Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 1–18, 1999

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Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

David A. Warner

Division of Liberal Arts

, Rhode Island School of Design, 2 College Street, Providence, RI 02903, USA

Abstract

This article examines one of the most controversial aspects of Otto III’s reign, his plan to create

a revived Roman Empire with the city of Rome as its centre. More than sixty years ago the largely
literary, visual, and symbolic evidence for this Renovatio imperii Romanorum was assembled and
examined by P.E. Schramm. His pioneering study then became the basis for virtually all subse-
quent work on the subject. Recent literature has brought the literature, character and perhaps the
existence of Otto’s Renovatio strongly into question though without proposing any convincing
alternative or, so it is argued here, surmounting the basic assumptions upon which Schramm’s
interpretation was founded. Specifically, it is argued that Schramm’s assumptions regarding the
preeminence of the monarch and of the German part of Empire continue to influence more recent
literature and that, as in Schramm’s various studies, there is still a tendency to neglect the issues of
stage and audience. The present study reexamines the subject of Renovatio in light of these
objections, and suggests new ways to view both the evidence and the as yet current methodology.

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Keywords

: Otto III; Renovatio; Germany; Rome; P.E. Schramm; Ottonians

He was ‘the father of monks and mother of bishops, son of humility and mercy, pure

servant of religion and faith, rich in good will, but poor in virtue at his life’s end; he was
generous in worldly things, without respect to person, but conquered the sins of his
youthful flesh through the love of heaven; scorning his homeland, he became the
sweetest glory of golden Rome; a hated corpse because of God’s brief anger at him and

DAVID A. WARNER is Associate Professor of History at the Rhode Island School of Design. His previous

publications have appeared in Viator

, Early Medieval Europe and elsewhere. He is currently preparing an

annotated translation of the chronicle of Thietman of Merseburg for Manchester University Press.

*Tel.: 1 1-401-454-6264; E-mail: dwarner@risd.edu

The present study represents a much revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the

Medieval Academy of America (Kansas City, 12 April, 1996). It is based on research chiefly carried out at
the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, to whose librarian and staff I am deeply grateful.

After the first citation, literature will be cited by the author’s last name, short title, volume, and page. Primary

sources will usually be cited by the author’s name (or title if anonymous) and an appropriate subdivision of
the work, usually book and chapter. Royal diplomata will be cited by the first initial of the ruler’s name (e.g.
O III for Otto III), followed by the document’s number in the standard edition of the M[onumenta]
G[ermanica] H[istorica].

David A. Warner

yet long mourned by mortals’. It was in such seemingly contradictory terms that Brun
of Querfurt summed up the career of the Emperor Otto III (994–1002), a figure both
admired and disparaged by his contemporaries, and one of the must controversial rulers
of the medieval German Reich. Modern scholars have found Otto equally perplexing. He
has been characterized as ‘one of the most admirable figures in the history of the Middle
Ages’, a ruler whose death was ‘a catastrophe for all Christendom’, but also as a ‘naive

imperial youth preyed upon by crafty Lombards’. There have even been attempts to

psychoanalyze him. But however ambiguous in some respects, there can be little doubt
that the most intriguing aspect of Otto’s career was his ill-fated attempt to create a
revived Roman empire with the city of Rome as its centre, a plan embodied in the phrase
Renovatio imperii Romanorum.

It is with Otto III and his Renovatio that the following study is chiefly concerned.

Inevitably, it is also concerned with the intellectual legacy of Percy Ernst Schramm

(1894–1970) and his monograph, Kaiser

, Rom und Renovatio (published in 1929). In

spite of a veritable flood of recent scholarship relating to Otto III, the influence of
Schramm’s monograph remains so profound that one can scarcely consider the subject
of Renovatio without confronting it on one level or another. After all, it was Schramm
who first assembled the now standard pool of evidence, established principles for
analyzing it, and convinced the scholarly community to treat it seriously. To the extent
that it has hitherto focused on the reinterpretation of this evidence, it would be fair to say
that the current debate regarding the significance of Renovatio is still being framed
within parameters established by Schramm more than sixty years ago. Among those
parameters, one should also include several of the fundamental, though unstated
assumptions upon which Schramm based his study. I refer specifically to his point of
view, based securely on the German side of the Alps and fixed on the king and court. In
spite of their importance for Schramm’s interpretation (as well as for more recent ones)
these assumptions have yet to receive the critical attention they deserve. Without making
any claims to completeness, the present study examines Otto’s Renovatio in the light of
its effect on Italy, and from the perspective of the warriors and churchmen most directly

Brun of Querfurt, [Vita quinque fratrum eremitarum, ed. J. Karwasinska.] Monumenta Poloniae Historica. n.s.

