Crusade

This chapter argues that the expansion of Christendom functioned as an outlet for antagonisms between sovereigns and barons. Crusade in medieval epics allows barons to escape oppression and to become sovereigns: the Crusade Cycle makes Godefroi de Bouillon a Christian hero equal to Charlemagne, whereas the hero of Huon de Bordeaux, exiled by Charlemagne, becomes heir to a marvellous eastern empire. Roland in the Franco-Italian L’Entrée d’Espagne, also cast out, brings Western civilization to Persia. Another Franco-Italian work, Huon d’Auvergne, tells the hero’s journey to hell at the request of Charles Martel, whose fantasy of complete earthly jurisdiction turns nightmarish. The dream of a world Christian community shapes a utopian, integrative approach to other genres in these texts, which bring travel writing to describe the East that the heroes conquer. The chansons de geste dialogue with other generic material to find new solutions to the old king–baron antagonism.

Sovereignty

This chapter argues that political thinkers across Europe in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries were negotiating the paradoxes of sovereignty when they elaborated distinctions between kingship and tyranny. New concepts of the just war, necessity, and treason conspired to allow sovereigns to crush opposition or abrogate full powers, suspending the laws. Any king, then, was a tyrant in waiting—hence the fears of political thinkers such as John of Salisbury, Aquinas, and Marsilius of Padua, who attempted to rein in sovereigns by articulating ideals such as the body politic and the common good, which argued for royal responsibilities towards society as a whole. Politics was drifting away from morality, but these writers attempted to recouple them.

Feud

This chapter contends that vendettas in the Loheren cycle and Raoul de Cambrai work as alternative forms of justice and social order, and thus as a refusal of sovereignty. The barons reject royal justice and resist royal bans on feud, preferring to pursue their own grievances, via violence that preserves their position vis-à-vis the monarchy and the peasantry they exploit, just as it shapes competition with their own kind for resources both abstract and material (land, women, status, royal favour, honour). Networks of friendship, allegiance, and kinship are maintained for and by feuding. Feuding is thus more than war; indeed it includes in its dynamic periods of peace, and gives form and meaning to a world. The correct moral and social order is defended by feud. The feuding aristocracy thus usurps sovereignty by portraying itself as protector of the common good.

Revolt

This chapter argues that the rebel baron chansons de geste justify baronial revolt. Sceptical about the effectiveness of moral constraints on rulers, they contain their own models for constructive opposition to sovereigns, where aristocratic violence provides the only effective brake on kings. They vehicle models for constructive opposition to sovereigns and portray revolt as a vital tool of social control. Rebellion in works like Les Saisnes, Gaydon, Gui de Bourgogne, Renaut de Montauban, and the Chevalerie d’Ogier is not anarchic but limited and structured like ritual, aiming to restrict royal demands and to allow for eventual appeals to the king’s mercy. The king is eventually freed from accusations of tyranny and the rebel from charges of treason, allowing for a new partnership, with the noble as brake on the sovereign’s power.

Introduction

The introduction argues that rebel baron narratives, including chansons de geste and their prose and chronicle offshoots, were a key vehicle for ideas of aristocratic resistance and independence. It contends that we need to read the corpus more broadly to realize this aspect of its importance. Rather than being an early element of a national French literary tradition, the rebel baron narratives constituted a widespread and long-lived tradition, which remained vital through the Middle Ages across many areas hostile to Capetian power, or which resisted imperial forces, including England, Italy, Occitania, and the Low Countries. The introduction also suggests that an approach deriving from Frederic Jameson can help understand the significance of the genre’s response to political antagonisms.

Conclusion

The Conclusion charts the survival of the rebel baron tradition into the early modern period, before looking at thinkers from the three spheres of influence that shape this book—Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes—who develop powerful doctrines of sovereignty that seek to put an end to the cultures of rebellion and feuding that this book describes. I contend that our thinking about power, legitimacy, and authority has been shaped by such thinkers, who are canonical for modern political theory and ideas of sovereignty, leading us to side automatically with kings and sovereigns, and to mistakenly associate revolts and vendetta with anarchy.

Charlemagne

This chapter reconstructs the debate over the meaning of the figure of Charlemagne in chronicles which rewrite the chansons de geste. Charlemagne’s wars in Spain become glorious Christian triumphs over evil in the Pseudo-Turpin, a pan-European literary hit. They are presented as the beginnings of a great crusading history for France in the popular Grandes Chroniques de France, and in Girart d’Amiens’s Istoire le roy Charlemaine. For less straightforwardly pro-Charlemagne texts, like the Burgundian Croniques et conquestes and the Liégeois Myreur des histors, the Spanish wars set a different precedent: Charles’s trust in the traitor Ganelon led to disaster. The chronicles, depending on their political aims, omit, defuse, or exploit resistance narratives. Finally, the chapter argues that the poetic biography of Charlemagne, which veers between sins and holy heroism, and especially his death—Charles is being taken to hell, before his rescue by angels—encapsulates his ambivalent narrative legacy.

Resistance

This chapter examines texts depicting aristocratic attempts to define and protect a separate polity outside of kingdoms. This geographical form of opposition to sovereigns, found in Aspremont, Girart de Roussillon (the twelfth-century epic poem, the hagiographical narrative and later Burgundian verse and prose rewritings), and the Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, which argue for the independence of Occitania and Burgundy, is often missed by modern scholars whose ideas are shaped by present-day nations. Yet it proves vital for understanding the regionalist politics of medieval Europe, with local governmental structures persisting in opposition to the drive to create kingdoms and empires.