Crusade, Crisis, and Statecraft in Latin Christendom: The Case of Fulk V of Anjou (1090-1143)

Abstract

Traditionally, scholars approached early crusading as a hermetically sealed phenomenon, whose Eastern Mediterranean locus of activity had no enduring impact on the political culture of western Europe. Recent studies have demonstrated this assumption to be untenable. However, in assuming cross-regional and/or diachronic approaches, these studies could not fully consider how crusading realities shaped and, in turn, were shaped by the historically contingent concerns of individual rulers embedded within specific contexts. This dissertation is a case study that illuminates how crusading informed the rulership and ruling identity of a prince who was prominent in twelfth-century landscapes of change: Fulk V, count of the western French principality of Anjou (r. 1109-1129) and monarch of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (r. 1131-1143). Treating his reign as count, this project demonstrates that, for Fulk, the crusading phenomenon was neither a substrate nor an overlay, but rather, a central determinant of his rulership in Anjou, transforming his performance of just governance. To rule effectively within the political-social environment of crusading, Count Fulk V of Anjou had to engage in a process of reformulating and systematizing administrative, material, and discursive strategies of governance that had previously been used only inconsistently. Drawing upon a wide array of archival and published Latin sources, I demonstrate that these crusade-inspired reforms of rulership included: the creation of an apparatus of bureaucratic functionaries who enforced justice at the local level as living extensions of the prince’s office; the routinization of charter production as a means of affirming re-centralized public authority; the collaborative exercise of power by male and female actors in elite kin-groups; and, selective building campaigns to articulate power through material representation. The resulting body of formalized practices yielded an administrative praxis of governance that helped establish the conceptual and logistical groundwork for the subsequent emergence of the medieval European state under Fulk’s continental successors. Fulk's comital reign offers, thus, a unique but neglected opportunity to illuminate how crusading revolutionized rulership in the western tradition. This dissertation concludes with a comprehensive cataloging and diplomatic analysis of Fulk’s 124 surviving pre-royal acta/acts, many of which have hitherto been unknown to scholars.