ROBERT DE CLARI AND THE LATIN-BULGARIAN RELATIONS

Author: Borislav Primov

OLD FRENCH CHRONICLES ON THE FOURTH CRUSADE AND LATIN EMPIRE OF CONSTANTINOPLE

Relatively little has been written in English on the chroniclers by literary scholars, but there are some important studies in French. One of these is by Faral who mounts a fierce defence of the reliability of Villehardouin whose veracity is, on the other hand, challenged by Faral’s contemporary, Albert Pauphilet. Longnon has two major contributions with his research into Villehardouin’s life and background and his catalogue of all the participants in the crusade who are mentioned in Villehardouin’s text. Jean Frappier produced two incisive articles on the style of Villehardouin, and, more recently, Jeanette Beer has written in English on the stylistic influences on Villehardouin. Relatively little has been written on Clari except in conjunction with Villehardouin and even less on Henri de Valenciennes. Jean Dufournet’s two volume study of Villehardouin and Clari is still essential reading. More recently Gerard Jacquin has published a monumental study of the style of French and Latin chroniclers of the Fourth Crusade which covers Villehardouin, Clari and Henri de Valenciennes. His analysis of the language of the French chroniclers shows just how they tried to influence their readers or listeners.

On the Greek side there is the history of Nicetas Choniates who also lived through the attacks on and the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders and who, as a highly placed civil servant in the immediate circle of successive emperors, almost certainly knew more than he chose to set down, as he himself hints at the beginning of his narrative. This is probably true of Villehardouin, too. To these should be added the three crusader letters from the Count of St Pol and Baldwin of Flanders which give insight into the way they saw events at one particular moment in the fortunes of the crusade. The letter of the Count of St Pol to Henry of Louvain is particularly interesting as it shows that in 1203 one of the main leaders of the crusade was still expecting to sail for the Holy Land the following spring, suggesting that he, at least, was not involved in a plot to seize Constantinople for the Latins. The letters thus contrast with the overall views attempted by Villehardouin and Clari who were both writing with some degree of hindsight. Clari was writing after his return to Picardy, perhaps in 1206 with the last few paragraphs added much later in 1216 after the death of Henry of Hainaut, although it is possible that the whole text was written closer to the later date. Villehardouin was writing at the earliest in 1208 just before Henri de Valenciennes wrote his account in 1208-9.

These accounts, useful as they are, attempt to follow the development of the crusade from the start until, in the case of Villehardouin, the death of Boniface of Montferrat and, in the case of Clari, his return home to Picardy, with only a few paragraphs devoted to events after 1206. Henri de Valenciennes covers a few months of the reign of Henry of Hainaut and then comes to a relatively abrupt end for no very obvious reason. Between them the three French chroniclers provide most of the details of the Fourth Crusade and the start of the Latin Empire, while Nicetas Choniates is the principal source on the Byzantine side.

It has become almost a cliche´ to say that Villehardouin saw the preservation of the unity of the army as an end in itself to which all else must be sacrificed. He was involved in the organization of the crusade from the very early days, being chosen as one of the six envoys sent to Venice and, according to Clari, to other Italian ports such as Genoa to arrange the transport of the army overseas. It seems highly probable that he was in touch with Boniface of Montferrat on this trip into Italy and was therefore well placed to push his candidature for the leadership of the Crusade after the untimely death of Thibaut of Champagne. He certainly seems confident that Boniface was willing to accept the leadership.

There can be no doubt that he bears a considerable share of the responsibility for the extremely unfavourable terms negotiated with the Venetians. It is also therefore plausible that he may have felt a sense of gratitude to the Venetians for agreeing to undertake the transportation of the crusaders and to participate in considerable numbers in the crusade themselves. It is clear from his narrative that Villehardouin had a great admiration for the Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, and rarely sees anything to criticize in the behaviour of the Venetians. There is little indication in his account that the crusaders suffered quite severely during the months when they were encamped on the islands in the Venetian lagoon trying to raise the money that would guarantee their passage. Nor does he criticize the Venetians for their attack on Zara, which had been explicitly forbidden by the Pope, and was a breach of the crusading ideal in that a crusading army was being used to attack another Christian city, which belonged to a fellow crusader, the King of Hungary.

