It may well be the case, then, that soon after this, Alfonso married John’s
niece, Matilda of Eu.^30 If this is the correct reconstruction of events,
though, then it did not help him very much. In the event, Philip IV did
little more than grant Alfonso a place at his court and a sizeable annu-
ity.^31 Yet the match may well show that the house of Eu’s Spanish
pedigree and connections had not been forgotten–and, indeed, that
the family still had serious ambitions on the wider European stage.
However, the pretensions of the house of Eu come across most vividly
in the sphere of cultural activity. Much of this is already quite well-
known. For instance, it has long been established that the celebrated
French author, Jean de Meung, translated Vegetius’sDe re militarifor
John II in the mid-1280s.^32 This may well suggest an interest in martial
matters that does not reallyfit our rather pacific image of the count. What
is not so well-known is that another distinguishedliteratus, Mahieu le
Vilain, worked for both John II and his son, dedicating his translation of
Aristotle’sMeteorologyto the latter:‘A Johan d’Eu,fiz au fort Johan,
conte d’Eu,fiz du roi de Jherusalem par la grâce de Dieu, Mahieu le
Vilain, de Neuf Chastel de Drincort, salus et subjection’.^33 Indeed, as
Monfrin has shown, the phrase‘fiz du roi de Jherusalem’was coming to
be used as a sort of tag line for the house of Eu, artfully blending the
distinction between‘son’and‘descendant’. To sum up: although we do
not have anywhere near a full picture of John II, we know enough to be
able to describe him as‘one of those cultured lords who did so much, in
the thirteenth century, for [the development of French] literature’.^34
Yet the house of Eu’s greatest monument was clearly the magnificent
new‘tomb of kinship’that John II constructed for himself and his
mother, Countess Mary.^35 It is described, in disproportionate detail, in
theChronique des comtes d’Eu. Evidently, it was far and away the greatest
structure in the author’s monastery of Foucarmont.^36 The tomb con-
sisted of twogisants(‘recumbent effigies’) of John II and his mother
respectively, surrounded by a large number of other‘ymaiges’, represent-
ing the dynasty’s lineage in the male and female lines. On Mary’s side,
naturally enough, these images focused on the earlier history of the house
(^30) For this, see D. E. Masnata y de Quesada,‘La Casa Real de la Cerda’,inEstudios
Genealógicos y Heráldicos1 (1985), 169–229.
(^31) SeeLes journaux de Trésor de Philippe IV le Bel, ed. J. Viard (Paris, 1940), nos. 598, 2464,
4322, 5414.
(^32) See Monfrin,‘Jean de Brienne, comte d’Eu, et la traduction des Météorologiques
d’Aristote par Mahieu le Vilain’(vers 1290)’,34–6.
(^33) Ibid., 30. (^34) Ibid.,28–30, 36.
(^35) For the term, see A. Morganstern,Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries
36 and England(University Park, 2000), 6.
For more on the author, seeRHGF, xxiii, 439.
110 The Angevins and Athens (c. 1267–1311)