ABSTRACT
The Gesta Francorum was perhaps the most influential of the chronicles of the First Crusade. It appears to have circulated widely, especially in France, very soon after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, and it was used by a number of authors in the composition of their own accounts. Although these chroniclers borrowed heavily from their source in terms of structure and information, each of them protested that the Gesta was too crude a rendition of events. The author of the Gesta Francorum is anonymous, it has been accepted by most modern historians that he was from southern Italy, on the basis of both his knowledge of the army of Bohemond of Taranto and an analysis of his Latin neologisms. Thus, while some of the authors were raised in or near the Norman heartlands, others would have had only remote experience of the Normans. Many of Baldric's uses of Normanni and Normannia proceed directly from the Gesta Francorum.
