THE CAMBRIDGE

HISTORY OF
FRENCH LITERATURE
*

Edited by
WILLIAM BURGWINKLE, NICHOLAS HAMMOND,
and
EMMA WILSON

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The Cambridge history of French literature / edited by William Burgwinkle,
Nicholas Hammond, Emma Wilson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-89786-0 (hardback)
1. French literature – History and criticism. I. Burgwinkle, William E., 1951–
II. Hammond, Nicholas, 1963– III. Wilson, Emma.
pq103.c26 2011
840.9 – dc22 2010051863

isbn 978-0-521-89786-0 Hardback

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 15
History and fiction: the narrativity and
historiography of the matter of Troy
marilynn desmond

If Aristotle classified history as a branch of literature, it was the vernacular

French cultures of the late Middle Ages that most fully develop what Hayden
White calls the ‘narrativity’ of historical discourse. In his De vulgari eloquentia
(c. 1305), Dante refers to the supple and pleasing features of French prose as the
qualities that make the langue d’oı̈l the most appropriate language for the com-
pilations of history (Book 1, chapter 10). From its emergence in the eleventh
century, the literary tradition of Old French is dominated by narrative genres.
When vernacular chronicles begin to appear in the twelfth century, they draw
on this highly developed narrative tradition. As the lingua franca that enabled
some form of linguistic and cultural exchange for a broad swathe of Western
Europe from Norman England to the Frankish settlements of the Latin East, as
well as francophone courts from Angevin Naples to Bohemia, French was the
vernacular language in which the historia of Western Europe could be written.
Since the narrative imperatives of historia require that a temporal awareness of
the past be represented through emplotment, the historiographical traditions
of medieval French rely on the narrative and rhetorical conventions of literary
traditions. Nothing better illustrates this dynamic interplay between history
and fiction – or historiography and narrativity – than the matter of Troy.
The plot of history requires an origin, and the medieval West located
its origins in the city of Troy in Asia Minor. Juxtaposed to the story of
Genesis from the Hebrew Bible, the narratives surrounding the Trojan War
provided an originary myth that allowed for the conflation of sacred and pagan
time. According to ancient legend, the Greek conquest of Troy precipitated
the migration of Trojan heroes who settled in the West and became the
progenitors of the people of Western Christendom. This legend derives from
a geopolitical paradigm centred on the Mediterranean basin whereby the East
was superseded by the West. In the seventh century ce, Fredegarius claimed
Trojan ancestry for the Franks in the first book of his Chronicle; from that point
on, Western European chroniclers routinely celebrate the Trojan ancestry of

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noble and royal figures by opening their narratives with a description of the
fall of Troy and an account of the Trojan diaspora. Such a programmatic use
of the Troy story in chronicles testifies to its status as a historical event in
medieval textual cultures.
Until the twelfth century, texts that treated historical events – annals or
chronicles such as the Gesta gentis Francorum (1120–31) – appear exclusively
in Latin. The Crusades, a predominantly Frankish enterprise undertaken in
the name of Western Christendom, stimulated the production of vernacular
chronicles, initially in verse in the twelfth century, followed by prose in
the thirteenth. Verse chronicles were also composed to articulate noble and
royal lineage: the tradition of the Grandes Chroniques de France illustrates the
trajectory of historical discourse – even in monastic houses – from Latin to
vernacular. Produced at the abbey of Saint- Denis, the Grandes Chroniques were
composed in Latin prose until the thirteenth century as a narrative record of
the Capetian dynasty. In 1274, however, Hugh (Primas) of Orléans translated
these Latin records into French in order to compile a vernacular history of
the monarchy up until the reign of Philip II Augustus (1179–1223). In following
his Latin sources, Primas locates the origin of the Capetian line with the fall
of Troy and the Trojan diaspora. In his prologue he asserts: ‘Certaine chose
est donques que li roi de France, par les quex li roiaumes est glorieus et
renommez, descendirent de la noble lignie de Troie.’ (‘Thus it is a certainty
that the king of France, through whom the realm is glorious and renowned,
descended from the noble lineage of Troy.’)1 The first chapter of Primas’s
Grandes Chroniques briefly narrates the rape of Helen, the siege and fall of
Troy and the consequent westward migration of the Trojan heroes. Primat’s
chronicle initiated a tradition of vernacular history that was continuously
produced at Saint-Denis until the late fifteenth century, thereby assuring the
historicity of the Troy story in vernacular narratives.
Medieval French literary traditions are likewise shaped by the historio-
graphical possibilities of the Troy story. While early genres such as hagiog-
raphy or the chanson de geste implicitly evoke the truth claims of history as
a means of performing contemporary ideologies and identities, the emer-
gence of the romans antiques in the twelfth century depended on a historical
vision inherited from ancient Roman constructs that subsumed classical leg-
ends drawn from the Troy story into a paradigm of universal history. Virgil’s
Aeneid, for instance, enabled a medieval appropriation of classical legend as

1 Les Grandes Chroniques de France, vol. i, ed. Jules Viard (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de France,
1920), p. 4.

