SOURCE: “Villehardouin: History in Black and White” in Seven French Chroniclers: Witnesses to History, Syracuse University Press, 1974, pp. 25-39, 127-29.

[In the following essay, Archambault summarizes the content of Villehardouin's Conquest of Constantinopleand reviews the debate concerning Villehardouin's motivation and sincerity. Archambault suggests that the work should be examined not as a historical document but as a work of literature “dictated by a certain vision of reality.”]

Villehardouin lived most of his life during the latter half of the twelfth century, but his Conquest of Constantinople, dictated in French from his castle in Thrace, belongs to the early thirteenth.¹ Born before 1150 at Valenciennes, about twenty miles from Troyes, Villehardouin came from one of the best-known aristocratic families of Champagne. The title of “Maréchal,” which he bore from 1185 onwards, made him the grey eminence of Count Thibaud III of Champagne. When the count, along with several other French barons, annnounced at the tournament of Ecri in November 1199 that he was preparing a crusade outremer, it was only natural that Villehardouin should come along. Villehardouin was one of six delegates sent to Venice by the French barons in order to arrange with the doge, Enrico Dandolo, for the transportation of twenty thousand crusaders, with their horses and arms, to the Holy Land. The Fourth Crusade was in the making.

Villehardouin's activities during the entire expedition were as varied as they were essential. He was one of the barons who argued for the “necessity” of diverting the Franco-Venetian expedition to Constantinople in order to chase the usurper, Alexius Mourtzouphlos, from the Byzantine throne. When Mourtzouphlos, terrified by the presence of the fleet in the harbor of the city, abdicated and fled in June 1203, Villehardouin was delegated by the French army to obtain from the rightful emperor, Isaac II, a confirmation of the commitments that had been made to the crusaders by his son, the young Alexius Angelus. After the conquest and sack of Constantinople by the crusaders in April 1204, and the ensuing conquest of Thrace, Villehardouin almost single-handedly avoided a civil war between the two most powerful barons, Boniface de Montferrat and Baldwin of Flanders, and their factions over the question of the occupation of Thessalonica.

Villehardouin was both a distinguished negotiator and a courageous warrior. After the death of Matthieu de Montmorency, he became the leader of the Champagne faction of the French army, and (between 1205 and 1208) participated in several victorious campaigns in Thrace. In 1205 he was named “Maréchal de Champagne et de Roumaine.” He died between 1212 and 1218. The exact time and place of his death are unknown.

Villehardouin's chronicle records the events he witnessed between the year 1198, when the hermit Fulk of Neuilly began preaching the Fourth Crusade, and the year 1207, when Boniface de Montferrat was killed by the Bulgars in Thrace. He does not seem to have divided his account into books or chapters, but it happens, quite naturally, to fall into two parts. In Part One (chapters 1-58 of Edmond Faral's edition) he relates the chain of events leading up to the conquest of Constantinople in April 1204: Fulk of Neuilly's predication throughout the Ile de France; Villehardouin's trip to Venice; his agreement with the doge over the matter of maritime transportation; the assembly of the barons and knights at Venice; the conquest of Zara; the arrival of the fleet before Constantinople; the first conquest of the city; the restoration of the young Alexius Angelus after the capitulation of Alexius Mourtzouphlos; the conspiracy of Mourtzouphlos; the second conquest and the sack of the city by the crusaders and the coronation of Baldwin of Flanders as Latin emperor of Constantinople. The second part of the narrative (volume II of the Faral edition) is a frequently tedious but lucid account of the events that separate Baldwin's coronation from the death of Boniface de Montferrat (1204-1207): the conquest of Thrace; the dispute between Baldwin and Boniface over the possession of Thessalonica; Baldwin's death at the hands of Johanis of Bulgaria; the coronation of Henry of Flanders as second Latin emperor; Henry's war against Johanis; and the death of Boniface, killed by the Bulgars in September 1207.

Throughout his account, Villehardouin argues vigorously that the failure on the part of many crusading barons and their soldiers to assemble at Venice in 1202, as the treaty with the Venetians had stipulated a year earlier, set off an unavoidable chain of events that resulted in the change of course of the crusade from its original destination of Saracen Egypt to Constantinople. Impeded in their sincere attempt to honor their financial engagements with the Venetians because of the betrayal of “those who sailed from other ports,” so the argument goes, the crusaders who sailed from Venice were compelled to help the Venetians in their conquest of Zara (a city on the Dalmatian coast long coveted by the doge) and to accept a plan submitted by the young refugee, prince Alexius Angelus, that would restore his imprisoned father, Isaac, to his rightful throne as emperor of Constantinople, provided Isaac were later to participate in the crusade.

