The Poetics of Translatio

the poetics of Cranslatio:
~rench- Byzantine Relations

in Chretien be troyes' s Cliges
SHARON KINOSHITA
Oh what a noble and beautiful city is Constantinople! How many mon-

asteries and palaces it contains, constructed with wonderful skill! How
many remarkable things may be seen in the principal avenues and even
in the lesser streets! It would be very tedious to enumerate the wealth that
is there of every kind, of gold, of silver, or robes of many kinds, and of holy
relics. Merchants constantly bring to the city by frequent voyages all the
necessities of man.
-Fulcher of Chartres, History of
the Expedition to jerusalem I
n 1096 the soldiers of the First Crusade got their first glimpse
of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The Greeks,2 under-
standably wary of the hordes of uncouth westerners making
their way towards Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, had forbidden
most of the massive army from entering the city, by far the most
1 Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition To jerusalem 1095-1127, 1.9,

ed. Harold S. Fink, trans. Frances Rita Ryan (Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1969), 79.
2 I refer to the Creek-speaking inhabitants of the empire centered at Constan-
tinople as "Creek" and "Byzantine" interchangeably throughout this essay; like-
wise, the inhabitants of modern France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and the Low
Countries are either "westerners" or "Latin."
Exemplaria 8.2 Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY
316 The Poetics of Translatio in Cliges
splendid in the Mediterranean world. Those Crusaders forced to re-

main camped outside the city maIVelled at the scale and strength of its
walls. Those allowed to enter this Second Rome were overwhelmed by
wealth and magnificence on a scale unimagined in the West; the "un-
polished barbarians," as Jacques Le Goff writes, "stood in incom-
prehension contrasting their simplicity with the sophistication of this
civilization of ceremony and worldly politeness with its rigid system of
etiquette."3 Count Stephen of Blois, one of the leaders of the Cru-
sade, wrote to his wife praising the incredible largesse of the Greek
emperor-to the detriment of her father, William the Conqueror:
Indeed, I tell you that in these days there is not another such as
he alive under the sky. He showers riches on all our leaders, re-
lieves all our knights with gifts and refreshes all our poor with
feasts .... Your father, my beloved, gave many and great gifts, but
he was almost as nothing to this man.4
Within a very short time, however, the Franks (as the westerners came
globally to be called5), having conquered Jerusalem from the Seljuk
Turks, established a military occupation of the Holy Land which
brought them into nearly constant conflict with their eastern co-relig-
ionists and erstwhile allies. Though the splendor of the Byzantine
capital continued to intimidate them, they came to resent what they
increasingly perceived as Greek arrogance and to revile what they per-
ceived as the Greek propensity to deception. This enmity was exacer-
bated by the disastrous Second Crusade of 1147-48, whose failure
Louis VII's chaplain Odo of Deui! directly ascribed to Byzantine
treachery; it was to reach its height in 1204-barely a century after the
western conquest of Jerusalem-when the Frankish forces ostensibly as-
3 Jacques Le Goff, "The Framework of Time and Space" in Medieval Civiliza-

tion, trans. Julia Barrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 142-43. Late-twelfth-
century Constantinople surpassed anything imaginable in the West; its population
of perhaps 100,000 was over three times as great as that of contemporary Paris;
see Sidney R. Packard, Twelfth-Century Eu"'Ope: A n Interpretive Essay (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1973), 46.
4 Cited by R. H. C. Davis in King Stephen, 1135-1154, 3rd ed. (London:
Longman, 1990), 2.
5 Originally an ethnic designation, the term "Frank" was generalized to mean
all westerners during the First Crusade. It was first used in this sense by Muslims
and Byzantine Greeks; the "Franks" themselves thus picked up this self-appellation
from non-westerners. See Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Coloniza-
tion, and Cultural Change 950-1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),
102-3.
SHARON KINOSHITA 317
sembled to launch a new assault on Muslim Syria instead directed

their "crusade" against the eastern Christians of Constantinople. Still,
such was the power that the Byzantine capital continued to exert over
the western imagination that, even as they prepared to sack it, "none
was so bold," in the words of chronicler Geoffroi de Villehardouin,
"not to tremble at it.,,6
The five romances of Chretien de Troyes-Erec et Enide, Cliges, Le

chevalier au lion, Le chevalier de La charrete, and Le conte du Graal-all
date from the decades between the Second Crusade of 1147-48 and
the Third Crusade of 1189-91, and his patrons Marie de Champagne
and Philip of Flanders belonged to two of the western lineages most
intimately involved in the affairs of the eastern Mediterranean. Marie's
parents, Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine, were leaders
of the ill-fated Second Crusade, while her husband, Count Henry the
Liberal, had been knighted by the Byzantine emperor Manuel 1.7
Count Philip's parents were frequent pilgrims to the Holy Land, and
he himself would die at the siege of Acre in 1191.8 Yet despite these
numerous ties, Chretien's texts-the occasional place name aside-
contain strikingly few allusions to western involvement in the politics
of the eastern Mediterranean, either Greek or Muslim.9 The one
6 Cited by jacques Bernard in "Trade and Finance in the Middle Ages,

900-1500" in The Fontana Economic History of Europe: The Middle Ages, ed. Carlo M.
Cipolla (London: Fontana Books, 1972), 290.
7 Henry was knighted in Constantinople in 1147, while accompanying his
overlord and future father-in-law Louis VII on the Second Crusade; in the late
1170s, Manuel ransomed him from the Turks. Marie's half-brothers Richard the
Lionheart and Philip Augustus would be co-leaders of the Third Crusade, her
younger son, Thibaut IV of Champagne, of the Fourth. Finally, her elder son
Henry was titular king of jerusalem from 1192-97.
8 This date thus constitutes the terminus ad quem of the Conte du Graa~
dedicated to the count. Philip's father Count Thierry of Flanders made five trips
to the Holy Land, in 1120, 1139, 1147, 1157-58, and 1165. His mother Sibylle
(the daughter of Fulk of Anjou, king of jerusalem from 1131-43) in 1158 re-
mained in Jerusalem, entering the double monastery of Bethany founded by her
stepmother, Queen Melisende. See Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 2:
The Kingdom of je1'lJSalem and the F,-ankish East, 1100-1187 (1952; rpt. London:
Penguin Books, 1965), 178n., 227, 253ff., 349, 361, 370.
9 The only explicit reference to the Crusades occurs near the beginning of
Chretien's Le chevalie, au lion (Yvain), ed. Mario Roques, CFMA 89 (Paris: Cham-
pion 1978), lines 595-96. As the knights of Arthur's court relax after their
customary Pentecost feast, the ever-irascible Sir Ke~ indicts his com~anions' verbal
bravura with the sardonic observation that, after dInner, everyone ISeager to slay
exception is Cliges, often taken as the least typical of Chretien's ro-

mances precisely because of its "Byzantine" setting. Grandson of the
Greek emperor on his father's side and grand-nephew of King Arthur
on his mother's, the titular protagonist falls in love with Fenice, the
bride of his paternal uncle Alis, and she with him. But openly reject-
ing the precedent of Tristan and Iseut-of the nephew who commits
adultery with his uncle's wife-the two separate. The tale follows Cliges
first to England, where he proves himself at the Arhurian court, then
back to Constantinople, where a surprise awaits him. Fenice informs
him that from her wedding night forward, the emperor has been
drugged by a magic potion: he dreams that he sleeps with his bride,
while in fact she remains a virgin-"faithful" to her true love Cliges.
Together the lovers plot an escape: Fenice feigns death, and her
"body" is spirited away to a marvelous safehouse Cliges has had con-
structed in the woods. There they live in blissful isolation, until dis-
covered one day by one of the emperor's vassals. Just as Alis sets out
in pursuit of the outlaw-lovers, however, he fortuitously dies. Cliges is
finally crowned emperor, and Fenice his empress. And that is why to
this day, the narrator concludes, Byzantine empresses are kept in
seclusion, for emperors are mindful of the precedent of the guile of
Fenice.
Despite the potential historical and political resonances of this tale
of a half-Arthurian prince who first cuckolds the Byzantine emperor,
then succeeds him, most recent interpretations of Cliges have concen-
trated almost exclusively on literary historical questions, specifically its
programmatic rewriting of the Tristan legend. Taking at face value Fe-
nice's determination not to repeat the example of the incestuous
Iseut, critics have examined Cliges's every permutation of its literary
subtext, from the precious wordplay on La mer/l'amor to the redou-
bling of the magic philtre. Is Chretien's text, they ask, an anti-Tristan
or a neo-Tristan? Does it convincingly demonstrate the compatibility
between passion and the social order?lO
Nur ed-din-a reference to the mid-twelfth<entury ruler of Aleppo whose consoli-

dation of Moslem Syria prepared the way for the conquests of his celebrated
successor, Saladin. Cf. the reference to Beirut in Le ,.oman de Perceval ou Le conte
du G,.aal 3052, ed. William Roach, 2nd ed. (Geneva: Droz, 1959).
10 Indicatively, nearly one-half of Anthime Fourrier's chapter on Chretien in
Le courant 1-ealistedans le roman courtois en France au moyen age (Paris: Nizet, 1960)
concentrates on such intertextual relations. Cliges is the only one of the five
romances he examines in any detail.
In this paper, I want to recontextualize Cliges by examInIng the

opening third of the romance-lines 43-2585 in Micha's editionll-
devoted to the events leading up to the birth of the titular protago-
nist. Alexander, the elder son of the emperor of Constantinople, sails
westward from Byzantium to Britain in order to win his spurs at the
Arthurian court, the undisputed center of the chivalric world. For his
decisive role in Arthur's war of revenge against a rebellious vassal, he
wins as his bride the king's niece, Gauvain's sister Soredamors. Brack-
eting the usual issues of literary influences and Celtic origins, I want
to read the Alexander episode-and Cliges overall-as an intervention
in one of the most problematic issues confronting the medieval imagi-
nation: the troubled relationship between Greek and Latin Christen-
dom in the century following the First Crusade. Whereas in historical
fact the Franks continued to marvel at the indescribable splendors of
Constantinople even while condemning Byzantine treachery, in Chre-
tien's literary-revisionist version, cultural capital indisputably migrates
from East to West, with the chivalric pilgrimages of Alexander and Cli-
ges demonstrating by example the ideologies of translatio explicitly ar-
ticulated in the romance's prologue. The Alexander episode, whose re-
lationship to the story of Cliges proper "has not always been clearly
understood,"12 in fact plays a crucial role, I will argue, in this ideo-
logical reversal, exploiting Latin stereotypes of Greek faithlessness and
deception systematically to invert the cultural hegemony that the
eastern empire exerted over the West.
Part I of this article gives a brief history of French and Byzantine re-
lations in the twelfth-century Mediterranean. Part II considers the par-
odic epic Le voyage de Charlemagne a jerusalem et a Constantinople as a
failed attempted to contain the ambiguities of Latin Christendom's
relationship to a foreign but nonetheless Christian other. In part III
we will examine how Chretien introduces the twinned topoi of transla-
tio studii and translatio imperii, in the prologue to Cliges, as an alter-
native response to this epistemological and ideological dilemma. Parts
IV through VI analyze how the romance of Alexander's adventures-
his chivalric pilgrimage to Britain, his participation in Arthur's war of
11 Chretien de Troyes, Cliges, ed. Alexandre Micha, CFMA 84 (Paris: Champi-

on, 1975).
12 Norris Lacy, The Craft of Ch,itien de Troyes: An Essay on Narrative ~,~, .Davis
Medieval Texts and Studies 3 (Leiden: E. j. Brill, 1980), 81. The formal dIVISIon of
Cliges into two parts is one of the aspects of the romance that critics have found
rnast problernatic.
revenge against a rebellious vassal, his courtship of and marriage to

the king's niece Soredamors-in decisively asserting the primacy of
military force over ruse and deception, both redeems the failure of
the vernacular chanson de geste adequately to represent the west's con-
frontation with the East, and asserts the political and cultural hegem-
ony of the Arthurian kingdom over the Byzantine empire. We begin
with a look at the tensions between Christian co-religionists in the
century between the First and Fourth Crusades.
I
As long as Latin West had little political contact with the Greeks,
their political, theological, and cultural differences could be subsumed
in the idealized vision of a unified Christendom resisting the incursion
of Islam-and this despite the "schism" of 1054, when the papal legate
and the patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other.13
In 1071, however, the Byzantine army's decisive loss to the Seljuk
Turks at the battle of Manzikert abruptly altered the balance of power
in the eastern Mediterranean.14 Eager to recover the Anatolian prov-
inces now under Muslim control, Emperor Alexios I requested aid
from the Latin West. But Pope Urban II converted the emperor's
pragmatic request for military aid into an appeal for a Christian
reconquest of the Holy Land, culminating in his predication of the
13 The Latin concept of Christendom drew heavily from Augustine of Hippo's