4.3. (Warsaw, 1969), 27–84, at c. 7., 47–48.

G. Ladner, ‘The Holy Roman Empire of the Tenth Century and East Central Europe’, The Polish Review, 5

(1960), 3–14; cited from the reprinted edition in Ladner, Images and Ideas in the Middle Ages

: Selected

Studies in History and Art, 2 vols. Storia e letteratura raccolta di Studi e Testi, 1561 (Rome, 1983), vol. 2,
457–70, at 462; A. Ollivier, Otton III empereur de l

’an mille (Lausanne, 1969), 411; F. Schneider, Rom und

Romgedanke im Mittelalter

. Die geistigen Grundlagen der Renaissance (Munich, 1926), 198.

´ ´

E-R. Labande, ‘Mirabilia mundi. Essai sur la personnalite d’Otton III’, Cahiers de Civilisation Medievale, 6

(1963), 297–313, and 455–76, at e.g. 299–303.

Kaiser

, Rom und Renovatio. Studien zur Geschichte des romischen Erneuerungsgedankens vom Ende des

karolingischen Reiches bis zum Investiturstreit, 2 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929). Henceforth, Schramm’s
text will cited as KRR with appropriate volume and page number. Originally published in two volumes, the
second volume of KRR comprised shorter studies and editions, most of which were revised for inclusion in

the collection, Kaiser Konige und Papste

. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, 4 vols.

(Stuttgart, 1968–1971). The first volume of KRR, including the real heart of Schramm’s analysis, is more
familiar through a reprint published by the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (Darmstadt, 1984).

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

affected by it. Equally in need of attention are the general issues of stage and audience
which were largely ignored in Kaiser

, Rom und Renovatio, as in most of Schramm’s

studies. Indeed, some of the chief witnesses to a conscious Ottonian Rompolitik are only
compelling if one has already assumed that such a Politik existed and, moreover, tacitly
agreed to follow Schramm in attributing to them an exclusively symbolic testimony. By
examining two particularly noteworthy witnesses (Otto’s palace in Rome and an
imperial diploma, D O III 285), the present study will suggest the value of a more
pragmatic approach. Overall, we might argue that, in addition to considering the content
of Otto III’s Rompolitik, any attempt to exceed the parameters established by Schramm
must, with greater precision, define both the context in which the supporting evidence
was transmitted and the audience to whom it was expected to appeal. Before proceeding
to these themes, however, it will be useful to outline briefly Schramm’s basic argument
and place it within an appropriate historiographical context.

The general outlines of Schramm’s career are, if not common knowledge, at least

relatively familiar to scholars concerned with medieval Germany. As the subject of a
chapter in a recent publication by Norman Cantor, he has even gained a degree of

undeserved notoriety. There is no need to review this material here. Similarly, we need
merely recall that it was Schramm’s singular accomplishment, as one recent treatment
has put it, ‘to grant the testimony of signs, symbols, and images, correctly analyzed, an

equal standing to other sources of information’. In Kaiser

, Rom und Renovatio, the first

major work in which he employed this methodology, Schramm essentially argued that
Otto III had constructed the policies of his government around an ideal vision of
‘Golden Rome’ which was specifically secular, political, and universal. What was
Renovatio? Although neither Otto III nor any of his contemporaries explicitly defined it,
Schramm argued that its outlines could be discerned in a variety of seemingly
heterogeneous witnesses, including acts of state, new forms of intitulature, and the
literary works of imperial favourites such as Leo of Vercelli and Gerbert of Reims. The
truly remarkable feature of Schramm’s work, however, was the degree to which it
incorporated arguments based on his reading of images and symbolic objects, an

approach owing much to the traditions of the Warburg school.

From this viewpoint, the

famous portrait from the Reichenau Gospels, in which Rome and various nationes
appear to offer Otto their homage, could be interpreted as an official statement of the

J.M. Bak, ‘Coronation Studies – Past, Present, and Future’, in: Coronations

: Medieval and Early Modern

Monarchic Ritual, ed. J.M. Bak (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford, 1990), 1–15; at 8.

See, most recently, J. Bak, ‘Percy Ernst Schramm (1894–1970)’, in: Medieval Scholarship

: Biographical

Studies of the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 1, eds. H. Damico and J.B. Zavadil (New York and London,
1995), 247–62.

N. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages

: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth

Century (New York, 1991), 79–117. For a critical response to Cantor’s characterization of Schramm as a
Nazi see, Bak, ‘Percy Ernst Schramm’, in: Medieval Scholarship, 249.

J. Bak, ‘Medieval Symbology of the State: Percy E. Schramm’s Contribution’, Viator, 4 (1973), 33–63, at 35.

On the methodology espoused by Aby Warburg and his circle see, for example, C. Ginzburg, ‘From Aby

Warburg to E.H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method’, in: Clues

, Myths, and the Historical Method, trs. J. and

A. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1992), 17–59.

David A. Warner

new order among the Empire’s component parts.

An ivory bucket (the so-called

Aachen Situla) depicting Pope Sylvester II and Otto III presiding over ranks of warriors
and churchmen became a visual commentary on the new relationship between Empire

and papacy.

Whatever their format, and regardless of the context or circumstances in

which they were produced, all such images and objects were to be associated with a
unified programme which found one of its clearest expressions, appropriately enough, in

a lead seal bearing the phrase Renovatio imperii Romanorum.

Of course, the notion that medieval politics can best be understood by examining its

symbols and images has long since entered the scholarly mainstream, and Kaiser

, Rom

und Renovatio has itself acquired the venerable aura of a classic work. To appreciate its
innovative character, one should recall that many of Schramm’s predecessors and
contemporaries had dismissed Otto’s Rompolitik as so much antiquarian nonsense or a
charming example of youthful romanticism. Such sentiments were shared, for example,
by both Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821–1891) and his archrival, Alfred von Reumont
(1808–1887), the latter going so far as to suggest that Otto had ‘abandoned the bedrock

of reality to pursue daydreams’.

Otto had also attracted the ire of German nationalists,

such as Wilhelm von Giesebrecht (1814–1889), who viewed the politics of nineteenth-

century nation states as a not always positive outgrowth of their medieval past.

In the

face of such attitudes, Schramm’s interpretation prevailed so thoroughly that, as a recent
study notes, there was a time when it would have been unnecessary to do anything more

than cite Schramm when referring to Otto III’s Rompolitik.

Those days have long since

passed, however. More recent literature has, for example, undermined both Schramm’s

insistence on an essentially secular Renovatio and his almost exclusive focus on ideas.
Equally apparent is a tendency to de-emphasize the more extraordinary aspects of Otto
III’s historical persona (and of Renovatio) in what we might refer to as a process of
‘normalization’. Even Otto’s purported desire to trade his crown for a monastic habit
now seems to place him closer to the norm for tenth-century kings rather than distancing

CLM 4453 f.23v–24r. KRR, 118–19.

KRR, 133.

KRR, 118.

F. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter vom V

. bis zum XVI. Jahrhundert, 2 vols., ed. F.

Schillman (Dresden, 1926), vol. 1, 824.; A. von Reumont, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, 3 vols. in 4. (Berlin,
1867–1870), vol. 2. p. 313. The debate between Gregorovius – Protestant, liberal, Prussian – and von
Reumont – aristocratic, Catholic, Rhenish – is discussed in detail by A. Forni, La questione di Roma
medievale

. una polemica tra Gregorovius e Reumont, Studi Storici, 150–151 (Rome, 1985), passim. A

useful overview of modern interpretations is provided by Althoff, Otto III (Darmstadt, 1996), 1–18.

W. von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 5th. ed., 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1881), vol. 1. p. 719.

Giesebrecht’s career and political sympathies are discussed by H. Heimpel in the Neue Deutsche
Biographie, vol. 6, 379–82.

Althoff, Otto III, 114.

To my knowledge, only M. Seidlmayer has tried to duplicate Schramm’s approach. See, ‘Rom und

Romegedanke im Mittelalter’, Saeculum, 7 (1956), 395–412. Also in Rom als Idee, ed. B. Kytzler. Wege der
Forschung, vol. 656 (Darmstadt, 1993), 158–87. The spiritual or ecclesiastical (i.e. reform) aspects of Otto
III’s Renovatio have been emphasized by, among others, R. Morghen, ‘Ottone III ‘‘Romanorum imperator
servus Apostolorum’’ ’, in: I problemi comuni dell

’Europa post-Carolingia, Settimane, vol. 2 (Spoleto,

1955), 13–35, at p. 32. For an attempt to highlight the concrete (e.g. economic) effects of Renovatio, see, G.

Beyreuter, ‘Otto III. 983–1002’, in: Deutsche Konige und Kaiser des Mittelalters, eds. E. Engel and E.
Holtz (Cologne and Vienna, 1989), 73–83, esp. 83.