More than a century ago Natalis de Wailly was the first to inquire whether Villehardouin was telling the story of the Fourth Crusade as he knew it, and much critical ink has flowed either to support or to challenge Villehardouin's sincerity.² Whether or not Villehardouin knew of a secret pact between the Venetians and the Sultan of Cairo; whether or not he knew, even before the Fourth Crusade was under way, that its real destination was Constantinople; whether or not he was aware of Dandolo's designs on the Byzantine city, no one has as yet been able to ascertain. The following pages will not resolve this problem, but they will attempt to detect concealed emotional charges, “blind spots,” and unguarded revelations. In apologetic or confessional works of literature, verbal idiosyncracies and tones of voice can be as significant as the facts themselves—the most defensive part of the author's testimony.

No account of the Fourth Crusade can afford to overlook Robert de Clari (ca. 1170-after 1216), a footsoldier who accompanied Pierre d’Amiens and Hugues de Saint Pol on the Fourth Crusade. His brief account of the expedition, Those Who Conquered Constantinople, written from the fighting man's point of view, provides an important cross reference in order to verify or refute Villehardouin's account.³ It is significant, perhaps even symbolic, that Robert brought back from his trip to Constantinople a number of religious relics to the artistic value of which he was totally indifferent—significant in that he managed to reduce his moral conscience to silence and justify, at least to himself, one of the most curious chapters in the history of medieval plunder; symbolic in that, unlike Villehardouin and other leaders of the expedition, Robert does not seem to have realized the importance or to have foreseen the consequences of his actions. His brief chronicle is wrapped in a shroud of insuperable ignorance. He participated in none of the great decisions; he did not know that the plan to attack Constantinople had been hatched since or before the departure of the expedition from Venice; he knew nothing about the military strategy that had preceded the battles in which he fought, a lackluster and solipsistic figure; he knew nothing, finally, about the art works he plundered or the cities he helped devastate.

Villehardouin was intelligent enough to be a scoundrel. Robert could never have been more than an amiable Boeotian. Of doubts, hesitations, and moral misgivings he seems to have had few; but neither his moral conscience nor his sense of logic was sufficiently honed to permit him to arrive at any significant conclusions. He described the palaces, homes, churches, and abbeys of Constantinople with an engaging stupidity, and seemed unable to tell one proper noun from another. He was fascinated by certain Byzantine objects which he had never seen in France—the buhotian, for example, which the Byzantines used as an oxygen mask. His account of those who conquered Constantinople might easily have fallen into oblivion, an energetic but jumbled tale, but its worth lies in its momentary flashes of conscience that offer an embarrassing refutation to Villehardouin's glib and all too symmetrical apologetics.

Medieval scholars are usually either hostile or favorable to Villehardouin, and the author of The Conquest of Constantinople might, to a certain extent, be to blame for the controversy that surrounds his name. He is that sort of military chronicler who is forever dividing the world into two camps: the attacker without the walls and the defender within; those “who sail from Venice” and those “who sail from other ports”; those “who wish to disband the army” and those “who wish to keep it together”; those “whom God loves” and those “whom He ceases to love.”⁴ The Manichaean Villehardouin elicits Manichaean responses: perhaps that is why scholars feel compelled to take up the gauntlet of the debate that bears his name, either to defend his sincerity or to accuse him of concealing part of the truth about the altered destination of the Fourth Crusade from Egypt to Constantinople.

But perhaps that is not the only way to read The Conquest of Constantinople. If Villehardouin's chronicle were to be judged not as a historical document but as a literary creation dictated by a certain vision of reality, then the value of the work might depend entirely upon the artistic, intellectual, and moral qualities of the mind that produced it.⁵ Villehardouin's chronicle tells the reader a good deal about the Fourth Crusade, but it incidentally tells him even more about the author's way of structuring his inner and outer vision. The problem of Villehardouin's sincerity has both a historical and a psychological sense; and, though it may perhaps never be possible to know whether Villehardouin was sincere in a factual sense, his language betrays a highly selective visual technique enabling the man quite literally to disregard whatever he consciously or unwittingly decides to exclude from his field of vision.

He seems to have been an eye witness to those moving sermons preached by the hermit Fulk of Neuilly, which open the chronicle. They were being attended by large audiences throughout the Ile de France and surrounding provinces—a convincing indication of the man's popular appeal. Success, whatever the enterprise, is an unmistakable sign of divine favor: “God worked many miracles,” and Frenchmen throughout the Ile de France decide to enlist in the crusade preached by the hermit because of the generous terms of the indulgence promised by the papal legate to France: “Because this indulgence was so great, the hearts of the people were quite moved; and many enlisted because the indulgence was so great.”⁶

In the spring of 1199, the barons assembled at Compiègne in order to decide when and from which port they would depart for outremer. In a familiar phrase, Villehardouin relates that “many points of view were put forward,” but the essential outcome of the gathering was that he was one of six “best messengers” chosen to make final arrangements for the expedition, “with full power to settle what should be done, exactly as if they were their lords in person.”⁷

