15
The Crusading Households of John of Joinville and Eudes of Nevers
Caroline Smith
Over the course of the thirteenth century thousands of western European knights visited the crusader city of Acre. Some were among the many peaceful pilgrims for whom Acre was the gateway to the Holy Land. Others came ready to fight, either as participants in one of a few large-scale, papally promoted crusade campaigns or, like Eudes of Nevers, having taken a crusade vow as part of a more personal initiative.1 Eudes was among the number of these crusaders who had sufficient wealth and status to lead a contingent of knights and to bring with him or recruit people necessary to support their military efforts and their lifestyle. We can get a deeper sense of the crusader world of Acre by examining Eudes’s crusading household—the people he had with him and things they valued—as reflected in the Account-Inventory drawn up by his executors, alongside John of Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis.2 John had arrived in Acre in 1250 in the company of Louis IX of France, after the collapse of the king’s first crusade in Egypt. He later described his own experiences as the leader of a crusading household within a text that presents itself as a hagiography of his royal friend.3 John’s narrative of his time on crusade is unusually personal in nature and includes many details concerning his companions and their belongings; it is an ideal complement to the Account-Inventory, helping us imagine how we could fill in the outline of Eudes’s household presented there.
The following comments on the people who made up Eudes’s crusading household will focus on the group as a whole—the kinds of people and relationships represented—rather than the named individuals. The Account-Inventory captures a crusading household and the people associated with it at a specific moment, or series of moments, in the weeks following Eudes’s death, and it shows the extent and complexity of this military and social unit.
The first thing to note about the group that accompanied Eudes in Acre is its hybrid nature. Some members appear to have had a service-based relationship with the count. They would have been long-term members of his household, and it is likely that many or all of them traveled with him from France. This subgroup included four household knights, a clerk (perhaps the person who wrote out the Account-Inventory itself), at least one chaplain (multiple chaplains are referred to later in the text, but only one is named), eight squires, and nine sergeants; these men made up the core of Eudes’s knightly household. Supporting this core group were servants who were paid wages. Some of the thirty-plus people (men and women) listed as “garçons” or pages in the Account-Inventory—particularly those who were better paid and would have carried out more specialized tasks—may also have been long-term members of the count’s household, while others would have been hired locally. In Acre, Eudes would also have been able to recruit the military specialists whom he paid in cash: the Account-Inventory mentions four turcopoles (light cavalrymen) and five crossbowmen.4 Eudes’s extended contingent also included knights who were not directly in his service. Thus he made payments to two knights sufficient to support their own small retinues, while Hugh of Augerant—who was one of Eudes’s household knights and executors—was himself the leader of a small group of knights the count supported financially.5 A similar arrangement, if on a different scale, seems to have been in place with Érard of Vallery, who appears in our sources as a partner with Eudes in his crusading enterprise.6 But while Erard must have had his own retinue of knights, he was in part funded by monies from Eudes; the Account-Inventory lists the sum of 831 bezants owed to Erard “for his pay.”7
There was thus a patchwork of different kinds of bonds at work in forming Eudes’s extended contingent. While his household knights, squires, sergeants, and key nonmilitary personnel may have formed a familiar and stable core, other relationships were more improvised and short-term. The Account-Inventory presents a fascinating snapshot of how these complex relationships coexisted. What it cannot do is convey how the size and shape of such a contingent could change over time. Here the Life of Saint Louis can be helpful. The losses within Louis IX’s army due to battle, disease, and captivity in Egypt were heavy. Of the nine knights John of Joinville led from their homeland of Champagne in 1248, only two were still with him when he was taken prisoner in 1250; six of them had died in (or from wounds received during) the Battle of Mansurah alone.8
When John arrived in Acre in 1250 he had to rebuild his household and the military unit he commanded. Through the descriptions in the Life we can observe him hiring servants, taking unfamiliar knights into his service, and negotiating with the king over how other knights should be supported and assigned.9 The kinds of dangers John of Joinville and his companions were exposed to in their war of conquest in Egypt were more extreme than those that Eudes and his contingent would have anticipated when they set out to contribute to the Latin kingdom’s defense, but the Life is a helpful counterpoint to the Account-Inventory because it reminds us that crusaders’ military and social units were not permanent or static. They were all, if to varying degrees, subject to the vicissitudes of conflict, long-distance travel, and quotidian exigencies in general. This was very obviously true for Count Eudes’s contingent. After his death, the people listed among his personnel would have seen their bonds of service, employment, and obligation shift, and the groups they belonged to would have been reassigned, broken apart, or dissolved completely.