As the churchmen accompanying the crusade were themselves deeply divided on the morality of the attack on Zara, Villehardouin, who describes the abbot of Loos, the spokesman for the war party, as a very holy man, had no difficulty in finding religious support for his point of view. He has to admit that the army was deeply divided about the use to which it was being put by the Venetians and that it became even more divided after the offer of Prince Alexius to support it with men and money, provided it put him on the throne of Constantinople. Villehardouin, however, reduces the importance of the opposition by denouncing its motives. According to him the opposition wished to break up the army so that the crusade could not continue. While the fact that some of the crusaders who left the army did go to Palestine, where, as Villehardouin suggests, they achieved very little, shows that their motives were not as base as he implies, he may well have been right about others. What emerges very clearly from his narrative is the tremendous tension and disunity within the army as it made its way down the Adriatic, a disunity which would continue until after the capture of Constantinople. The two sides were those who wished to remain true to their crusading vow and proceed to the Holy Land without delay and those who were prepared to accept almost any expedient provided it would further the ultimate aim of reaching Palestine. Villehardouin is clearly the voice of the second party. For him the preservation of the army as a unit is essential, as only a united and strong force can have any effect in the Holy Land. To achieve that aim he accepts the attack on Zara, the diversion of the crusade to Constantinople and the prolongation of their stay there at the request of Alexius IV, who feared the revenge of his own subjects. The voice of the opposition is downplayed by not reporting in detail the debates between the two sides. Instead as Gerard Jacquin has shown, he uses the technique of summary to omit the counter arguments and to present the conclusions which were favourable to his own point of view.

Throughout the first stages of the crusade, that is to say before the army reached Constantinople, Villehardouin does not emphasize his own position, mentioning his role only when necessary. After the arrival of the army at Constantinople his role seems to have increased in importance, as he is sent as ambassador to the Byzantine court and has an ever-more prominent military role, for example taking command of the retreat to Rodosto after the disaster at Adrianople and also leading the rescue of Renier of Trit, marooned in his remote castle and surrounded by hostile Greeks and Bulgars. With the establishment of the Latin Empire and the enthronement of Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin Emperor all pretence that the crusade would continue to Jerusalem disappeared. Villehardouin makes no further mention of the possibility. Instead all his energy and attention are focused on the needs of self- preservation as the westerners seize land and property from the Greeks. As Queller and Madden have argued, the final stages of the campaign against Alexius V were seen as a crusade against the heretical Greeks. It is possible, therefore, that many in the army felt that they had fulfilled their crusading vows and were henceforth free to pursue their own interests, establishing themselves as feudal lords in Greece.

Villehardouin’s whole approach to the crusade is governed by two aspects of his character, his ability as an experienced and practical soldier and his sincere but undemonstrative Christian faith. He is quite convinced that God is on the side of the crusaders and attributes all the successes of the early part of the crusade to the
fact that God did not want to see the Christian army dispersed. He is also quite certain that only the power of God could have enabled the tiny crusading army to overcome a city as powerful and wealthy as Constantinople, the first sight of which so moved Villehardouin that he indulged in one of his rare descriptions of what he saw as the greatest city in Christendom. He is further convinced that the wickedness of the Greeks made them quite unfit to rule their land.

When the crusaders start to suffer reverses, not so much at the hands of the Greeks as at the hands of Kalojan and his Bulgarians, Villehardouin is quite clear that the crusaders are responsible for their own defeats because of their failure to behave in a morally acceptable way. Their greed and their ill-treatment of the Greeks after the capture of Constantinople and the distribution of fiefs alienated God, without whose support the crusaders found themselves in an extremely dangerous situation.

Villehardouin’s military ability emerges particularly clearly in two episodes, the battle of Adrianople followed by the withdrawal of the Franks to Rodosto and secondly the quarrel between Baldwin of Flanders and Boniface of Montferrat over Salonika. The whole Adrianople campaign was seriously weakened by the fact that Baldwin felt unable to wait for the return from Asia Minor of the troops which had been campaigning there under the leadership of his brother, Henry of Hainaut and other prominent knights.

As a result the crusading army which attempted to relieve Adrianople was smaller than usual and on the first day displayed the lack of discipline which was to prove fatal to its survival. The knights failed to keep formation and, when the Cumans, Kalojan’s nomadic horsemen, feigned flight, many of the knights gave chase as individuals and were easily picked off one by one. Baldwin and his council, of which Villehardouin was probably a member, although he does not say so, issued new battle instructions absolutely forbidding any charges in pursuit of the enemy. When the battle was resumed on the next day, the orders were not obeyed and the first offender, who led the charge and called on the emperor to follow him, was one of the commanders, Count Louis of Blois. Villehardouin comments with a note of weariness on the poor discipline of the crusaders.