At the age of fifty or so, Villehardouin was thus fulfilling what it is not presumptuous to call a lifelong ambition: to act and speak with the full power of a count. Villehardouin, the Marshal of Champagne, had the temporary privilege of acting and speaking like his master Thibaut de Champagne! One imagines him during that scenic if arduous trip on horseback from Compiègne to Venice wrapped entirely in thoughts of power and prestige. One must perforce imagine him thus, as he does not seem to have paused to record a single visual detail. A Froissart in the same circumstances would have riddled every Alpine innkeeper with questions, described every landscape, and collected every folktale along the way. Not so with Villehardouin. On such an important mission as this, he cannot afford to waste his time or disperse his attention: “The six messengers departed, … conferred among themselves, and decided that in Venice they were likely to find a greater number of ships than in any other port. And they journeyed on horseback in stages until they arrived at their destination the first week in Lent.”⁸

Villehardouin's account of the treaty signed in 1201 with the Venetians is one of his finest pieces of factual reporting. When the aged doge, Enrico Dandolo, tells Villehardouin and his companions that they must wait four days before he can summon the members of his council and present the French requests, Villehardouin notes quite simply that “the envoys waited until the fourth day, as the doge had appointed and then returned to the palace, which was a most beautiful building and very richly furnished.”⁹ Like so much of Villehardouin's “bridge material,” such an incidental remark might reveal more about the narrator's psychological and visual equipment than many of his more consciously florid passages. Had Villehardouin been endowed with great esthetic interest, would he not have paused at this point of his account, even a dozen years later, to describe his impressions of Venice during that four-day waiting period? But Villehardouin's is a practical, rather than a visual or speculative temper. To him, the act of seeing is a selective process and a preamble to action. Like a man of action, Villehardouin considers visual description a waste of time and energy. One is attentive to reality not in order to see it, but to act upon it. Inactive moments are spent not in dreams but in expectations: “They waited until the day he had fixed.”¹⁰

Although shorn of visual interest, Villehardouin's account of the mission to Venice has an abstract geometric pattern. The doge's attempts to persuade the Venetian citizenry to grant the requests of the French envoys are drawn in concentric circles. First the doge is alone; four days later he presents the French proposals to his privy council, which approves them; three days later he summons his Grand Council, composed of forty of the wisest and most influential Venetian citizens; finally, “he brought them all to … approve and agree to accept the proposed covenant, … persuading first a few, then more, then still more, till at last all the members of his council expressed their approval and consent. After this he assembled a good ten thousand of the common people in the church of San Marco—the most beautiful church in the world—where he invited them to hear a Mass of the Holy Spirit, and pray to God for guidance concerning the request the envoys had made to them.”¹¹

Villehardouin sees reality more like an architect than a painter; like a strategist, he draws not with a brush but with a chalk and compass. Indeed, one is impressed in general by the poverty of Villehardouin's coloring, the one tint that seems worthy of his attention being vermilion.¹²

In a moving discourse at San Marco Villehardouin implores the people of Venice to take pity on Jerusalem and to join the French barons in the crusade. Then the six French envoys kneel at the feet of the crowd in tears. The doge and all the others cry out in a single voice, “‘We do agree! We do agree!’ Then there was such a noise that it seemed as if the earth was falling. … When the great tumult had subsided, and this great show of pity, which surpassed anything that had ever been seen, the good duke of Venice, a very wise and courageous man, went up to the lectern and said to the people: ‘My lords, see what an honor God has given us. …’ I cannot recount all of the Duke's good and beautiful words.”¹³

A memorable passage, but again how visually poor! How were the envoys dressed? Where were they kneeling? Where was the crowd standing? The reader must, like an imaginative archeologist, recreate the scene as if Villehardouin had provided a mere sketch or fragment. He must add epithets of color and sound to sentences that are almost entirely constructed with substantives and active verbs. Villehardouin's reluctance to recount “all of the duke's good words” reveals a distaste for digressive detail and an unquestionable talent for bringing out the inner meaning of an event, however biased the interpretation.

Villehardouin's habitual indifference to visual and intellectual nuance seems even more pronounced after the departure from Venice. The French barons have assembled at Venice in the spring of 1202, a year after the treaty with the Venetians. Of the eighty-five thousand marks requested by the Venetians for transporting the crusading army to Egypt, the barons have managed to a pay little better than fifty thousand, many of them having decided to sail from Flanders and Marseille. Perhaps Villehardouin is correct in arguing that it is the failure of all the barons to live up to the conditions of the treaty with Venice that compelled those who sailed from Venice to accept the altered course of the crusade.¹⁴ His universe, in any case, is henceforth irrevocably divided between “those who sailed from Venice” and “those who sailed from other ports,” and any action after the departure from Venice is motivated either by a treacherous desire to disband the army or by a patriotic attempt to keep it together. There can be no other way of seeing reality. Those who wish to disband the army are intended to resemble the fallen angels of a Manichaean heaven, even if their vision happens to have the greater number of adherents. Although the majority of the barons declare, at Venice, that they will shift for themselves and go some other way if the Venetians refuse to transport them to Egypt, Villehardouin suspects them of merely wishing to disband the army and return home. The enlightened, disinterested minority to which Villehardouin belongs is alone capable of acting nobly and in keeping with the divine mandates: “We’d much rather give all we have and go as poor men with the army than see it broken up and our enterprise a failure. For God will doubtless repay us in His own good time.”¹⁵

