OUTPOSTS
As unpredictable as the final of Fumeux fume was the location of the other main center of ars subtilior
composition. Cyprus, the most easterly of the major Mediterranean islands, off the southern coast of
Turkey and the western coast of Syria, had been conquered during the Third Crusade in 1191 by an army
under Richard Lion-Heart, who then bestowed it as a sort of consolation prize on Guy of Lusignan, the
deposed ruler of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. The French-speaking Lusignan dynasty ruled Cyprus
until 1489 when the island fell under the rule of the city-state of Venice. The highpoint of Cypriot French
culture was reached at the end of the fourteenth century under King Janus (reigned 1398–1432), who in
1411 married the princess Charlotte de Bourbon whose entourage included a musical chapel.
The decade between their marriage and Charlotte’s death in 1422 was a period of intense musical
activity on the island, memorialized for us by a huge manuscript containing plainchant Masses and Offices
and 216 polyphonic compositions in every contemporary French genre—Mass Ordinary settings, Latin
and French motets, ballades, rondeaux, and virelais. (The manuscript is now kept at the National Library
of Turin in northern Italy.) Although produced entirely by imported French musicians, it was a wholly
indigenous repertory, and (with a single exception) a wholly anonymous one. Not one composition from
the Cypriot manuscript turns up in any other source.
Ballades are predictably the most numerous genre. The 102 specimens in the Cypriot manuscript are
the handiwork of supremely sophisticated craftsmen; one of them, Sur toutes flours (“Above all other
flowers”), is well known to generations of struggling musicology trainees as the single most ferocious
specimen of ars subtilior puzzle-notation in existence. The most distinguished body of French-Cypriot
music, however, is the group of Mass Ordinary settings, consisting entirely of Glorias and Credos, most