Material Outremer: Methods and Approaches

The Account-Inventory is first and foremost a list of things. In some cases, they are described in great detail, and in others only laconically recorded and itemized. This makes the text a marvelous case-study for thinking about the material Outremer and crusader materiality. Recent interdisciplinary work on material culture and materiality has yielded an ever more sophisticated set of methodologies for working with objects and material remains. Scholars have become extremely adept at interpreting both tangible things, accessible in museums and private collections, and textual things, that is, objects in texts like wills, inventories, and charters, as well as hagiography, romance, and lyric, together in light of one another.¹⁴ The methodologies integral to the study of materiality depend on several layered interpretative strategies that move between the textual and the tangible, drawing together knowledge gleaned from both. Methodologically, materiality is committed to and reliant on the fact that things in the past are and were relational, that is, parts of networks and imbrications, assemblages and entanglements.¹⁵ A materiality approach follows the connections that draw together access to materials (linen and wool, gold and parchment, for example) with the knowledge practices to transform those materials into objects of use or esteem, and through the networks of people and things that deployed, traded, sold, recycled, or gave them away and thus set things into circulation anew. Following objects and their use as things opens new relationships and affordances for scholarly interpretation. An object made for one purpose may be deployed, repurposed, described, or returned as something quite different, but its persistence through time and space is indicative of its changing meaning, value, and relationality. Finally, materiality always presses the point of the silent and silenced story. Objects cannot talk (with rare and enchanted exceptions), and their experiences are not reflected in subject-driven narratives.¹⁶ Moreover, the labor of their making, partial use, and emotional or intellectual value is often occluded or kept deliberately silent. That objects held other histories—of symbolic, commemorative, associative, and affective value and resonance—should haunt us as we read and write, for this was yet another dimension of their role in the past.¹⁷

Two more precise articulations of materiality’s methodology have been integral to this project. One is the use of material philology and the attendant codicological analysis of the parchment rolls themselves, their layout, scribal practices, use of language and abbreviation, and the placement of words on the page.¹⁸ As a method, material philology seeks to discover “how surviving documents of all kinds insert themselves into their context, culture, and language practices.”¹⁹ In this sense, as Stephen G. Nichols defined some years ago, material philology is an “ensemble of practices and methods for the study of medieval culture broadly conceived,” not simply the concern of those producing or consuming a manuscript edition. It is “a means of reading contextually and against a broad horizon of cultural” circumstances.²⁰ Elaborated further to the space and “dynamics of the parchment page”—or what Nichols has called the “manuscript matrix”—we can see the page “not [as] an inert place of inscription, but rather an interactive space inviting continual representational and interpretative activity.”²¹ Eudes’s texts were spaces where the multifaceted, multicultural, religious, and linguistically diverse world of Outremer came together, a world that was always constructed relationally as away or other (outre) to a place across the sea. Outremer continually presented another French space of cultural production, and another religious and cultural sphere of living and dying.²²

A second and equally important methodological approach is that of documentary archaeology, that is, recovering or excavating objects from the imprint they leave in the textual record.²³ As a practice and method that consciously “relies on descriptions of things generated by contemporaries in the act of reflecting on their own material world,” documentary archaeology is critical for seeing and re-creating relationships of objects through the textual record.²⁴ Rather than jettisoning language in favor of purely tangible objects, documentary archaeology uses the relational ideas and concepts suggested by language and its grammar on the page to address what Daniel Lord Smail, Gabe Pizorrno, and Laura Morreale refer to as “folk taxonomies,” that is, the ways in which individuals described and characterized objects in their worlds, as known through their experiences. These local and specific descriptive terms offer yet another layer of information for interpreting relations between objects and people. Indeed, “the ultimate goal of documentary archaeology, is to provide a framework that translates between the modern domain ontologies used by scholars to characterize museum objects and archaeological artefacts and the historical folk taxonomies” used by people in the past to describe objects.²⁵

In the case of Eudes’s things, no known tangible objects survive, but we can use the linguistic assemblages of nouns and adjectives that give shape to each textual thing to excavate objects from the page as they were once made, used, and set in motion, and to frame them in relation and reference to other comparable objects in tangible collections. The archeological process is critical here, for many objects in Eudes’s inventory come into clearest view when read in relation to other things on the parchment page, or as assemblages of textual objects. Accounting for textual stratigraphy aids in disentangling one object from another and in relating it or finding its echo—its second imprint—in other parchment rolls, when it was sold off, given away, or left as a remainder to be carried back into the West. In short, the methods archaeologists and anthropologists have long used to make sense of things unhinged from texts can be redeployed here for the parchment rolls and within the textual configuration of the page itself.

