Constance and the Holy Land in the Cronicles of Nicholas Trevet

Abstract:Nicholas Trevet's version of the Constance story, most often read in excerpt against its poetic adaptations (The Man of Law's Tale and Gower's "Tale of Constance"), falls at the middle of Trevet's Anglo-Norman Cronicles (c. 1334), a history of the world from Creation to the 1320s. This article suggests that Trevet's Constance story gains political and historical meaning as a part of this longer world history. The Cronicles uses the "Old Testament" as a frame for the Anglo-British past, positing a certain affinity between Israel and England. That the biblical Maccabees—who had been cast in Latin Europe as prototypical crusaders—play a major role in this project points to Trevet's interest in holy war. The Maccabees help to demonstrate that righteous actors oppose idolatry; the Constance story represents an epochal moment in which "idolatry" is reformulated as Islam. The Constance story further suggests the nation's special place in the history of crusade, yoking Christian England to Islam at their respective points of origin. Later episodes, such as that of the Third Crusade, pick up where the Constance story leaves off, with Plantagenet kings continuing the work of their Maccabean forebears. Like the Maccabees, however, England's righteous kings are threatened by the treachery of their co-religionists. That Trevet highlights such fissures within "Christendom" points to the rhetorical environment of 1330s geopolitics, a time when religious authority facilitated English nation-building and the prospect of an Anglo-French crusade was intractably connected to more local projects of regnal expansion.