SOURCE: An Introduction to The Crusade of Richard Lion Heart, translated by Merton Jerome Hubert, Columbia University Press, 1941, pp. 4–27.

In the following essay, LaMonte studies two accounts of the Crusade of Richard the Lion-Hearted (the Third Crusade) and suggests that both works are derivatives of “a common basic form of the narrative.”

The poem here presented has unusual value both for the historian and for the student of medieval literature. Of all the accounts of the Crusade of Richard written down by those who lived through it, the Estoire de la guerre sainte of Ambroise and the Itinerarium regis Ricardi provide the most complete and circumstantial narratives that we now possess. They furnish, indeed, the major part of our factual knowledge of that ill-fated expedition. The evidence of an eyewitness is always precious, doubly so in the case of medieval events, for which only meager records were kept...