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

him from it.

In what is arguably the most noteworthy case of ‘normalization’, two of

the hitherto most compelling witnesses to Otto’s originality have become so ques-
tionable as to be virtually at a dead end. I refer, specifically, to the imperial diploma
designated D.O. III 389 in the edition of the MGH, and to the supposed coronation of
Duke Boleslav Chrobry at Gniezno in 1000.

Issued for Pope Sylvester II (i.e. Gerbert of Reims), D.389 concerns the eight

countships of the Pentapolis, possession of which had long been a matter of dispute
between the papacy and the archbishops of Ravenna, and more recently between Otto III

and a surprisingly assertive Pope Gregory V (996–999).

By returning the counties as a

personal gift to his old teacher, Gerbert / Sylvester, as he proposed to do in the diploma,
the emperor managed to skirt the issue of whether or not the papacy actually had a right

to them.

The most remarkable feature of the diploma, as Schramm read it, was the fact

that it appeared to have Otto III rejecting papal claims because he believed the

Constitutum Constantini to be a forgery.

The problem with this claim is that the

passage upon which it depends is so ambiguous that it can, and has been interpreted to

mean something quite different from and contradictory to what Schramm proposed.
Nevertheless, because all interpretations must ultimately rest on the same tortured Latin,

new interpretations of this text are unlikely to be any more plausible than Schramm’s.
Hence, while the question of whether or not Otto III saw through one of the most
notorious forgeries in history will undoubtedly continue to be debated, one should no

See, J-M. Sansterre, ‘Otton III et les saints ascetes de son temps’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 43

(1989), 377–412. More mundane interpretations have also been suggested for his patronage of the
monastery of S. Alessio, his ‘establishment’ of the Polish Church, and his interest in acquiring a Byzantine

bride. See J-M. Sansterre, ‘Le monastere des Saints-Boniface-et-Alexis sur l’Aventine et l’expansion du
Christianismo dans le cadre de la ‘‘renovatio imperii Romanorum’’ d’Otton III’, Revue Benedictine, 100
(1990), 493–506, esp. 495–99; T. Reuter, ‘Otto III and the Historians’, History Today, 41 (1991), 21–27, at
27; and Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages c

. 800 –1056 (London and New York, 1991), 259; G.

Wolf, ‘Die Byzantinisch-abendlandischen Heirats- und Verlobungsplane zwischen 750 und 1250’, Archiv

f ur Diplomatik, 37 (1991), 15–32, at 20–23.

Indeed, he was both an imperial appointee and Otto’s own cousin! On the background to the dispute see, G.

Fasoli, ‘Il dominio territoriale degli arcivescovi di Ravenna fra l’viii e l’xi secolo’, in: I poteri temporali dei
vescovi in Italia e in Germania nel Medioevo, ed. C.G. Mor and H. Schmidinger. Annali dell’Istituto Storico
Italo-Germanico, Quaderno, 3 (Bologna, 1979), 87–140, at 100–11. The eight countships are described as
being sub lite in a letter from Otto to Gregory. MGH, Diplomata regum et imperatorum Germaniae

, 2.2:

Ottonis III

. Diplomata, ed. T. Sickel (Hannover, 1893), nr. 228. The friction between pope and emperor is

discussed (and probably exaggerated) by T. Moehs, Gregorius V

996 –999: A Biographical Study, Papste

und Papsttum, vol. 2 (Stuttgart, 1972), 31–40. Cf. Althoff, Otto III, 85.

KRR, 169.

Hec sunt enim commenta ab illis ipsis inventa quibus Iohannes diaconus cognomento Digitorum mutilus

preceptum aureis litteris scripsit et sub titulo magni Constantini longi mendacii tempora finxit. According to
Schramm’s reading (KRR, 163), Otto had declared that document to be a papal Machwerk which had been
falsely attributed to Constantine and also complained that Deacon John ‘of the mutilated fingers’ had made a
copy of it in gold letters.

E.g. studies by Fuhrmann and Zeilinger have argued that Otto did not reject the Constitutum per se, but

rather the alterations to a copy of the document which made it appear to be Constantine’s original. H.

Fuhrmann, ‘Konstantinische Schenkung und abendlandisches Kaisertum. Ein Beitrag zur Uberlieferungsges-
chichte des Constitutum Constantini’, Deutsches Archiv, 22 (1966), 63–178; K. Zeilinger, ‘Otto III. und die

konstantinische Schenkung. Ein Beitrag zur Interpretation des Diploms Kaiser Ottos III. fur Papst Sylvester

II. (DO III. 389)’, in: Falschungen im Mittelalter, 6 vols., Schriften der MGH, vol. 33 (Hannover, 1988),
vol. 2, 509–36.