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 History and fiction: the matter of Troy

history in the earliest verse romances: the anonymous Roman de Enéas (c. 1155)
and Roman de Thèbes (1150–5), as well as Benoı̂t de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de
Troie (c. 1165). Although the generic classification of these texts as romances in
modern scholarship would suggest that they do not lay claim to any histori-
cal foundation, the narratives of the romans antiques authorise themselves by
reference to ancient history. Benoı̂t sets up an elaborate framework for the
process of translatio studii that argues for the authenticity of his account of the
Troy story; he further argues that the veracity of the Troy story is important:
‘En maint sen avra l’om retrait, / Saveir com Troie fu perie, / Mais la verté est
poi oı̈e.’ (‘One often hears recounted how Troy perished, but the truth is diffi-
cult to hear.’)2 Benoı̂t establishes his poetic authority by identifying his source
as the Latin text of Dares, a fifth-century prose account of the destruction
of Troy, which circulated widely in the medieval West in place of Homer’s
Iliad, for which there was no complete Latin translation. Benoı̂t reiterates in
detail the fictional credentials of Dares as they were outlined in the prologue
to the Latin text: that Homer lived more than a hundred years after the siege
of Troy and consequently wrote a fictional account of the destruction of that
city. Dares’ account, by contrast, presents itself as an eyewitness record, since
the Latin text purports to be a translation of a Greek account supposedly
written by a Trojan who lived through the war and preserved an eyewitness
account of it. Benoı̂t fleshes out his source slightly to emphasise the materi-
ality of Dares’ book, supposedly found in Athens and translated from Greek
into Latin by Cornelius Nepos, whom Benoı̂t designates as the nephew of
Sallust. Benoı̂t argues for the truth of Dares’ account as an accurate record
of the truth of the Trojan War. In his emphasis on his own faithful word-for-
word translation of Dares, Benoı̂t claims that his Roman de Troie provides the
vernacular reader with a historically accurate account of the fall of Troy.
The Roman de Troie was produced in the court of Henry II (1133–89), the
Norman/Angevin king whose patronage of vernacular clerks was intended
to support his claim to the re-conquered throne of England. The significance
of the Troy matter for the Angevin/Plantagenet ideology is evident in the
Roman de Brut by Wace (c. 1100–74), a text composed in 1155 and dedicated, like
the Roman de Troie, to Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. An adaptation of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1135), the Roman de Brut is
a verse chronicle that narrates the legendary past of the Britons. In translating
Geoffrey’s brief account of the Trojan diaspora from the introduction of the

2 Benoı̂t de Sainte-Maure, Le Roman de Troie, ed. Léopold Constans (Paris: Société des anciens
textes français, 1904), lines 42–4.

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Historia regum Britanniae, Wace greatly expands Geoffrey’s narrative to relate

the travels of Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas, up until his arrival in Britain,
where he founds a city he calls New Troy, which, Wace explains, came to
be called London. The Roman de Brut appears to have prompted Henry II to
commission Wace to compose another vernacular chronicle on the history
of the Normans, the Roman de Rou (1160–74). When Wace failed to complete
the chronicle, Henry turned to Benoı̂t with the same commission. Benoı̂t’s
Chronique des ducs de Normandie (c. 1180), composed in the same octosyllabic
metre as the Roman de Troie, establishes Trojan descent for the Normans
through their Danish heritage by positing Antenor as the founder of the
Danish race. Benoı̂t’s historical vision uses the Trojan past to recuperate the
Danes despite the well-known atrocities of their earlier campaigns in England.
Through his Danish heritage, the Norman king Henry II could appeal to a
Trojan ancestry as a counterclaim to the Trojan heritage represented by
Brutus in the Roman de Rou. While the modern scholar might seek to make
generic distinctions between the Roman de Troie and the Chronique des ducs de
Normandie in order to classify one as fiction and the other as history, the texts
themselves allow no such distinctions. Like Wace’s Roman de Brut and Roman
de Rou, Benoı̂t’s two texts share the same discourse of historical authenticity
suggested by their historiographical rhetoric.
The story of the Trojan diaspora was fluid enough to enable the Capetians,
the Britons, and the Normans to identify their respective Trojan ancestors,
and thereby appeal to the authority of history in support of their competing
dynasties.3 But the Trojan past could also be used to buttress aristocratic
claims to autonomy in the face of encroaching monarchical power, as the
production of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César illustrates. In the first few
decades of the thirteenth century, Roger IV, castellan of Lille, commissioned
this extensive compilation of universal history, the first such text to appear in
the vernacular rather than Latin. The Histoire ancienne follows a chronology
that incorporates Genesis and biblical history, and the history of Assyria,
Greece, Thebes, the Amazons, the fall of Troy, and the founding of Rome by
Aeneas. The narrative includes the story of Alexander the Great and the early
history of Rome before it abruptly breaks off. As Gabrielle Spiegel has shown,
this text functions as a statement of aristocratic resistance to the consolidation
of royal power by Philip II Augustus (1165–1223).4 Like the Faits des Romains

3 Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 226–44.
4 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-
Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 107–18.