As the chronicle progresses, Villehardouin's conscious selection of detail appears to grow more and more willfully systematic. One notices that he consistently views and represents reality in a contrast of light and shade which permits him to shape the contours of his narrative. His vision, in short, seems less a direct projection than a byproduct of contrasting light and shadow. With each advancing page, Villehardouin's “enlightened” viewpoint is forcefully, dogmatically projected against the foil of his adversaries' “dark” motives.

At Venice, in the summer of 1202, the leaders of the French army discover that, because many members of the crusading army have sailed from other ports, it will be impossible for them to pay the Venetians the full sum of money that was agreed upon at the treaty signed the year before. A few of the barons then propose that barons and foot-soldiers alike make up for the missing sum by contributing voluntarily of their money and goods. A majority of the crusaders argue against this proposal by stating that the sum they have already paid for their own passage is quite enough: “and if the Venetians are willing to take us, we’re quite ready to go. If not we’ll make shift for ourselves, and go some other way.” Villehardouin cannot accept the good faith of such an argument and immediately accuses the majority of the crusaders of acting for some latent darker purpose: “They said this in actual fact, because they would have liked the army to be disbanded, and each man free to go home.” Right after the meeting a few of the barons decide to set an example for the rest of the army by handing over all or most of their personal possessions to a common fund. Here Villehardouin describes the situation as a struggle between the niggling and destructive forces of darkness, who wish to disband the army, and the enlightened, disinterested few who share the narrator's opinion. And if it is the latter opinion that prevails, it is simply that God, “who gives hope to men in the depths of despair, was not willing” for the other side to have its way.¹⁶

Such a vision in black and white leads him to overdramatize the presence of the dark forces surrounding him and wishing him ill. Villehardouin is a master of the technique, well know to the professionally military, which consists of painting the darkest possible picture of what the enemy might do if he is not immediately wiped out. Hence the devastation and plunder of the Dalmatian city of Zara during the winter of 1203 is described as a “precaution” against the king of Hungary, to whom it belongs. Almost to reassure himself, Villehardouin adds dramatically “that the hearts of our people were not at peace, for one party was continually working to break up the army and the other to keep it together.”¹⁷ Surely such a “beautiful, prosperous and strongly defended” city as Zara could only be taken “with the help of God Himself!”¹⁸

Villehardouin's vision often loses all sense of perspective and proportion. Small objects are magnified and large ones made almost invisible. When Pope Innocent III excommunicates the barons for the crime of destroying the Christian city of Zara, his attitude is described merely as one of “displeasure.”¹⁹ The annihilation of the city by the Venetians, before the departure for Corfu, is described in a fleeting sentence: “The Venetians razed the city and its towers and walls.”²⁰ Whereas the sight of a ravaged enemy city appears to be only a part of the logic of warfare, the defection from the army of several French barons is described much more strongly as “a great misfortune for the army, and a great disgrace to those who left it.”²¹ Villehardouin is adept at highlighting those events he wishes to dramatize. He is equally effective at blurring or dimming the reader's vision of an event that might prove embarrassing, the assembly of the French barons at Zara, for example. The barons have just proposed to the army that if they help the young Alexius Angelus reconquer the throne of Constantinople from his uncle, the usurper Mourtzouphlos, he will bring the Byzantine empire back under the religious jurisdiction of Rome, pay the French barons two hundred thousand silver marks, and accompany the crusaders to Egypt with an army of ten thousand men.²² There follows “a great divergence of opinion in the assembly. The Cistercian abbot of Vaux had something to say, in common with those who were eager to have the army disbanded. They all declared they would never give their consent, since it would mean marching against Christians. They had not left their home to do any such thing, and for their part wished to go to Syria.”²³ The abbot's declaration makes one wonder why Villehardouin should then wish to blur the clarity of the issues involved by adding that “there was discord in the army. Nor can you wonder if the laymen were at loggerheads when the Cistercians accompanying the forces were equally at variance with each other.”²⁴ The narrator thus subtly manages to blame the disarray of the army on the Cistercian abbots' confusion rather than on the moral untenability of the barons' proposal. Rather than reproducing reality, Villehardouin is creating an artificial windstorm of confusion, presumably to make the reader infer either that the moral issues are impossible to resolve or that the army is hopelessly divided.²⁵ The incidental minutiae will, Villehardouin seems to hope, blur the embarrassing conclusion that only twelve persons in all took the oaths on behalf of the French; no more could be persuaded to come forward.²⁶