Finally, as a long-form text that traveled out of Outremer, the Account-Inventory shared a trajectory and set of linguistic practices and terms with other contemporary literary texts both prose and poetry. Indeed, physically, the Account-Inventory rolls traveled alongside or along the same networks as the parchment codex counterparts that were listed among Eudes’s baggage. It has been helpful to adapt methodological insights from literary theory and literary studies that address the role of objects in texts that call attention to character development, emotional registers, memorial devices, and plotted action.²⁶ Theoretically inflected readings of the role of things in texts point to the poetic echoes in Eudes’s inventory. The words on parchment we now read would have first been formed as a spoken text set onto parchment after they were delivered or performed. Indeed, accounting and inventorying were almost always an active, embodied, and often collaborative endeavor in the medieval world. Each entry, description, and summation most likely originated first as spoken words, recollections, or negotiations before finding a more permanent form on the page.²⁷ Likewise, the choice of words in many cases is revealing. Some descriptors are quite straightforward (numbers of objects), while others (old/new, best/worst, or color schemes) have valuative and affective valences that reveal even more about their meaning.²⁸ In the case of Eudes’s Account-Inventory, such resonances are made all the more powerful in that they find echo, if not revealing correspondence, in the corpus of Rutebeuf’s crusade poems translated in part III. Writing at the same moment, Rutebeuf and the inventory authors use very similar words and images that together conjoin and illuminate Eudes’s world with poetic force and personal sentiment. We have thus taken into account the literary quality of Eudes’s texts as we reconstructed both the textual composition of the rolls and the material world they sought to represent and contain.

The Texts: Form and Function

It is difficult to know if someone, or perhaps a team of scribes, created the parchment rolls originally as a fair-copy text set aside for posterity and archiving, or if they wrote them out as a living record, created for use at a particular moment. Most likely, as was often the case with documents of practice, scribes copied the rolls from notes taken on wax tablets or smaller, rougher, pieces of parchment. As they exist today, the rolls retain the flexible quality of a text in action as reflected in the repetition of the details and decisions the scribes recorded, in the summary totals reckoned, and in the omissions and lines crossed out that indicate changes after a scribe first wrote. Copied on both sides—the front (recto) and dorsal (verso)—of five unequal rolls of parchment (which the previous editor and archivists labeled A–D), the cleric-scribes created a text that is repetitive, complicated, overlapping, and highly detailed. The rolls reflect the work of Eudes’s close companions and his clerics writing and rewriting, engaging in discussion and returning to procedures, and recalculating debts and sums owed. From the five separate pieces of parchment, someone sewed together the first two to render a record in four rolls, each about the length of two modern standard sheets of 8½ x 11–inch paper set end to end; two are quite a bit thinner and more delicate than this contemporary approximation (see figures 3–7). In all, the rolls measure as follows:

Roll A: The first roll is in two parts, originally sewn together:

Part 1 is 16 11/16 inches long and 7 9/16 inches wide (42.39 cm x 19.2 cm) at its maximum point; parchment is very thin.

Part 2 is 35 13/16 inches long and 7 13/16 inches wide (90.96 cm x 19.84 cm) at its maximum point; parchment is thick and shows signs of wear. In the archive today they are wrapped together, and Roll A is now and was then the outermost piece of parchment, which would have received the most wear and tear as a consequence. This is still clearly visible (see figures 1–4).

Roll B: The parchment is 19 1/4 inches long and 7 9/16 inches wide (48.90 cm x 19.2 cm) at its maximum point; parchment is softer and of a more standard thickness than in Roll A (see figure 7).

Roll C: The parchment is 16 7/16 inches long and 5 7/8 inches wide (41.75 cm x 14.92 cm) at its maximum point; parchment is slightly thinner and more finely prepared, and much whiter than Rolls A and B. This is the smallest and finest roll and would have been rolled inside the others preserving the quality of the parchment (see figure 2).

Roll D: The parchment is 23 11/16 inches long and 6 15/16 inches wide (60.17 cm x 17.62 cm) at its maximum point: parchment is also very stiff, as with Roll C.

