Literature in Frankish Greece 313
oral and literate norms in the vernacular and the Chronicle can be viewed as
transitional in several aspects. Firstly, the Chronicle is created primarily for lis-
teners, and most likely for recitation and, secondly, the composition may have
been at least in part oral, or have used substantial elements of source material
of oral origin. Similarly, the transmission of the text may have been oral as well
as written. Lastly, though composed in writing, the Chronicle features many
key aspects of oral composition—the “oral residue”.
Reflecting its oral background, the Chronicle has much in common with the
chansons de geste that would have been familiar to the Franks of the Morea.70
In the way of a chanson, its purpose is to evoke the grand deeds of its audi-
ence’s predecessors in order to entertain, inform and provide an example. Like
such a chanson, it is far from an accurate account, but would have nevertheless
been perceived as historically true. Holding up a paradigm of society, in this
case the principality under the Villehardouins, it functioned as an “important
repository of collective memory”.71
In this regard, the different versions of the Greek Chronicle reveal how that
collective memory changed and so how the “repository” changed accord-
ingly. Vernacular Greek texts were subject to variability in transmission that
seems to echo the variability of oral transmission (see below), and it is clear
that the scribe of the P version composed c.1400 had no hesitation in adapt-
ing and emending the text before him. He thus toned down overt Catholicism
(e.g. 495, 6131, 6216–20), corrected formal modes of address in a more correct
“Byzantine” style (e.g. 4297, 5320), omitted slighting references to the Romans
(i.e. Greeks, e.g. 3995, 4183, 5011) and toned down considerably the eulogies
of the Villehardouin princes and of Geoffrey of Karytaina (2754–5, 7224–32,
7804).72 This shows, then, that the nostalgia for the Villehardouins diminished
over the course of the 14th century. Nevertheless the story remained popular—
it was, after all, the story of the Morea and the Moreots and this remained the
identity with the greatest resonance.73
Poetry,” in Origini della letteratura neograeca, atti del secondo congresso internazionale
Neograeca Medii Aevi, ed. Nikolaos Panagiotakis (Venice, 1993), pp. 253–54 and 263–65.
70 Thus Jeffreys, “Formulas,” pp. 191–92; Carolina Cupane, “Λογοτεχνική παραγωγή στο
Φραγκοκρατούμενο Μορέα” [“Literary Production in Frankish Morea”], Βυζαντιναί Μελέται 6
(1995), 381.
71 Joseph Duggan, “Social Functions of the Medieval Epic in the Romance Literatures,” Oral
Tradition 1 (1986), 730–46.
72 Page, Being Byzantine, pp. 259–62.
73 Page, Being Byzantine, pp. 264–66.