The reader is left wondering by what juridical ploy a party of twelve barons managed to decide the destiny of more than twenty thousand crusaders. Rather than be forced to answer such a question, Villehardouin chooses immediately to distract the reader's attention to the great number of desertions taking place: “During this time many men from the lower ranks deserted and escaped in merchant ships. About five hundred of them got away in one ship, but all of them lost their lives by drowning. Another group escaped by land, thinking to travel safely through Sclavonia; but the people of that country attacked them, killing a great number, and those who were left came flying back to the army. Thus our forces dwindled seriously from day to day.”²⁷

But the reader refuses to be distracted. How did the barons manage to convince the army that the altered course to Constantinople was morally acceptable? Strategists like Villehardouin know how useful tears can be in reducing logical structures. Whether or not they are historically factual, tears serve to blur description and provide the chronicler with an added excuse to heighten the dramatic nature of a critical moment: “The marquis [Boniface de Montferrat] and those with him fell at the feet of the other party, weeping bitterly, and said they would not get up again until these men had promised not to go away and leave them. … And when the others saw them they were filled with a great pity and wept sorely when they saw their lords, their relatives, and their friends fallen at their feet; and they said they would confer together and withdrew. Their decision was that they would remain with the army until Michaelmas, provided the leaders would solemnly swear on the gospels.”²⁸

Robert de Clari seems to have witnessed the same event with a drier eye:

Then all the barons of the host were summoned by the Venetians. And when they were all assembled, the doge of Venice rose and spoke to them. “Lords,” said the doge, “now we have a good excuse for going to Constantinople, if you approve of it, for we have the rightful heir.” Now there were some who did not at all approve of going to Constantinople. Instead they said: “Bah! What shall we be doing in Constantinople? We have our pilgrimage to make, and also our plan of going to Babylon or Alexandria. Moreover, our navy is to follow us for only a year, and half of the year is already past.” And the others said in answer: “What shall we do in Babylon or Alexandria when we have neither the provisions nor the money to enable us to go there? Better for us before we go there to secure provisions and money by some good excuse than to go there and die of hunger. … ” And the marquis de Montferrat was at more pains to urge them to go to Constantinople than anyone else who was there, because he wanted to avenge himself for an injury for which the marquis hated the emperor of Constantinople. … Then the bishops answered that it would not be a sin but rather a righteous deed.²⁹

The departure of the Franco-Venetian fleet from Corfu “on the eve of the Pentecost” (1203) is the most far-reaching and panoramic sight of Villehardouin's chronicle: “It seemed, indeed, that here was a fleet that might well conquer lands, for as far as the eye could reach there was nothing to be seen but sails outspread on all that vast array of ships, so that every man's heart was filled with joy at the sight.”³⁰ Villehardouin, however, cannot help revealing himself even when enraptured. His visual attention is above all a process of exclusion ordained toward action; his joy at the sight of the fleet is neither an esthetic nor a moral response but an anticipation of action: “Here was a fleet that might well conquer lands.” “There was nothing to be seen but sail outspread” is a curious admission that his visual field had excluded everything else. The common spectator like Robert de Clari knows that when a fleet like this lifts anchor, there is far more to be seen than sails outspread: “When the fleet left the port of Venice with its galleys, rich warships and so many other vessels, it was the most beautiful sight since the beginning of the world. For there were a hundred pairs of trumpets, made of silver as well as brass, sounding together at the weighing of the anchors, and so many bells and drums and other instruments that it was marvelous to behold. When the fleet was out to sea and had spread its sails and raised the banners and ensigns high on the masts, the whole sea seemed afire glittering with the ships upon it pouring out their joy.”³¹

Villehardouin's exclusion of material unrelated to the action or purpose at hand applies to interior as well as exterior perceptions. At Cape Malia, in the southern Peloponnesus, the fleet happens to encounter two ships on their way back from Syria, “full of knights, sergeants, and pilgrims who were part of the company that had gone to that country by way of Marseille.” Unwilling to trust the Venetians or to accept the mystifications of Boniface de Montferrat, these crusaders and the other barons had decided to sail directly for Syria. When they encountered the large fleet, a sergeant in one of the ships from Syria told his friends that he was going to join the expedition, “for it certainly seems to me they’ll win some land for themselves.”³² Unable to resist the temptation to moralize, Villehardouin attributes the sergeant's gesture to a pious turn of heart: “And, after all, as people are wont to say, no matter how often a man can have gone astray, he can still come round to the right way in the end.”³³ The comment does not seem to be made ironically, and it does not speak highly for Villehardouin's intuitions. It never seems to have occurred to the narrator that the sergeant's real motive might have been not to “come round to the right way” but to satisfy his appetite for gain. Such is one of the major paradoxes of Villehardouin's personality: his lucidity and intellectual rigor feed on truisms and reassuring platitudes. Even when he examines the human psyche he manages to exclude what he does not wish to see. Whether he is looking at the world or considering the arguments of those moral objectors “who wished to destroy the army,” Villehardouin seems to see and hear only what his senses and his viewpoint care to admit.

