Exploring Latin texts, as well as Old French, Castilian, and Occitan songs and lyrics, this book contributes to new directions in studies of the crusades by offering a more nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which medieval authors presented events, people, and places central to the crusading movement. It investigates how the transmission of stories related to suffering, heroism, the miraculous, and ideals of masculinity, helped to shape ideas of crusading presented in narratives produced in both the Latin East and the West, as well as the importance of Jerusalem in the lyric cultures of southern France, and how the narrative arc of the First Crusade developed from the earliest written and oral responses to the venture.