The outcome of the battle was the death of Louis of Blois, the capture of Baldwin of Flanders who in true chivalric style refused to leave the field of battle, and a crushing defeat for the crusaders.

Villehardouin himself had to rally the survivors and command the retreat to Rodosto. The consequences of the defeat could hardly have been more serious as 7000 crusaders fled from Constantinople on the news of the battle despite the efforts of Conan of Bethune and the Cardinal, Peter of Capua, to detain them. When the fleeing ships put in to Rodosto, the appeals of Villehardouin also met with no success. In this way, as Villehardouin saw all too clearly, a moment’s folly on the part of some headstrong knights resulted in defeat for the army, the capture and death in captivity of the emperor, the death of some of the other leaders and a serious weakening of the Latin position in Greece.

Similarly Villehardouin understood fully the danger to the Latin army when Baldwin of Flanders and Boniface of Montferrat quarreled over who had the right to receive the surrender of Salonika. Baldwin, urged on by his advisors, was not prepared to give way despite the fact that he had agreed to exchange Salonika for Asia Minor, granted to Boniface in the distribution of lands after the election of the new Latin emperor. In retaliation Boniface started raiding the cities which had already submitted to the emperor and used his wife, Mary of Hungary, the widow of Isaac II, to rouse the Greeks in support of her son. Villehardouin laments the folly of both men and puts the blame firmly on the advisors of Baldwin for aggravating the trouble.

Civil war, which, as he says, would have rejoiced the hearts of the Greeks was only just avoided thanks to the forceful intervention of the other crusade leaders who had stayed at Constantinople. As Villehardouin is rarely so overtly critical, the situation must have been serious indeed, and he makes no attempt to disguise the threat to the very survival of the Latins posed by internal quarrels of this nature.

Villehardouin is very proud of the accuracy of his account and boasts that he says only what he himself knows to be true. There is no reason to doubt this assertion. His facts are, as far as they can be checked, accurate. His style is sober and undramatic, perhaps because he did not have the rhetorical or literary resources to elaborate or ornament it. He is not blind to the faults of his own side, and when he is critical of those who opposed the diversion of the army and disparages their motives, modern readers should bear in mind that he was actually there and knew the people involved rather better than we can. Nevertheless he undoubtedly omits things which we today would very much like to know.

He is less than open about the involvement of Boniface of Montferrat with Prince Alexius. As already stated, he glosses over the anger of the Pope and his refusal to absolve the Venetians for the attack on Zara. Paul Archambault is scathing in his criticisms of Villehardouin’s account of the sack of Constantinople, which he contrasts with the description provided by the Byzantine historian, Nicetas Choniates, to show how partial and incomplete the text of Villehardouin is. Similarly he analyses Villehardouin’s account of the events after the capture of Zara when there were negotiations between the leaders and the main body of the army, which, Villehardouin has to admit, was opposed to accepting the offer of Prince Alexius. Archambault again contrasts his account with that of another eye- witness, this time Robert de Clari, to show how Villehardouin uses emotion and selection to present a favourable picture of how the leaders out-manoeuvred their opponents. The account of Villehardouin, therefore, needs to be read with more critical awareness than some critics in the past have shown. It seems reasonable to assume that it is the truth but not the whole truth and that Villehardouin was not a detached and dispassionate observer but a participant very much involved in and responsible for many of the decisions which were taken.

The account of Robert de Clari, dismissed by Archambault as ‘wrapped in a shroud of insuperable ignorance’, is valuable as a cross-reference to that of Villehardouin and because it gives a very different impression of the life of a crusader.

