Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/128

120 REVIEWS OF BOOKS January Arabia Petraea, and thus had the opportunity of viewing for himself the marvels of the Dead Sea.^ In 1101 he was at the taking of Caesarea and the victory of Ramla ; ^ and in 1111 he went with Baldwin on the foray against Mosul.^ But he was a man of timorous disposition, and we can well believe that he discontinued these excursions with relief. He may have gone on the Egyptian expedition of 1118, in which Baldwin lost his life ; but the conjecture depends upon the fact that he records the last illness and death of the king with some particularity of detail,* and is not convincing, since Fulcher must have known many of the king's household and could easily learn such details from them. After 1118 there is no indication that Fulcher ever left Jerusalem. Dr. Hagenmeyer thinks that he may have stood in some personal relation to Baldwin II, but the only evidence for this is a rhetorical admonition to the new sovereign, which might have been written by any of his subjects.^ Fulcher ends his work abruptly with an account of a plague of rats which visited Acre and other places in the year 1127. By that date he was in his sixty-eighth or sixty- ninth year, and it is reasonable to suppose that he died soon afterwards. In later life he may have been prior of the church which was founded on the Mount of Olives in memory of the Ascension ; for a certain Fulcherua prior montis Oliveti attests a charter of the Patriarch Arnulf in the year 1112.^ But there are only two references in the Historia to the Moimt of Olives, and neither implies any close connexion of the writer with that place. It has also been suggested that Fulcher was a canon of the church of the Holy Sepulchre. His references to this foimdation are more numerous, and perhaps are dictated by a personal interest. He specially mentions a reconciliation between the patriarch Daimbert and certain of the canons in 1101.' This is the first time that Fulcher's book has been separately published ; and Dr. Hagenmeyer is the first editor who has approached the peculiar problem of the text in a strictly scientific spirit. Fulcher published two distinct recensions of the Historia. In the second he continued his story from 1124, the point at which he had originally broken o£F, to 1127. The manuscripts of the first recension end with the partition of Tyre between Baldwin II and the Venetians ; ^ and cc. 37-62 of the third book are only foimd in the manuscripts of the second recension. There are further differ- ences between the two recensions ; for it sometimes happened that Fulcher, in preparing the second, modified what he had previously written. The earlier editors — Bongars, Duchesne, Migne — did not realize that the manuscripts fall into two distinct classes, and constructed hybrid texts, in which they followed sometimes the first recension, sometimes the second. Wallon, who edited the Historia for the ' Recueil des Historians des Croisades ', distinguished between the two recensions, and rightly decided that the second, as giving Fulcher's mature conclusions, was to be preferred. But he was not entirely consistent in his method, and sometimes followed the readings of the first recension without sufficient reason. Dr. Hagen- meyer, on the other hand, has only followed the first recension in cases » II, c. 5. » II, cc. 8, 11. » II, c. 45. * II, c. 64. » III, c. 7. • Rohricht, Regesta Regni Hierosol., no. 101. ' n, c. 6. • III, c. 36.