Jaroslav Folda, an expert on manuscripts produced in Acre, notes that “overall, these different-sized pieces of parchment appear utilitarian and unexceptional in terms of their parchment, preparation, ink, lack of rulings, and the hands of the scribes. They look comparable to similar western European documents, and except for the content of the text there is nothing that would indicate they were done in Acre with regard to their codicological characteristics.”²⁹ Indeed, it is very difficult to guess where they were created or copied. What is clear is that Eudes’s scribes and executors were still working out the final totals and sums of the accounts. This suggests that the rolls were most likely produced and copied in Acre, in the weeks that followed Eudes’s death, while those in his employ assembled and assessed the many and various items in his household for sale and for donation. It is harder to imagine a scenario in which this would have occurred in France. Had the rolls been fair copies it is unlikely they would have retained the ongoing calculations and uneven spacing that are still evident. It is also possible that there were more rolls than we now possess and that other objects—such as swords and weapons of war, missing from these parchments—could have appeared elsewhere, on rolls that are no longer extant.

The first editor of the rolls, A.-M. Chazaud, suggested that a rough draft of the accounts was to be found on the dorsal/verso of the rolls, and the fair copy or final version on the recto.³⁰ As we shall discuss below, this was certainly not the case. Rather, the documents are better understood as related pieces, interlocking and informing each other, some used for accounting, some for inventorying and appraising the values of objects, and others for a final reckoning. Most likely these were the final drafts or summary fair copies, as noted above, even if they continued to be augmented after scribes had copied them from wax or other working versions. Although the script is hasty, the hands are not unclear nor exceedingly abbreviated; rather this is the work of well-trained administrative men in the service of the count writing in what could best be described as gothic cursive.³¹

Although most archival records in northern French collections take the form of folded or rolled charters or letters patent, the roll form of the Account-Inventory is not surprising for a fiscal administrative text, particularly one that was not subsequently copied into a formal register or cartulary.³² Many of the French royal inquest and financial records dating to the 1260s and 1270s kept in the Trésor des chartes took the form of parchment rolls. The codicological and archival practice of using a series of parchment rolls for a working text like an expense account or inquest was not unusual, especially for account records kept from Burgundy and the Auvergne.³³ Beyond France, a comparable example is the royal inventory of gifts that Henry III of England (r. 1216–72) received and distributed between December 6, 1234, and July 16, 1236.³⁴

More revealing is the fact that those who compiled the texts chose to write them in a northern dialect of Old French rather than in Latin, as was more common for the account records and inventories that royal and princely households and ecclesiastical institutions maintained.³⁵ The use of the vernacular communicates the preferences and abilities of the texts’ primary users, the knights Hugh of Augerant, Geoffrey of Sergines the younger, and Érard of Vallery, as well as the graphic practices of their administrative partners, the Templars. Indeed, the correspondence kept between Geoffrey of Sergines the elder, Érard of Vallery, and the French crown shows that these men preferred to write and have their documents written in French.³⁶ Likewise, in his enrolled correspondence with the crown and in local agreements within Burgundy, Eudes of Nevers communicated primarily in French.³⁷ Moreover, by the 1260s, French was the predominant language of the eastern Mediterranean; a true lingua franca.³⁸

The Chronology of the Rouleaux

The parchments that encompass Eudes’s Account-Inventory are not straightforward texts. Despite being archived together, they were compiled at various moments between Eudes’s death on August 7, 1266, and a final reckoning of accounts on October 7, 1266 (as reflected at the end of Roll A), in Acre when all three executors—Érard of Vallery, Hugh of Augerant, and Geoffrey of Sergines the younger—were present. A consideration of the material qualities of the rolls, of their codicology, the nature of parchment use and reuse, as well as the paleography and graphic placement of the text on the page, suggests a clear chronology for the writing and use of the rouleaux.³⁹ In making this chronological reconstruction we have set aside the modern archival numbering (which often does not reflect recto-dorsal parchment use). Moreover, the original editor, Chazaud, chose to subsume and suppress parts of the texts that were repetitive or did not fit his idea of a modern French edition. In some cases, although Chazaud was overall an extremely competent editor, the organization of his text privileged nineteenth-century conventions of presentation and information over and above the ways Eudes’s knights, companions, and kin wrote, copied, and used the rolls.⁴⁰

Chronologically, Roll B appears to be the first text written among the five rolls. The contents of this roll take up most of one long side of moderately well-prepared parchment. Given the size, the parchment itself was probably made from sheep or cowhide that was cured, cut, and prepared in the West, or from sheep or goat skin prepared in and around Acre. There is a slight curvature to all of the rolls, reflecting the size and shape of the animal.⁴¹ Roll B is one of the finer pieces of parchment but carries some discoloration at the top and bottom margins, probably from storage rather than use. The ink is light brown and has seemingly faded somewhat. Compared to the other roles, especially Roll D, the stylus seems to have been a less fine-pointed instrument, creating broader strokes as the scribe wrote. The text is written in a clear, fast-moving, administrative or bureaucratic hand not unlike that used in northern France for administrative documents and royal enquêtes.⁴²

