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  • Historia Ierosolimitana. History of the Journey to Jerusalem
  • Jonathan Riley-Smith
Historia Ierosolimitana. History of the Journey to Jerusalem. By Albert of Aachen. Edited and translated by Susan B. Edgington. [Oxford Medieval Texts.] (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. Pp. lxii, 949. $302.50. ISBN 978-0-199-20486-1.)

The author of this history of the First Crusade and the early years of the Latin settlements in the East, who goes by the name of Albert of Aachen, wrote that he had been thwarted in joining the expedition. He was not, therefore, an eyewitness of the events he described and there are inconsistencies and chronological inaccuracies in his account. At the same time no one can deny that he has left a simply wonderful text. It is also the main source for subjects such as the crusade of 1101 and the county of Edessa, and it is full of details that are not found elsewhere, such as reports on the entourage of Godfrey of Bouillon, the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem, and on the early years of the settlements. The reaction of most historians, however, has been extraordinarily ambivalent. Few have dared to question the apparently late date of a text that everyone thought could not have been composed long before 1128 or to challenge Heinrich von Sybel's destructive criticism of its reliability in the 1840s, but at the same time its inestimable value as an independent source has made historians reluctant to dismiss it. Instead, they have seized on the supposed existence of a lost Lorrainer chronicle that, they claim, was the basis of Albert's [End Page 787] account and the primitive version of the Chanson d'Antioche. This assertion ignores the fact that it is quite impossible to identify the contents of any original redaction of the Chanson. In recent years, however, a few, including myself, and also those brave individuals who have somewhat vainly tried to rehabilitate the role of Peter the Hermit in the crusade, have chosen to ignore the problems and have treated Albert as almost as good a source as the eyewitness accounts.

Edgington's edition cannot be praised highly enough, and its value to future historians is almost beyond estimation, because she has resolved many of the issues. She provides the badly needed definitive edition—a major achievement, because the text is long and quite complex. She also suggests very convincingly that it was written in two stages. The first half (books i–vi) is composed of what Albert originally intended to be a free-standing account of the crusade and was completed soon after 1102. He then began again and wrote an account in books vii–xii of the early years of the Latin settlements, which ends abruptly in mid-course in 1119. The two halves had been pasted together by the late 1120s, but the account of the First Crusade already may have been in circulation. This would explain why later in the century William of Tyre made extensive use of it in his Chronicon, but did not reference books vii–xii, which would have been of great value to him. Thus, although Albert may not have been an eyewitness, his narrative of the crusade was a very early one, and his sources of information seem more solid. Questions, of course, remain, and some of Heinrich von Sybel's remarks are still useful correctives, but Albert has been rehabilitated, and a first-class edition of his history now exists.

Jonathan Riley-Smith
Emmanuel College, Cambridge
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