See, H. Hoffmann, ‘Ottonische Fragen’, Deutsches Archiv, 51 (1995), 53–82, at 72–76.

David A. Warner

longer feel comfortable in employing D.389. as evidence of that emperor’s interest in a
specifically secular renewal of Rome. Ambiguity also surrounds the question of whether
or not Otto III crowned Boleslav Chrobry king during their meeting at Gniezno in

1000.

The answer depends almost entirely upon a chronicle compiled more than one

hundred years after the event (1100–1115), by an anonymous French monk residing at

the court of Duke Boleslav III (1102–1138).

While the chronicler’s reference to the

bestowal of a royal diadem upon the earlier Boleslav does not overly strain belief – the
political atmosphere may well have been conducive to such an act – the tone of the
passage (e.g. references to the duke’s fabulous wealth) suggests that he was primarily
engaged in dynastic myth-making, a motivation evident elsewhere in the text and

seemingly in accord with the wishes of his patron.

To say that assessments of the

chronicler’s reliability as a witness have differed markedly would be very much an

understatement.

Still, the fact that his account is supported by no source contemporary

with the events ensures that, once again, we are left with little more than uncertainties: a
new if undefined status for the Polish duke and no more than a hint of a new conception

of empire which was never made explicit.

Amid this rising tide of doubt and scepticism, a recent monograph by Knut Gorich

This issue did not engage Schramm’s attention in KRR, but it represents a natural extension of his work and

he did turn to it in a later publication, Kaiser

, Konige und Papste (above n. 5), vol. 4.2, p. 571.

G. Labuda, ‘Gallus Anonymous’, in: Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 4, col. 1099.

A crown definitely had been conceded to Stephan of Hungary and there are hints that Otto intended some

new status for the Venetian Doge; M. Uhlirz, Jahrbucher des Deutschen Reiches unter Otto II

. und Otto III,

vol. 2 (Berlin, 1954), 572–82; W. Giese, ‘Venedig-Politik und Imperiums-Idee bei den Ottonen’, in:

Herrschaft

, Kirche, Kultur. Beitrage zur Geschichte des Mittelalters. Festschrift f ur Friedrich Prinz au

seinem

65. Geburtstag, eds. G. Jenal and S. Haarlander. Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters, vol.

37 (Stuttgart, 1993), 219–43, at 233–42. The chronicler’s literary intentions are discussed in E. Skibinski,
‘Identity and Difference. Polish Identity in the Historiography of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, in:
The Birth of Identities

: Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. B.P. McGuire (Copenhagen, 1996),

93–98. By the twelfth century, Piast sentiment had transformed the events at Gniezno into a kind of political
‘coming of age’ and a link to the traditions of Carolingian rulership. See R. Micholowski, ‘Aix-la-chapelle

et Cracovie au xie siecle’, Bullettino dell

’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano,

95 (1989), 45–69, esp 62.

In a highly controversial study, Johannes Fried has argued strenuously in favour of the account, proposing

that what the Duke received was a kind of secular crowning which in no way prevented him from receiving
a second crown following the death of Emperor Henry II (1025). J. Fried, Otto III und Boleslaw Chrobry

Das Widmungsbild des Aachener Evenageliars der

‘Akt von Gensen’ und das fruh polnische und ungarische

Konigtum

. Eine Bildanalyse und ihre historischen Folgen (Stuttgart, 1989), 69–76. Althoff maintains that

what took place at Gniezno was a more conventional pact of friendship or amicitia and not a coronation.
Althoff, Otto III, 143–47. Althoff’s interpretation should be read in conjuction with his review of Fried’s

contribution to the series Propylaen Geschichte Deutschlands and with Fried’s response. G. Althoff, ‘Von

Fakten zu Motiven. Johannes Frieds Beschreibung der Ursprunge Deutschlands’, Historische Zeitschrift, 260

(1995), 108–17; J. Fried, ‘Uber das Schreiben von Geschichtswerken und Rezension. Eine Erwiderung’,
Historische Zeitschrift, 260 (1995), 119–31.