City of God; the Greek concept of empire [basileia), on the other hand, was
indebted to Eusebius's notion of the Roman Empire as the terrestrial image of the
kingdom of heaven. See Donald M. Nicol, "The Crusades and the Unity of
Christendom" in The Meeting of Two Wm'lds: Cultu1'al Exchange between East and
West during the Pe110dof the Crusades, ed. Vladimir Goss and Christine Bornstein,
Studies in Medieval Culture 21 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986),
169.
14 In that same year, the Norman adventurer Tancred de Hauteville seized
Constantinople's colonies in southern Italy, founding expansionist states that soon
challenged Byzantine hegemony. Papal blessings on this '~ust" war further
aggravated relations between East and West. See Donald Nicol, "Crusades and the
Unity of Christendom," 170. Tancred was nominally a vassal of Duke William of
Normandy, who had himself "conquered" England only a few years before.
Tancred's sons would eventually establish themselves as kings of Sicily, dukes of
Apulia, and princes of Salerno, It was largely their common antagonism towards
Norman Sicily that led the German and Greek emperors to attempt alliances
throughout the early twelfth century.
First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095.15 But when the

western militias led by Baldwin of Flanders, Raymond of St. Gilles and
Bohemond of Apulia arrived in the eastern Mediterranean in 1096
imbued with the ideology of holy war and made impatient by the
promise of profit and adventure, the disparity between Greek and
Latin interests immediately precipitated conflicts. Alexios I, surprised
by the magnitude of the western response, was alarmed at the size of
the armies traversing his empire and appalled at the political preten-
sion of their leaders. For their part, the Crusaders, as we have seen,
were awed by their first close-up view of the material wealth and cul-
tural capital of Constantinople: its elaborate rituals, its abundance of
sacred relics, the superiority of its artistic and scientific technology. At
the same time, because their military might was superior to the emper-
or's, they demanded what they regarded as their due for the recon-
quest and defense of the Holy Land.16 In particular, they chafed at
Alexios's insistence that they swear in advance to recognize his sover-
eignty over any former Byzantine provinces they might recapture from
the Turks. Throughout the campaigns culminating in the bloody con-
quest of Jerusalem in 1099, relations between the Crusaders and their
Byzantine co-religionists were at best ambivalent and at worst openly
adversarial, with the Franks suspecting the Greeks of deception or
treachery.
The foundation of the four Crusader states inaugurated a western
military occupation of the eastern Mediterranean that would last for
nearly two centuries. Since the counties of Edessa, Tripoli, and Anti-
och were created out of territories that the Seljuk Turks had only re-
cently conquered from the Greek empire, Alexios I regarded their up-
start princes as his vassals and tried to enforce the oaths he had
wrested from them as they had passed through Constantinople. They,
however, acknowledged only the nominal lordship of their own
leader, the newly consecrated "king" of Jerusalem, and fiercely resist-
ed the emperor's attempts to subdue them. I? The antagonism was
]5 Pope Urban lifted the ban of excommunication on the Greek emperor in

1089. Roger Beaton notes that, from the defeat of Manzikert in 1071 to the sack
of Constantinople in 1204, the borders of the Byzantine empire largely coincided
with the boundaries of the Greek-speaking world. See The Medieval Greek Romance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 7-8.
]6 This discrepancy between political power on the one hand and cultural
prestige on the other is integral to the very history of the translatio topos. Cf. the
famous line from Horace's Epistle to Augustus: "captive Greece took its captor
captive." Epistles 2.1.156 (my translation).
]7 Alexios I's son and successor John Comnenos, for example, waged a long
cultural as well as political. Though the defeat of Manzikert had sub-

stantially undermined the Greeks' confidence that "the social and po-
litical order to which they belonged was divinely appointed to the role
of universal empire," they retained an acute sense of their cultural he-
gemony.I8 The Crusaders, on the <?ther hand, unaccustomed to the
cultural diversity of the eastern Mediterranean, where different ethnic
and religious groups had long cohabited, were scandalized by the em-
peror's tolerance of divergent religious practices and especially by his
use of non-Christian mercenaries. By 1111, any pretense of a united
Christian campaign against Muslim expansionism was dispelled when
the emperor appealed to the caliph of Baghdad to make common
cause against the Frankish invasion.19
The antagonism reached new heights with the Second Crusade of
1147-48. Its immediate cause was the Muslim leader Zengi's recon-
quest of the Crusader state of Edessa; mobilized by the impassioned
oratory of Bernard of Clairvaux, the princes of western Europe re-
sponded to the threat posed by this new Muslim counter-crusade by
mounting a huge expedition, this time led by the two greatest rulers
of Latin Christendom, Emperor Conrad III and Louis VII of France,
the latter accompanied by his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and by
Henry of Champagne and Philip of Alsace, who were to play such an
important role in Chretien de Troyes's literary career.
The disasters of the Second Crusade-the multiple hardships of the
road, the failure of the ill-conceived campaign against the city of Da-
mascus-are carefully recounted in De profeetione Ludoviei VII in orien-
tem, the eyewitness account authored by Louis VII's chaplain Odo of
Deui!. Clearly an attempt to come to terms with the expedition's utter
failure, the chronicle returns again and again to the theme of Byzan-
tine treachery. Even before the French army's departure, Odo reports,
battle to force the count of Antioch, Raymond of Poitiers, to acknowledge himself

a Byzantine vassal, besieging the city in 1137 and again in 1138; a third campaign
in 1142-43 was forestalled only by the emperor's death.
18 Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, 51. Tensions were exacerbated by the
Franks' sporadic attempts to Latinize the eastern Christians of their newly-con-
quered lands, appointing a Latin, for example, to the vacant Orthodox patriar-
chate of Jerusalem. See Steven Runciman, "Byzantium and the Crusades," in
Meeting of Two Worlds, 19.
19 See Amin Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, trans. Jon Rothschild
(New York: Schocken Books, 1984),83, and The Arab Historians of the Crusades, ed.
and trans. Francesco Gabrieli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969),
29-30.
"there were men in the assembly who said that the Greeks, as they
had learned either by reading or by experience [sicut iectione et ex-
perientia], were deceitful." This was already a long-standing cultural
stereotype, as his quotation of Virgil's Aeneid suggests: "the proverb 'I
fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts' [timeo Danaos et dona feren-
tes] has always been well known, even among certain laymen. "20
Nevertheless, the Franks' growing disillusionment with their co-relig-
ionists and nominal allies is evident in the contrast between Odo's
description of the Byzantine capital and that of Fulcher of Chartres
from a half-century before. Though still the essence of hyperbole,
Constantinople-in a fascinating blend of graphic description, prag-
matic detail, and cultural convention-now inspires awe as much for its
evils as for its splendor:
The city itself is squalid and fetid and in many places harmed by
permanent darkness, for the wealthy overshadow the streets with
buildings and leave these dirty, dark places to the poor and to
travelers; there murders and robberies and other crimes which
love the darkness are committed .... In every respect she exceeds
moderation; for just as she surpasses other cities in wealth, so,
too, does she surpass them in vice.
Later he adds:
Constantinople is arrogant in her wealth, treacherous in her prac-

tices, corrupt in her faith; just as she fears everyone on account
of her wealth, she is dreaded by everyone because of her treach-
ery and faithlessness.21
Throughout Odo's De profectione, it is the Greeks' verbosity and their
20 Odo of Deuil, De p1'ofeetioneLudoviei VII in orientem: The Journey of Louis VII

to the East, ed. and trans. Virginia Cingerick Berry (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1948), 12-13,26-27.
21 Ibid., 65, 87. Odo continues (87),
If she did not have these vices, however, she would be preferable to all other
places because of her temperate climate, rich fertility of soil, and location
convenient for propagating the faith. In fact she commands the Arm of St.
George, which is at one and the same time a body of water teeming with fish
and salt and a stream so small that it can safely be crossed seven or eight
tirnes in one day.
Whether in its degradation or in its splendor, the Greek capital continues to

overwhe1nl.
manipulation of signifiers that most mystify and irritate the more lit-
eral-minded Franks. From Louis VII's first audience with the Byzan-
tine emperor's ambassadors, the Crusaders are struck by how easily
they simulate [praetendebat] the friendship that westerners are accus-
tomed to showing only their most intimate friends as well as by the
interminability of their formulas. "French flatterers," ado flatly de-
clares, "even if they wish, cannot equal the Greeks." He recalls:
Godfrey, bishop of Langres, taking pity on the king and not able to
endure the delays caused by the speaker and the interpreter, said,
"Brothers, do not repeat 'glory,' 'majesty,' 'wisdom,' and 'piety' so
often in reference to the king. He knows himself, and we know him
well. Just indicate your wishes more briefly and freely."22
Worse than their verbosity is their flagrant disregard for the sanctity of
the oath. Where for the Franks oaths and promises are (in principle if
not always in practice) magico-religious speech acts, the Greeks, Odo
reports, "lightly swore [!eviler jurabant] whatever they thought would
please us, but they neither kept faith ffidem] with us nor maintained
respect for themselves. "23 Of greatest moment to the outcome of the
Second Crusade is the scandalous dissociation between word and intent,
gesture and deed in the fervent pledge of support the Byzantine emper-
or himself extends to Louis VII; here is ado's retrospective assessment:
Would that it had been done as sincerely as it was gracefully! If