Roll B begins with a short offset title: “These are the things of the Count of Nevers that he had the day he went from life to death [Ce sont les chose lou conte de Neverz quil avoit au jor quil ala de vie amort]” (see figure 7).⁴³ This appears to be the earliest roll to have been created, written on the day Eudes died—August 7, 1266—and drafted from within his lodgings. The inventory first lists things in the hand (la main) of different men in the count’s retinue, namely, sergeants. These appear to be from among the count’s personal possessions. They included items with specific provenance, associations, and descriptions that only a user/owner might know. From there, Roll B lists objects in each of the rooms in the count’s residence including the longest entry for his wardrobe (robe), ending with a note that “everything that is in the old wardrobe mentioned above was given to the poor hospitals of Acre and to the poor religious houses.”⁴⁴ On the verso/dorsal of Roll B is a list of the jewels and rings that the count gave to his closest knights and retainers, one presumes on his deathbed, that is, on “the day he went from life to death.” The text is otherwise undated. We believe this parchment roll is as close as we come to a deathbed testament or inventory and reflects Eudes’s most intimate objects and spaces.

Roll C was drawn up between the time of the count’s death (August 7) and September 15, 1266, when his executors paid off his remaining debts at the Temple. The recto, or front-side, of this roll offers both a list of the appraised value of each item in Eudes’s wardrobe, reflecting the opulent clothing and whole cloth he carried with him or purchased while in Acre, and a list of those institutions or individuals who received each item as a charitable donation. Although an appraisal was done for many of these objects, the clothing was donated in kind, presumably intended for reuse or recycling and reappropriation as altar cloths or clerical vestments. Items like doublets, leggings, and head coverings given to the poor or to beguines were presumably either used as they were or sold for cash. On the dorsal, or back, of Roll C there is a second copy of the list of jewels and rings the count gave to his closest knights and retainers. This roll concludes by noting that the Hospital of St. John was to receive his two cooking pots from the kitchen and that all other kitchen wares were sold. This short dorsal list is a copy (although not exact) of the dorsal list on Roll B. Clearly it was useful to have two copies of the final list of gifts, one that corresponded to the spaces of Eudes’s lodgings and that may have been generated as he lay dying, and a second copy his agents used to disburse the personal objects from his wardrobe. Indeed, scribes may have copied Roll C for use as a handlist or checklist when his garments and other objects were disbursed after his death. While the objects given away and circulating out in the world may have lost their connection to Eudes as they were reused or reappropriated, the inventory text itself anchored them to the deceased crusader. In this way the rolls are a historical record of connections between people (Eudes, the men in his retinue, and the poor men and women receiving his largess) and things.

Roll D was created on or before September 15, 1266, for on that date a final accounting was done as part of, or following, a series of estate sales, which generated “the record of the count’s things that were sold.” This account and its summary value were “made … before the master of the Temple, and my lord Érard of Vallery, and my lord Geoffrey of Sergines the younger.”⁴⁵ The dorsal of Roll D then goes on to list, in the same ink and hand, “things that were not yet sold.”⁴⁶ At the bottom of the dorsal of Roll D, turned upside down, is a short list of “what the count had in deniers currency and bezants on the day he went from life to death.”⁴⁷ This note is written in the same ink and hand as Roll B and is dated to the feast of Saint Laurence, August 9, 1266. Thus, Roll D appears to have been written on what had been a second, continued page of Roll B, and is here recycled to form part of a second final valuation and accounting of Eudes’s goods taken six weeks after his death.

Temporally, Roll A was produced last. Formed from stitching together two parchment pieces of nearly identical width but varying lengths, Roll A is the most worked and utilitarian of the rolls and is the closest we have to a formal account (see figures 4–6). A scribe drew up the first section of Roll A shortly after the count died and listed the pay due to each of Eudes’s retainers, including his knights, sergeants, and servants, for the two months that followed the count’s death, thus through October. The second parts of Roll A were generated in mid- and then late September (the fifteenth and twenty-ninth respectively) when Eudes’s debts to the Temple were concluded before the treasurer and master of the Temple. On October 7 final payments in cash and kind were made to his knights and retainers, several of whom were preparing to return to the West. With that, his estate in Acre was settled.

