Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/252

Rh 230 VILLEHAEDOUIN the post of honour in this disaster, so he had that (the command of the vanguard) in the expedition which the regent Henry made shortly afterwards to revenge his brother Baldwin s defeat and capture. And, when Henry had succeeded to the crown on the announcement of Bald win s death, it was Villehardouin who fetched home his bride Agnes of Montferrat, and shortly afterwards com manded under him in a naval battle with the ships of Theodore Lascaris at the fortress of Cibotus. In the settlement of the Latin empire after the truce with Lascaris Yillehardouin received the fief of Messinople (supposed to be Mosynopolis, a little inland from the modern Gulf of Lagos, and not far from the ancient Abdera) from Boniface of Montferrat, with the record of whose death the chronicle abruptly closes. In the foregoing account only those particulars which bear directly on Yillehardouin himself have been detailed ; but the chronicle is as far as possible from being an autobiography, and the displays of the writer s personality, numerous as they are, are quite involuntary, and consist merely in his way of handling the subject, not in the references, as brief as his functions as chronicler will admit, to his own proceedings. The chronicle of Villehardouin is justly held to be the very best presentation we possess of the spirit of chivalry, not the designedly exalted and poetized chivalry of the romances, not the self-conscious and deliberate chivalry of the 14th century, but the unsophisticated mode of thinking and acting which brought about the crusades, stimulated the vast literary development of the 12th and 13th centuries, and sent knights-errant, principally though not wholly of French blood, to establish principalities and kingdoms throughout Europe and the nearer East. On the whole, no doubt, it is the more masculine and practical side of this enthusiastic state of mind which Yille hardouin shows. No woman makes any but the briefest appear ance in his pages, though in reference to this it must of course be remembered that he was certainly a man past middle life when the events occurred, and perhaps a man approaching old age when he set them down. Despite the strong and graphic touches here and there, exhibiting the impression which the beauty of sea and land, the splendour of Constantinople, the magnitude of the effete but still imposing Greek power made on him, there is not only an entire absence of dilation on such subjects as a modern would have dilated on (that was to be expected), but an absence likewise of the elaborate and painful description of detail in which contempor ary trouveres would have indulged. It is curious, for instance, to compare the scanty references to the material marvels of Constan tinople which Villehardouin saw in their glory, which perished by sack and fire under his very eyes, and which live chiefly in the melancholy pages of his Greek contemporary Nicetas, with the elaborate descriptions of the scarcely greater wonders of fabulous courts at Constantinople itself, at Babylon, and elsewhere to be found in his other contemporaries, the later chanson de gestc writers and the earlier embroiderers of the Arthurian romances and romans d aventures. And this latter contrast is all the more striking that Yillehardouin agrees with, and not impossibly borrows from, these very writers in many points of style and phraseology. The brief chapters of his work have been justly compared to the laisses or tirades of a chanson in what may be called the vignetting of the subject of each, in the absence of any attempt to run on the narra tive in the precise forms, and in poetical rather than prosaic word- order of the sentences. Undoubtedly this half-poetic style (ani mated as it is and redeemed from any charge of bastardy by the freshness and vigour which pervade it) adds not a little to the charm of the book. Its succession of word pictures, conventional and yet vigorous as the illuminations of a mediaeval manuscript, and in their very conventionality free from all thought of literary presentation, must charm all readers. The sober lists of names with which it opens ; the account of the embassy, so business-like in its estimates of costs and terms, and suddenly breaking into a fervent description of how the six deputies, &quot;prostrating them selves on the earth and weeping warm tears, begged the doge and people of Venice to have pity on Jerusalem ;&quot; the story immediately following how the young count Thibault of Champagne, raising himself from a sickbed in his joy at the successful return of his ambassadors, &quot;leva sus et chevaucha, et laz ! com grant domages, car onques puis ne chevaucha quo cele foiz,&quot; compose a most striking overture. Then the history relapses into the business vein and tells of the debates which took place as to the best means of carrying out the vow after the count s decease, the rendezvous, too ill kept at Venice, the plausible suggestion of the Venetians that the balance due to them should be made up by a joint attack on their