CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
Oxford University Press
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
TO
MY WIFE
PREFACE
Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror, had been dead but a few years when Abbot Suger set about rebuilding the great abbey church of Saint-Denis, which was dedicated with such pomp and ceremony in 1144. Among the scenes from the First Crusade which filled one of its famous stained-glass windows, there was one which portrayed Robert, mounted upon his charger, in the act of overthrowing a pagan warrior—“Robertus dux Normannorum Partum prosternit,” ran the inscription beneath it.[1] It was thus, as a hero of the Crusade, that the great Abbot Suger chose to recall him, and it was as such that his fame survived in after times. Robert was not a masterful character, and it cannot be said that as a ruler he made a deep impression upon his generation. Overshadowed by his great father, cheated of a kingdom by his more aggressive brothers, and finally defeated in battle, deprived of his duchy, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment, his misdirected life offers a melancholy contrast to the more brilliant careers of the abler members of his family. Yet, if he was himself lacking in greatness, he was closely associated with great names and great events; and his unmeasured generosity and irrepressible bonhomie gained him many friends in his lifetime, and made him a personality which is not without its attractions to the modern. It is hoped that a study of his career which attempts to set him in his true relation to the history of Normandy and England and of the Crusade may be of interest not only to the specialist but to the general reader.