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celebrated great occasions with jousting, feasting and carolling.9 They pro-
moted their own good name, with young lords like Marco Sanudo taken into
the court to learn lordly ways and be duly impressed. And with their golden
spurs and massive entourages the Villehardouin boys also specifically showed
off through largesse and display.10 As part of this whole lifestyle the knights
and their households would surely also have enjoyed the romances of Arthur
and of Troy and the music and poetry of the troubadours and trouvères.11
The Morea Chansonnier
The earliest literary survival from the Frankish Morea is now in Paris, at the
Bibliothèque Nationale. Manuscript fonds. fr.844 (the “Chansonnier du Roi”
or the “Manuscrit du Roi”) is in a fairly sorry condition.12 Eighteen of the
original pages are entirely missing, and many of its splendid initials have
9 Sanudo, Istoria p. 105, lines 12–14; section 242. Greek Chronicle vv. 2408–10; French
Chronicle §242.
10 In a fascinating confirmation of Sanudo’s account, recent excavations of the Villehardouin
town of Glarenza have revealed gilded spurs in knightly tombs: Demetrios Athanasoulis,
“The Triangle of Power: Building Projects in the Metropolitan Area of the Crusader
Principality of the Morea,” in Viewing the Morea: Land and People in the Late Medieval
Peloponnese, ed. Sharon Gerstel (Washington dc, 2013), p. 124.
11 See especially David Jacoby, “Knightly Values and Class Consciousness in the Crusader
States of the Eastern Mediterranean,” Mediterranean Historical Review 1 (1986), 158–85,
repr. in idem, Studies on the Crusader States and on Venetian Expansion (Northampton,
1989), I; and Jeanne Horowitz, “Quand les champenois parlaient en Grec: La Moréé
franque au xiiie siècle, un bouillon de culture,” in Cross Cultural Convergences in the
Crusader Period: Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Michael
Goodich, Sophia Menache and Sylvia Schein (New York, 1995), pp. 111–50.
12 The Chansonnier is variously referred to under various sigla as M (the trouvère con-
tent), W (troubadour content) and R (the motet content); it also includes Mt (the spe-
cific added booklet of songs by Thibaut of Champagne); for these sigla see Haines,
“The Transformations of the ‘Manuscrit du Roi,’ ” Musica Disciplina 52 (1998–2002), 6.
The fullest account of the manuscript is now John Haines, “The Songbook for William
of Villehardouin, Prince of the Morea (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds
français 844): A Crucial Case in the History of Vernacular Song Collections,” in Viewing
the Morea, pp. 57–109: I am grateful to Professor Haines for an advance viewing of this
work. See also his earlier The Musicography of the Manuscrit du Roi (Toronto, 1998) and
“Transformations” above. The Chansonnier is also dealt with in some detail in Elizabeth
Aubrey, The Music of the Troubadours (Bloomington, 1996), pp. 39–43 and again by
Elizabeth Aubrey in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley
Sadie, 29 vols. (London, 1980), 23:853 (part of the entry “Sources, Ms”, 791–938); also
Hans Spanke, “Der Chansonnier du Roi,” Romanische Forschungen 57 (1943), 38–104 and