Fulcher of Chartres

Also known as Fulcherius Carnotensis

First-Crusade chaplain and chronicler whose Historia Hierosolymitana covers the foundation generation of the kingdom from an eyewitness perspective.

Fulcher took the cross at the Council of Clermont, served as chaplain first to Stephen of Blois and then — from 1097 — to Baldwin of Boulogne. He accompanied Baldwin on the detour that founded the County of Edessa in 1098, and followed him to Jerusalem when Baldwin became king as Baldwin I in 1100.

His Historia Hierosolymitana covers the period 1095 to 1127 and was written in the Holy Land itself, mostly in Jerusalem. As a settled Frankish chaplain at the centre of the kingdom's first generation, he is the principal eyewitness for the foundation of Crusader institutions — the first siege of Jerusalem, the early campaigns of Baldwin I, the establishment of Frankish settlement on the coast — and his work is one of the basic sources from which all later Latin chroniclers, including William of Tyre, drew.

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