Literature in Frankish Greece 289
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 princi-
pality 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 liter-
ary 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 <https://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za/handle/10210/6312>, and consulted in March 2014.