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The Chronicle marked a change in focus whereby Constantinople need
no longer be the apex of aspirations. In presenting a history of the Frankish
Peloponnese where local archons were able to prosper, the Chronicle was an
illustration of the possibilities for advancement outside the traditional ave-
nues which had once all led to the City. In this context of the capital versus
the provinces, the Greek Chronicle was a popular work in its form and in its
reception, and its use of a written form approximating to the vernacular was
no coincidence. Similarly, the Chronicle appears to know nothing of any exist-
ing Greek history or indeed any other Greek work at all. Those written sources
it refers to are all western. With its combination of vernacular language and
ignorance of learned sources, then, the Chronicle uses the voice of those to
whom Constantinople and its values were both physically and mentally a long
way away.
The Chronicle’s metre is arguably another significant aspect of its popular
character. It is true that the fifteen-syllable metre of political verse was very
much the metre of the vernacular in the 14th century, but it was also known
in the more educated Greek of the Byzantine elite and is thus no guarantee in
itself of a truly popular character; indeed, the earliest survivals of the metre
are closely associated with the imperial court. Nevertheless the possibility of
demotic origins cannot be ruled out.80 Again, when the metre became to some
extent fashionable in 12th-century Constantinople, it seems to have been asso-
ciated with lower status; notwithstanding, these Komnenian works emerged
from the most elite levels.81 Yet again, however, this metre is also strongly asso-
ciated with folk-song from the early modern period and it has been speculated
that it was also used in genuinely popular song and story in the oral tradition
back into the medieval period. This is not least because it was the fundamental
metre of vernacular Greek written texts from the 12th century onwards. Thus it
is argued that, notwithstanding its use among the elite, political verse was the
established metre of the Greek medieval oral tradition that underlies extant
vernacular written works like the Chronicle of the Morea.82 In other words,
the choice of the fifteen-syllable metre for a written work is another aspect of
“oral residue” within the work which can be put alongside its formulaicism, its
80 See especially Michael J. Jeffreys, “The Nature and Origins of the Political Verse,”
Dumbarton Oaks Papers 28 (1974), 142–95; Marc D. Lauxtermann, The Spring of Rhythm.
An Essay on the Political Verse and Other Byzantine Metres (Vienna, 1999).
81 Hinterberger, “Vernacular Literature”.
82 Jeffreys, “Oral Background,” pp. 509–14; Michael J. Jeffreys, “The Literary Emergence of
Vernacular Greek,” Mosaic 8 (1975), 171–93.