E.g. Reuter, Germany, 280 Thietmar of Merseburg comes closest to suggesting that Boleslav was crowned

when he complains that Otto had transformed the Polish Duke from a ‘payer-of-tribute’ into a lord, and it is
also suggestive that he compares him to Arduin of Ivrea who actually was a king though in name only
according to Thietmar. Thietmar [of Merseburg, Chronicon, ed. R. Holtzmann. MGH. Scriptores rerum
Germanicarum], ns.9 (Berlin, 1935), 5.10, p. 232; 6.93, p. 384. In contrast, his assertion that Boleslav
named one of his sons after Otto would tend to suggest a more dependent, possibly feudal relationship (4.58.
p. 196). This point is highly controversial, however. See, perhaps, M. Mitterauer, ‘Senioris sui nomine’,

‘Zur Verbreitung von Furstennamen durch das Lehenswesen’, Mitteilungen des Instituts f ur Ostereichische
Geschichtsforschung, 96 (1988), 275–330, at 297.

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

deserves particular notice.

After revisiting much of the evidence, Gorich concludes not

only that it is mostly too ambiguous to support the kind of theoretical structure presented
by Schramm, but also that it may be insufficient to support the existence of any kind of

Rompolitik at all.

Although not without its critics, Gorich’s unsettling, but credible

analysis has had a dramatic impact on subsequent discussions of Otto’s reign.

Indeed,

Otto’s most recent biographer, Gerd Althoff, devotes virtually his entire chapter on

Renovatio to an exposition of Gorich’s arguments.

According to Althoff’s own,

distinctly functionalist assessment, Otto had discovered, in Renovatio, a formula which
was general and compelling enough to encompass his appointed tasks in a single
programme; viz to forcefully seize the reins of Empire, battle opponents, and combat

dissent.

In light of the concerns raised by these most recent assessments, one can no

longer feel secure in declaring, as was possible not so long ago, that ‘the renewal of

Rome stood completely in the forefront of [Otto III’s] political activity and thought.’
As yet, what one can say remains far from clear. There seems to be general agreement
that Renovatio was not a truly coherent programme but rather something less tidy or
easy to comprehend in modern terms. Drawing on the analogy of the so-called
Ottonian–Salian Reichskirchensystem, we might say that, just as royal intervention in the
German Church no longer appears to have been either consistent or widespread (i.e.
systematic), so Otto’s Rome programme no longer appears to have been very
programmatic. Although the ‘new’ Renovatio appears to have little in common with the
one proposed by Percy Ernst Schramm, as we have noted above, certain assumptions
inherent in Schramm’s Renovatio have persisted as an undercurrent in even the most
recent literature. We may now consider these in somewhat greater detail.

Although Schramm’s focus on the issue of continuity (i.e. of Antique culture in the

Middle Ages) avoided any overt association with nationalism, his intellectual standpoint
lay clearly and firmly to the north of the Alps. It also rested on the unstated assumption
that all medieval polities aimed, or should have aimed at the centralization of political

power.

Given this starting point, it was almost inevitable that the Emperor’s opponents

would be judged as obstacles to an altogether laudable, if quixotic goal (i.e. the unity of
the Empire). Like others before and after him, Schramm chiefly levelled this accusation

Otto III

. Romanus Saxonicus et Italicus. Kaiserliche Rompolitik und sachische Historiographie, Historische

Forschungen, vol. 18 (Sigmaringen, 1993). A good two-thirds of Gorich’s work focuses on the argument
that German resistance to Otto III’s rule had its roots in a growing sense of national identity and, more
specifically, in a perceived loss of status as the prevailing Reichsvolk. The issue of Renovatio is touched on

only indirectly. It is central to the final third of Gorich’s book, however.

Gorich, Otto III, 187–274. Gorich does hold out the possibility, however, that Renovatio may have referred

to a more limited programme of ecclesiastical reform, with a specifically Roman aspect (cf. below n. 59).

Gorich’s methodology, in particular, has been the subject of criticism. See reviews by S. Airlie, Early

Medieval Europe, 4 (1995), 115–16; and D. Warner Speculum, 70 (1995), 621–23.

G. Althoff, Otto III, 114–25.

Here, essentially translating Althoff’s comments at Otto III, 125.

Quoted from, E. Boshof, Konigtum und Konigsherrschaft im

10. und 11. Jahrhundert Enzyklopedie

deutscher Geschichte, 27 (Munich, 1993), 22.

Indeed, Schramm concluded his treatment of Otto III’s reign by questioning, more or less like Giesebrecht,

whether the emperor’s death had ended an era of great possibilities for the Empire or freed it from a grave
misfortune (KRR, 184). In fact, the question itself is anachronistic, in that it assumes the birth of the nation
state as its chief point of reference. See, e.g. J. Gillingham, ‘Elective Kingship and the Unity of Medieval
Germany’, German History, 9 (1991), 124–35.

