324 Page
barony of Arcadia under the patronage, once again, of the le Maure family.111
The Wa r also gives the hero Ajax the epithet “of the Mani”, a geographical asso-
ciation that is known nowhere else and just perhaps reflects a tradition local to
the Peloponnese.112 In this respect it is also interesting that the Greeks of the
Wa r are called “Hellenes”. Benoit had called his ancient Greeks “Grezeis”, and
the natural Greek translation of the 14th century might have been “Romaioi”
(as in the contemporary Chronicle). Twice the translator of the Wa r makes an
apparent slip, using “Romaioi” instead of “Hellenes” at 6852, and at 12945 refer-
ring to the Greek language as “the tongue of the Romans”: he is thus of course
aware of the contemporary usage.113 This use of “Hellenes” in the Wa r may just
be a conscious attempt to avoid any identification of the ancient Greeks with
the contemporary Romans, that is, with one specific ethnic group within the
Morea. Such an identification might have ended up excluding the Franks, and
it was important that the Franks too be allowed to identify with the ancient
Greeks whose lands they now held.
In Conclusion, The Morea is Different
Culturally, the Frankish Peloponnese could present as conclusively periph-
eral, the medieval definition of a backwater. Historically, the Peloponnese
had been part of the Byzantine Empire until the Fourth Crusade and the
creation of the Frankish Principality of the Morea. And in Byzantine terms,
the Peloponnese was definitely the back of beyond. The highly educated
elite of faraway Constantinople typically looked down on the natives of what
we now call Greece as uneducated illiterates who could barely speak the lan-
guage. Although the area was tolerably well off, with a successful and pros-
perous economy, it barely figured on the cultural or intellectual landscape of
Byzantium.
And then one could look at it from a western perspective—far from the
courts of France, which commanded the heights of literary endeavour and
style, Greece and the Greeks tended to be viewed with suspicion and distrust.
They were Other in many ways, not least as schismatic in rejecting the pri-
111 Caroline Cupane, “Λογοτεχνική,” pp. 371–74; Jeffreys “Prism,” p. 20. Note also the appeal
made to the ancient past in the title of the Frankish duke of Athens: Shawcross, Chronicle,
p. 144.
112 Shawcross, “Reinventing,” p. 144.
113 Papathomopoulos and Jeffreys, Polemos, pp. lxi–ii.