Beyond the considerations of compositional chronology, the Account-Inventory is a collection of several independent moments recorded over the course of a two-month period. The time taken to assess and record all of the objects in the inventory, to account for the outstanding pay owed to Eudes’s knights and servants and to make those payments, and to account for the dates that successive additions were made is duly registered in the document, with the majority of the transactions appearing on Roll A, the longest of the rolls. Assessing what remained of Eudes’s possessions and fulfilling the outstanding financial obligations was a lengthy process requiring coordination among those responsible for the count’s administrative affairs and the institutions where he conducted business. Even if the rolls themselves were written at different moments and in response to immediate needs and circumstances rather than to a desire for narrative clarity, there is a clear chronology to how the accounts were settled, which is mapped throughout the parchments as a whole. We must then think like their creators and users and follow the flow of activity and the movement of people and things. The earliest recorded entry is the date of the count’s death (August 7), the next comes on the “eve of the feast of Saint Lawrence” (August 9), and the last on “the Thursday after the feast of Saint Remy in the year 1266” (October 7). Table 1 below plots each dated entry, the roll where they were recorded, and at what point the dates appear in the inventory. As noted above, Rolls B and C are effectively undated for accounting purposes in that Roll C has no date at all, and Roll B notes only “the day the count went from life to death.”

As an administrative tool, the graphic and functional quality of the material texts indicates how they were used as an account and an inventory. Scribes intended for the rolls to be separated, moved around, turned upside down, added to, even repurposed. Even in their current state they fold back onto themselves and use internal references to settle accounts. They engage a practice of listing and itemizing (item is the key term employed), use a numeric system (roman numerals of account), and employ a summarizing of totals that differs from modern or later medieval notarial double-entry bookkeeping. The executors’ desire to appraise and to value objects, to create currency equivalences, and then to retain or reuse the valued object also suggests the ways that wealth was rendered portable. Eudes’s wealth moved not as coins in wallets or chests—indeed, he possessed precious little currency (as noted on the recto of Roll D)—but in the form of opulent fabrics, jewelry, and plate, objects with multifold affordances that facilitated their reuse and deployment in many different ways: as diplomatic gifts, as payments, as personal tokens, as useful objects in their own right, as memorials, or as salaries. As such, we can glimpse an Outremer mentality at work in the need to have wealth ready at hand in the form of silver plate, opulent clothing, and small gold rings, but also to understand its relative value, its worth in bezants and pounds tournois, or marks sterling. Indeed, the Account-Inventory is fluent in these currency equivalents even if it is not fluid with coinage. Scribes worked out each of those operations in the rolls and actively calculated values and currency exchanges in the given moment that they were recorded. Likewise, the scribes and executors noted the reckoned values of things in denominations used in the local setting of Acre but also in the still more familiar currencies used in France. It was, furthermore, easier and cheaper to give over objects of value than to exchange currencies and make payments in turn. Portable wealth characterized the mindset of those who traveled and lived in and out of Outremer.

Finally, the many portable objects listed carried personal memories and associations that gave them value and meaning in and beyond the Outremer context.⁴⁸ The scribes used staccato descriptive identifiers to note that specific pieces of cloth came from Troyes or Provins, or were a gift from the countess of Burgundy, most likely Eudes’s stepmother, Beatrice of Champagne (1242–95).⁴⁹ Described through associations, French cloth had a different meaning, manufacture, and value in the East than in its native West. Similarly, Tartar and Bukharan cloth of eastern provenance communicated something different still when taken into the West than it did in Acre. Eastern cloth carried its Outremer quality with it, its fibers, designs, and labors.⁵⁰ All of these attributes gave cloth its material value, rendering it—like the rings of Le Puy, the chapel and cross relic, and the vernacular books in Eudes’s estate—something more than its appraised value. As the texts show, many of Eudes’s things required functional descriptions to set them apart and to identify each piece, each object, as distinct, holding a copious carrying capacity that encompassed the economic, emotional, and historical, all anchored to places, people, and moments in time. In this way, the rolls contain so much more than an account and an inventory.

1. See Joshua Prawer, Histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem, trans. Gérard Nahon (Paris: CNRS, 1970; repr. 2007); and Uri Zvi Shachar, A Pious Belligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

2. See Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul, introduction to The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean, ed. Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), esp. 1–2.

3. See Michelle R. Warren, Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joesph Bédier’s Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

4. See, for example, “The Last Will and Testament of Barzella Merxadrux, 9 December 1219,” and “The Codicil of Count Henry of Rodez, Acre 16–31 October 1222,” both translated in Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291, ed. Jessalynn Bird, Edward Peters, and James M. Powell (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 439–45. See also the final testaments for Hugh of Neville and Edward I of England included in this volume.