his gestures [gesta corporis], his liveliness of expression, and his
words [verba] had been a true indication of his inner thoughts
[cordis intima demonstrarent], those who stood nearby would have
attested that he cherished the king with a great affection; but
such evidence is only plausible, not conclusive [tale argumentum
probabile est, non necessarium ].24
22 Ibid., 27.
23 Ibid., 56-57. Magico-religious speech acts, in the words of Louis Marin,
"dans Ie temps de leur enonce, font naitre"; Utopiques:jeux d'espaces (Paris: Minuit,
1973), 115. Cf. John Searle's speech act category "direction of fit," described in
his. Inte~tionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge
UnIversIty Press, 1983), 7. Searle distinguishes between "word-to-world" cases, in
which "statements, descriptions, assertions, etc. are supposed in some way to
match an independently existing world," and "world-to-word" cases, in which
speech acts "are supposed to bring about changes so that the world matches the
propositional content of the speech act"-what Searle categorizes as "causal self-
reference."
24 Odo, 68-69.
Once again, the harshest verdict comes from the Bishop of Langres,
who accuses Constantinople of being Christian in name only: "rem
Christianitatis non habet, sed nomen. "25 From there it is only a short
step to his outraged response to the emperor's insistence that the
westerners recognize him as their overlord: "When we already have
such a noble lord, it is certainly disgraceful to do homage to an
infidel. "26
The bishop's fulminations notwithstanding, the Greeks were of
course not infidels, but Christian others whose difference from them-
selves continued to aggravate the Franks throughout the second half
of the century. The decades following the Second Crusade brought
both increased contact between Constantinople and the West, and in-
creased tension. In 1143, Emperor John Comnenus was succeeded by
his son Manuel I, a "francophile" who, while as wary as his predeces-
sors of Latin military presence in the eastern Mediterranean, actively
promoted both political and cultural relations. Apparently fascinated
by the exotic customs of the westerners, he staged tournaments- "a
new and unusual spectacle for the Byzantines"-and introduced other
forms of western chivalry into the Greek empire.27 Both his wives
were westerners: Bertha of Sulzbach, sister-in-law of the German em-
peror, and Maria of Antioch, first cousin of Eleanor of Aquitaine and
daughter of that old Byzantine nemesis, Raymond of Poitiers. In the
second half of the century, Manuel arranged several marriage alliances
between imperial princesses and important western princes, including
Ranier of Montferrat, William VIII of Montpellier, and King Baldwin
III of jerusalem,28 and in 1179 married his son, the future Alexios II,
to Agnes of France, daughter of King Louis VII, in a match negotiated
by Count Philip of Flanders. Frankish influence on the East may have
extended to literature as well; the medieval Byzantine romance, notes
Roderick Beaton, appeared at nearly the same moment as the French
romans d 'antiquiti, only to disappear quite suddenly in the 1180s, follow-
25 Ibid., 60-61.
26 Ibid., 78-79. Astoundingly, the bishop concludes by calling, over a half
century before the disaster of 1204, for the sack of Constantinople.
27 George Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, trans. Joan Hussey (New
Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 380. For an account of Greek-
Latin relations to 1204 largely sympathetic to the former, see Runciman, "Byzanti-
um and the Crusades."
28 See A. P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Cultu,"e
in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centu,ies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985), 178.
326 The Poetics ofTranslatio in Cliges
ing the death of Manuel I. "Byzantine awareness of western achieve-

ments in all fields," he writes, "was probably greater, during the century
of the crusades, than Byzantine writers themselves admit. "29
The emperor's enthusiasm for the Franks, however, was not shared
by his subjects. When his niece Theodora was given in marriage to
Henry of Austria, brother of the German emperor, shocked Byzan-
tines wept, in the words of historian Steven Runciman, "to see the
lovely young princess sacrificed to so barbarous a fate- 'immolated to
a beast of the West,' as a court poet wrote sympathetically to her
mother. "30 More significantly, the privileges-including high state of-
fices-that Manuel granted to westerners increasingly provoked the re-
sentment of his Greek subjects. The late twelfth-century chronicler
Niketas Choniates stereotyped the westerners as greedy, uncultivated,
gluttonous, violent, and arrogant. "The widest gulf," he wrote, "exists
between us and them. We have not a single thought in common. We
are poles apart.,,31 At Manuel's death in 1180, the dowager empress
Maria of Antioch became regent for her thirteen-year-old son, the first
time Byzantine rule had fallen to a Latin. Within a few months her fa-
29 Roderick Beaton, The Greek Romances, Cambridge Studies in Medieval

Literature 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 17; see especially
10-11, 15-18. For Elizabeth jeffreys, on the other hand, the lines of influence run
unilaterally in the opposite direction; see her "The Comnenian Background to the
Romans d'antiquite," Byzantion 50 (1980): 455-86, rpt. in E. J. and M. j. jeffreys,
Popular Literature in Late Byzantium (London: Variorum Reprints, 1983). She
argues for the Greek origin of the romans d'antiquite, suggesting that Eleanor of
Aquitaine, passing through Constantinople while accompanying her husband
Louis VII on the Second Crusade, was inspired by the example of the Byzantine
empress Bertha of Sulzbach-patron of the four extant Byzantine romances Ysmini
and Ysminias, Aristand,os and Kellithea, Drosilla and Chariklis, and Rodlinthi and
Dosiklis-to commission the Roman de T,oie, the Roman de Thebes, and the Roman
d'Eneas shortly after her return to the West.
30 The wedding, which took place in 1148, helped mark the reconciliation
between Constantinople and the German Crusaders following some skirmishes in
the Balkans (Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 2:285). For the limitations of
current scholarship on Byzantine attitudes towards Latin Christendom, see
Dorothy Abrahamse, "Byzantine Views of the West in the Early Crusade Period:
The Evidence of Hagiography," in Meeting of Two Worlds, 189-90. After examining
Greek saints' lives as an alternate source to official histories, Abrahamse concludes
that the West "remained on the periphery of this part of the Byzantine conscious-
ness" (195).
31 Nicetae Choniatae Historia 27-28, ed. jan-Louis Van Dieten, CFHB 11.1
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975), 301; cited in George T. Dennis, "Schism, Union, and
the Crusades" in Meeting of Two Worlds, 182. See also Kazhdan and Epstein,
Change in Byzantine Cultu,e in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, 169-70.
voritism, particularly towards the Italian merchant community of Con-

stantinople, set off anti-Latin violence culminating in the massacre of
1182. The following year Alexios was overthrown by his cousin Andro-
nicos, who executed Maria of Antioch and married the French child-
empress Agnes. Western, and especially Venetian outrage at these acts
contributed, two decades later, to the diversion of the Fourth Crusade
to the sack of the capital and the foundation of the Latin empire of
Constantinople.32
II
The chanson de geste is, among other things, the genre of feudal so-
ciety's encounter with Islam, whether in the high tragic mode of the
Roland or the mitigated comic mode of the Charroi de Nimes. The re-
ductive binarism underpinning all notions of alterity finds its starkest
and least problematic expression in the canonical text of the French
Middle Ages, La chanson de Roland, where Franks and Saracens face
off in an apocalyptic battle whose outcome is assured from the begin-
ning. For in this black and white world in which "Pagans are wrong
and Christians are right"-"paien unt tort e chrestlens unt dreit," as
Roland himself so unequivocally puts it-the only possibility for the
Saracens is death or conversion.33
Such conceptually reassuring stylizations had already been chal-
lenged by the Franks' conquest of Jerusalem and occupation of the
eastern Mediterranean. Accustomed only to their own relatively iso-
lated and parochial culture, "those who stayed," writes historian Josh-
ua Prawer,
had to face a task for which they were hardly prepared and which
they probably never envisaged. What followed, one imagines, was
a kind of identity crisis, even if the warriors of the First Crusade
were not necessarily given to contemplation or introspection. The
earlier Crusader kings were uncertain not only about the future
32 See Robert Mantran, "Byzance et I'Islam: Les changements" in L 'Eurasie:

Xle-Xllle siecles, ed. Georges Duby and Robert Mantran, Peuples et Civilisations 6
(Paris: PUF, 1982), 366-71.
33 La chanson de Roland, ed. Pierre Jonin (Paris: GaJJimard, 1979), line 1015;
my translation. Significantly, the song includes Constantinople among the many
European conquests Roland attributes to his sword Durendal (2329).
but even about the present. ... [A]lI notions brought over from
Europe were crumbling under the impact of a new reality.34
The complex relations between Latin Christendom and the Byzantine
empire posed an equally difficult epistemological challenge: represent-
ing the antagonism between the Franks and a Christian but non-west-
ern other, adjudicating the contradictions between the military superi-
ority of the former and the cultural hegemony of the latter. The task
of resolving these political and ideological ambiguities proved beyond
the capacity of the chanson de geste; or rather, it strained its generic
limits, producing the "parodic" epic, Le voyage de Charlemagne a jeru-
salem et a Constantinople.
In this curious text, a prequel to the Chanson de Roland, the Frank-
ish emperor's aggressive sense of inferiority towards his eastern coun-
terpart forces a confrontation in which western honor is eventually re-
deemed, but at the price of the deconstruction of the epic discourse
of alterity. Charlemagne and his twelve peers stake not their lives but
their honor in a contest between Frankish bravura and Byzantine tech-
nology. The poem opens with Charlemagne presiding over his own
coronation at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, celebrating his own majesty
and loudly demanding to know if anyone has ever seen a more splen-
did ruler. Expecting no response to this rhetorical question, he is as-
tonished when his own queen, in terms reminiscent of Stephen of
Blois's letter to his wife, suggests that the reputation of the Greek em-
peror in fact exceeds his own. Even her attempts to placate him
underscore the extent to which money, in Eugene Vance's words, now
rivals the sword as master-signifier:35
"Emperere, dist ele, ne vus en curucez!
Plus est riche d'aver e d'or e de deners,
Mais n' est mie si pruz ne si bon chevalers
Pur ferir en bataile ne pur ost encaucer!" 26-29
"Emperor," she said, "don't be angry! He's richer in possessions,
in gold, and in money than you, but is not at all as brave or as
good a knight when he strikes in battle or chases armies. ,,36
34 Joshua Prawer, "The Roots of Medieval Colonialism" in The Meeting of Two

Worlds, 24-25.
35 Eugene V anee, "S" emlotles an d P ower: Rehes,
. Icons, and the Voyage de
Charlemagne a jerusalem et a Constantinople," Romanic Review 79.1 (1988): 173.
36 Le voyage de Cha1'lemagne a jerusalem et a Constantinople 26-29, ed. Paul
Aebiseher (Geneva: Droz, 1965); trans. Vance.
Indignant, Charlemagne declares he will test the truth of the queen's

