No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
II.—The Chronicle of the Conquest
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
Extract
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 Ducange also intended to publish it, but was prevented by death, and no use was made of it as a historical document until Buchon's time.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.
- Type
- The Franks in the Peloponnese
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1883
References
page 187 note 1 Buchon himself computes the number of lines in the latter part as 7892, but Ellissen has pointed out (Pref. p. xxx.) that in the verses 570—580, by an oversight, five verses are reckoned as if they were ten.
page 188 note 1 Livre de la Conqueste, p. 29. A full discussion of this and other points here referred to will be found in Buchon's preface to this work, and in Ellissen's preface to his extracts from the Greek Chronicle, though the point of view of these writers is often different.
page 188 note 2 Paris text, p. 213.
page 188 note 3 Copenh. text, 1. 5955. The μεγάλο κυράτον is the duchy of the grand-sire, or Μέγς Κύριος.
page 189 note 1 Prol. 592, 593.
page 190 note 1 Livre de la Conqueste, p. 62.
page 190 note 2 Gr. Chron. 864—876.
page 190 note 3 Lines 2704, 2679, 1583, Prol. 532.
page 191 note 1 Line 5351.
page 191 note 2 Lines 7454—7459. The name of Ozero, which is here given to the lake of Yanina, is the Slavonic word for a piece of water, jezero, which is found at the present day attached to some lakes in Greece, sometimes in the form Nezero (τἷνἘΖερόν).
page 192 note 1 Gr. Chron. 4603 foll.; Livre de la Conqueste, p. 200. The story is found in Villani (Book vi. chap. 90), who makes the count, Charles of Anjou, to say, ‘Contessa, datti pace, che io ti farò tosto maggiore reina di l ro.’ He rightly speaks of three sisters who were queens. The four are mentioned by Dante (Par. vi. 133). The story in Livy (vi. 34) relates to Licinius Stolo.
page 192 note 2 Gr. Chron. Prol. 928 foll.; Gibbon, vii. 321 (Smith's edit.); Finlay, iv. 90, 94.
page 193 note 1 Gr. Chron. Prol. 1225 foll.
page 193 note 2 Gr. Chron. 75 foll.
page 193 note 3 Gr. Chron. 828 foll. This story has been made the subject of a historical novel in modern Greek, Ὁ αὐθέντης τοῦ Μωρέως by Alexander Rhizos Rhangabé, which has been translated into German by Dr. Ellissen, with the title Der Fürst von Morea, and published as Part II. of the second volume of his Analekten. The interesting sketch which this romance gives öf the chief personages and the life of the period, is not seriously interfered with by the unhistorical character of the event on which it turns.
page 194 note 1 Gr. Chron. 1144 foll.
page 194 note 2 Ibid. 1436 foll.
page 194 note 3 Strabo, viii. 2, §1, p. 335.
page 194 note 4 Fallmerayer, , Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea, i. 243, 244Google Scholar.
page 195 note 1 Geschichte Griechenlands, pp. 265—267.
page 195 note 2 Sathas, Documents inédits relatifs à l'histoire de la Grèce au moyen âge; vol i. Pref. pp. xxx—xxxviii.
page 195 note 3 Gr. Chron. 3067.
page 195 note 4 Livre de la Conqueste, pp. 466, 386. Cp. Gr. Chron. 4376, 5394.
page 196 note 1 Recherches Historiques, i. Pref. p. xxviii.
page 196 note 2 Griechische Geschichte, p. 266.
page 196 note 3 Livre de la Conqueste, p. 44; Gr. Chron. 1. 442.
page 197 note 1 Gr. Chron. 3344; Livre de la Conqueste, p. 176.
page 198 note 1 Livre de la Conqueste, p. 153, note.
page 199 note 1 Ducange's Glossarium mediae et infirmae Graecitatis is still the great source of information on mediaeval Greek words, and even where it does not give their etymologies, it provides the means of investigating them in the numerous passages which are quoted in their historical order. Additional information may be obtained from Sophocles' Glossary of Later and Byzantine Greek; from Buchon's indices; from Koray's Ἄτακτα; and from the glossaries appended to the collections of mediaeval and modern Greek poems, which have been published during the last twenty years.
page 200 note 1 Book xviii, chap. 19.
page 200 note 2 Gr. Chron. 149—153.
page 201 note 1 While this is passing through the press, I have received from M. Sathas the following quotation from Mutinelli, Fabio's Lessico Veneto, 1851, p. 107Google Scholar. “Cocca, legno di guerra (però anche da traffico), aìto, rotondo, e perciò molto concavo, laonde caucos significando in greco, concavo, corrottamente gli venne il nome di cocca. Navigano questi legni per mezzo di vele soltanto, aveano, una ciurma dai settecento ai mille uomini, volendosi che le cocche siano state i primi navigli sopra i quali si sian poste artiglierie.”
page 202 note 1 For the history of the introduction of these words into familiar use, see Mr. Freeman's remarks in vol. iii. of this Journal, pp. 372 foll.