The Life of Saint Louis also presents a useful counterpoint by allowing glimpses of the kinds of tasks some of the nonknightly members of Eudes’s contingent may have performed. So, for example, we know that one of John’s squires brought him a fresh horse in battle, his chamberlain slept at the foot of his bed and was sent to investigate when the alarm was raised in the crusader camp, and his cellarer offered advice on what to do when facing imminent capture.10 His priests said Mass (as you might expect) and launched solo assaults on the enemy (as you might not).11 The richest of these examples concerns the new servant, Guillemin, whom John hired as soon as he arrived in Acre in 1250. This man made him useful by going to find coifs, combing John’s hair, carving meat at table, and arranging lodgings and bathing facilities.12 Eudes of Nevers and his knights must have had a similar range of needs, to which his “garçons” would have been attentive as well.
Unlike the Account-Inventory, the Life of Saint Louis does not give us a full picture of how many and what varieties of people accompanied or were employed by John of Joinville at different stages of his crusade journey. Priests, sergeants, cellarers, poultry minders, and others feature in the Life when they contribute to the telling of a good anecdote, but John’s story of the crusade, and his household, revolved around knights.13 The same was true of Eudes of Nevers’s contingent. Nonknightly forces (such as crossbowmen and light cavalry) had proved themselves essential to the defense of the Latin Kingdom and were recruited in large numbers by the French regiment and others, but appear to have formed a relatively small part of the force Eudes maintained.14
The knightliness of Eudes’s contingent is important when it comes to considering the things he had with him, and how they were used and valued. More in-depth studies of these objects appear elsewhere in this volume, but the fine cloth, elegant outfits, and items made of silver, gold, and precious stones that Eudes had with him were perhaps as necessary to these men as their weapons and armor as a means of carrying their status with them across the Mediterranean. As well as being useful in lieu of cash, these things could be used to display status and offer hospitality, or gifted as demonstrations of largesse. John of Joinville offers a good example of this at work in his gift of cloth and fur to the empress of Constantinople so she could have a dress made after the ship carrying her belongings was lost.15 The inventory of Count Eudes’s possessions confirms that men of high status had such cloth and furs to hand, ready for such an eventuality.
Valued objects and rituals of gifting also feature in the distribution of rings and other precious items to Eudes’s followers.16 It is tempting to imagine that these were physically given by the count himself from his deathbed, and in their commentary on the Account-Inventory in this volume Lester and Morreale suggest that Érard of Vallery received objects other than a ring because he was not present on the day of Eudes’s death itself.17 The objects that the count might have given in person are ones that could be worn: jewels, a cameo, and rings. These things would already have significance as mementos of Eudes, of the recipients’ presence with him in the East and at his deathbed, and as symbols of the ties of friendship and obligation that bound the count to the closest members of his household and knightly colleagues. The meaning of these objects would have been further enhanced by the intimate physical act of Eudes touching the recipients as he personally gave his gifts: placing a jewel around a man’s neck, pinning a cameo to his clothes, or, in the case of the rings, perhaps placing the gift not only into the recipient’s hand but onto his finger.
