Page:Romances of Chivalry on Greek Soil.djvu/9

4 In a society tenacious of tradition and dominated by these two authorities—the incompatibility of which caused no embarrassment—we might expect that the most likely, if not the only, chance for the birth of fresh and original works of imagination would be impact and influence from another world, sufficiently strong and persistent and exciting. There was obviously an opportunity for influence of this kind in the last period of the history of the Byzantine Greeks, when they were overwhelmed, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, by the invasion of the Western knights, and Greece and the islands of the Aegean passed under the rule of Frenchmen and Italians. Throughout the three following centuries the two civilizations, Greek and Frank, were side by side.

The Frank invaders, who thus settled in the midst of the Greeks, had the fully developed institutions of Western chivalry, and it was a matter of course that the new literature of the twelfth century which was so intimately associated with chivalry, the Provençal romances of adventure, and the tales of the Arthurian cycle, should have circulated at the courts of the barons who ruled in Hellenic lands. The poetry of the French romance writers proved its cosmopolitan quality by its reception in Germany, Italy, and England. Could it fail in Greece, where the external conditions for its reception seemed incomparably more favourable? Western women were not very numerous in the Frank colonies, and there was much intermarrying between the foreigners and Greek ladies. In this mixed society there followed, in the course of time, a demand for romances of love and chivalrous adventure in the Greek tongue, and the demand was partly met by adaptations of French poems. For instance, the story of Floire and Blanceflor, the romance of Pierre of Provence and