Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 1.djvu/559

CHAP XXII declined. Then Godfrey was made king; though he would not be crowned, nor would he ever wear a crown where his Lord had worn a crown of thorns. As a servant of Christ and of His Church he fought and ruled some short months till his death. His fame has grown because his heart was pure, and because, among the knights, he represented most perfectly the religious impulse of this crusade which fought its way through blood, until it poured out its new song of joy over the blood-drenched city. He errs who thinks to find the source and power of the First Crusade elsewhere than in the flaming zeal of feudal Christianity. There was doubtless much divergence of motive, secular and religious; but over-mastering and unifying all was the passion to wrest the sepulchre of Christ from paynim defilement, and thus win salvation for the Crusader. Greed went with the host, but it did not inspire the enterprise.

Doubtless the stories of returning knights awakened a spirit of romantic adventure, which stirred in later crusading generations. It was not so in the eleventh century when the First Crusade was gathering. The romantic imagination was then scarcely quickened; adventure was still inarticulate, and the literature of adventure for the venture's sake was yet to be created. So the First Crusade, with its motive of religious zeal, is in some degree distinguishable from those which followed when knighthood was in different flower. If not the Crusades themselves, at least the Chansons of the trouvères who sang of them, follow a change corresponding with the changing taste of chivalry: they begin with serious matters, and are occupied with the great enterprise; then they become adventurous in theme, romantic, till at last even romantic love is infelicitously grafted upon the religious rage that won Jerusalem.

This process of change may be traced in the growth of the legends of the First Crusade and Godfrey of Bouillon. Something was added to his career even by the Latin Chronicles of fifty years later. But his most venturesome development is to be found in those French Chansons de geste which have been made into the "Cycle" of the First Crusade. Two of these, the Chansons of Antioche and Jerusalem, were originally composed by a contemporary, if