Eudes and his companions would probably have thought of these items—fine cloth, jewelry, and other luxury goods—as necessities, but when we think of that term in relation to knights the objects that first spring to mind would usually be horses, weapons, and armor. We can get a sense of the range of equipment Eudes and his knights would have required from the Templar Retrais (statutes issued as additions to the rule of the order), which stipulated that every knight brother should have three or four horses, a hauberk, iron leg-coverings, a helmet, a sword, a shield, a lance, a mace, an over-tunic, shoulder guards, protective footwear, a dagger, a bread knife, and a pen knife.18 The Account-Inventory of Eudes’s executors mentions many of these items, or ones that may be equivalent, with the notable exception of the hauberk, sword, shield, and lance.19 It is unthinkable that Eudes was on crusade in Acre without these most essential knightly items (and perhaps more than one of them in some cases—we know John of Joinville had multiple swords with him on crusade),20 so what happened to them? We cannot know, but it is likely that when the Account-Inventory was begun they had already been given away or set aside for special treatment. It is important to remember that the Account-Inventory deals only with the count’s possessions on the day of his death. Stephen Church has suggested that people dying of illness would normally dispose of most of their possessions before they were in extremis.21
For any noble, and perhaps especially for a man of elevated status like Eudes of Nevers, weapons, and swords in particular, were not just tools but important symbols of knighthood and lordship.22 Swords could become potent dynastic treasures, as evidenced by the story of John of Warenne, who supposedly wielded a rusty and ancient sword before the court of England in 1279 as proof of the rights won by its original owner, John’s ancestor, during the Norman Conquest.23 A century later Edmond, earl of March, stipulated that his son and heir was to receive items including “our sword garnished with gold,” and that these were to “remain to his next heir, and after him to his heirs forever.”24 Such weapons were probably too valuable as symbols of family status to ever have been used in battle, and if there was an equivalent sword in Eudes’s family he is unlikely to have brought it with him to Acre. He might have wanted one of his sons-in-law to receive his personal sword, though. In the mid-1380s when he was departing England with the intention of going to Jerusalem, Hugh, earl of Stafford, issued a codicil to his will in which he left specific items of arms and armor to his son Thomas, including a sword given to him by a knightly colleague.25
Perhaps Eudes himself made gifts of his weapons and knightly equipment to friends or companions. The English lord Hugh de Neville planned to do so if he had died during the time he spent in Acre. According to his will of 1267 Hugh planned gifts to his knights of jeweled buckles or rings, and one of them would also receive his small sword. Another man, Hugh’s squire, was to receive a horse and all the armor befitting a gentleman (“vn gentil home”).26 If his closest knightly companion was to get Hugh’s small sword, there must have been a bigger and, possibly, more valued one too. He was not a magnate on a par with Eudes of Nevers, and his circumstances at home in England as well as his financial situation in the East were precarious.27 His will envisaged the sale of all his possessions, including horses and arms, to continue to support his retinue for a period. Perhaps Hugh was ready for his large sword to be sold if necessary, but this would probably not have been his preferred outcome.
The first gift to a religious house in Hugh’s will was to the Order of St. Thomas of Canterbury in Acre, to which he gave “my light gray palfrey and my arms, appropriate for one person.” The French word armures could refer specifically to defensive armor, but also more generally to armor and weapons, including swords. Hugh, and possibly Count Eudes, would not have been alone if they chose to make a pious gift of weapons to one of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem’s military or religious institutions. Such a gift could be of practical use after a knight’s passing, or weapons and armor might be displayed as evidence of his presence in and dedication to the Holy Land. Many knights had bequeathed their horses and arms to a military order since they came into existence in the twelfth century.28 In his 1241 testament, Nunó Sanç, lord of Roussillon and Cerdagne, instructed that “my horse and arms, and my own equipment and that of the horse” should be left to the Hospitaller commandery of Bajoles, near Perpignan.29 A similar bequest may well have been made by John of Joinville’s uncle before he died at the Hospitaller stronghold of Crac des Chevaliers in 1204. Decades later John retrieved his late uncle’s shield from Crac during his own stay in the Latin kingdom and placed it in the chapel near his family’s castle in Champagne so that, John said, his uncle’s “renown should not fade.”30 This object would have had one set of meanings to the Hospitaller knights who saw it on the walls of their castle, and another to members of the Joinville family and their neighbors after John reclaimed this dynastic relic. We can be confident that however Eudes disposed of his most valued knightly accoutrements he intended them to have value and meaning to whoever possessed them, and to those who saw or heard about them.
