Literature in Frankish Greece 303
Listen All of You, Franks and Romans!
It would be easy to conclude from all this that the Franks of the Morea were a
haughty, and exclusive caste living out their hyper-French dream in the beauti-
ful Greek landscape while having nothing to do with the people and culture
on whom they had so rudely intruded. But this was not so. The Morea was a
land of considerable cultural assimilation, and the extent of this assimilation
is above all shown by the fact that by the middle years of the 14th century the
knights of the Morea were enjoying works written in the Greek vernacular.40
The transition from the high French art of the trouvères to the—at times—
40 Gill Page, Being Byzantine: Greek Identity before the Ottomans (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 200–
01; also Michael Angold, “The Latin Empire of Constantinople, 1204–1261: Marriage
Strategies,” in Identities and Allegiances in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1204, ed. Judith
Herrin and Guillaume Saint-Guillain (Farnham, 2011), pp. 60–61.
figure 9.3 Au novel tans, musical notation. (Edited and transcribed by Paul Leigh).