When he first arrives within sight of Constantinople from the sea of Marmara, Villehardouin seems particularly impressed by such quantitative dimensions as the length, breadth, and height of the city: “I can assure you that all those who had never seen Constantinople before gazed very intently at the city, having never imagined there could be so fine a place in all the world. They noted the high walls and lofty towers encircling it, and its rich palaces and tall churches, of which there were so many that no one could have believed it to be true if he had not seen it with his own eyes, and viewed the length and breadth of that city which reigns supreme over all the others. There was indeed no man so brave and daring that his flesh did not shudder at the sight.”³⁴

Throughout his account of the siege and conquest of the city, Constantinople remains an object of eventual possession rather than of visual perception. One gathers the impression that the city is an abstract, two-dimensional configuration of lines being examined in headquarters, on a military map. Neither ships nor scaling ladders nor land nor sea nor horses are given any concrete dimensions; nor is the city viewed from a recognizable geographical perspective: “The Venetians were strongly of the opinion that the scaling ladders should be set up on the ships and the whole assault be made from the sea. The French, for their part, protested that they could not give such a good account of themselves on sea as the Venetians; but once on land, with their horses and their proper equipment, they could do much better service. So in the end it was decided that the Venetians would launch their attack from the sea while the barons and their army would tackle the enemy by land.”³⁵

Yet some of the scenes are recorded “live.” The first of three great fires within the city's walls is observed from the shore opposite the port, near the tower of Galata, whence Villehardouin commands a broad and relatively close view of the city's walls: “The fire was so great and horrible that no one was able to extinguish or control it. When the barons in the camp on the other side of the port saw it, they were sorely afflicted, seeing the high churches and rich palaces crumble and collapse, and the great commercial quarters burn. … The fire spread beyond the port toward the most densely populated part of the city, until it reached the sea on one side near the church of Saint Sophia. … As it burned, the fire extended easily over a mile and a half of land.”³⁶

Villehardouin seems to be standing on the very same spot several months later as he watches the Venetians foil the Greeks' attempt to burn the crusading fleet:

One night, at midnight, they set fire to their ships, hoisted the sails, and let the ships flame, so that it seemed as if the shore was on fire. The Greek ships floated toward the crusaders' fleet. The alarm went off in the camp. All ran to take up their arms. The Venetians and all those who owned ships scrambled to their ships and set about protecting them as best they could. And Geoffroy de Villehardouin, the Marshal of Champagne, who has composed this work, can testify that never did a seafaring people better manage than the Venetians. They leaped into the galleys and rowboats of their ships, grappled the Greek ships with hooks, and pulled them with all their strength (while their enemies looked on) into the current of the sea of Marmara, and let them sail in flames down toward the sea. There were so many Greeks on the far shore that it was impossible to count them; and the din was so great that it seemed as if the earth and the sky were falling.³⁷

When Constantinople is sacked by the army in April 1204, however, the chronicler's eye is distracted by the various foci of action and dispersed ubiquitously throughout the city:

The Marquis de Montferrat rode straight along the shore to the palace of Bucoleon. As soon as he arrived there the place was surrendered to him. … In the same way that the palace of Bucoleon was surrendered to the Marquis de Montferrat, so the palace of Blachernae was yielded to the Comte de Flandre's brother Henri, and on the same conditions. … There too was found a great store of treasure, not less than there had been in the palace of Bucoleon. … The rest of the army, scattered throughout the city, also gained much booty; so much, indeed, that no one could estimate its amount or its value. It included gold and silver, table-services and precious stones, satin and silk, mantles of squirrel fur, ermine and miniver, and every choicest thing to be found on this earth. Geoffroy de Villehardouin here declares that, to his knowledge, so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world. … So the troops of the crusaders and the Venetians … all rejoiced and gave thanks to our Lord for the honour and the victory he had granted them … so that those who had been poor now lived in wealth and luxury.³⁸

But even this, one of the most large-scale of Villehardouin's pictures, excludes all embarrassing detail. Without going so far as to recall Delacroix's flamboyant recreation of the sack of the city, one has only to read the contemporary Byzantine chronicler Nicetas Choniates in order to realize that Villehardouin's picture is a whitened one indeed:

The lust of the army spared neither maiden nor the virgin dedicated to God. Violence and debauchery were everywhere present; cries and lamentations and the groans of the pilgrims were heard throughout the city; for everywhere pillage was unrestrained and lust unbridled. The city was in wild confusion. Nobles, old men, women, and children ran to and fro trying to save their wealth, their honor, and their lives. Knights, foot-soldiers, and Venetian sailors jostled each other in a mad scramble for plunder. Threats of ill treatment, promises of safety if wealth were disgorged, mingled with the cries of many sufferers. These pious brigands … acted as if they had received a licence to commit every crime.³⁹

