The representation of the crusades in the songs attributed to Thibaud, Count Palatine of Champagne

Thibaud of Champagne (1201-1253) was count of Champagne and, from 1234, king of Navarre. He was an accomplished poet, and indeed is better known as a chansonnier than as a statesman, although he was involved in many of the most important political struggles in France and led a crusade to the East. Several songs attributed to him deal with crusading. A fresh reading of these poems affords an opportunity to penetrate the mental world of a representative member of the French aristocracy in the first half of the thirteenth century, and it confirms Jonathan Riley-Smith's famous observation that, in the Catholic ethical universe of the time, crusading was an 'act of love'.