320 Page
and its provenance seems more likely to have been late and Venetian.96
However, in combination with the various characteristics shared among them-
selves and with the Chronicle of the Morea, it is above all the fact of the deriva-
tion of these tales from western originals that has prompted their association
with the principality, given the established melange of languages in the region.
In this regard, and again similarly to the Chronicle, the translated romances
reveal a highly multilingual community, which was home to “poets who spoke
and wrote vernacular Greek and read some of the simpler texts in ‘educated’
Greek but also understood and read the French and Italian vernaculars”.97
Thus, while these works must inevitably be seen within the general context
of romance production in Greek from the 14th to 15th centuries, we should
also be ready to see the western romances as a group apart. If produced in
the Morea, then they were intended for a Greek-speaking audience which was
oriented heavily towards the West: this included the noble families of largely,
though not exclusively, western origin. These nobles were, notwithstand-
ing their origins and continued interest in the culture of the West, fluent in
the Greek of the region and used to being entertained in that language. The
vernacular texts were most credibly produced by professional and bilingual
Greek scribes working in trusted positions at the princely court or its baro-
nial equivalents. The romances were of course not orally composed as the pro-
cess of translation and adaptation required literate skills; however, given the
added difficulties of the Greek alphabet, it is highly likely that Greek was for
the French Moreots primarily a spoken language. This would have fostered the
continuing importance of oral performance and therefore also oral transmis-
sion within the Morea.98
The romances and the Chronicle as a group fit well within such an oral
context in the Morea. They exhibit the combination of, firstly, vernacular
96 For dating and provenance of Imberios and Margarona, Kostas Yiavis, “Finding Imberios
and Margarona: An Inventory of Extant Editions,” Ελληνικά 56 (2006), 321–45. In con-
trast, however, Cupane finds a distinctive Moreot detail and general tone in Imberios:
“Λογοτεχνική,” pp. 384–85.
97 Jeffreys, “Place of Composition,” p. 323; see also more recently Elizabeth Jeffreys, “The
Morea through the Prism of the Past,” in Viewing the Morea, pp. 16–9.
98 Note the fragment of Imberios incorporated in a poorly remembered song in a manu-
script of the 15th century: see Vicky Panayotopoulou-Doulaveras, “Late Byzantine and
Post-Byzantine Vernacular Love Poetry: An Overview,” in Greek Research in Australia:
Proceedings of the Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University
April 2003, ed. Elizabeth Close, Michales Tsianikas and George Frazis (Adelaide, 2005),
p. 106. Note too that the library of Leonardo da Veroli contained one Greek book: there
may well have been some Greek literacy among the Franks.