Literature in Frankish Greece 305
behalf of Queen Joanna of Naples from 1377 to 1381. Beyond this, de Heredia
was a bibliophile with an active interest in history and this document reflects
his interest, forming part of a larger group of works dedicated to the history
of Greece. Thus the Aragonese chronicle, while clearly heavily dependent on
one or more existing versions of the Chronicle, is a very different work from
the other versions. It is a relatively sophisticated attempt to compile a history
of the principality from a wide range of sources and contains much material
that does not derive from the Chronicle at all. The materials for this compila-
tion could well have been gathered by Heredia and his agents while they were
in the principality around 1379–80, and almost certainly included both French
and Greek versions of the Chronicle. The work itself was created outside the
principality, probably at the papal court in Avignon.44
The French version of the Chronicle (referred to as B) is particularly inter-
esting.45 The single extant manuscript of c.1400 was in the library of the dukes
of Burgundy by 1469 at the latest, but it is possible that its exemplar arrived
in the West as early as the 1330s, when the historian and crusading propa-
gandist Marino Sanudo Torsello sent a text dealing with “the conquest of
Constantinople and with many other things” to the count of Hainaut.46 There
were close links between Hainaut and the Morea, as a result of the marriage
of Isabelle de Villehardouin to Florent de Hainaut; moreover, the library of the
counts passed to Burgundy in 1428. It seems likely, then, that at least one copy
of the French Chronicle was in the West by around 1400, when the surviving
manuscript was made, and that this manuscript itself was made in the West,
being copied from a far from perfect original deriving from Latin Greece.47
Like the Spanish Libro, B gives specific information about its origins, having
as its title the declaration:
This is the book of the conquest of Constantinople, and of the empire
of Romania, and of the land of the Principality of the Morea, which
was found in a book which was once the property of the noble baron44 For the relationship with older versions, see Shawcross, Chronicle, pp. 268–73; also
Anthony Luttrell, “Juan Fernández de Heredia and the Compilation of the Aragonese
Chronicle of the Morea,” in Deus Vult, miscellanea di studi sugli Ordini militari, ed. Cristian
Guzzo (Tuscania, 2011), pp. 124–33.
45 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale 15702; ed. Longnon, Livre de la Conqueste (see above, n. 3).
46 Shawcross, Chronicle, pp. 89–90.
47 Shawcross, Chronicle, pp. 86–95; Jacoby, “Considérations,” pp. 149–50. Rodrigues, French
Chronique, pp. 70–71.