words; if she has lied, she will sacrifice her head. With epic resolve the
emperor summons his twelve peers and announces he will undertake
a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and, he adds as if in afterthought, go
to seek out a king he's heard of. The army of pilgrims, its baggage
train laden with gold and silver, takes the overland route to the East,
traversing Burgundy, Lorraine, Bavaria, Hungary, Laodicea, and
Greece before reaching Jerusalem. Once there, Charles and his peers
enter a church and, finding the seats of Christ and his twelve apostles,
sit down to rest, constituting a living tableau that inspires a credulous
Jew witnessing the scene immediately to convert. The emperor, re-
christened Charles Maines by the patriarch of Jerusalem, arms himself
with numerous relics and sets off to challenge his true rival, the em-
peror of Constantinople.37
Like Fulcher of Chartres and the knights of the First Crusade,
Charles and his men are overwhelmed by the magnificence of the city.
On nearing Constantinople they are struck by the curious sight of the
Greek emperor himself working the surrounding fields with a golden
plough. In Hugh the Strong, Charlemagne encounters a foreign king
who-unlike Baligant in the Chanson de Roland-cannot reassuringly be
understood as simply his pagan counterpart in a cosmic chess game of
good and evil. Similarly, the artistic splendors of the domed imperial
palace surpass anything the Franks might have imagined; most star-
tling of all are the artfully crafted statues of children flanking each of
the palace's one hundred pillars, mechanically rigged so the wind
makes them spin and laugh until they are indistinguishable from life
itself. Intimidated and aggressively defiant at this undeniable evidence
of Greek cultural hegemony, Charlemagne's peers pass the evening in
private, getting drunk and boasting one after the other of the extraor-
dinary physical feats they will perform to vindicate their superiority
over the Greeks. Several of the gabs emphasize the Franks' propensity
to destruction: knocking down every door in the city with a blast on
the Olifant, toppling the columns supporting the emperor's palace,
flooding the city by diverting a near-by river; most astonishing of all,
however, is Oliver's boast that, given the chance, he will "take" the
emperor's daughter 100 times in a single night.
37 The relics named in the text include several actually housed in the Abbey of
Saint Denis: the nails of the cross, Christ's crown of thorns, the arm of Saint
Simon and the blood of Saint Stephen. See Eugene Vance, "Semiotics and
Power," 177.
330 The Poetics oj Translatio in Cliges
The next day, the Franks are horrified to learn that their gabs have
been overheard by one of the emperor's spies and that they are now
being called on to make good their drunken boasts. Desperate to save
face, Charlemagne uses the relics he has brought from Jerusalem to
invoke the intervention of God and his saints. In a deus ex machina de-
nouement, an angel descends from the heavens and on God's behalf
sternly admonishes the emperor against the misuse of relics even as
he agrees (just this once) to bail out the hapless Franks. (The one ex-
ception is Olivier, who seduces the emperor's daughter into swearing
he has fulfilled his gab by promising she will be his sweetheart, though
in fact he has taken her "only" thirty. times and not the promised one
hundred.) Chastened but victorious, Charlemagne returns to Saint
Denis and, (in)secure in the knowledge of his proven superiority,
tersely pardons his queen "for love of the Sepulchre he has wor-
shipped" (870).38
The Voyage de Charlemagne il jerusalem et il Constantinople stages the
confrontation between Latin West and Byzantine East, Eugene Vance
suggests, as the encounter between two distinct and incommensurate
epistemologies, represented by the relic and the icon. The Franks
understand the world through the synechdochal logic of the relic, by
which one passes "from the apprehension of an abject fragment
marked with the violence of dismemberment ... to the vision of a
resplendent, resurrected whole. ,,39 Such is the underlying order of
the Roland, in which the relics embedded in the swords of Roland and
Charlemagne guarantee their filiation to God. In Constantinople, on
the other hand-which Alexandre Leupin describes as "the place par
excellence where Natura is submitted to the domination of the differ-
ent anes: statuary, architecture, painting"40-the Franks encounter a
different order of representation altogether: the icon, where art be-
comes a perfect simulacrum of life itself. Their triumph over the
Greeks is a Pyrrhic victory, won at the cost of the radical disjuncture
of signifier and signified that subverts epic discourse itself; the reassur-
ing literal-mindedness of the Roland had spent itself in the confronta-
tion with a manifestly superior other. As Alexandre Leupin writes:
38 For Vance, Charlemagne's pilgrimage and its aftermath indirectly reflects

the failure of the Second Crusade and Louis VII's divorce from Eleanor of
Aquitaine ("Semiotics and Power," 174n).
39 Ibid., 164-83.
40 Alexandre Leupin, "La compromission (sur Le voyage de Charlemagne a

Jerusalem et a Constantinople)," Romance Notes 23.3 (1985): 223, my translation.
In the Voyage, the epic dies, becoming-in the different forms it had
known over two centuries-impossible. Indeed, the Voyage corrodes all
the genre's modes, ensnaring them in an impossible critique.41
III
In contrast to Le voyage de Charlemap;ne, Cliges stages the problematic
encounter with the Byzantine other through the topos of translatio. In
his much-quoted prologue, Chretien de Troyes contextualizes his
romance in the history of the twinned topoi of translatio studii and
translatio imperii, rewriting the cultural contact of East and West as the
westward migration of both intellectual and political hegemony. As an
alternate ideological strategy to the (pseudo- )epic mode of the Voyage
de Charlemap;ne, the topoi of translatio represent the triumph of the
French over the Greeks not as the result of a direct, symbol-laden
confrontation or competition, but as a natural function of history:42
Ce nos ont nostre livre apris

Qu'an Grece ot de chevalerie
Le premier los et de clergie.
Puis vint chevalerie a Rome
Et de la clergie la some,
Qui or est an France venue.
Dex doint qu'ele i soit maintenue
Et que Ii leus li abelisse
Tant que ja mes de France n'isse
41 "La chanson de geste trouve sa mort dans Ie Voyage, devient, sous les formes
diverses qu'elle a connues pendant deux siecles, impossible. Le Voyage, en effet, cor-
rode toutes les modalites du genre, pour les prendre dans les rets d'une critique
imparable" (ibid., 228; my translation). Significantly, the triumph of art-techne-over
nature is one of the dominant themes in the learned Byzantine romance of the mid-
twelfth century. See Beaton, Medieval G1eekRomance, chapter 5.
42 For Jacques Le Goff, the notion of translatio itself assumes "a connection
between the sense of time and the sense of space, an innovation more revolution-
ary than is initiaIly apparent." The notion of history is reintroduced by Hugh of
Saint-Victor in his Didascalicon, in which historia is linked to narration, that is, to
organized sequences and continuities "whose interconnections have a meaning
which is precisely the object of historical inteIligibility"; Le Goff, "Merchant's
Time and Church's Time in the Middle Ages" in his Time, Work and Cultu're in the
Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980), 33-34.
L'enors qui s'i est arestee.

Dex I'avoit as altres prestee:
Car des Grezois ne des Romains
Ne dit an mes ne plus ne mains,
D'ax est la parole remese
Et estainte la vive brese. 28-42
Our books have taught us that chivalry and learning first flour-
ished in Greece; then to Rome came chivalry and the sum of
knowledge, which now has come to France. May God grant that
they be maintained here and may He be pleased enough with this
land that the glory now in France may never leave. God merely
lent it to others: no one speaks any more of the Greeks or Ro-
mans; their fame has grown silent and their glowing ember has
gone out.43 123
Modern commentators on the prologue, ever-alert to examples of Chre-

tien's own authorial self-consciousness, have tended to focus primarily on
his evocation of translatio studi~ the historical migration of clergie. Indeed
in the opening lines of the text, the narrator explicitly contextualizes his
project within the general twelfth-century revival of Latin letters by
establishing his literary credentials as a translator of Ovid:44
43 Alexandre Micha~s edition is cited by line number; trans. William W. Kibler,

Arthurian Romances (London: Penguin Books, 1991), cited by page number.
Together with the chronicles of Chretien's near-contemporary Otto of Freising,
the Cliges prologue has become a locus classicus of the topos, the most celebrated
example of which is the Aeneid's account of the transfer of empire from the
Hellenic world to Rome. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1953), 29, 384-85; and A. G. jongkees, "Translatio studii: Les avatars d'un theme
medieval" in Miscellanea mediaevalia in memoriam jan F,'ederik Nienneyer (Gronin-
gen: j. B. Wolters, 1967), 41-51.
44 Michelle Freeman reads Cliges as "a veritable demonstration of Chretien's
understanding of romance poetics/' emphasizing its intertextuality with both Ovid
and Tristan. See her article "Cliges" in The Romances of Ch,itien de Troyes: A
Symposium, ed. Douglas Kelly (Lexington: French Forum Publishers, 1985),
89-131. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski calls attention to the exemplary function
served by the Roman de Thebes and the Roman d'Eneas in Cliges; see "Chretien de
Troyes as a Reader of the Romans antiques," Philological Quarterly 64.3 (1985):
398-405. Roger Dragonetti, on the other hand, suggests the possibility that this
list of "lost" works may itself be a fictional gab, in La vie de la lettre au moyen age:
Le conte du G,'aal (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 19. For other perspectives on the reception
history of the prologue, see Faith Lyons, "Interpretations critiques au XXe siecle
du Prologue de Cliges: La translatio studii selon les historiens, les philosophes et les
philologues," Oeuvres et critiques 5.2 (1980-81): 39-44.
Cil qui fist d 'Erec et d'Enide,

Et les comandemanz d'Ovide
Et l'art d'amors an romans mist,
Et Ie mors de l'espaule fist,
Del roi Marc et d'Ysalt la blonde,
Et de la hupe et de I'aronde
Et del rossignol la muance,
Un novel conte rancomance. 1-8
He who wrote Erec et Enide, who translated Ovid's Commandments
and the Art of Love into French, who wrote The Shoulder Bite, and
about King Mark and Iseut the Blonde, and of the metamor-
phosis of the hoopoe, swallow, and nightingale, now begins a new
tale. 123 (modified)
Besides stirring generations of medievalists to wistful speculations on
his "lost" texts, this tantalizing bibliography, evoking both Ovid and
the Tristan legend in the same breath, underscores the double nature
of Chretien de Troyes's literary genealogy, rooted in both Celtic and
classical traditions-like the titular hero himself, the half-Greek prince
who is the only one of Chretien's heroes to belong to King Arthur's
line. In the prologue to Erec et Enide, he had already vaunted his mas-
tery over the matiere de Bretag;ne; now he vastly extends the scope of
his boast with the astounding claim that in letters as in politics,
France-due in no small part, we assume, to his own efforts-has de-
cisively surpassed the glory of both Greece and Rome.45
The ideological implications of this assertion of French hegemony
are enprmous. In insisting on the parallelism of translatio studii and
translatio imperi~ Chretien by a single gesture resolves the historical
asymmetry (so strikingly encoded in the Voyage de Charlemag;ne) be-
45 Contrast the medieval topos of modern dwarves perched on the shoulders

of ancient giants, in, e.g., Lee Patterson, "Virgil and the Historical Consciousness
of the Twelfth Century: The Roman d 'Eneas and Erec et Enide" Negotiating the Past:
The Historical Unde1"Standing of Medieval Lite1YJture (Madison: University of Wiscon-
sin Press, 1987), 184-85.
This passage furnishes the internal evidence on which the relative chronology of
Chretien's extant works has been constructed: since the narrator mentions only Erec
el Enide, the argument goes, that must have been his first romance, with Cliges the
second. The intertextual references in the Chevalier de Laeharrete and the Chevalier au
lion suggest their simultaneous composition; the Conte du Graa~ left unfinished pre-
sumably because of the death of the poet, is assigned fifth and final position. In sum,
Chretien's least-known romance has been important to literary history precisely be-
cause of its own self-consciousness of its place in literary history.
tween Frankish military might on the one hand and Greek cultural su-
periority on the other, establishing western dominance in both areas
as a function of the passage of time. Furthermore, this historical filia-
tion-from Greece to Rome to France-is overdetermined by the gene-
alogical mode in which Chretien casts his romance:
[Crestiens] un novel conte rancomance

D'un vaslet qui an Grece fu
Del linage Ie roi Artu.
Mes ainz que de lui rien vos die,
Orroiz de son pere la vie,
Dom iI fu, et de quel linage.
Tant fu preuz et de fier corage
Que por pris et por los conquerre
Ala de Grece an Engleterre,
Qui lors estoit Bretaigne dite.
Ceste estoire trovons escrite,
Que conter vos vuel et retraire,
En un des livres de I'aumaire
Mon seignor saint Pere a Biauvez;
De la fu Ii contes estrez
Qui tesmoingne I'estoire a voire:
Por ce fet ele mialz a croire. 8-24 (my italics)
Chretien now begins a new tale of a youth who, in Greece, was of

