The Canso d'Antioca was a late twelfth-century Occitan epic poem in the form of a chanson de geste

Chanson de geste

The chansons de geste, Old French for "songs of heroic deeds", are the epic poems that appear at the dawn of French literature. The earliest known examples date from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, nearly a hundred years before the emergence of the lyric poetry of the trouvères and...

describing the First Crusade

First Crusade

The First Crusade was a military expedition by Western Christianity to regain the Holy Lands taken in the Muslim conquest of the Levant, ultimately resulting in the recapture of Jerusalem...

 up to the Siege of Antioch

Siege of Antioch

The Siege of Antioch took place during the First Crusade in 1097 and 1098. The first siege, by the crusaders against the Muslim city, lasted from October 21, 1097, to June 2, 1098. The second siege, against the crusaders who had occupied it, lasted from June 7 to June 28, 1098.-Background:Antioch...

 (1098). It survives only in a manuscript fragment of 707 alexandrines preserved in Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

.

The Canso was a reworking of an earlier Occitan epic history of the First Crusade written by Gregory Bechada probably between 1106 and 1118. Being based partially on eyewitness testimony, the Canso serves as a source in its own right for the Occitan contribution at Antioch. It emphasises the feats of the knights of southern France, especially Gouffier de Lastours, and southern Italy, the Italo-Normans under Bohemond of Taranto. It is sometimes supposed to have also dealt extensively with Raymond IV of Toulouse

Raymond IV of Toulouse

Raymond IV of Toulouse , sometimes called Raymond of St Gilles, was Count of Toulouse, Duke of Narbonne, and Margrave of Provence and one of the leaders of the First Crusade. He was a son of Pons of Toulouse and Almodis de La Marche...

, but he is not found in the surviving fragments.

The Canso also served as the literary model for the early thirteenth-century Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise

Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise

The Song of the Albigensian Crusade is an Old Occitan epic poem narrating events of the Albigensian Crusade from March 1208 to June 1219. Modelled on the Old French chanson de geste, it was composed in two distinct parts: William of Tudela wrote the first towards 1213, and an anonymous continuator...

of William of Tudela

William of Tudela

William of Tudela was the author of the first part of the Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise or Song of the Albigensian Crusade, an epic poem in Occitan giving a contemporary account of the crusade against the Cathars.According to his own account in the first lines of his poem, William was...

 and for the late thirteenth-century History of the War of Navarre of William Anelier. Portions of it were also translated into Castilian for the Gran Conquista de Ultramar, which also contains unique material possibly borrowed from the complete version of the Canso or from Bechada's earlier epic.