Uri Shachar
‘Re-Orienting’ Estoires d’Outremer: The Arabic Context of the Saladin Legend
Estoires d’Outremer is a work of Old-French prose which combines historical narrative and
legendary anecdote, with a clear focus on the figure of Saladin. Covering the years 1101-1230, large parts
of this composition feature textual affinity to various manuscripts that constitute the so-called William of
Tyre corpus. Estoires d’Outremer differs, however, from other members of this ‘family’ in that its
redactor uniquely introduced into the main narrative several accounts of legendary character, some of
which also circulated independently and enjoyed a great deal of popularity. Scholars of the Crusades and
of the Near East, however, have traditionally been rather dismissive toward Estoires d’Outremer. It was
felt by the nineteenth-century editors of Outremer literature to contain either inferior versions of texts that
had been preserved elsewhere, or fabulous material of little historical value.
The scholarly consensus on the relative unimportance of Estoires d’Outremer rests largely on the
assumption that it is a late-thirteenth-century northern French composition. The thesis, which has
remained uncontested for over a century and a half, is that the anonymous redactor used as the basis for
his composition a fairly corrupt version of a William of Tyre ‘Continuation’ (namely, the Abrégé) that
circulated in the West, into which he interpolated short independent romance narratives that, by the
second half of the thirteenth century, had gained some popularity. However, closer examination of the
various textual units that make up Estoire d’Outremer vis-à-vis their respective manuscript traditions
reveals that, in fact, it is far more likely that the original redactor compiled this text in an Oriental setting
in 1230’s.
This possibility bears important consequences for our understanding of early European attitudes
toward Saladin. A widely scattered group of stories – the so-called ‘Legend of Saladin’– has been
circulating in the West since the thirteenth century to the present, celebrating the sultan’s extraordinary
largess and chivalry, as well as his uncanny ties to Latin Christendom. Estoires d’Outremer not only
represents a historical account that features a peculiar interest in the affairs of the illustrious Ayyubid
Sultan; it furthermore contains fabulous narratives that establish Saladin’s French-Christian descent (‘La
Fille du Comte de Pontieu’) and which relate Saladin’s dubbing into knighthood by one of his Frankish
captives (‘Ordene de Chevalerie’). A re-assessment of Estoires’ origin, therefore, reveals that part of the
legend which sought to appropriate the sultan and to re-fit him in Christian garb had, in fact, deep oriental
roots. The compilation of these stories and their framing in a highly stylized historical prose took shape,
in other words, not only within a different a political landscape, but also in a different literary orientation
than previously thought.
This paper will focus on one rarely discussed narrative involving Saladin, and will discuss the
extent of its entanglement with a variety of Near-Eastern literary traditions. In a number of places
throughout Estoire d’Outremer the redactor threaded into the prose a unique narrative about Saladin’s
alleged military campaigns against the King of Nubia, fueled by an ill-fated love affair with the Queen of
Turkey. My discussion of this highly charged and manifestly fabulous romance will dwell on aspects that
show the imprint of an oriental literary language. This narrative, I will argue, was conceived in a cultural
and political context that was saturated in Ayyubid didactic and popular-epic literature. Gestures of
Frankish appropriation in this narrative, in other words, were far more subtle and subversive than
previous readers of Estoires d’Outremer have allowed.