King Arthur's lineage. But before I tell you anything of him, you
will hear about the life of his father-where he was from and of
what lineage. He was so valiant and so bold of heart that, in or-
der to win fame and glory, he went from Greece to England,
which in those days was called Britain. This story that I wish to re-
late to you we find written down in one of the books in my lord
Saint Peter's library in Beauvais. The tale which attests to the truth
of this story was taken from there, therefore making it more
worthy of belief. 123 (modified)
The narrator's articulation of translatio studii and translatio imperi~ it turns

out, is indistinguishable from his dual concern with the provenance-the
paternity-of both the vernacular text and its titular protagonist.
What are we to make of Chretien's sudden and uncharacteristic in-
terest in origins, deferring the story of the son until he has devoted
well over a third of the romance to the story of the father, acquiescing
to the authority of the (presumably Latin) text from the library of
saint Pere? In none of the other romances save the Conte du Graal is
the father's tale taken as even remotely significant to the son's. If it
were, it would hint at a determinism antithetical to chivalric aventure
(in the etymological sense of a chance occurrence) and the rootless-
ness of youth.46 Furthermore, in his other prologues Chretien em-
phasizes not the authority of his sources but the added value of his
own artistic mastery. This appears most clearly in Erec et Enide, where
he credits himself with having composed the definitive version of ma-
terial countless others have treated before him. The two commis-
sioned romances present subtler, more interesting variations on the
same theme. In the Chevalier de la charrete he carefully distinguishes
between matiere el san provided (or, as he hints, imposed) by the coun-
tess of Champagne (26-29), while in the Conte du Graal he invites us
to attend to how he acquits himself of the book given him by Philip of
Flanders (66-68).47 In each case, however, the sense of his rebellion
against the constraints imposed by his patrons is palpable.
Both in his acknowledgement of his source and in his attention to
the adventures of Alexander, Chretien's apparent concern with pater-
nity in fact functions, like the topoi of translatio, to establish an ambiv-
alent filiation that concedes the importance of the old, all the better
to assert the superiority of the new. Consider, for example, the fact
that Saint Peter's of Beauvais, the library putatively housing Chretien's
source, burned in 1180.48 If we conjecture that Cliges was composed
after this event, then the destruction of the Latin text, surviving now only
as a vanished subtext, authorizes Chretien's work while in fact liberating
him from the tyranny of traditional authority altogether. Despite all
appearances to the contrary, the attribution of the story of the father to
a purported Latin antecedent confers on his vernacular text the legitima-
cy of a project of translatio studii, precisely the better to assert his tran-
46 In fact the Knight of the Cart-as opposed to Lancelot-and Knight of the

Lion-as opposed to Yvain, son of Urien-are precisely (as Stephen Greenblatt
might put it) the products of long processes of "self-fashioning."
47 Conte du Graal cited from Roach's edition; Chevalier de la char-rete, ed. Mario
Roques, CFMA 86 (Paris: Champion, 1975).

48 Though some external evidence points to the late 1170s as a likely moment
for the composition of Cliges, the burning of Saint Peter's alone would, to my
mind, suggest 1180 as the terminus a quo for the romance. The year 1180 is
significant for Franco-Byzantine relations as well: Louis VII dies in France, and
Manuel I Comnenus dies in Byzantium, bringing the accession of the latter's son
Alexios II and the former's daughter Agnes under the regency of the dowager
empress Maria of Antioch.
scendence of the very tradition that authorizes his activity. Similarly, the
Alexander episode-the story of the father-functions as an integral part
of Chretien's re-envisioning of relations between the Latin West and the
Byzantine East, recuperating the symbolic gap created by the epic's
inability convincingly to represent western Europe's confrontation with
the culturally other but nevertheless Christian empire.
N
What the prologue of Cliges articulates in theory, the Alexander sec-
tion illustrates in practice. Far from functioning merely as the pro-
logue to the tale of the titular protagonist, it narrativizes the topos of
translatio imperii, demonstrating in unambiguous terms the hegemony
of the Arthurian West over the Byzantine East. In the process, it sys-
tematically reverses the humiliations suffered by the Franks in the Voy-
age de Charlemag;ne d jerusalem et d Constantinople, recuperating the
chanson de geste's inadequate symbolic containment of the ambiguity of
Greek-Latin relations in the second half of the twelfth century by
removing any trace of ambivalence or parody from the narrative proof
of western superiority. The most overt enactment of the topos of
translatio imperii is young Alexander's chivalric pilgrimage from
Constantinople to King Arthur's court. Charlemagne's journey east
with his twelve peers had constituted an implicit acknowledgement of
the Greek emperor's superior charisma; this time the Greek emperor's
son and namesake Alexander insists on making a pilgrimage to the
west, since France is now the undisputed center of chivalric splen-
dor.49 The significance of this gesture does not escape Arthur who,
for the only time in Chretien's five romances, inquires at length after
the young man's identity: "Dom estes vos? .. Qui est tes peres? ..
[CJomant as non?" (360-63). Upon learning he is Emperor Alexan-
der's son, the king warmly responds:
[M]olt m'avez grant enor feite,

Quant venuz estes a rna cort.
Molt vuel que l'en vos i enort
Com franc vaslet et sage et dolz.
49 Thus Chretien pointedly inverts the tr~ectory not only of the Voyage de
Charlemagne, but of the Roman d'Alexandn! (itself "translated" from Greek to Latin
to vernacular French) in which the titular hero ventures east in search of glory.
Trop avez este a genolz:

Relevez sus, jel vos comant;
Et soiez des ore en avant
De rna cort et de mes privez,
Qu'a boen port estes arivez. 370-78
You have paid me great honor in coming to my court. I wish you
to be honored here as free, wise, and noble young men. You have
been on your knees too long: arise, I command you, and hence-
forth be of my court and household. You have reached a safe har-
bor. 127 (modified)
The capital that the Greek prince brings from East to West is not,
however, merely symbolic; here, as in all the Crusader accounts of Con-
stantinople, it is above all Byzantine wealth that exerts fascination. In the
Middle Ages, the name "Alexander" was synonymous with feudal lar-
gesse, and Cliges's father fully lives up to his role as the perfect represen-
tative of a spendthrift economy. Generosity, in fact, is as central to his
definition of the ethos of aristocratic youth as is chivalric adventure:
Ne s'acordent pas bien ansanble

Repos et los, si com moi sanble,
Car de nule rien ne s'alose
Riches hom qui toz jorz repose,
Ensi sont contraire et divers.
Et cil est a son avoir sers
Qui toz jorz l'amasse et acroist. 155-61
Idleness and glory do not go well together, it seems to me; a

noble man who sits and waits gains nothing; thus they are con-
trary and opposed. He who spends all his time amassing wealth is
a slave to it. 229 (modified)
Before leaving Constantinople, Alexander not only willingly accepts

the money proffered by his father the emperor (in contrast to Erec,
who pointedly refuses the riches urged on him by his father, King Lac,
as he sets out into the forest with Enide), he actually resorts to a rash
boon to procure additional gold and silver. Once in the west, with his
unprecedented largesse and apparently inexhaustible wealth, he single-
handedly redresses the asymmetry of twelfth-century Mediterranean
trade, symbolically reversing the one-way flow of western specie in ex-
change for the luxury goods of the East. Significantly, however, de-
spite Alexander's unparalleled riches, his lavish generosity to his Brit-
338 The Poetics ofTranslatio in Cliges
ish hosts in no way undermines the authority or charisma of King

Arthur. In the Voyage de Charlemagne, the queen had triggered the
Frankish emperor's journey to the East by suggesting that (Greek)
wealth had supplanted (western) military prowess as the criterion of
majesty; Emperor Alexander had implied something similar in remind-
ing his son that generosity, the queen of all virtues, confers prodomerie
where birth, courtesy, wisdom, gentillesce, wealth, power, chivalry,
prowess, lordship or beauty alone do not (197-203). Once in Britain,
however, though the young Alexander freely distributes valuable
Greek steeds to everyone around him ("it done a toz chevax de pris /
que de sa terre ot amenez," 410-11), only the horses, clothing and ar-
mor King Arthur bestows on him and his twelve companions as part
of their initiation into knighthood are treated as gifts of any symbolic
significance; for the Byzantine prince, all the fabulous riches of the
East have become less important than his apprenticeship as an Arthur-
ian knight.
The main work of the Alexander sequence, however, consists of the
reassertion of (western) military might as the foundation of both feu-
dal authority and symbolic power. In light of this ideological agenda,
it becomes much easier to understand not merely the Alexander epi-
sode's function, but its strong attachment to the chanson de geste. The
Voyage de Charlemagne, as we have seen, succeeded in vindicating the
Franks' superiority over the Greeks only at the cost of the viability of
epic discourse itself. Chretien's rewriting of the feudal imagina-
tion-while cast, through the theme of translatio, in the mode of ro-
mance-begins by recuperating this loss by resurrecting the possibility
of epic, this time with Arthur supplanting Charlemagne as epic king
par excellence.
Indeed the Arthur Chretien depicts in Cliges differs substantially
from the do-nothing ceremonial king of the other four romances, and
the main dilemma of the Alexander section consists not in chivalric
adventures of the lone questing knight but in the drama of feudal war-
fare, corresponding to both contemporary politics and the French
epic .cycle of the Rebellious Barons. Soon after Alexander's arrival in
England, Arthur announces his intention of crossing the Channel to
visit his Continental holdings (an allusion, perhaps, to Henry II's logis-
tical difficulties in governing the far-flung Angevin empire). On the
advice of his assembled barons, Arthur appoints one of their number
to serve as regent during his absence: the count of Windsor, whose
name, Angres, already hints at the Greek-like treachery to come.50

And indeed at the end of the summer, word reaches the king of his
deputy's treason. Reacting swiftly and decisively, Arthur immediately
calls his barons to account, blaming them for having elected a felon
"worse than Ganelon" (1. 1068), the prototypical epic traitor (and, not
coincidentally, the name of one of the four felonious barons in the
Tristan as well), then musters a great army to besiege the stronghold
of the rebel vassal in a campaign in which Alexander plays a promi-
nent part. In pressing the son of the Byzantine emperor into service
in Arthur's war of revenge, Cliges neatly inverts the hierarchy that had
so enflamed Greek-Latin tensions in the eastern Mediterranean; where
Alexios I and his successors insisted that the Crusaders acknowledge
imperial overlordship, here the Greek emperor's son and heir not
only willingly accepts his role as defender of the Arthurian monarchy,
but considers it an honor to do so. During the campaign, Alexander
wins chivalric glory and a place in the king's household by placing the
legendary Greek propensity to deception in the service of the siege:
donning enemy armor to fool the castle's defenders, the prince and
his companions penetrate the fortress and capture the renegade An-
gres.51 In the end the traitorous count is executed, young Alexander
is rewarded with a golden cup and the hand of Gauvain's sister Sore-
damors, and Arthur restores the credibility of monarchy, reviving a vi-
sion of military kingship blurred by both his own jaineantise in Erec et
Enide and Charlemagne's abjection in Le voyage a jerusalem et a Con-
stantinople.
The Alexander episode does more, however, than simply confirm
Arthur's monarchical authority. In fact, it enhances the power of his
personal rule, liberating him from the feudal constraints limiting the
power of medieval kings, both historical and legendary. From the first,
Arthur exploits the news of Angres's treason to curb the power of his
council of barons. Derived from forms of government in which the
king was little more than primus inter pares, this medieval body institu-
50 Cf. the near-homophonous expression "an Grece" (or "en Grece"), which
appears in Cliges at lines 9, 29, 2351, etc.
51 The ruse of donning enenlY armor had been employed by the Turks against
the Franks at the Battle of Harran in 1104, the military defeat that halted the First
Crusaders' eastward advance. See Ibn al-Athir's account in Maalouf, Crusades
through Arab Eyes, 70-71 and Gabrieli, Anlb Hist017.ans, 20. Cf. the epic hero
William of Orange, who disguises himself as a Christian merchant to penetrate the
city in the Chan'oi de Nimes, and as a Saracen ambassador in the Prise d'O,ange.
tionalized the feudal obligation of consilium, the "advice" that vassals