While the fate of some of Eudes’s most prized possessions will remain a mystery, what happened to some of the more mundane items his executors had to dispose of is revealing. The sale of Count Eudes’s remaining possessions is indicative of the priorities and concerns of individuals and institutions in Acre at this time. Some items were clearly purchased strategically, with medium- or long-term needs in mind: Geoffrey of Sergines the elder, for example, bought bulk quantities of wine, salted meats, and kitchen equipment, entirely appropriate for the captain of the French regiment, who needed to plan for a lengthy stay and a household full of mouths to feed.31 Other selections appear more random. For example, among the detailed list of items sold off to unnamed buyers were an iron blade, two pieces of gold embroidered cloth, and a chess set, priced together as a group.32 Perhaps this and other groupings of items reflect the particular needs or whims of individual purchasers who perused the late count’s possessions as you or I might look at the items offered in a yard sale. Of course, this is pure speculation, but these purchases are a useful reminder that the Account-Inventory is not just a record of who and what was left at the end of Count Eudes of Nevers’s life. It also marks a new beginning. With his death the people and things he had with him would find new usefulness, new roles, and new meanings.
1. For independent crusaders in the twelfth century see Fordham University’s Independent Crusaders Mapping Project, https://independentcrusadersproject.ace.fordham.edu/.
2. Jean de Joinville, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. J. Monfrin (Paris: Garnier, 1995); trans. Caroline Smith, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008). Hereafter, Joinville, VSL.
3. The date(s) of the Life of Saint Louis’s composition and the nature of its author’s project (hagiography, memoir, or a blend of these and perhaps other genres) have been much debated. See, for example, Monfrin’s introduction to Joinville, VSL, lxvi–lxxvi; Caroline Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 47–74; M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 181–85.
4. On turcopoles and their role in crusader armies, see Yuval Harari, “The Military Role of the Frankish Turcopoles: A Reassessment,” Mediterranean Historical Review 12 (1997): 75–116; Stephen Tibble, The Crusader Armies, 1099–1187 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 117–24. On the importance of paid fighters more generally, see Alan Forey, “Paid Troops in the Service of Military Orders during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in The Crusader World, ed. Adrian Boas (London: Routledge, 2016), 84–97.
5. Monies owed and paid to Reynaud of Précigné, Robert of Juennesses, and Hugh of Augerant are mentioned in the Account-Inventory, Roll A Front, Part 2.
6. For example, in instructions from Patriarch William of Jerusalem to the commander of the Templars in France sent after Eudes’s death, edited in Gustav Servois, “Emprunts de Saint Louis en Palestine et en Afrique,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 4 (1858): 292 (Appendice).
7. See Account-Inventory, Roll A Front, Part 1.
8. Joinville, VSL, paras. 305, 297–98. On the knights with whom John departed from Champagne, see Jackie Lusse, “D’Étienne à Jean de Joinville: L’ascension d’une famille seigneuriale champenoise,” in Jean de Joinville: De la Champagne aux royaumes d’outre-mer, ed. Danielle Quéruel (Langres: D. Guéniot, 1998), 28–29.
9. Joinville, VSL, paras. 408–10 (discussed in further detail below), 415, 440–41, 466–68.
10. Joinville, VSL, paras. 229, 255–56, 318–19.
11. Joinville, VSL, paras. 258–60, 299.
12. Joinville, VSL, paras. 408–11. John was disappointed when he discovered that Guillemin was an accomplished thief as well as an attentive servant: para. 417.