Clari was in the ranks, excluded from the councils of the great and dependent for information on the rumours and gossip which are part of the life of every army. He had little knowledge of the world, but he had an eye for colour and a naive curiosity which led him to include interesting details about Constantinople in his chronicle. Whereas Villehardouin divides the army into those who supported the plans of the leaders and those who wished to destroy the army, Clari sees the divisions in terms of ‘li haut homme, li rike homme’ (LXXX, 11-12) and ‘le menu gent’ (LXXX, 16) to which he belonged. He gives voice to the resentment felt by the latter at the way in which they were treated by the leaders, particularly when it came to the distribution of booty after the fall of Constantinople. He reveals both the ignorance and the awe of the mass of the army when faced with the incomparable riches and the holy relics of Constantinople. In this, of course, he was not alone, as the account of Gunther of Pairis has a near farcical description of the pious Abbot Martin busily despoiling a Greek church so that the holy relics can be smuggled back to his own monastery. He is sufficiently aware of the ignorance of his audience to attempt to fill in the background to the dynastic quarrels in Constantinople with a somewhat confused summary of the turbulent years preceding the crusade. These episodes no doubt seemed to him essential to his narrative, although most scholars nowadays treat them as digressions, but to his audience, even less informed than he about the east, and filled with a simplistic faith, the stories about the quarrelling Greeks or the details of the wonderful relics stored in Constantinople and those which he brought back were probably of great interest.

Clari’s account supplements that of Villehardouin but also gives a different slant to the crusade. For him the Venetians have no special role whereas in Villehardouin’s account his admiration for the Doge is patent. As a result, Villehardouin says nothing to the Doge’s discredit, consistently portraying him as a dignified and high-minded figure. Clari, however, gives verbatim accounts of the Doge’s military vocabulary which bring to life a strong-minded, vigorous individual who did not like to be crossed. The brawl between the Venetians and the crusaders at Zara, which Villehardouin treats extremely seriously, devoting three paragraphs to its description (88-90), since several on both sides were killed and it took days of negotiations to settle, barely rates a mention in Clari.

Presumably it was just another incident in camp life, and the scale of it did not seem important to him. On the other hand he devotes great attention to the stand-off between the crusaders and the army of Alexius III outside the walls of Constantinople. Thanks to Clari we have a clear picture of the moments of disarray when the crusader squadrons were hesitating over whether to advance or not against the Greeks. Clari was presumably in one of the squadrons, and his report has a first- hand immediacy which brings out the rivalry between the different squadrons and illustrates clearly the difficulties of controlling the unruly knights, foreshadowing the defeat at Adrianople. The crusaders were foolishly given the time by a weak and unwilling adversary, Alexius III, to reform and present a hostile front, thus escaping from a dangerous situation.

Clari gives a first-hand, lengthy, but rather rambling account of the fighting which preceded the actual capture of Constantinople, highlighting the role played by his brother, the priest Aleaume de Clari who was one of the first into the city. He captures much more vividly than Villehardouin the collapse of Greek morale from the moment that the crusaders gained a footing on the walls, a collapse which is confirmed by Nicetas Choniates.

The arrival on the scene of the massive Peter of Amiens was particularly discouraging for the Greeks who completely ignored the attempts of Alexius V to rally resistance against the invaders. Clari is also much more candid than Villehardouin about the sack and pillaging of Constantinople in which he clearly sees no wrong.
Clari is not accurate in the way that Villehardouin is, although he is equally concerned to present himself as a truthful narrator.

His numbers are exaggerated, and his dating is vague. He confuses the order of events at which he was not present and has the very limited view of a soldier in the ranks, not privy to any of the plans of the leaders. Nonetheless his chronicle is valuable because it reveals so much about the attitude of the ordinary crusader who would otherwise be left without a voice. He also includes details which are lacking elsewhere. He alone tells us about the embassy from Kalojan proposing an alliance against the Greeks which the crusaders were unwise enough, in Clari’s eyes, to reject contemptuously (LXIV–LXV). He also had the curiosity and interest to ‘sight-see’ in Constantinople and report on the many treasures which he found there, something totally lacking in Villehardouin. Ill-educated, but devout, brave and inquisitive he left an account which balances the account of Villehardouin. Thanks to him some of the hitches and uncertainties in the crusader camp which Villehardouin either ignored or did not know are recorded and reveal some of the problems with which the leaders had to grapple.

The third French chronicler, Henri de Valenciennes, was trying to do something very different from either of his predecessors. His account of the first part of the reign of Henry of Hainaut is clearly designed to glorify his emperor and probable patron. The narrative is centred round the deeds of Henry who is shown to be an effective and daring ruler, reacting vigorously to challenges whether they be from the successor of Kalojan, the Bulgarian leader Boris, or from the disaffected Lombards in Salonika, plotting to install the brother of the dead Boniface of Montferrat instead of his baby son. It has been shown elsewhere that Valenciennes used his literary talents to create a flattering picture of Henry. He mixes the scenes to provide variety, showing Henry exhibiting great bravery rescuing, at the risk of his life, an over-rash knight from the consequences of his own folly. He also describes full-scale battle, council scenes and even an epic-style joust between a Lombard and a follower of the emperor. Henry’s strategic skill is described as he out-manœuvres the Lombards to secure entry to Salonika. His readiness to conciliate even his worst enemies is another of the reasons for his success, and there is a touching scene when he advises his illegitimate daughter, about to be married to a Bulgarian chieftain, on how to adapt to her husband.