"owed" their lords and that the lords, in turn, were obliged to follow.
In other twelfth-century vernacular texts, whether epic or romance,
the council's consultative function seems in fact to limit royal au-
thority, forcing the king to act contrary to his will or better judgment.
Thus in the Chanson de Roland, once the barons assent to the nom-
ination of his beloved nephew to the dangerous post of leader of the
rearguard, even Charlemagne seems powerless to reject their "coun-
sel." In an example directly relevant to the second part of Cliges, it is
on the advice of his vassals that Tristan's King Mark is persuaded to
take a wife in violation of his previous vow never to marry. 52 But
despite the tragic or near-tragic consequences of these cases of ill-
considered advice-the death of Roland, the cuckolding of the king-
never do Charlemagne or Mark ever question the legitimacy of their
vassals' counsel. Arthur, on the other hand, upon learning of Angres's
treason, reacts swiftly and unequivocally, convoking his assembly of
barons in order to berate them:
Lors dit que Ii blasmes est lor

De son tribol et de sa guerre,
Car par aus bailla il sa terre
Et mist an la main au felon
Qui pires est de Guenelon.
N'i a un seul qui bien n' otroit
Que Ii rois a reison et droit,
Car ce Ii conseillierent il. 1064-71
He said they were to blame for his worries and strife since it was
at their counsel that he had entrusted his land to the hands of the
renegade, who was worse than Ganelon. To a man they granted
that the king was entirely right, for they had indeed given him
that advice. 136 (modified)
Thrown on the defensive, the barons not only accept full responsibility
but, scrambling to compensate for their bad advice, emphatically swear-
"aseiirent et afient formant et jurent"-that if the traitor is not caught,
52 This episode can be found in T1ist1'ams saga, the 1226 Old Norse translation
of the T1istan of Thomas; see T1istan et Iseut: Les poemes .fi"G,rlfais, la saga norroise,
ed. and trans. Daniel Lacroix and Philippe Walter (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1989),
497 and 560-61. Cf. Marie de France's lai Le F"esne, in which Gurun, a simple
baron, is obliged by his vassals to put aside his concubine in order to take a
legitimate wife, lest their interests be compromised.
they will forfeit their fiefs-'~a mes terre ne tandront" (1077-80).

Having wrung this vow of self-.abasement from his vassals, Arthur then
succeeds in representing his war of feudal revenge as a battle to help
guarantee bourgeois interests. In the opening stages of his campaign, the
king learns that the rebel count, in full retreat before the advancing royal
army, has plundered the city of London, distributing gold, silver, and
provisions among his followers in the manner of a feudal warlord. Finding
the city's inhabitants "impoverished, disinherited, and miserable" (1220-
21), Arthur masterfully represents his desire for feudal vengeance as
synonymous with his solicitude for his urban subjects: "the king responded
that he would accept no ransom for the traitor, but would hang him if he
could take or capture him" (1222-25). With this strategic display of epic
outrage, Arthur thus constructs a political alliance consonant with received
notions of late feudal society: on one side, linked by mutual self-.interest,
monarchy and the nascent bourgeoisie; on the other, an increasingly
archaic feudal aristocracy-here literally "under siege."53 Where the Ar-
thur of Erec et Enide had been content to remain a kind of magister ludi,
the Arthur of Cliges purges the monarchy of its feudal limitations, equip-
ping it with the power and flexibility required to decisively end the inter-
nal threat posed by the rebellious vassal.
v
Cliges transcends the Chanson de Roland and the Voyage de Charlemag;ne
not just politically but discursively as well. Rather than returning to the
formulaic language and paratactic logic of epic, the Alexander episode
instead assimilates two new and apparently contradictory discourses:
a historical "realism," implying a certain referential transparency, and
a self-conscious reflection on the potential ambiguity of all signs. In
this section and the next, I will show how the striking polyphony of
the text is mobilized in Arthur's confrontations both with the internal
threat of the rebellious vassal and with the external threat posed by
his symbolic competition with the Byzantine East.
From the beginning Cliges forsakes the phantasmagoric terrain typical
of the Arthurian romance-Broceliande Forest, the land of Gorre, the
53 For Erich Kohler, it is precisely to this situation that the medieval French
romance responds, providing ideological vindication for a warrior class whose
social function was increasingly in doubt; see his L 'aventure chevaleresque: Ideal et
realiU dans Ie roman cou1tois, trans. Eliane Kaufholz (Paris: Gallimard, 1974).
gasteforest soutaine-in favor of some of the most historically important

sites in twelfth-century Europe: Constantinople (whose overdetermined
place in the medieval imagination we have already noted), London,
Winchester, Windsor, Regensburg, and Cologne. Though by and large
they remain simple names in the text, their specificity not only contrib-
utes to the text's reality effect, but often bears significant symbolic
weight as well.54 Similarly, time in Cliges is no longer punctuated by
the eternal recurrence of the Christian-Arthurian festival (Easter, Pente-
cost and so forth), or measured in the folk-increments of epic ("Carles
Ii reis, nostre emperere magnes / set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Es-
paigne ... "). Instead, a new specificity and pragmatism appear-Alex-
ander's sea voyage from Constantinople to Southampton, for example,
takes "all April and part of May" (266-67), while his return from Shore-
ham to Athens takes "less than a month" (2406 )-suggesting a temporal
realism consonant with what Jacques Le Goff describes as the emerging
conception of "merchant time. ,,55 Even the day is represented with
new exactitude: Alexander docks at Southampton "between nones and
vespers" and, setting out early the next morning, arrives at the court at
Winchester "before the hour of prime" (270, 298).
The most striking use of historical "realism" in the Alexander epi-
sode, however, occurs in scenes concerning matters of warfare, which
are governed by a pragmatic appreciation of the cycle of the seasons
and the precariousness of "meteorological time." Count Angres's for-
tification of Windsor castle, Chretien informs us, consumes "all June,
July, and August," while news of his betrayal travels "from London
and Canterbury, via Dover," finally reaching Arthur in Brittany only
at "the end of summer, the beginning of October" (1044-48). This
54 The English sites, for example, are all closely associated with the monarchy
of Henry II. Winchester, where King Stephen had officially acknowledged him
heir to the crown in 1153, had been the center of the realm of Henry I, the
grandfather whose royal prerogatives the grandson worked so systematically-and
self-consciously-to recover. The agreement of 1153 contained provisions for the
control of certain "key castles," including several that also figure in Cliges: the
Tower of London, Windsor, Oxford, Winchester, and Southampton. See W. L.
Warren, Henry II, 14-15, 28.
55 In the twelfth century, Le Goff explains, "the traditional framework of
Christian thought on time was seriously shaken"; this was primarily the result of
the medieval commercial revolution, as the logistics of transport-the "duration of
a sea voyage or of a journey by land from one place to another"-affected the rise
and fall of prices and "the duration of the labor of craftsmen and workers ...
became the object of ever more explicit regulation" ("Merchant's Time and
Church's Time," 34-35).
new. ge~graphical and temporal specificity is equalled, moreover, by a

fascInatIon for technical description that-in contrast to the highly rhe-
torical and metaphorical language of the love monologues-further en-
hances the romance's reality effect. The narrator spares no detail, for
example, in recounting Angres's fortification of Windsor Castle.56
A ce jor, comant qu'il soit ores,

Qui Ie chastel volsist desfandre,
Ne fust mie legiers a prandre,
Car Ii traitres Ie ferma,
Des que Ia traison soucha,
De dobles murs et de fossez,
Et s'avoit les murs adossez
De pex aguz et de darciere,
Qu'il ne cheissent par derriere.
Au fermer avoit mis grant coust.
Tot juing, et juingnet, et aoust
Mist au feire Ie roilleiz,
Et fossez, et pont torneiz,
Tranchiees, et baTres, et lices,
Et portes de fer coleices,
Et grant tor de pierre quarree. 1228-43
Whatever may be the case now, in those days the castle was not
easy to capture as long as it was garrisoned, for the traitor had
enclosed it with double walls and moats as soon as he had plotted
the treason, and had so shored up the walls from behind with
heavy logs that no catapult could knock them down. Throughout
June, July and August he had spared no cost in constructing
walls, stockades, moats, drawbridges, trenches, barriers, lists, iron
portcullises, and a mighty tower of dressed stone.
138 (modified)
Fortunately for the king, this new pragmatic exactitude works in his fa-
vor as well: by the time he reaches Windsor, drought has made the
56 Originally constructed by William the Conqueror, Windsor Castle was in

fact rebuilt in stone between 1165 and 1171. Along with Winchester and D<r
ver-both also named in Cliges-it was among the castles that Henry II spent at
least 1000 to fortify. See Trevor Rowley and Michael Cyprien, A Traveller's Guide
to Nonnan Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 119-20 and Warren,
HenlY II, 234.
Thames low enough for his army to ford, creating optimum condi-
tions for a successful offensive siege.
The "realism" expressed in the narrator's new interest in geographical,
temporal, and logistical exactitude, however, is also accompanied by a
growing consciousness on the part of the characters themselves of the
unreliability of signs. Where in the Chanson de Roland and indeed in Erec
et Enide the word is inseparable from deed and language from truth-
"parole que rois a dite ne doit pois estre contredite," as Arthur himself
puts it in inaugurating the Custom of the White Stag-Cliges's association
with the Tristan legend on the one hand and traditional stereotypes of
Greek duplicity on the other overdetermine its obsessive interest in the
power of ambiguity and deception. In the final section of this paper, we
will examine the poetics and politics of indeterminacy in the Alexander
episode as a function of the generic hyblidity of romance.
VI
The romance, writes R. Howard Bloch, is a "privileged locus of
'contamination' ... of geographic zones, of social classes, of economic
orders, and, finally, of literary genres"; specifically, he sees the ro-
mance as a mixed form resulting from the combination of the dis-
courses of the epic chanson de geste and the lyric canso. 57 In the Alex-
ander episode of Cliges, the hybridization that Bloch characterizes as
constitutive of the genre is particularly striking: while Arthur appropri-
ates the lex talionis justice of the epic to enhance his own feudal rule,
Guenevere encourages the language of courtly love, encoded in the
lengthy Ovidian monologues that the young lovers, Alexander and
Soredamors, delivel- in the midst of Arthur's military siege. In this
gendered division of genres, this provocative juxtaposition of epic war-
fare and rhetorical love casuistry, the one common element turns out
to be the increasing opacity of the signifier.
As in the Tristan, it is love that first opens the gap between signifier
and signified, producing both the need for interpretation and the dan-
57Blo~h, Etymol~gies ~nd Genea~ogies: A Literary Anthropology of the F,'emh Middle