David A. Warner

at the Roman and Italian aristocracy, going so far as to accuse it of being uniquely

rebellious and an ‘unworthy ally of the Empire’.

The Roman nobility’s apparently

corrupting influence on the papacy and the Church merely added to its already scurrilous

reputation.

Similar attitudes are implicit in more recent literature, if only because it

tends to employ an approach in which both Italy and Renovatio are treated more or less

exclusively in terms of their impact on the Empire.

We should say, at the outset, that

such an approach is by no means self-evident. Thus, scholars for whom Italy represents
the primary focus of attention, when they mention the Ottonians at all, have tended to be
more concerned with their contribution to specifically Italian phenomena such as the
growth of communes or the rise of seigneuries, or with those in which they were not so

much the active party as the beneficiary (viz. the trade in intellectual goods and relics).
It is also worth noting that the reputation of the popes installed by the Roman nobility no
longer seems unambiguously negative. Insofar as it relies on the far from dispassionate
testimony of outsiders, such as Gerbert of Reims, or on the hyperbole of Liudprand of

Cremona, this reputation has always been somewhat questionable.

Recent studies have

suggested, moreover, that men such as Pope John X and John XII were not altogether
lacking in redeeming qualities and that even their most egregious moral lapses may have
been less a matter of outright corruption than a reaction to practical politics and Italy’s

post-Carolingian ‘crisis of authority’.

Indeed, the German clergy may not have been

much better. While we have no evidence of serious moral failings on the part of Ottonian

KRR, 17–20, 185.

E.g. Althoff, Otto III, 82–91. Gorich takes a somewhat more balanced approach to the situation in Rome

(e.g. Otto III, 250–261), but the book, as a whole, is still focused predominantly on Germany and on
German public opinion. More general objections to the ultramontane perspective of modern medieval

scholarship have been raised by G. Wolf, ‘Der Sogenannte ‘Gegenkonig’ Arduin von Ivrea (ca. 955–1015)’,

Archiv f ur Diplomatik 39 (1993), 19–34; and B.H. Rosenwein, ‘The Family Politics of Berengar I, King of
Italy (888–924)’, Speculum, 71 (1988), 247–89, esp. 249–250.

E.g. E. Dupre Theseider, ‘Ottone I e l’Italia’, in:

‘Renovatio imperii’, Atti della giornata internazionale di

studio per il millenario (Faenza, 1963), 97–45; G. Tabacco, ‘Regno, impero e aristocrazie nell’Italia

post-Carolingia’, in: Il secolo di ferro

: mito et realta del secolo x, Settimane 37.1-2. (Spoleto, 1991), vol. 1,

243–69, esp. 264–68; and M. Ferrari, ‘Manoscritti e testi fra Lombardia e Germania nel secolo X’,
Lateinische Kultur im X Jahrhundert 5 Mittelateinisches Jahrbuch, 24 (1991), 105–116, at 105–07,
110–11.

After one of his earlier visits to the city, Gerbert asked, with evident disgust: ‘In quo nunc statu Roma est?

Qui pontifices vel domini rerum sunt?’ Die Briefsamlung Gerberts von Reims, ed. F. Weigle. MGH. Die
Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit, vol. 2 (Berlin, Zurich, Dublin, 1966), esp. 40, 68–69. The prejudices and

antipathies of the major German witnesses are examined in great detail by Gorich, Otto III passim. On
Liudprand, see P. Buc, ‘Italian Hussies and German Matrons. Liudprand of Cremona on Dynastic

Legitimacy’, Fruhmittelalterliche Studien, 26 (1991), 207–25, at 214–25.

Attempts to partially rehabilitate these two popes have been offered by E.-D. Hehl, ‘Der wohlberatene Papst.

Die romische Synode Johannes XII vom Februar 964’, Ex ipsis rerum documentis Beitrage zur Mediaevistic

Festschrift f ur Harald Zimmermann zum

65. Geburtstag, ed. K. Herbers et al. (Sigmaringen, 1991),

257–75; and R. Savigni, ‘Sacerdozio e regno in eta post-Carolingia: L’episcopato di Giovanni X,
Arcivescovo di Ravenna (905–914) e papa (914–928)’, Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia, 46 (1992),
1–29. For a more sympathetic view of the so-called ‘papal pornocracy’ see, for example, G. Arnaldi,

‘Papato, arcivescovi e vescovi nell eta post-carolingia’, in: Vescovi e diocesi in Italia nel medioevo

(sec.

ix –xiii

), Italia sacra, vol. 5 (Padua, 1964), 27–53, esp. 51; and O. Capitani, Storia dell’Italia medievale

410 –1216 (Rome and Bari, 1986), 155–59.