He goes on to urge her never to forget her love for her own people. The speech is a model of what a royal father might say to his daughter who is about to leave him to marry a foreign prince and may have taken place, but it is highly unlikely that Valenciennes actually witnessed it. It seems to be a literary creation grafted onto events which did take place to show another aspect of the character of Henry. The result is that Valenciennes creates a fully rounded character for the emperor and without him we would have almost no knowledge of the events which took place in 1208-9 and which saw Henry establish his authority as the most successful of the Latin emperors. There is no reason to doubt the historical basis of Valenciennes’ narrative. The Lombards were suppressed, and the authority of the Queen Mother as regent of Salonika was established. The Bulgarians were driven back, and client princelings were established to govern buffer statelets on the frontiers. The literary embroidery adds to the interest of the narrative and may, since Valenciennes was undoubtedly close to the court, be based on fact, but some of it, such as the scene already cited, is almost certainly from his imagination. His narrative is clear, detailed and lively, however, and his chronicle is a valuable addition to the texts available on the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade and the start of the Latin empire.

The three French chronicles discussed above are, together with the relevant chapters of Nicetas Choniates, the main sources for the history of the Fourth Crusade and the Latin empire. Allowance has to be made for the fact that the three men were very different in background, status and education, so that they each approach their task from a very different angle. Villehardouin’s rather dry, dispassionate narrative conceals a certain bias in favour of the Venetians and Boniface of Montferrat and a natural desire to put the best gloss possible on a campaign, of whose righteousness he was convinced but which had been extremely controversial among his contemporaries. He nonetheless provides a detailed account of the campaign, hints at the motives of many of those involved and then charts the first desperate efforts of the Latins to establish their empire on the corpse of the Greek empire. Clari had less ambitious aims. His purpose was to inform his possible audience about the east and to give his audience a true account of the capture of Constantinople in so far as he could remember it. He had, of course, his prejudices but on the whole he brought an open, inquisitive mind to what he saw and provides many details which can be found nowhere else and which a more sophisticated writer would not have considered worthy of mention. Valenciennes has a clear purpose, to glorify the deeds of his emperor, but he had a worthy subject who was engaged in noteworthy deeds. It is probable that he did not have time to polish and revise his narrative, but even as it stands, his account is lively and colourful.

The literary importance of three of the first writers of French prose cannot be doubted. Villehardouin shows considerable ability to master detail and explain tactics, as long as he is able to follow a linear narrative. He has problems with the simultaneous expeditions from Constantinople of the knights who were trying to conquer territory. It is extremely difficult to follow the sequence of events, and it is here that his lack of experience as a writer is revealed. His vocabulary is not rich, and his interest in anything outside the military and political sides of the expedition is almost non-existent, but his occasional interventions in the narrative show clearly that he had firm Christian beliefs and standards to which he adhered. Clari’s narrative, on the other hand is lively and chaotic with digressions on subjects which interested him or which he thought would interest his audience. Unlike Villehardouin, he has an eye for colourful detail and an ear for a good story. He did not have the same access to the leaders as Villehardouin, nor did he have the same experience of court life. As a result the resentment felt by the rank and file at the behaviour of the leaders is clearly voiced by Clari, whose inquisitive, lively personality and gift for story-telling clearly emerge from his rather disorganized narrative. Henri de Valenciennes produces an altogether more polished piece of writing than either of the others. As a professional writer, he had more resources to draw on. He was more aware of both epic and courtly literature, and there are certain signs of the influence of both genres on his work, which are largely lacking in the other two. His account ends very abruptly with several disjointed paragraphs, suggesting that he did not have the time to polish it to the same extent as the narrative of the war against the Bulgars. Longnon suggests plausibly that he was in a hurry to finish his manuscript so that he could send it back to France with Peter of Douai who returned in the autumn of 1209. Despite the awkwardness of the ending his narrative is still clear and entertaining, giving a good impression of the frenzied activity of the early period of the reign of Henry as he fought to establish the Latin Empire securely.