13. For the wide variety of people who fought, worked, and traveled with large crusade armies, but who are often not the focus of crusade narratives, see Christopher Tyerman, “Who Went on Crusades to the Holy Land?,” in The Horns of Hattin: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, Jerusalem and Haifa 2–6 July 1987, ed. Benjamin Z. Kedar (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi: Israel Exploration Society, 1992), 13–26.
14. On the importance of these nonknightly forces to the armies of the Crusader States, see Christopher J. Marshall, “The French Regiment in the Latin East,” Journal of Medieval History 15 (1989): 304–5. Patriarch William’s communication with the commander of the Templars in France in 1267 reported that monies for the defense of Acre had been spent on crossbowmen and archers; Servois, “Emprunts de Saint Louis,” 292.
15. Joinville, VSL, paras. 137–38.
16. On the significance of rings as tokens, including tokens bequeathed by crusaders, 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), 107–10.
17. See above, chapter 6.
18. Henri de Curzon, ed., La Règle du Temple (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1886), 109–10.
19. The Account-Inventory mentions, for example, daggers, knives, blades, iron thigh and leg protectors, a helmet, a gambeson, coats of armor, horses (though it is unclear how many of these were suitable for use as war horses), and a small mace.
20. Joinville, VSL, para. 221.
21. Church cites the twelfth-century will of Archbishop Theobald of Bec. Stephen Church, “King John’s Testament and the Last Days of His Reign,” English Historical Review 125 (2010): 510.
22. On the ritual and symbolic significance of swords to knighthood and lordship, see Kristen Neuschel, Living by the Sword: Weapons and Material Culture in France and Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 60–61, 72–73; Emma Mason, “The Hero’s Invincible Weapon: An Aspect of Angevin Propaganda,” in The Ideals and Practices of Knighthood III: Papers from the Fourth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1988, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), 123.
23. David Crouch, “The Warenne Family and Its Status in the Kingdom of England,” in Princely Rank in Late Medieval Europe: Trodden Paths and Promising Avenues, ed. Thorsten Huthwelker, Jörg Peltzer, and Maximilian Wemhöner (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2011), 281–82.
24. Nicholas H. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta: Being Illustrations from Wills of Manners, Customs, etc. as Well as the Descents and Possessions of Many Distinguished Families, from the Reign of Henry II to the Accession of Queen Elizabeth (London: Nichols and Son, 1826), 1:110–11.
25. Nicolas, Testamenta Vetusta, 119. Nicholas Paul notes that a subsequent codicil to Earl Hugh’s will, issued from Rhodes, bequeathed rings (presumably ones he carried with him) to female relatives. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, 108.
26. See the will edited and translated above.
27. M. S. Giuseppi, “On the Testament of Sire Hugh de Nevill, Written at Acre, 1267,” Archaeologia 56 (1899): 361–62.
28. Dominic Selwood, Knights of the Cloister: Templars and Hospitallers in Central-Southern Occitania, c. 1100—c. 1300 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), 176.
29. Rodrigue Treton and Robert Vinas, “Le testament de Nunó Sanç, seigneur de Roussillon et de Cerdagne (17 décembre 1241),” e-Spania: Revue interdisciplinaire d’études hispaniques médiévales et modernes 28 (2017), https://doi.org/10.4000/e-spania.27026; for this practice as a feature of confraternity in the Order of the Temple, see Jochen Schenk, Templar Families: Landowning Families and the Order of the Temple in France, c. 1120–1307 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 48–49.
30. “Épitaphe composée par Joinville,” in Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis, Credo et lettre à Louis X, ed. Natalis de Wailly, 2nd ed. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1874), 546. Translated by Caroline Smith in Chronicles of the Crusades, 347.
31. Account-Inventory, Roll D Front.
32. Account-Inventory, Roll D Front.