; however, Roll C’s notes are slightly longer and elaborated. We have corrected for this and retained the repetitions in our edition.

49. Here again we must underline the fact that the dorsal is not a rough draft of the recto as Chazaud suggested, but functioned quite differently, perhaps as an addendum or aide-mémoire, if not a fully performative text: a script for the presentation of Eudes’s most personal objects.

50. On such objects meant to be sent back from Outremer, see Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 90–170; Anne E. Lester, “What Remains: Women, Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade,” Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014): 311–28; and Lester, “Remembrance of Things Past: Memory and Material Objects in the Time of the Crusades, 1095–1291,” in Remembering Crusades and Crusading, ed. Megan Cassidy-Welch (London: Routledge, 2017), 73–94.

51. Edition, Roll B Back.

52. Edition, Roll B Front.

53. Edition, Roll B Back.

54. It may be that some of the same jewels mentioned in the inventory also appear in the testament of Guy IV of Forez, count of Nevers from 1241; see above, chapter 5, n. 54. These objects are also discussed in Lester, “Crusading as a Religious Movement.”

55. It is hard to know what “the good sapphire [li boens saffirs]” may have looked like. Perhaps, although this seems unlikely, it was a single jewel. More reasonable is to assume it was a large “beautiful” sapphire set either in a ring or on a pendant. A possible later comparable object could be the so-called Middleham Jewel from the second half of the fifteenth century depicting an engraved crucifixion scene with a large sapphire set above. Such jewels were often worn attached to a necklace or on a collar. See C. M. Woolgar, The Great Household in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 175. For a discussion of Eudes’s jewels and other valuable heirlooms, see the essay by Richard Leson below.

56. Edition, Roll B Back; and Roll A Front, Part 2.

57. Joinville, VSL, paras. 755–59.

58. See Meredith Parsons Lillich, The Queen of Sicily and Gothic Sainted Glass in Mussy and Tonnerre (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998), 68–95; and Lynn Courtenay, “The Hospital of Notre Dame des Fontenilles at Tonnerre: Medicine as Misericordia,” in The Medieval Hospital and Medieval Practice, ed. Barbara S. Bowers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 77–106.