Colonizing Christianity by Demacopoulos George E.;

Author:Demacopoulos, George E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

CHAPTER

6

THE CHRONICLE OF MOREA

Chapters 1 and 2 examined the ways in which Frankish authors employed Orientalizing and colonial discourse to authorize the attack, looting, and settlement of Christian Constantinople in ways akin to Western European authors of later centuries. Chapter 3 investigated the context and mechanisms by which the papacy and its correspondents de-Christianized the Byzantines as part of a broader strategy to authorize their religious and political subjugation in the context of Latin Empire of Byzantium. Chapters 4 and 5 took altogether different approaches to our subject by looking at the way that the Fourth Crusade fueled internal divisions among Eastern Christians along the lines of whether and to what extent resistance to Frankish rule in the East translated into an exclusion of Latins (and Latin-sympathizing Greeks) from the authentic Church. Our final chapter approaches the colonization of the Christian East in a different manner by assessing the ways in which the prolonged, often peaceful, cohabitation of Franks and Greeks in the Peloponnese led to subtle transformations in the identity and ideology after generations of mixed population under Frankish rule.

Founded in 1205 by William of Champlitte and his vassal, Geoffrey de Villehardouin, the “Principality of the Morea” was one of three crusader vassal states of the Latin Empire, established in 1204.1 Geoffrey took control of the principality in 1209 when William returned to France and by 1213 his army, which consisted of both Franks and indigenous Greeks, controlled most of the Peloponnese. The Villehardouin dynasty ruled the Morea relatively unchallenged until 1262, when Geoffrey’s younger son, William II, was forced to forfeit three powerful castles in the southeast to a resurgent Nicaean/Byzantine empire.2 The truce between William II and the Byzantines soon fell apart and William was forced to seek new Western alliances. That support came in the person of Charles of Anjou, who was able to extract personal suzerainty of the principality from William.3 From 1278–1307, Charles and then his son, Charles II, retained control of Frankish Morea and administered it through a series of appointed baillis. Members of the Villehardouin family continued to be involved in the government of the Morea but a series of contested successions, which pitted various Frankish rulers against one another, greatly diminished the dynasty’s influence. Frankish presence in the region continued until the 1430s.

It was in the context of the bitter succession battles and loss of Villehardouin’s dynastic prestige of the early 1300s that the text known as The Chronicle of Morea first appeared. More than anything else, the author and the subsequent editors sought to intervene in the political quagmires of their day by offering a nostalgic glimpse of a time gone by, when Frankish governance of the Morea had flourished politically, economically, and culturally under the Villehardouins.4

Following an overview of the text (its composition, its content, and its historiographical challenges), this chapter will assess The Chronicle of Morea from the vantage point of postcolonial critique.5 Like Robert de Clari and Gunther of Pairis, the author of The Chronicle of Morea provides a series of discursive juxtapositions between the Franks and the Greeks.

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