The Deeds of God Through the Franks | Page 9

who had undergone such great danger, testified that
they could have known of no race comparable to the Turks, either in
liveliness of spirit, or energy in battle. When the Turks initiated a battle,
our men were almost reduced to despair by the novelty of their tactics
in battle; they were not accustomed to their speed on horseback, not to
their ability to avoid our frontal assaults. We had particular difficulty
with the fact that they fired their arrows only when fleeing from the
battle. It was the Turk's opinion, however, that they shared an ancestry
with the Franks, and that the highest military prowess belonged
particularly to the Turks and Franks, above all other people.
Having praised the West at the expense of the East in the first book, in
the second he praises the French at the expense of the Teutons,
recounting a conversation he recently held with a German ecclesiastic,
to show himself an ardent defender of ethnicity:
Last year while I was speaking with a certain archdeacon of Mainz
about a rebellion of his people, I heard him vilify our king and our
people, merely because the king had given gracious welcome
everywhere in his kingdom to his Highness Pope Paschalis and his
princes; he called them not merely Franks, but, derisively, "Francones."
I said to him, "If you think them so weak and languid that you can
denigrate a name known and admired as far away as the Indian Ocean,
then tell me upon whom did Pope Urban call for aid against the Turks?
Wasn't it the French? Had they not been present, attacking the
barbarians everywhere, pouring their sturdy energy and fearless
strength into the battle, there would have been no help for your
Germans, whose reputation there amounted to nothing." That is what I
said to him.
Guibert then turns to his reader, and provides a more extensive
panegyric for his people, recalling pre-Merovingian accomplishments:
I say truly, and everyone should believe it, that God reserved this
nation for such a task. For we know certainly that, from the time that
they received the sign of faith that blessed Remigius brought to them,

they succumbed to none of the diseases of false faith from which other
nations have remained uncontaminated either with great difficulty or
not at all. They are the ones who, while still laboring under the pagan
error, when they triumphed on the battlefield over the Gauls, who were
Christians, did not punish or kill any of them, because they believed in
Christ. Instead, those whom Roman severity had punished with sword
and fire, French native generosity covered with gems and amber. They
strove to welcome with honor not only those who lived within their
own borders, but they also affectionately cared for people who came
from Spain, Italy, or anywhere else, so that love for the martyrs and
confessors, whom they constantly served and honored, made them
famous, finally driving them to the glorious victory at Jerusalem.
Because it has carried the yoke since the days of its youth, it will sit in
isolation,[34] a nation noble, wise, war-like, generous, brilliant above
all kinds of nations. Every nation borrows the name as an honorific title;
do we not see the Bretons, the English, the Ligurians call men "Frank"
if they behave well? But now let us return to the subject.
"Let us return to the subject," like the earlier injunction, "let us
continue in the direction in which we set out," indicates Guibert's
awareness of his tendency to perform "sorties."[35] At times he turns
from the narrative to deliver a sermon, or to offer a biography of
Mahomet, and, more than once, to lecture on ecclesiastical history. The
apparent looseness of structure which results, a quality Misch attributed
to the Memoirs as well, may be symptom of Guibert's Shandy-like
temperament, or may be evidence that the remarks he made about his
style in an early aside to the reader apply equally well to his structure:
Please, my reader, knowing without a doubt that I certainly had no
more time for writing than those moments during which I dictated the
words themselves, forgive the stylistic infelicities; I did first write on
writing-tablets to be corrected diligently later, but I wrote them directly
on the parchment, exactly as it is, harshly barked out.
Such a cavalier attitude towards the finished product was not
characteristic of Guibert,[36] and seems to be in keeping neither with
his declared penchant for difficulty, nor with his declared intention to

raise the level of his style to match the significance of his subject:
No one should be surprised that I make use of style very much different
from that of the Commentaries on Genesis, or the other little treatises;
for it is proper and permissible to ornament a history