Literature in Frankish Greece 323
reawakened in both sides the desire to assert the supposed historical grounds
for their own authority.107
Unsurprisingly, then, the rhetoric of Troy had a role in the Fourth Crusade,
for it was possible to see the conquest of Constantinople as revenge by the
Franks (the Trojans) on the Greeks (the Byzantines), and the taking of the city
as in some sense a retaking of Troy. This claim was explicitly stated by the cru-
sader Peter de Bracheux, as reported by Robert de Clari, and Niketas Choniates
referenced the same belief in his account of the sack of Constantinople,
speaking of the actions of “the sons of Aeneas” in revenge for the sack
of Troy.108 There is evidence that the Roman de Troie was circulating in Latin
Constantinople soon after the conquest, and also that a French prose version
(Paris, BnF fr.1612) was produced in the Peloponnese towards the end of the
13th century.109
In this context, The War of Troy is rather surprising. Given that Benoit’s origi-
nal tale was pro-Trojan, and that the Frankish knights of Greece were descen-
dants of crusaders, one would expect this account to favour the Trojans as
well—but it does not. While it cannot entirely eliminate the pro-Trojan tone
of the original, it unmistakeably favours the Greeks.110 This is surely indica-
tive that its audience was expected to favour the Greeks and that, therefore,
the Franks of the Morea did not (by the mid-14th century at least) necessarily
see themselves as reborn Trojans.
By now long established on the Greek mainland, the Franks of the
Peloponnese knew something of their land’s ancient past and placed value
on this past, as witness the garbled mythical history of the Diegesis peri tes
Peloponnesou, which is thought to have originated in verse form in the
107 Teresa Shawcross, “Reinventing the Homeland in the Historiography of Frankish Greece:
The Fourth Crusade and the Legend of the Trojan War,” Byzantine and Modern Greek
Studies 27 (2003), 120–52; Jeffreys, “Place of Composition,” pp. 317–20.
108 Robert de Clari, La conquête de Constantinople, ed. Philippe Lauer (Paris, 1924), p. 102;
Niketas Choniates, Nicetae Choniatae Historia, ed. Jan-Louis van Dieten, 2 vols. (Berlin
1975), 1:§652; note that Choniates elsewhere identifies the Byzantine side with the
Hellenes: Choniates, Historia, 1:§580, §610; see Page, Being Byzantine, pp. 88–89.
109 Shawcross, “Reinventing,” pp. 137–39; Krijnie Ciggaar, “Les villes de provinces byzantines
et les échanges culturels. Quelques traducters peu connus,” in Byzance et le monde exté-
rieur: Contacts, relations, échanges, ed. Paule Pagès, Élisabeth Malamut and Jean-Michel
Spieser (Paris, 2005), pp. 89–91.
110 Papathomopoulos and Jeffreys, Polemos, pp. lxi–ii.