enemy, the king of Hungary. Yillehardouin does not in the least conceal the fact that the pope (&quot; 1 apostoilles de Rome,&quot; as he calls him in the very phrase of the chansons) was very angry with this; for his own part he seems to think of little or nothing but the reparation due to the republic, which had loyally kept its bargain and been defrauded of the price, of the infamy of breaking company on the part of members of a joint association, and perhaps of the nnknightliness of not taking up an adventure whenever it presents itself. For here again the restoration of the disinherited prince of Constantinople supplied an excuse quite as plausible as the liquida tion of the debt to Venice. A famous passage and one short enough to quote is that describing the old blind doge Dandolo, who had &quot; Grant ochoison de remanoir (reason for staying at home), car viels horn ere, et si avoit les yaulx en la teste b iaus et n en veoit goto (goutte),&quot; and yet was the foremost in fight. It would be out of place to attempt any further analysis of the Conquetc here. But it is not impertinent, and is at the same time an excuse for what has been already said, to repeat that Villehar- douin s book, brief as it is, is in reality one of the capital books of literature, not merely for its merit, but because it is the most authentic and the most striking embodiment in contemporary literature of the sentiments which determined the action of a great and important period of history. There are but very few books which hold this position, and Villehardouin s is one of them. If every other contemporary record of the crusades perished, we should still be able by aid of this to understand and realize what the mental attitude of crusaders, of Teutonic knights, and the rest was, and without this we should lack the earliest, the most undoubtedly genuine, and the most characteristic of all such records. The very inconsistency with which Yillehardouin is chargeable, the absence of compunction with which he relates the changing of a sacred religious pilgrimage into something by no means unlike a mere filibustering raid on the great scale, add a charm to the book. For, religious as it is, it is entirely free from the very slightest touch of hypocrisy or indeed of self-consciousness of any kind. The famous description of the crusades, gesta Dei per Francos, was evidently to Villehardouin a plain matter-of-fact description, and it no more occurred to him to doubt the divine favour being extended to the expeditions against Alexius or Theodore than to doubt that it was shown to expeditions against Saracens and Turks. The person of Villehardouin reappears for us once, but once only, in the chronicle of his continuator, Henri de Valenciennes. There is a great gap in style, though none in subject, between the really poetical prose of the first historian of the fifth crusade and the Latin empire and the awkward mannerism (so awkward that it has been taken to represent a &quot;disrhymed&quot; verse chronicle) of his follower. But the much greater length at which Ville hardouin appears on this one occasion shows us the restraint which he must have exercised in the passages which deal with himself in his own work. He again led the vanguard in the emperor Henry s expedition against Burilas the Bulgarian, and he is represented by the Valenciennes scribe as encouraging his sovereign to the attack in a long speech. Then he disappears altogether, with the exception of some brief and chiefly diplomatic mentions. Du Cange discovered and quoted a deed of donation by him dated 1207, by which certain properties were devised to the churches of Notre Dame de Foissy and Notre Dame de Troyes, with the reservation of life interests to his daughters Alix and Damerones, and his sisters Emmeline and Hayc, all of whom appear to have embraced a monastic life. A letter addressed from the East to Blanche of Champagne is cited, and a papal record of 1212 styles him still &quot;mar shal of Romania.&quot; The next year this title passed to his son Erard; and 1213 is accordingly given as the date of his death, which, as there is no record or hint of his having returned to France, may be supposed to have happened at Messinople, Avhere also he must have written the Conquete. The book appears to have been known in the ages immediately succeeding his own ; and, though there is no contemporary manu script in existence, there are some half dozen which appear to date from the end of the 13th or the course of the 14th century, while one at least appears to be a copy made from his own work in that spirit of unintelligent faithfulness which is much more valuable to posterity than more intelligent editing. The first printed edi tion of the book, by a certain Blaise de Vigenere, dates from 1585, is dedicated to the seigniory of Venice (Villehardouin, it should be said, has been accused of a rather unfair predilection for the Vene tians), and speaks of either a part or the whole of the memoirs as having been printed twelve years earlier. Of this earlier copy nothing seems to be known. A better edition, founded on a Nether-