Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/11



French literature of the middle-ages penetrated Greek South-Eastern Europe in two forms. First, as a direct influence of the chansons de geste as sung in the castles of the western barons, who had established themselves in the conquered provinces of the former Byzantine Empire; so that the figures of the French epics were adopted by the vanquished and new works in their own languages reproduced the well-known tales of fierce and gallant strife and amorous romance. Secondly, by passing through the Francized realm of the two Sicilies, the French poems were an incitement to present, in the Serb poesies, the poetized history of other struggles and sufferings.

Subsequently a long period was put to western literary penetration. In the fifteenth century the Latin life of South-Eastern Europe was no longer represented by French dukes or Catalan and Navarrese adventurers; Venice, the practical and the calculating, was the sole heiress of the former barons in Greece, and the last of these was a nobleman of indifferent attainments like Pierre de St. Exupery, or a fortune-hunter in the style of the Italian tyrants of his time, like Antonio Acciaiuoli, Lord of Athens. Constantinople was never French under the latinocracy, notwithstanding men like Balduin of Flanders, his brother Robert, Pierre de Courtenay who wore