Outremer Objects

This chapter evaluates the inventories that form rolls B and C of the Account-Inventory, which reveal the workings of Eudes of Nevers’s household itself and the religious houses and individuals in Acre that received the count’s goods as they were given out after his death. Geographically, Eudes’s inventory is oriented toward Outremer and its holy sites. Rolls B and C also list items in the spaces where they were kept and used. In this way, the inventory seems to follow the movement of its scribes as they progressed through rooms filled with things that were themselves afforded values, histories, associations, and future trajectories as they were enumerated, given over, sold off, and distributed in turn. As is clear from this list and what is known from other examples, crusader rings and jewels were a transmissible mode of participation in the knightly culture of Outremer. Eudes gave away objects that had belonged to his father and father-in-law, both crusaders in their own right, to specific family members from his own family lines. Evident in these short lists is not only the transfer of wealth but also the transfer of a set of ideas, memories, experiences, and ideals: the transfer of an ideology of aristocratic crusading embedded within things.