5. The texts were edited by A.-M. Chazaud, “Inventaire et comptes de la succession d’Eudes, comte de Nevers (Acre 1266),” Mémoires de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France, 4th series, 2 (1871): 164–206. Hereafter we refer to the texts as the Account-Inventory. Below we include several images of the rolls themselves. The full parchment rolls are now viewable on the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (hereafter: DALME) website: https://dalme.org/collections/ecclesiastical-inventories/ with permission from the Archives nationales.

6. Reinhold Röhricht, Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani (MXCVII–MCCXCI) (Oeniponti: Libraria Academica Wageriana, 1893). See 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), 45–62, who makes this point at 59n69. Riley-Smith’s final project was to oversee the digitization of the Regesta: see Reinhold Röhricht, ed., Regesta, http://crusades-regesta.com/about.

7. Réne de Lespinasse, Le Nivernais et les comtes de Nevers, 3 vols. (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1909–14), 2: Maisons de Donzy, de Bourbon, de Flandres (1200–1384), 270–86, offers an overview of the contents of the Account-Inventory. The rolls have been discussed more recently by Riley-Smith, “The Crown of France and Acre”; and Jaroslav Folda, Crusader Art in the Holy Land, from the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre, 1187–1291 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 356–58.

8. See, for example, William Purkis’s work in his Arts and Humanities Research Council–funded project “Bearers of the Cross: Material Religion in the Crusading World, 1095–c.1300,” and the special issue of the journal Material Religion 14 (2018), titled “Material Religion in the Crusading World.” See also Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); Anne E. 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; Lester, “What Remains: Women, Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade,” Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014): 311–28; Linda Paterson, Singing the Crusades: French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137–1336 (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018); Megan Cassidy-Welch, War and Memory at the Time of the Fifth Crusade (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); and Marissa Galvez, The Subject of Crusade: Lyric, Romance, and Materials, 1150 to 1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).

9. Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 2.

10. There is a vast bibliography that could be cited, but recent exemplary work focused on these questions includes William J. Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095–c.1187 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008); M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017); and Danielle E. A. Park, Papal Protection and the Crusader: Flanders, Champagne, and the Kingdom of France, 1095–1222 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2018). To be sure, this religious or spiritual inclination was in reaction to previous interpretations that cast crusading in colonialist terms. For these longer-term trends in the historiography, see Giles Constable, “The Historiography of the Crusades,” in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001), 1–22.

11. Riley-Smith, “The Crown of France and Acre,” and Riley-Smith, “Towards an Understanding of the Fourth Crusade as an Institution,” in Urbs Capta: The Fourth Crusade and Its Consequences / La IVe Croisade et ses consequences, ed. Angeliki Laiou (Paris: Lethielleux, 2005), 71–87.

12. For an example of how to read household possessions as frames for identity, see Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Katherine L. French, Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity after the Plague (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

13. For a discussion of these terms, see the introduction to the poems of Rutebeuf below and the glossary. Crusading as an imagined practice made its way into a vast corpus of romance texts, but much more work is needed before those textual refractions can be related in a sustained and analytical way to the lived practices of crusading. We believe Eudes’s Account-Inventory will enrich this discussion. Literary scholars who have worked on related texts include Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Galvez, The Subject of Crusade. For an important resonance of these ideas regarding crusading differences as it was deployed in the construction of race, see Cord J. Whitaker, Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). For a sense of this sort of cross-pollination among vernacular texts and lived experience, see Nicholas L. Paul, “In Search of the Marshal’s Lost Crusade: The Persistence of Memory, the Problems of History and the Painful Birth of Crusading Romance,” Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014): 292–310; and Paul, “Possession: Sacred Crusading Treasure in the Material Vernacular,” in “Material Religion in the Crusading World,” ed. William Purkis, special issue, Material Religion 14 (2018): 520–32. Relatedly, 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 Pres, 2021), 127–69.

14. There is a large and growing literature on materiality and its methods. As pertains to this project and the distinction between “tangible” and “textual” things, see Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), esp. 1–30, at 10. Also Laurel Thatcher Ulrich et al., Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). A useful case for studying the movement and meaning of things from inventories is made by Robert S. DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

15. As should be clear, the methods of materiality rely on fundamental insights from anthropology and social theory. Concerning myriad different approaches to materiality, see the comments on the “material field” in Anne E. Lester, “Possession, Production and Power: Reading Objects in the Material Field,” Medieval Feminist Forum 56 (2020): 204–20. On the major theories alluded to here, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); and Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2010).