Important as these texts are for literary scholars, their importance as historical sources is greater. It is rare to have the evidence of eye-witnesses and participants at such an early date, but all three, Villehardouin, Clari and Valenciennes, took part in or witnessed the events which they describe. All three claim to be utterly truthful, and there is no reason to doubt that that was their intention. There are, of course, mistakes, ambiguities and omissions, some of them deliberate. Literary scholars have shown how Villehardouin and Henri de Valenciennes can use their narrative to influence their audience, research which has not always been noticed by historians, all of whom, however, recognize the importance of Villehardouin, but pay less attention to Clari because of his numerous factual inaccuracies. Clari, however, is essential to an understanding of the mentality of the crusaders, while de Valenciennes gives crucial information on the immediate aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. All three need to be read with an awareness of the literary conventions of the period which, in varying degrees, influenced their writing. All three bring to life different sections of crusading society and different aspects of the clash between Latin and Greek. Thanks to the survival of their texts, a remarkably full picture of the Fourth Crusade and the start of the Latin Empire of Constantinople as seen by the Franks can be constructed.

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Addendum: We shall try to borrow some time from the Internet navigator and present a narrative on the Medieval Crusades from Bulgarian perspective. The introductory essay is taken from circulation sources. The work from historian Borislav Primov is first part from threesome monograph on the Fourth Crusade (published in consecutive numbers of the "Annual of Sofia University" 1946-1948). As we have mentioned in some previous reviews B. Primov is not the primer Bulgarian historian that worked on that topic. Before him Svetozar Georgiev on the pages of "Bulgarian Historical Library", issued in six Bulletins from 1928 to 1936, gave separate treatment on each Crusaders plot (not in chronological order and up to 1444 at the Battle of Varna). Vsevolod Nikolaev has also received special acclaim on the same topic with his bulk monograph "Epoch of Asen Dynasty" (published 1944).

It should be orderly here to expand a bit and say few words on the tycoon Bulgarian historians Prof. Vasil Zlatarski and Prof. Petar Mutafchiev. Zlatarski left some half dozen separate articles written on the Second Bulgarian Kingdom (1195-1393) and later systematized in v. III of his magisterial history. He always wrote as a dignitary and specifically in the case of Fourth Crusade treated Kalojan as Bulgarian king and victor, also, paid much attention on his correspondence with Pope Innocentii III. More lenient was Mutafchiev who wrote also several articles and short monographs on Second Bulgarian Kingdom. Mutafchiev's predisposition was on the Macedonian theme and he treated minor Bulgarian warlords Hriz, later also Strez/Slav, as vassals to Greek despots and Latin barons ruling on the territory of Northern Thessaly. Both Zlatarski and Mutafchiev were heavily influenced by Russian scholar Fyodor Uspensky and his primer book "Second Bulgarian Kingdom (1195-1393)" (originally published in Russian language somewhere in the 1880s).

Now let's turn back to B. Primov's monograph. Expressly we should mention that he has used thoroughly the original sources of eye-witness writers Geoffroy de Villehardouin, Robert de Clari and Henri de Valenciennes (from different modern editions but written originally in Old French language ca.1200s, later preserved in archive manuscripts and published from 19th and 20th cc. in modern translations). Ad passim fully annotated editions of those semi-Latin authors appeared in Bulgarian translations from the 1970s and 1980s (on the pages of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Series' "Greek and Latin Sources of Bulgarian History". The complementary work of Nicetas Choniates also appeared in these Series).

I think the work of Borislav Primov should be read in itself, moreover, we haven't found in Western literature detailed account on Bulgarians and their attitude towards the Crusaders (Templers). The fact that Bulgarian Kalojan defeated at least three great Western knights is ominous — Emperor Baudouin Flanders, Boniface de Montferrat, and Renier de Trit. He also had word dispute with marquis Pierre de Bracieux. All those factology is vividly described by the three old French writers at hand. There is also some pending controversy on the origins of Bulgarian Medieval State. Were those people of pure Bulgar descent (doubtfully!?) or were they mixed Bulgar - Wallachians with mercenary troops of Cumans, Petchenegs, etc. The Latin authors use the terms "Blaquie", "Blakie-le-Grant" and others which show that confusion was dominant, ditto.