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(1213–14), a contemporary vernacular compendium of Roman history drawn

from Sallust, Caesar, Suetonius and Lucan, the Histoire ancienne was composed
in prose. The choice of prose emphasised the historical veracity claimed for
these narratives, since by the thirteenth century verse narrative had become
associated with fiction and prose with historical truth. The ancient legends
gathered together in the Histoire ancienne all derive from the Mediterranean
basin; in that spatial and temporal context, the fall of Troy marks a pivotal
moment since it precipitates the founding of Rome, and by extension Western
Christendom. In the context of universal history as constructed in medieval
cultures, the Trojan diaspora not only unites East and West but simultaneously
links the pagan past to the medieval Christian present. For the aristocracy of
Flanders, the initial patrons of the Histoire ancienne, the narrative of the Trojan
diaspora allowed them to locate for themselves a place in history.
Over the next three centuries the Histoire ancienne was copied and exten-
sively revised throughout the francophone West, most noticeably in the
colonial outposts of the Latin East as well as the Angevin court in fourteenth-
century Naples. The Angevin dynasty, which had gained dominion in south-
ern Italy in the thirteenth century, was a branch of the Valois dynasty. In the
1330s, Robert of Anjou, who ruled the kingdom of Naples from 1309 to 1343,
commissioned a new redaction of the Histoire ancienne; this version omits the
segment on Genesis and begins its historical narrative with Thebes. The most
significant alteration in the second redaction is the expansive narrative of the
Troy story; in the first redaction, this is a brief French translation of Dares’s
account of the fall of Troy. The first redaction consequently deploys the Troy
story only for the sake of the Trojan diaspora in order to choreograph the
Trojan genealogy leading up to the settlement of Flanders. By contrast, the
second redaction, the Angevin/Neapolitan version of the Histoire ancienne,
greatly expands the Troy segment of the text by adding a lengthy prose ren-
dition of Benoı̂t de Saint-Maure’s Roman de Troie. Benoı̂t’s twelfth-century
verse narrative had extensively developed the plot of events related to siege
warfare, such as the twenty-three battles that took place outside the walls of
Troy; such a detailed heroic plot becomes the basis for a prose history of the
fall of Troy in the Histoire ancienne. The importation of the Roman de Troie
results in a historical paradigm that emphasises the story of the destruction of
Troy rather than the Trojan diaspora. The Troy story is more than a vehicle
for articulating the Trojan foundations of European history. Since the narra-
tive possibilities of siege warfare are vast, the story from Benoı̂t’s text offers
a compelling and dramatic plot, one dense with heroes and battles in place
of the schematic description of destruction and defeat represented by the first

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redaction of the Histoire ancienne. The conventions of romance narrative have

become the plot of historical narrative.
Throughout the medieval period, the Troy matter enjoyed considerable
currency as a historical event that could be put to a variety of literary, political
or ideological uses, all of which depend on a cultural acceptance of the
historicity of the Trojan War as well as the Trojan diaspora. Perhaps the
most vivid example of the rhetorical applications of the Troy story is found in
Robert de Clari’s account of the Fourth Crusade, the Conquête de Constantinople
(1207). Towards the end of this prose narrative, Robert de Clari reports that
one of the crusaders, Pierre of Bracheux, was questioned about the purpose
of their expedition by Jehans li Blaks, the leader of the Vlachs: ‘“De n’avés
vous”, fisent il, “teres en vos paı̈s dont vous vous puissiés warir?”’ (‘“Have
you not got”, they said, “lands in your country from which you can support
yourself?”’)5 Given the problematics of accounting for the goals and intentions
that led to the conquest of Constantinople by the crusaders and their Venetian
allies, this question could be taken programmatically (see Guynn, Chapter 11).
Pierre responds by asking if Jehans has heard the story of how the great
city of Troy was destroyed; when Jehans replies that they do indeed know
the ancient tale, Pierre explains: ‘Troies fu a nos anchiseurs. [E]t chil qui
en escaperent si s’en vinrent manoir la dont nous sommes venu. [E]t pour
che que fu a nos anchisieurs, sommes nous chi venu conquerre tere.’ (‘Troy
belonged to our ancestors. And the ones who escaped from it came to stay
where we are now. And because it belonged to our ancestors, we have come
here to conquer the land’ [pp. 124–5]). In conflating Troy and Constantinople,
this fanciful anecdote illustrates the figurality of Troy as a city that might
represent a contemporary city in the eastern Mediterranean such as Jerusalem
or Constantinople. The rhetorical shape of Robert of Clari’s Conquête treats
the legend of Troy as a well-known historical fact. With this anecdote, Robert
of Clari manages to collapse the past and the present in order to claim a truth
value for his own account of the Fourth Crusade. The conventional quality of
the ideology suggested by this rhetorical set piece on the fall of Troy and the
Trojan diaspora demonstrates how well the fictions of Trojan origin served
the historiographical imperatives of Old French narratives.

5 Text and translation from Robert of Clari, La Conquête de Constantinople, ed. Peter Noble
(Edinburgh: Société Rencesvals British Branch, 2005), pp. 124–5.

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