FOLQUET DE MARSEILLE AND THE EMPRESS OF MONTPELLIER The posthumous life ofEudoxia Comnena in story and historical criticism has been far more exciting than anything the hapless lady experienced while still incarnate. A niece of the Emperor Manuel Comnenos, she was sent from Byzantium in 1178 to marry Ramón Berengar the count ofProvence. The marriage never took place, however, for it went against the wishes of Frederick Barbarossa, who was the count's overlord. Eudoxiawasmarried instead to Guilhem VIII ofMontpellier, and her escort proceeded with more important business, taking Agnès the daughter of Louis VII of France back to marry Manuel's son Alexius (Maragone 68). Guilhem repudiated Eudoxia in 1187 because she had borne him only a daughter (the equally unlucky Maria of Montpellier), and married another Agnes (this one commonly but erroneously known as Agnes of Castille),"procreandorumfiliorum amore' (d'AchéryIII550). Eudoxia, it seems, lived out her days at Aniane, under the watchful eye of theabbot Raimond Guilelmi, Guilhem's uncle (Stronski 157). By the time her grandson, Jaume I King of Aragon and Count ofBarcelona, came to write the first portion of his autobiographicalLlibre dels Feits (ca. 1240), Eudoxia'sweddinghad become rather more interesting. Now the daughter of Manuel rather than merely his niece, she is betrothed not to Ramón Berengar but to his far more powerful brother, King Alfons I (in Catalonia, II inAragon); the engagement is broken off not because of sordid politics, but because Alfons has already married Sancha ofCastille when Eudoxia arrives. After a certain amount of hurried negotiation over the inheritances of possible children, she is married to Guilhem VIII. For Jaume, this is all part of a providential plan: Alfons does not marry Eudoxia, but Alfons' son Pere marriesEudoxia'sdaughter Maria, and Jaume is the fruit of that union, after his parents are brought together by a plot showing strongparallels to the story ofthe conception of Galahad (Jaume ch. 2-5). Song and story could do little to romanticize the empress' repudiation, but historical criticism (of a sort) filled her life between 1178 and 1187 with an affair with a wandering troubadour. Building on the "simple et conventionelle louange ' (Stronski 155) of Folquetof Marseille's Tan mou decortezia razo (155, 23; Stronski III), and relying on an unquestioned belief that troubadour lyrics are fragments of erotic autobiographies, Ross G. Arthur a thirteenth-century composer of vidas and razos tells us that Folquet, after an unhappy experience with the wife of Barrai of Marseille, fell in love with Eudoxia, that she was accused of infidelity and banished, and that Folquet composed Us volers outracujatz (155, 23; Stronski IV) as an expression ofhis sadness (Razo II, in Stronski 6; Boutière-Schutz 474- 5). Unravelling the fabulation about Eudoxia's wedding was methodologically ratherstraightforward: all ittook tocutthrough the endless arguments of the critics was Winfried Hecht's keen eye falling on thepassagein thePisan annalswhich gavethetrue story. It iscloser intime to the events and comes from an author with nopersonal axe togrind, and sononew critical principles are needed to declare it a better source. Dismantling the tale of the Eudoxia- Folquet affair is rather more complex, since it is based moreongeneralattitudes towardthe ways poems mean than on any solid evidence. Critics have, of course, sought such proof, and found some. When telling Guilhem not to divorce his wife, Innocent III reminded him that even adultery did not break the bonds of marriage (col. 1132a); this might mean that Guilhem had accused her of adultery, which might mean that she had committed adultery, which might mean that Folquet was her lover. It is one of the merits of Stronski's commentary that he dismisses all this as historically highly improbable and based on a false notion of the nature of Occitan lyrics. Documentary evidence showsthat Folquetwasnota wanderingminstrelfrequenting all the courts of the region and falling in love with all the married ladies he met, but a well-established merchant with a wife and family. His poems reveal nothing about his personal love-life, but only his ideas on love in general. His "chansons amoureuses ne sont pour nous que . . . des tissus de motifs littéraires et de lieux communs, ? ayant aucun...