16. For examples of such exceptions, see Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Things: Agency, Materiality, and Narratives of Objects in Medieval German Literature and Beyond (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2020).

17. See Lester, “What Remains,” and Lester, “Remembrance of Things Past.” Outside the crusade context, see Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (New York: Random House, 2021).

18. See Stephen G. Nichols, “Why Material Philology,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 116 (1997): 10–30; for further elaboration of these ideas, see also Nichols, “What Is a Manuscript Culture? Technologies of the Manuscript Matrix,” in The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches, ed. Michael Johnston and Michael Van Dussen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 34–59.

19. Nichols, “Why Material Philology,” 13.

20. Nichols, “Why Material Philology,” 13.

21. Nichols, “What Is a Manuscript Culture?,” 39; see also Nichols, “Introduction: Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” Speculum 65 (1990): 1–10.

22. For thoughts about this process of dynamic definition, see Anthony Cutler, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Invisible Muslim and Christian Self-Fashioning in the Culture of Outremer,” in Weiss and Mahoney, France and the Holy Land, 253–81.

23. See the presentation of this idea in Smail, Legal Plunder, 9–12. The pioneering work on this concept is Françoise Piponnier, “Archéologie et histoire,” in Le Moyen Âge aujourd’hui: Actes de la Rencontre de Cerisy-la-Salle, juillet 1991, ed. Guy Lobrichon and Jacques Le Goff (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1998), 83–100; and Mary Carolyn Beaudry, ed., Documentary Archaeology in the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

24. See the comments by Daniel Lord Smail et al. on “Methodology” at DALME, https://dalme.org/project/methodology/.

25. Smail et al., “Methodology.”

26. The work of Bill Brown has defined the field in this regard. See Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1–23; and more recently, Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Along these lines, see also Andrew Cole, “The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies,” minnesota review 80 (2013): 106–17; and the essays collected in the special issue on “Medieval Materiality,” ed. Anne E. Lester and Katherine C. Little, English Language Notes 53 (2015). In the context of medieval literature and texts, see also Katherine C. Little, “The Politics of Lists,” Exemplaria 31 (2019): 117–28; Galvez, The Subject of Crusade; and Bildhauer, Medieval Things.

27. On the memorial and emotive qualities of inventories and lists of objects, see Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” American Historical Association 110 (2005): 1015–45.

28. For examples of such objects and readings, see Leora Auslander, “Deploying Material Culture to Write the History of Gender and Sexuality: The Example of Clothing and Textiles,” in “Making Gender with Things,” special issue, Clio, no. 40 (2014): 157–78; and Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and Sarah Randles, eds., Feeling Things: Objects and Emotions through History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

29. Folda, Crusader Art, 356 and 643n925. In creating our edition and translation we worked from digital photos supplied by the Archives nationales. These are extremely useful for reading the text and resolving certain questions of orthography, layout, and use. In March 2022, when the archives opened after the COVID-19 pandemic closures and travel bans were resolved, Anne Lester consulted the parchments in Paris and confirmed the above measurements and made other observations in person.

30. As he notes, “Le verso de chacun de ces rôles est, en général, occupé par le brouillon ou une rédaction primitive d’un des états ou comptes dont la mise au net se lit au recto. Ces sortes de minutes nous ont parfois fourni quelques variantes.” Chazaud, “Inventaire,” 164.

31. We thank Lisa Fagin Davis for her advice on the hand. For a discussion and example of similar forms, see Albert Derolez, The Paleography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

32. For comparisons, see Xavier Hélary, Jean-François Nieus, Alain Provost, and Marc Suttor, eds., Les archives princières, XIIe–XVe siècles (Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2016).

33. See Alexandre Teulet et al., eds., Layettes du Trésor des chartes (Paris: H. Plon, 1863–1909), 5:305–27, from the “Acta Omissa.”

34. See Nicholas Vincent, “An Inventory of Gifts to King Henry III, 1234–5,” in The Growth of Royal Government under Henry III, ed. David Crook and Louise J. Wilkinson (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), 121–48; and Benjamin Linley Wild, “A Gift Inventory from the Reign of Henry III,” English Historical Review 125 (2010): 529–69. For a discussion of the objects listed and the larger royal networks, see Amanda R. Luyster, “Reassembling Textile Networks: Treasuries and Re-collecting Practices in Thirteenth-Century England,” Speculum 96 (2021): 1039–78.