Ages ~ChIcago: UnIVe~sIty of ChIcago Press, 1983), 175, 177; see chapter 5,
espeCIally 175- Y9, CUrIously, the example he invokes is, like the Voyage de Charle-
magne, a generIc anomaly: the "chantefable" A ucassin et Nicolette where the love
of the titular protagonists mediates and neutralizes differences ~ot only of race
and religion, but of class and gender as well,
ger of misinterpretation. Soon after his arrival at the Arthurian court,

the Byzantine prince falls violently in love with the king's niece Sore-
damors and she with him. As in the Tristan, it is the sea, that oneiric
(non-) place outside the structures of feudal society, that proves the
first agent of deception. When Guenevere first notices how pale both
Alexander and Soredamors are during the channel crossing, she im-
mediately assumes they are seasick, a logical interpretation given that
the prince and his companions had exhibited the same symptoms dur-
ing their voyage from Constantinople to England. But no: "Ia mers
... la deceiist j ... l'angingne et de~oit" (540-41), for the two young
people are not seasick at all, but lovesick. Insecurity, however, pre-
vents either of them from imagining that his or her passion is recipro-
cated. Unschooled in the semiotics of love and lacking a conventional
language in which to test the responses of the other, each privately en-
dures the agony of unrequited love.
Under the watchful eye of the queen, epic logic gives way to Ovid-
ian paradox; deliciously savoring the torment of conjuring the object
of desire in the mind's eye, the lovers "translate" their ardor into long
rhetorical monologues on the nature of passion: how can she continue
to desire, Soredamors asks herself, that which brings her pain and
madness? how could Love have wounded his heart, Alexander won-
ders, while leaving his eyes intact? Transfiguring Soredamors into a
beautiful arrow in his mind's eye, he solemnly asserts that not for the
city of Antioch would he trade its nock and feathers (791-92): a signif-
icant statement to place in the mouth of a Byzantine prince-the exi-
gencies of the rhyme "floichej Antioiche" notwithstanding-given the
twelfth-century history of conflict between the counts of Antioch and
the Greek emperor.
What function is served by this preciosity, beyond displacing the
Virgilian subtext subtending the project of translatio imperii with an
Ovidian one? Ostensibly, the monologues provide a context in which
the workings of love might be investigated totally apart from the polit-
ical, economic, and social interests governing medieval society. How
does one fall in love? How can such torment be so sweet? In fact, Cli-
ges contains-in both senses of the term-Chretien's speculation on the
nature of love. First, the lovers' casuistry demonstrates how much pas-
sion depends on deferment. To be narratable, love must face obstruc-
tion. As Bakhtin writes in his description of the Hellenistic romance,
"rnarriage cannot take place straightaway ... [since the lovers] are con-
fronted with obstacles that retard and delay their union. "58 In trou-
badour lyric as in most romances, lovers sing because they are kept
apart by physical distance-jaufre Rudel's amor de lonh-or social con-
59
straints. But the impression of excess attached to the lovers' tor-
tured musings results precisely from the fact that Alexander and Sore-
damors are perfectly suited for one another, he the son of the Greek
emperor, she the niece of King Arthur, each unmarried and helplessly
in love with the other. Nowhere else in Chretien's five romances do
passion and political expediency so exactly coincide. It is manifestly
the monologues themselves that threaten to defer that union indefi-
nitely: only their mutual timidity-and their common propensity to am-
plijicatio-defer their inevitable marriage. This brings us to the second
point. What Cliges ultimately demonstrates is that passion may be safely
represented only where it perfectly reinforces the social order: the always
already circumscribed love of the ideally matched couple versus the
illicit, disruptive passion of the adulterous Tristan and Iseut.
Given the superfluity of the lovers' tortured reflections, the balance
of the Alexander episode reads like an almost parodic enactment of
Bloch's characterization of the generic hybridity of romance. Most of
the time the disjuncture between the discourses of passion and war re-
mains absolute, the lovers' precious and extended monologues abrupt-
lyjuxtaposed with the graphic physical detail of the battlefield. Alexan-
der's first fight, for example, recalls not the ritualized single combat
typical of romance but the epic slaughter of the Roland:
Assez i ot testes colpees,

Mes Alixandre en ot Ie pris,
Car par son cors 11ezet pris
An mainne quatre chevaliers;
Et Ii mort gisent estraiers,
Qu'asez i ot des decolez,
Des plaiez et des afolez. 1330-36
Many were decapitated, but Alexander won the prize by alone
bringing back four knights captured and bound. And the dead lay
58 M. M. Bakhtin. "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," The

Di.alogical Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and
MIchael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),87.
59 In comparis~n, Chretien's other protagonists are separated by class differ-
ence (Erec and Enlde), by the threat of blood feud (Yvain and Laudine) and by
the illegality of adulterous love (Lancelot and Guenevere). '
upon the sands, for many had been beheaded, and many more
were wounded and crippled. 139
Again, Alexander appears governed by an epic paradigm: when his

companion Macedor is killed during their assault on Windsor Castle,
the prince throws himself on his friend's assassin with a fury worthy of
an Achilles. The entire text, in fact, momentarily shifts into epic
mode, describing the killer, Angres, in terms reminiscent of the black-
and-white world of the Chanson de Roland:60
[D]e grant force estoit Ii cuens
Et chevaliers hardiz et buens,
Que el siegle meillor n' eiist,
Se fel et traltres ne fust. 1887-90
The count was strong, and a bold and mighty knight: had he not
been a wicked traitor, there would have been no finer knight in
the world. 146
Occasionally the generic distinction is partially deconstructed, erased
through a process of metaphorizat.on, as in this characteristically rhe-
torical conflation of love and war:
Del roi Artus parler ne quier
A ceste foiz plus longuemant,
Ein~ois m' orroiz dire comant
Amors les deus amanz travaille
Vers cui il a prise bataille. 562-66
At this time I do not wish to speak any further of King Arthur;
instead, you'll hear me tell how Love attacked the two lovers
against whom he was waging battle. 130
Yet the fundamental discursive incompatibility between the Iiteral-
mindedness of epic and the rhetorical excess of the monologues is
both foregrounded and scrupulously ignored, mediated only by the
Greek prince himself. In this gendered division of genres, Alexander
is clearly aligned with love, romance, and the queen. Immediately
after his first battle, for example, he rushes off to Guenevere's pavil-
ion to engage in courtly banter with the queen and her ladies with not
a second thought to the grisly slaughter behind him. In fact he spends
60 Cf. the Emir of Balaguer in La chanson de Roland (898-899): "De vasselage

est il ben alosez; / Fust chrestiens, asez oust barnet."
every evening by Soredamors's side, falling into paroxysms of ecstasy

on learning that a strand of her golden hair is woven into the shirt
Guenevere has given him. "Love easily makes the wise man a fool,"
editorializes Chretien, "when he so rejoices over one strand of hair"
(1621-22).61
The contradiction between the two discourses structuring the Wind-
sor episode threatens to erupt in direct conflict only once, in the bat-
tlefield argument of the king and queen over the fate of the four rebel
knights captured by Alexander. A far cry from the ceremonial ruler of
Erec et Enide, obsessed with the Custom of the White Stag, here Ar-
thur is the intransigent epic king determined to exact vengeance from
the rebels.62 Guenevere, on the other hand, advocates the ways of
chivalric romance; even in the midst of a battlefield strewn with decap-
itated corpses, she blithely insists on treating the prisoners like losers
in a courtly tournament, automatically granting mercy for the asking.
In this gendered generic dispute, Alexander is both literally and figur-
atively in the queen's camp, privileging the forms of courtesy over the
business of war:
Alixandres par corteisie

Sa premiere chevalerie
Done et presante la relne;
Ne vialt qu'autres en ait seisine,
Car tost les felst li rois pandre:
La relne les a fez prandre,
Et ses fist garder an prison
Come restez de tralson.
[Par l'ost parolent des Grezois
Et dient que molt est cortois
Alixandres et bien apris
Des chevaliers que i1 a pris
61 Thus Chretien casts an ironic light both on King Mark's devotion to the
unknown owner of the blond strand of hair brought from Ireland and on Lance-
lot's ecstatic trance upon finding a few strands of Guenevere's hair caught in her
golden comb. The fact that the close companionship of Alexander and Guenevere
excites not the slightest anxiety about the queen's honor betrays the extent to
which all passion in the Windsor sequence has been domesticated in advance;
later Guenevere will even preach the importance of conjugal love!
62 Unlike even pagans who, like Queen Bramimunde in the Chanson de Roland,
enjoy the option of conversion, the traitors, having already once arbitrarily
changed allegiances, are not given a second chance.
Des qu'il nes a al roi randus

Car il les eiist tos pandus. ]
Mes Ii rois ne s'an geue pas;
A la reine eneslepas
Mande que a lui parler veigne,
Ne ses traitors ne deteigne:
Car a randre Ii covandra
Ou oltre son gre les tandra. 1337-50
Out of courtesy Alexander offered and presented his first chevale-
rie to the queen; he did not want the king to claim them, for he
would have had them hanged at once. The queen had them taken
and guarded as closely as if they had already been charged with
treason. [Through the camp everyone was talking about the
Greeks, saying that Alexander was courteous and wise in not hav-
ing turned over the captive knights to the king, for he would have
had them hanged.] But the king was not amused; he immediately
gave orders that the queen come to speak with him and not keep
in custody those who had betrayed him; if she did not turn them
over to him, she would be holding them against his wishes. The
queen came before the king; they discussed the traitors with one
another, as was proper.63 189 (modified)
Staged as a struggle for power between husband and wife, king and
queen, the generic conflict literally embodied by the prisoners of war
is ultimately resolved hors texte, in favor of the ethos of epic. When
Guenevere responds to Arthur's summons, narrative focus remains on
the young lovers and on Soredamors's extended internal debate on
whether she dares call Alexander "ami." Just as she works up her re-
solve to speak, the queen returns, chastened:
"Amis, fet ele, il me requiert

Que je Ii rande a sa devise,
Si I'an les feire sa justise.
De c'est Ii rois molt correciez
Que je ne Ii ai ja bailliez,
Si m 'estuet que jes Ii anvoi,
Qu'il les veaust avoir devers soi." 1406-12
63 The six Jines in brackets are absent from B.N. 794 (on which Micha's edition
is based) and are added from B.N. 1450; see Cliges, ed. Micha, 210.
"Friend," she said, "he has asked me to hand them over at his
discretion and allow him to punish them. He's very angry that I
have not surrendered them already; I see no other choice than to
send them to him." 140 (modified)
The resolution of the crisis is, then, two-fold. First, even as Guenevere re-
ports her own capitulation, her casual way of addressing Alexander as
"friend" exposes the idleness of Soredamors's minutely detailed med-
itation a moment before. Second, epic vengeance seems to have won
complete victory over chivalric courtesy. Alexander's handsome gesture
of presenting his premiere chevalerie to the queen is ruled out of court. All
that is left to decide is whether the rebels should be flayed, hanged, or
burned; final judgment rests with the king, who unilaterally sentences
them to be drawn-the same fate, in other words, to which Charlemagne
condemns Ganelon, the quintessential traitor of epic.
In the meantime, however, once the monologism of epic discourse has
been broken, the innocent young lovers quietly become increasingly
adept at concealment and deception. As distracted as they are by their
passions, both Alexander and Soredamors carefully regulate appearanc-
es: "Estuet chascun que il de~oive par faus sanblant totes les genz"
(604-5). Ironically it is Guenevere, the adulterous queen of Le chevalier
de La charrete, who invents the possibility of conjugal love by bringing
Alexander and Soredamors together; after having first mistaken signs of
love for symptoms of seasickness, she on second try correctly diagnoses
the couple's mutual passion and does what she can to advance their
courtship. Still, ever-vigilant to protect their secret-if only from the
lovers themselves!-she, too, automatically resorts to Jaus semblant:
Bien apar~oit et voir Ii sanble

