II.—The Chronicle of the Conquest

Abstract

The Greek Chronicle, which brought to light the feudal organisation of the Frank Principality, and is the principal authority for the first century of its existence, was first printed from the manuscript in the Paris library in 1841 by M. Buchon in his Chroniques étrangères relatives aux Expéditions françaises pendant le treizième Siècle. Its existence had long been known, for Ducange in his Greek Lexicon refers to it under the title De bellis Francorum in Morea; and the frequency of his quotations from it attests its value for linguistic purposes, so that it appears in some cases to be the earliest, and in some the only, authority for certain mediaeval Greek words. Ducange also intended to publish it, but was prevented by death, and no use was made of it as a historical document until Buchon's time. When it was first published, the editor believed that it was an original work; but this opinion he was led to alter by the discovery in 1845 of a French text in the library at Brussels, entitled Le Livre de la Conqueste de la Princée de la Morée. The view that this was the earlier of the two, and that the Greek version was derived from it, is now generally accepted, though it was doubted by so excellent a critic of Byzantine literature as the late Dr. Ellissen, who published extracts from the Greek poem, with a verse translation into German and historical notes, in the second volume of his Analekten der mittel- und neugriechischen Literatur, in 1856. The French chronicle was printed as vol. i. of Buchon's Recherches historiques sur la Principauté française de Morée, while the second volume of that work contained another Greek text, taken from a manuscript discovered at Copenhagen. This latter is undoubtedly superior to the text of the Paris manuscript, as it is fuller, and supplies many of its lacunae; but it is inferior in respect of orthography and metre: in the following pages, however, the references are made to the Copenhagen text, and the quotations are taken from it, unless the contrary is stated, because in it alone the lines are numbered. The poem, as edited by Buchon from the Copenhagen manuscript, supplemented in parts by the other, contains 9219 lines of ‘political’ verse, of which 1332 belong to the Prologue, and the remaining 7887 to the Conquest of the Morea. Its title is Χρονικὰ τῶν ἐν Ῥωμανίᾳ καὶ μάλιστα ἐν τῷ Μωρέᾳ πολέμων τῶν Φράγκων; for though the editor has given to the whole work the title Βιβλίον τῆς κουγκέστας, by which it is generally known, and to the part that follows the prologue the separate heading Τὸ πῶς οἱ Φράγκοι ἐκέρδισαν τὸν τόπον τοῦ Μωραίως, which is a line from the poem itself, yet these convenient appellations are his own invention. The Livre de la Conqueste carries the history twelve years further down than the Greek chronicle, for it continues to A.D. 1304, while the Greek manuscripts end in 1292.