So complex, so morally embarrassing is the event that Villehardouin must fall back upon his habitual defenses of selection and distraction to describe it. Selection of visual detail is a rather easy process: one simply excludes what one does not wish to see. But how does the writer distract the reader's attention when describing the climactic event of a chronicle? By overdramatizing the dangers of the situation and creating a “new enemy.” To the ranks of those iniquitous sons of darkness who had “sailed from other ports,” of those enemies “who wished to disband the army,” of those Byzantine Greeks who did the French army so much harm by attempting to defend their own city, Villehardouin adds a fourth group of enemies, the soldiers within the crusading army who refused to surrender their plunder to the barons: “Some performed this duty conscientiously; others, prompted by covetousness, that never-failing source of all evil, proved less honest.”⁴⁰

His Manichaean world is henceforth divided between the “righteous” sackers of cities, who dutifully surrender their spoils, and the “unrighteous,” who try to keep theirs: “From the very first, those who were prone to this vice began to keep some things back and became, in consequence, less pleasing to our Lord. Ah! God, how loyally they had behaved up to now! And up to now, in all their undertakings, our Lord had shown his gracious care for them and had exalted them above all people. But those who do right often have to suffer for the misdeeds of the unrighteous.”⁴¹

The second half of Villehardouin's chronicle is a tedious recitation of the battles fought between those who do right and those who do wrong, of new enemies either defeated or victorious. “Such an arduous task it was to found the Latin empire in Greece,” he might have concluded with a Vergilian turn of phrase, “when so many enemies were opposed to the designs of providence: Greeks, Wallachians, Bulgars, not to mention the dissident factions within the conquering army!” The chronicler's account of the events that occur between the election of Baldwin of Flanders as emperor of Constantinople (May 1204) and the death of Boniface de Montferrat (September 1207) is a dry enumeration of sieges, battles, and conquests in Thrace, on the Greek Mainland, in the Peloponnesus, and in Asia Minor. It is almost as if Villehardouin himself found the events that followed the sack of the city to be anticlimactic and hardly worth the reader's interest.

After the conquest Villehardouin never so much as alludes to the possibility of a departure for outremer. So much has happened since Venice that the reader will (one hopes) have forgotten that the expedition originally began as a crusade against the Infidel. The account of the events of 1204-1207 is but a prolonged distraction intended to discourage the reader from inquiring why, after conquering the city and liquidating their debt with the Venetians, the French barons thought it necessary to conquer the entire Greek empire rather than get down to the business of continuing the crusade.

Selection, discoloration, exclusion, dramatization, obfuscation of issues, distraction—such are a few of the major components of Villehardouin's narrative technique. Though it would be presumptuous to argue that a study of this technique allows one to bring a definitive answer to the “Villehardouin debate,” it does seem to permit an evaluation of it. Historians will perhaps never know whether Villehardouin willfully concealed some facts as to the origins of the Fourth Crusade; but his visual and psychic makeup were such that, had he known these facts, he would probably have selected them carefully and rigorously. Can one conclude otherwise when one sees him so selective in depicting even harmless and unembarrassing events?

Approaching the problem of Villehardouin's sincerity by way of narrative technique serves the further purpose of providing a different opinion of the author's character. One fails to see that “mixture of simplicity and nobility that are characteristically his.”⁴² One finds it hard to respond to those “energetic, adventurous, rough and loyal spirits of the conquerors of Constantinople,” or those “tears of pity” that Sainte-Beuve praises in a highly rhetorical passage.⁴³ One finds it impossible, finally, to agree with Edmond Faral's all too flattering picture of Villehardouin the loyal and courageous soldier.⁴⁴

Such glorified images of Villehardouin are perhaps better discarded. Of his love of courage it can surely be said that he admired it selectively, in those who happened to share his views; and it might be argued that his “rough and loyal” character is largely the product of his selective perceptions. Villehardouin strikes some readers as a man of immoderate ambition whose talent for discourse and political compromise was largely self-serving. His fascination for wealth, plunder, and reputation impoverished his better impulses; despite his wealth of experience, his visual memory remains poor, rough, and discolored; the result is a sketchy, unshaded, and curiously defensive picture of the most important event of his age.

Notes

1. Textual references are to G. de Villehardouin, La Conquête de Constantinople, edited by E. Faral (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1938). Biographical material on Villehardouin has been taken from R. Bossuat, art., “Geoffroi de Villehardouin,” Dictionnaire des lettres francaises (Paris: A Fayard, 1964), pp. 304-307.

2. For a discussion of the problem of Villehardouin's sincerity, see Villehardouin, La Conquête, I, xvi-xxxvii; D. E. Queller and S. J. Stratton, “A Century of Controversy on the Fourth Crusade,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, edited by William M. Bowsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), VI, 235-77.