Par les muances des colors
Que ce sont accident d'amors;
Mes ne lor an vialt feire angoisse,
Ne fet sanblant qu'ele conoisse
Rien nule de quanqu'ele voit.
Bien fist ce que ele devoit,
Que chiere ne sanblant n'an fist. 1578-85
She clearly noticed, and it seemed to her true, that these changes
of color were the effects of love. However, not wishing to cause
them any embarrassment, she gave no indication of having no-
ticed any of what she had seen. She behaved exactly as was prop-
er, giving no sign or indication. 142 (modified)
This propensity to deception, however, is not confined to the covert

space of secret passion but quickly makes itself felt in the public sphere
of feudal wanare as well.Just as the "realism" of the romance had been
put to work in the service of epic revenge, so too the unreliability of
signs is recuperated as military stratagem. Significantly, it is the Greeks
who from the beginning are aware of the tactical advantages to be
gained from exploiting the arbitrary nature of the signifier. Wanting to
distinguish himself in his first military campaign, Alexander persuades
his companions to infiltrate Windsor castle by disguising themselves in
enemy armor: "Chanjons, fet ii, noz conuissances" (1815). The quick
success of this strategy demonstrates how conceptually unprepared the
castle's defenders are for such semiotic maneuvers, allowing the Greeks
to penetrate Angres's lovingly constructed fortification without so much
as a challenge. Once inside, the prince and his companions defeat the
count's men in hand-ta-hand combat, eventually taking the traitor him-
self captive. The problem, however, is that the ruse works nearly too
well: allied forces outside the castle are no more prepared for Alexan-
der's deception than are the rebels within. When some of Arthur's men
come upon corpses clad in the very armor that the Greek guerrillas have
shed, they naturally assume that it is the prince and his companions who
have been killed:
Si feisoient un duel si fort
POl' lor seignor li Greu a tort;
POl' son escu qu'iI reconoissent
trestuit de duel feire s'angoissent. 2041-44
The Greeks greatly mourned their lord, mistakenly; because they
64
recognized his shield, all were in anguish and mourning.
Soon Arthur's entire court is plunged into mourning; in a remarkable

passage unparalleled in Chretien's texts, each individual launches into
a passionate epic lament that reveals lineage, not lordship or love, to
be the fundamental bond constitutive of feudal society:
Chascuns pleignoit Ie suen enui,

Qui Ii est pesanz et amere.
La plore Ii filz SOl'Ie pere,
Plore Ii peres SOl'Ie fil;
SOl' son cosin se pasme cil,
&1 My Iranslatioll.
Et cil au tres sor son neveu;

Einsi pleignent an chascun leu
Peres, et freres, et paranz. 2100-2107
Each one gave vent to his own loss, which was heavy and bitter:
here the son wept for his father, while there the father bewailed
his son; this man swooned over his cousin, while that one fainted
for his nephew. Thus fathers, brothers, and relatives moaned on
all sides. 148
Equally intense but in an entirely different register is the reaction of

Soredamors, who now must work to conceal the extent of her grief as
she had previously concealed her love. When later in the romance
false report of Alexander's death reaches the court at Constantinople,
the news has serious consequences: his younger brother Alis assumes
the imperial throne in his stead. This time, however, the prince's time-
ly reappearance with the rebel count as his captive puts a happy end-
ing on what might have been a tragic misinterpretation. If the Frank-
ish gabs in the Voyage de Charlemag;ne may be read as a failed attempt
to beat the Greeks at their own verbal game, Alexander succeeds in
his first military campaign precisely by appropriating the Greek
propensity for deception to serve Arthurian ends.
Despite the juxtaposition of so many different discourses whose in-
commensurability seemed to threaten to tear the episode apart, by the
conclusion of the Windsor campaign all are reintegrated in the mar-
riage of Alexander and Soredamors, a symbolic resolution that equally
serves the interests of king and queen on the one hand, epic and ro-
mance on the other,. completing the westward trajectory of translatio
in the process. Even as the Byzantine prince reemerges to a conquer-
ing hero's welcome, the text reaffirms the viability of a feudal semiot-
ics, reestablishing the perfect commensurability between signifiers and
signifieds and reinscribing the excesses of Ovidian love within a feu-
dal-epic paradigm. The traitor Angres is summarily executed; the king,
in a characteristically magnificent but reckless gesture of largesse,
offers Alexander anything he might want short of the crown and the
queen (2185). But the prince, whose thoughts have already turned
from war and revenge back to love, wants only one thing: the hand of
Arthur's niece Soredamors. The love that had begun as an intense
private passion is thus consummated in a way entirely consonant with
the interests of feudal society. Once again, the queen plays the role of
intermediary; but one need only compare the public nature of her
interventions with the furtiveness ofThessala's-her structural counter-
part in the second half of the romance-to grasp the wholly non-
subversive quality of their love.65 Even Soredamors's consent to the
proposed marriage is phrased not in the Ovidian language of passion
but in the feudal language of obedience, addressed not to Alexander
but to the queen:
Le voloir de son cuer ancuse,

Et par parole, et par sanblant,
Car a lui s'otroie an tranblant,
Si que ja n'an metra defors
Ne volante, ne cuer, ne cors,
Que tote ne soit anterine
A la volante la reine,
Et trestot son pleisir n'an face. 2294-2301
Through her words and her expression she betrayed the desire in
her heart, for she gave herself to him trembling, saying that her
will, her heart, and her body were wholly the queen's to com-
mand, and that she would do whatever she wished.66 151
The dialogism between love and war is resolved in favor of the public
discourse of the epic; in the end, Soredamors's hand in marriage is
one of three clear tokens of Alexander's full acceptance in the Arthur-
ian community, along with a golden cup commemorating his heroics
in battle and the "best kingdom in Wales" as an Arthurian fiefdom.
For Olivier's shameless seduction of the nameless Byzantine princess
is substituted the legitimate union of Arthur's own niece to the son
and heir of the emperor of Constantinople. Once the marriage is de-
cided, the text wastes no time on superfluous detail, economically nar-
rating in a fraction of the space allotted the lovers' monologues not
only the wedding ceremony but Alexander's investiture and Sore-
damors's pregnancy. The episode concludes with the birth of the titu-
lar protagonist Cliges, the Greek-Arthurian prince who will combine
the martial prowess of his maternal lineage with a Byzantine talent for
deception and duplicity.
65 As in E1'ee et Enide, where she offers advice on choosing the most beautiful
lady at court, the queen remains a pure intermediary, in contrast to her narrative
function in Marie de France's Lai de LanvaL (where she insists on being named the
fairest woman at court), or Chretien's ChevaLier de La eharrete (where she becomes
the general object of desire).
66 Contrast Fenice, heroine of the main plot of the romance, whose body
belongs (or should belong) to Alis even while her hea1t belongs to Cliges.
In the remainder of the text, the dislocation of Arthurian history

from the oneiric landscape of the western forest to the artifice of the
Byzantine court seems to authorize the quest for symbolic resolutions
to problems too volatile for Chretien's other romances. These prob-
lems are, on the one hand, poetic: the amorous adventures of Cliges
and Fenice once again thematize the troubling slippage between sign
and referent, putting it to work in the narrative as the legendary
Greek propensity for duplicity and deception. On the other hand,
they are unmistakably historical as well: monarchical legitimacy, fratri-
cidal war, disputed successions. The result is the vindication of the
moral and cultural supremacy of the Arthurian West, as the Byzantine
East is transformed through the poetics of translatio into the reposito-
ry for all the contradictions of feudal society: a compensatory symbol-
ic gesture, perhaps, symptomatic of the confused hostility that in 1204
would erupt in the Fourth Crusaders' conquest and devastation of the
Christian city that had so overwhelmed them a little over a century be-
fore.
Oakes College
University of California, Santa Cruz

The Poetics of Translatio

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The Poetics of Translatio

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the poetics of Cranslatio:

~rench- Byzantine Relations

Oh what a noble and beautiful city is Constantinople! How many mon-

1 Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition To jerusalem 1095-1127, 1.9,

splendid in the Mediterranean world. Those Crusaders forced to re-

3 Jacques Le Goff, "The Framework of Time and Space" in Medieval Civiliza-

sembled to launch a new assault on Muslim Syria instead directed

The five romances of Chretien de Troyes-Erec et Enide, Cliges, Le

6 Cited by jacques Bernard in "Trade and Finance in the Middle Ages,

exception is Cliges, often taken as the least typical of Chretien's ro-

Nur ed-din-a reference to the mid-twelfth<entury ruler of Aleppo whose consoli-

In this paper, I want to recontextualize Cliges by examInIng the

11 Chretien de Troyes, Cliges, ed. Alexandre Micha, CFMA 84 (Paris: Champi-

revenge against a rebellious vassal, his courtship of and marriage to

13 The Latin concept of Christendom drew heavily from Augustine of Hippo's

First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095.15 But when the

]5 Pope Urban lifted the ban of excommunication on the Greek emperor in

cultural as well as political. Though the defeat of Manzikert had sub-

battle to force the count of Antioch, Raymond of Poitiers, to acknowledge himself

Constantinople is arrogant in her wealth, treacherous in her prac-

20 Odo of Deuil, De p1'ofeetioneLudoviei VII in orientem: The Journey of Louis VII

Whether in its degradation or in its splendor, the Greek capital continues to

Would that it had been done as sincerely as it was gracefully! If

ing the death of Manuel I. "Byzantine awareness of western achieve-

29 Roderick Beaton, The Greek Romances, Cambridge Studies in Medieval

voritism, particularly towards the Italian merchant community of Con-

32 See Robert Mantran, "Byzance et I'Islam: Les changements" in L 'Eurasie:

34 Joshua Prawer, "The Roots of Medieval Colonialism" in The Meeting of Two

Indignant, Charlemagne declares he will test the truth of the queen's

38 For Vance, Charlemagne's pilgrimage and its aftermath indirectly reflects

40 Alexandre Leupin, "La compromission (sur Le voyage de Charlemagne a

Ce nos ont nostre livre apris

L'enors qui s'i est arestee.

Modern commentators on the prologue, ever-alert to examples of Chre-

43 Alexandre Micha~s edition is cited by line number; trans. William W. Kibler,

Cil qui fist d 'Erec et d'Enide,

45 Contrast the medieval topos of modern dwarves perched on the shoulders

[Crestiens] un novel conte rancomance

Chretien now begins a new tale of a youth who, in Greece, was of

The narrator's articulation of translatio studii and translatio imperi~ it turns

46 In fact the Knight of the Cart-as opposed to Lancelot-and Knight of the

Roques, CFMA 86 (Paris: Champion, 1975).

[M]olt m'avez grant enor feite,

Trop avez este a genolz:

Ne s'acordent pas bien ansanble

Idleness and glory do not go well together, it seems to me; a

Before leaving Constantinople, Alexander not only willingly accepts

ish hosts in no way undermines the authority or charisma of King

name, Angres, already hints at the Greek-like treachery to come.50

tionalized the feudal obligation of consilium, the "advice" that vassals

Lors dit que Ii blasmes est lor

they will forfeit their fiefs-'~a mes terre ne tandront" (1077-80).

gasteforest soutaine-in favor of some of the most historically important

new. ge~graphical and temporal specificity is equalled, moreover, by a

A ce jor, comant qu'il soit ores,

56 Originally constructed by William the Conqueror, Windsor Castle was in

57Blo~h, Etymol~gies ~nd Genea~ogies: A Literary Anthropology of the F,'emh Middle

ger of misinterpretation. Soon after his arrival at the Arthurian court,

Assez i ot testes colpees,

58 M. M. Bakhtin. "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," The

Again, Alexander appears governed by an epic paradigm: when his

60 Cf. the Emir of Balaguer in La chanson de Roland (898-899): "De vasselage

every evening by Soredamors's side, falling into paroxysms of ecstasy

Alixandres par corteisie