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The Greek Context
In literary terms, the Frankish Peloponnese looked chiefly to the West.74 Clearly,
the Chansonnier was a very western product: there is nothing to associate this
with Greece in particular, it merely has a close link with a prince of Frankish
Greece who, to judge only from this work, operated in a wholly French way
and could as well have been living in Champagne, in Burgundy, or in Acre. The
Chronicle of the Morea also looks west. It exists in three “western” languages
as well as Greek and may have been originally written in French; at the very
least it existed in French very early in its history. Moreover it is, ostensibly
at least, pro-French in its portrayal of the Morea. Additionally, although the
Greek Chronicle was written by someone thoroughly acculturated to the Greek
world (and probably of Greek descent), he was not ideologically part of the
Byzantine world. The chronicler expresses no loyalty to the Byzantine Empire
of Constantinople and shows minimal awareness of Greek culture; although
plainly he had had some education, he betrays no evidence of this beyond the
mere fact of being able to write. In terms of Greek literature, the Chronicle was,
as far as we can tell, something new: the first historical work written in the
vernacular in the fifteen-syllable iambic metre often known as “political verse”.
However, for all its novelty and its westward inclinations, the Greek
Chronicle of the Morea needs to be placed in its Greek context, as a vernacular
work composed in this political verse, and as one produced on the periphery
of the Byzantine Greek world. It can be set alongside the small group of 14th-
and 15th-century vernacular Greek texts also written in political verse and also
associated with the Morea. These texts—The War of Troy, Florios and Platzia-
Flora, and Imberios and Margarona—share much with the Chronicle in terms
of their relationship with the oral tradition, their language and their meter,
and their comparably western frame of reference, as they are all translations
or adaptations into vernacular Greek of originally western-language texts. In
turn, though, these three texts are linked to the more wide-ranging genre of
late Byzantine vernacular romance.75
74 See Cupane, “Λογοτεχνική,” pp. 384–85.
75 I use the term “romance” loosely to denote stories produced in Greek vernacular political
verse from the 13th century; my definition is wider than some and includes The War of
Troy. “Vernacular romance” is a widely used but somewhat inexact term: see Panagiotis
Agapitos, “Genre, Structure and Poetics in the Byzantine Vernacular Romances of
Love,” Symbolae Osloenses 79 (2004), 9. Note also that Carolina Cupane has additionally
associated the vernacular Apollonius of Tyre (c.1400?) with the Peloponnese: Cupane,
“Λογοτεχνική,” pp. 381–85.