Literature in Frankish Greece

chapter 9 Literature in Frankish Greece

Gill Page

This paper considers works of literature associated with the Frankish Peloponnese between the 13th and the 15th centuries. That word “literature” suggests a body of work which has been written down, a collection of fixed and noteworthy texts which exist to be read, and of course, we have a body of texts surviving from Frankish Greece. But in the context of the High Middle Ages much creative work existed independent of books, independent of writing. This was still an age of oral creation and transmission alongside, and increas- ingly interweaving with, written transmission. If we want to understand the origin and context of these texts, then seeing “literature” as only and strictly written and read is unhelpful, as the written text did not occupy the same privileged position as it does in the modern era.1 Thus “literature” might be more usefully understood as denoting “cultural or leisure activity of the word”. It is a dilemma—an awkward fact—that we might wish to speak coherently of this complex cultural sphere but all we have to go on are the written survivals. Nevertheless, the written texts are our way into a discovery of enjoyment of the word in Frankish Greece. What did the residents of Frankish Greece create, value, and enjoy in terms of the word? This paper looks at this activity of the word in Frankish Greece, focusing on the Principality of the Morea in the Peloponnese. As Frankish Greece is a large area both in terms of time and geography, it can be difficult to speak sensibly and concisely over the whole, and I have thus chosen to concentrate on a more specific area and time. The Principality of the Morea lasted a little over two centuries after the conquest of the Fourth Crusade in 1204; geographi- cally it included initially large parts of the Peloponnese, although it had shrunk to a nubbin by the time its final remnant passed to Byzantine rule in 1430. Moreover, the medieval Peloponnese is comparatively rich in recorded history, monuments and culture.2

1 This position is not universally recognised: contrast Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982), pp. 10–14 and Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry (Cambridge, 1977), p. 2. 2 Other areas of Frankish Greece also have much to offer. Cyprus has a wealth of material in both Greek and French including religious accounts as well as histories: for recent work,

Nova Francia

Literary production in the Frankish Peloponnese should come as no surprise: the chivalrous splendour of the Villehardouin principality in the 13th century is well attested. In such a glittering model of French culture we should expect to find literary activity of various kinds, a thriving court entertainment scene, and also the production of books. It is true that very little of this has survived to the present day, but enough is extant to give us a glimpse of this aspect of Moreot society in the first century of the principality. What is also clear is that well before the middle of the 14th century the Frankish Morea was a culture of considerable ethnic assimilation. A significant aspect of this blurring of ethnic boundaries was linguistic crossover—Franks speaking Greek, Greeks speaking French. The fundamental literary monument of Frankish Greece, the Chronicle of the Morea, is the clearest witness to this assimilation; it exists in four different languages, and versions in both French and Greek were in existence in the 14th century. Thus the people of the principality were culturally active in French and Greek and the principality was heir to two distinct cultural traditions. Any account of the literature of the Morea must thus consider both the French and the Greek components. The extant literary heritage of the Frankish Peloponnese is not great. This paper will consider, firstly, the Chansonnier du Roi, a songbook associated with Prince William ii de Villehardouin in the third quarter of the 13th century. The Chansonnier shows us the Villehardouin principality at its most glorious— and very French—height, and it links the Morea closely to the western literary and musical scene. Secondly, it will consider the 14th-century Chronicle of the Morea, and primarily its French and Greek versions as these were

see Gilles Grivaud, “Literature,” in Cyprus: Society and Culture, 1191–1374, ed. Angel Nicolaou- Konnari and Christopher Schabel (Leiden, 2005), pp. 219–84; and Gilles Grivaud, Entrelacs Chiprois: essai sur les lettres et la vie intellectuelle dans le royaume de Chypre, 1191–1570 (Nicosia, 2009); also Krijnie Ciggaar “Le royaume des Lusignans: terre de littérature et des traditions, échanges littéraires et culturels,” in Les Lusignans et l’Outre-mer, ed. Claude Mutafian, (Poitiers, 1994), pp. 89–98. Crete offers poetry in Greek on a broad variety of subjects and for a varied audience, as well as later vernacular histories: see David Holton ed., Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete (Cambridge, 1991); and Nicolaos Panagiotakes, “The Italian Background of Early Cretan Literature,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 49 (1995), 282–323. The Chronicle of the Tocco (Epiros, early 15th century) is a significant Greek vernacular compara- tor to the Chronicle of the Morea on which Thekla Sansaridou-Hendrickx has recently written extensively: see “The World View of the Anonymous Author of the Greek Chronicle of the Tocco, 14th–15th Centuries” (doctoral thesis, University of Johannesburg, 2000), published online at , and consulted in March 2014.