ABSTRACT
As is well known, it was during the 1170s and early 1180s that Archbishop William of Tyre was at work on his history of the crusades and the Frankish states in the East which covers the period from the First Crusade to 1184. Then, at some point in the first decades of the thirteenth century, his work was translated from the original Latin into French. Most of the manuscripts of the translation include additions that were composed in French and which take the story down to nearer the date they were produced. Although historians examining the period before 1184 will turn in the first instance to William’s original Latin text rather than to the French translation, everyone who has studied the history of the Latin East between 1184 and 1277 has had to make use of the additional material which is usually referred to as The Old French Continuations of William of Tyre or Eracles. Closely associated with the Continuations is the text known by its nineteenth-century title as La Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier. The significance of these narratives is considerable. Together they constitute the fullest continuous account of events in the Frankish territories in the Levant between 1184 and 1277. Their interest lies partly in the historical information they contain, but also in their capacity to mirror the political and cultural preoccupations of their authors and their original audience. The large number of surviving manuscripts is a pointer to the importance of these texts in the Middle Ages: no less than fifty-one manuscripts of the French translation of William of Tyre dating from before 1500, forty-five of which contain continuations, have found their way into public collections in Europe and the United States, while the text of Ernoul-Bernard is preserved in eight medieval manuscripts.1