3. Robert de Clari, De chiaus qui conquistrent Constantinople, edited by Philippe Lauer (Paris: H. Champion, 1924). Biographical material on Robert has been taken from U. T. Holmes, art., “Robert de Clari,” Dictionnaire des lettres francaises, Le Moyen âge, p. 639.

4. For a summary of the controversy on the origins of the Fourth Crusade, see Queller and Stratton, “A Century of Controversy on the Fourth Crusade,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, edited by Bowsky, 233-77. I have used M. R. B. Shaw's translation of Villehardouin, Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades (London: Penguin Books, 1963), and E. H. McNeal's edition and translation of Robert de Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939). Whenever I have disagreed with these translations I have provided my own. On Villehardouin's habit of dividing the world into opposite camps, see La Conquête, I, par. 86, 87, 100, 234, 236.

5. A. Pauphilet, Le Legs du moyen âge (Melun: d’Argences, 1950), p. 219.

6. La Conquête, I, par. 2.

7. Ibid., par. 11.

8. Ibid., par. 14.

9. Ibid., par. 18.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., par. 25.

12. The one adjective of color that retains his attention is the vermilion of the Byzantine emperor's boots (ibid., par. 227, and again par. 245).

13. Ibid., par. 27-29.

14. Ibid., par. 57.

15. Ibid., par. 60.

16. E.g., ibid., par. 61: “Those who had retained their possessions were highly delighted and refused to add anything of their own, since they were now quite confident that the army would be broken up and the troops dispersed. But God … was not willing for this to happen.”

17. Ibid., par. 100.

18. Ibid., par. 77: “Comment porroit estre prise tel ville par force, se Diex meïsmes nel fait?”

19. Ibid., par. 105.

20. Ibid., par. 108.

21. Ibid., par. 110.

22. Ibid., par. 93.

23. Ibid., par. 95-97.

24. Ibid.

25. Villehardouin's clever game of obfuscation has succeeded down to the present. In his Introduction to La Conquête, I, xxii, Faral argues that the refusal of the Abbot of Vaux and Simon de Montfort to attack Constantinople did not prevent them, several years later, from destroying the Albigensians, “des hérétiques, mais pourtant des chrétiens.” The point at issue is not whether the dissenters were contradictory in their conduct. One might simply remark that not unlike Villehardouin, Faral almost succeeds in distracting the reader's attention from the event at hand toward an ulterior and unrelated event.

26. Ibid., par. 99. Villehardouin attempts further to blur the embarrassing central issue by narrating it in an impersonal style as if it had been witnessed by someone else: “And the book says that there were only 12 who took the oath.”

27. Ibid., par. 101.

28. Ibid., par. 116-17.

29. Robert de Clari, The Conquest of Constantinople, translated by E. H. McNeal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), pp. 59-66.

30. La Conquête, I, par. 120.

31. Robert de Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, edited by Ph. Lauer (Paris, 1924), ch. XIII (my translation).

32. La Conquête, I, par. 122.

33. Ibid.: “Et por ce dit hom que de mil males voies puet on retorner.”

34. Ibid., par. 128.

35. Ibid., par. 162.

36. Ibid., par. 204.

37. Ibid., II, par. 218.

38. Ibid., II, par. 249-51.

39. Nicetas Choniates, Devastatio quoted in E. Pears, The Fall of Constantinople (New York, 1886), pp. 354-55.

40. La Conquête, II, par. 253. One should note the Manichaean language of Villehardouin's text: “Li uns aporta bien et li autres mauvaisement.” Robert de Clari gives a less biased account of the event: “Afterwards it was ordered that all the wealth of the spoils should be brought to a certain church in the city. The wealth was brought there, and they took ten knights, high men, of the pilgrims, and ten of the Venetians who were thought to be honorable, and set them to guard the wealth. … And each one of the rich men took gold ornaments or cloth of silk and gold or anything else he wanted and carried it off. So in this way they began to rob the treasure, so that nothing was shared with the common people of the host or the poor knights or the sergeants who had helped to win the treasure” (McNeal translation, pp. 101-102).

41. La Conquête, II, par. 256-500.

42. Pauphilet, Le Legs, p. 95.

43. C. A. Sainte-Beuve, “G. de Villehardouin,” Causeries du lundi, 6 février 1854, p. 412. Sainte-Beuve's portrait of Villehardouin ends on a dithyrambic note: “He has tears of pity beneath his visor, but he does not overuse them. He can get down on both knees, and without weakness, get up his feet again. His even temper and his common sense are equal to the situations in which he finds himself. In the breach to the very end of the battle, he carries his sword intrepidly and his pen simply. Among historians who also qualify as men of action, he is one of the most honorable and complete of his time.”

44. La Conquête, I, xxx-xxxvii: “He was a lord. He belonged to the order of chivalry whose law was composed of two commandments: be faithful and be brave.”