35. Chazaud suggests that this is French “en roman du Nord” (“Inventaire,” 168). As will be elaborated below, we suggest it reflects more clearly the vernacular used in Champagne and Burgundy, much like what Rutebeuf likely employed rather than a dialect like Picard, for example. Indeed, BnF, MS fr. 1635, the manuscript containing Rutebeuf’s crusade poems that we have used as the basis of our transcription and translation, shares many linguistic commonalities with Eudes’s rouleaux.

36. Teulet et al., Layettes, 4:228–29, no. 5293 and 4:230, no. 5295.

37. Teulet et al., Layettes, 3:374, no. 4329 (September 10, 1257, in which Eudes pays homage to Count Thibaut V of Champagne for the county of Nevers); 3:415–16, no. 4421 (June 8, 1258; agreement between Eudes of Nevers and Louis IX for the marriage of Yolande and Jean Tristan). This contract would be recopied and selected for inclusion among numerous volumes by Duprey and other érudites throughout the seventeenth century as the beginning of a form for such contracts. See Paris, BnF, MSS fr. 4508, fr. 4329, Dupuy 98, and Collection de Picardie 331. See also Maximilien Quantin, Recueil de pièces pour faire suite au cartulaire général de l’Yonne (Paris: Durand et Pédone-Lauriel, 1878), 292–93, no. 601 (June 1261) in French concerning the rights to justice shared with the monks of Reigny; 304, no. 621 (July 1265), written in the months before he departed.

38. The French (or langue d’oïl) used in the lands outside of France has been studied along two axes: the southern axis, extending from the Kingdom of France, southward through the Italian and into the Iberian peninsulas, and then eastward to the Holy Land, Cyprus, and the Morea; and the northern axis, which includes the British Isles, the Low Countries, and the German lands, though significant crossover occurred between these geographic regions. See Morreale and Paul, The French of Outremer; and Nicola Morato and Dirk Schoenaers, eds., Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019). For the case of Acre, see Jane Gilbert, Simon Gaunt, and William Burgwinkle, “History, Time, and Empire: The Histoire ancienne in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” in Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad, Oxford Scholarship Online, 2020, doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198832454.003.0005. For various genres in French, see Shachar, A Pious Belligerence.

39. Nichols, “Why Material Philology.”

40. An analogy to play scripts or song scripts is perhaps apt here as we develop below. On this process generally, see Carol Symes, “The Medieval Archive and the History of Theater: Assessing the Written and Unwritten Evidence for Premodern Performance,” Theater Survey 52 (2011): 29–58; and Symes, “Knowledge and Transmission: Media and Memory,” in A Cultural History of Theater in the Middle Ages, ed. Jody Enders, A Cultural History of Theater 2 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 199–211. For the case of inventories as scripts, see Katherine Anne Wilson, “The Household Inventory as Urban ‘Theatre’ in Late Medieval Burgundy,” Social History 40 (2015): 335–59. Below we address our editorial conventions and how our choices differ from those of Chazaud. For example, we have chosen not to impose modern accents in French where no accents were used and to retain the thirteenth-century spelling and orthography. See the text edition here.

41. To take a materiality approach to the text reminds us that in dealing with parchment records we are also setting ourselves within the network of animal-human relationships that structured much of the medieval world. At this point it is impossible to know where the animals came from, whether France or the Levant. See Bruce Holsinger, On Parchment: Animals, Archives and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022); and Sarah Kay, Animal Skins and the Reading Self in Medieval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

42. For comparable graphic practices, see the essays in Xavier Hermand, Jean-François Nieus, and Étienne Renard, eds., Décrire, inventorier, enregistrer entre Seine et Rhin au Moyen Âge, Mémoires et documents de l’école des chartes 92 (Paris: École des chartes, 2012).

43. For quotations from the text itself, see below in the edition and the corresponding images online as noted above in note 1. Hereafter we refer to the “Edition,” followed by roll letter and section: Edition, Roll B Front.

44. Edition, Roll B Front.

45. Edition, Roll D Front.

46. Edition, Roll D Back.

47. Edition, Roll D Back.

48. See Lester, “What Remains.” I have developed these ideas further in my forthcoming book, Fragments of Devotion: Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, 1204–1261.

49. See the appendix for the genealogy of Eudes’s family. His mother, Yolande of Dreux, died in 1248, and his father, Hugh IV of Burgundy, remarried in 1258 to Beatrice of Champagne, sister of Thibaut V, count of Champagne, and II, king of Navarre. The counts of Champagne oversaw the international trade fairs of Troyes and Provins, which were also major centers of cloth production.

50. On the many meanings of eastern cloth, see 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,” edited by William Purkis, special issue, Material Religion 14 (2018): 533–44; and Luyster, “Reassembling Textile Networks.”