Robert Curthose's Crusading Career: Memory, Politics, and Invention in Norman Chronicles

Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy and William the Conqueror’s oldest son, has traditionally been viewed as a failure: too lazy to rule well, too gentle to fight well, and outright incompetent. Because of these inherent qualities, he was deposed as duke and lived his final years in prison. Recent scholarship (such as that of William Aird, Judith Green, Katherine Lack, and James Bickford Smith) now challenges that master narrative to suggest that Robert was actually a good duke, but that he received unfavorable treatment from chroniclers after his defeat. These chroniclers suppressed evidence of Robert’s earlier successes and attributed negative qualities to him—traits that he may not actually have had—in order to make his overthrow seem justified or even inevitable. The same hindsight characterizes chroniclers’ treatment of Robert’s participation in the First Crusade. After all, to go on crusade was one of the highest achievements for a Christian in the central Middle Ages, and early accounts suggest that Robert performed quite well both militarily and politically. Yet throughout the twelfth century, Norman historians depicted Robert’s time on the First Crusade as a complete failure. My paper will trace the way in which Norman chroniclers’ depiction of Robert Curthose’s crusading career changed after he was deposed, and the specific ways in which these revisionist stories implied that Robert was unfit to rule Normandy. For instance, early accounts—and even later accounts written by non-Normans—suggested that Robert arranged for someone else to become king of Jerusalem. Yet later Norman and Anglo-Norman chronicles circulated the story that Robert had turned down the crown because he was too lazy to take on the work that being king would entail. Tales like these served to retroactively discredit Robert, and to tarnish his reputation for centuries to come.