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

popes, the seven deadly sins are certainly evident among the German episcopate, the

ranks of which were heavily populated with royal / imperial appointees.

A ‘top-down’ approach to Otto’s Rompolitik also involves a number of more specific,

methodological problems. For one, it tends to skew the picture in the ruler’s favour by
assigning an active and positive character to his intervention while implying that his

opponents were merely reactive.

As we follow Otto III on his first trip to Rome, for

example, local populations and concerns come suddenly and sharply into focus, and

when he leaves the focus moves with him.

One can easily lose the sense that such

populations would have been affected by political forces which, in terms of their
durability, were far more substantial than the relatively brief intrusions of an itinerant
monarch. If allied, even implicitly, with the assumption that Renovatio represented
anything approaching an organized programme, a ‘top-down’ approach would also
appear to contradict an emerging consensus that the Ottonian monarchy was an
essentially reactive institution. Indeed, rather than consistently and deliberately fostering

unity, the acta of Ottonian kings were as likely to produce the opposite effect.

In this

respect, their relations with the German aristocracy were no more or less difficult than
their relations with its southern counterpart. Ottonian kings readily engaged in internal
feuds and employed the mechanisms of government and the Church to punish their
enemies. Even in relatively peaceful contexts, moreover, their presence could have an
intrusive and disruptive effect. The king’s entourage might descend upon its hosts like a
conquering army and his acts of munificence, especially in the distribution of
ecclesiastical resources, represented a potential threat to the credibility of local power-

brokers and to the generally accepted influence of consanguinity and clientage.

The

aristocracy, including churchmen, responded by forming conspiracies, staging uprisings,
and colluding with the monarchs’ bitterest enemies. Public opinion, at least as
represented by clerical litterati, did not necessarily view such actions as treasonous and
might even sympathize. Resentment spawned during Otto’s reign was just coming to a

For an interesting example of episcopal sinning, see G. Wolf, ‘Prinzessin Sophia (978–1039). Abtissen von

Gandersheim und Essen. Enkelin, Tochter und Schwester von Kaisern’, Niedersachsisches Jahrbuch f ur
Landesgeschichte, 61 (1989), 105–23, at 114, who argues that Archbishop Willigis of Mainz, one of Otto
III’s confidants, was openly keeping a mistress.

In contrast, see the works cited at n. 39.

See, e.g. Althoff, Otto III, 82–91.

I do not, however, dispute the argument that, over time, the experience of electing kings may have

encouraged the German aristocracy to think in terms of a unified realm. See R. Schneider, ‘Das Konigtum

als Integrationsfaktor im Reich’, in: Ansatze und Diskontinuitat deutscher Nationsbildung im Mittelalter, ed.
J. Ehlers. Nationes. vol. 8 (Sigmaringen, 1989), 59–82, at 72–77.

T. Zotz, ‘Prasenz und Reprasentation. Beobachtungen zur koniglichen Herrschaftspraxis im hohen und spaten

Mittelalter’, in: Herrschaft als Soziale Praxis

. Historische und sozial-anthropologische Studien, ed. A.

Ludtke. Veroffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Insituts fur Geschichte, 91 (Gottingen, 1991), 168–94, at

176–77; K. Schreiner, ‘Consanguinitas Verwandtschaft als Strukturprinzip religioser Gemeinschafts- und

Verfassungsbildung in Kirche und Monchtum des Mittelalters’, Beitrage zur Geschichte und Struktur der

mittelalterlichen Germania Sacra, ed. I. Crusius. Studien zur Germania Sacra, vol. 17 (Gottingen, 1989),
176–305, at 185–90. In regard to bishops favoured by the king, see T. Reuter, ‘Property Transactions and
Social Relations between Rulers, Bishops and Nobles in Early Eleventh-Century Saxony: The Evidence of
the Vita Meinwerci’, in: Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, eds. W. Davies and P. Fouracre
(Cambridge, 1995), 165–99, at 192.

David A. Warner

head as the emperor lay dying at Paterno and, had he survived, he might well have faced

a major uprising of the sort that later plagued his successor, Henry II.

The disruptive effect of Ottonian rulership was equally apparent in Italy, where the

dynasty’s representatives resided long enough to generate resentment, but not long
enough to be incorporated into the prevailing balance of power. The depth of that
resentment is suggested by Benedict of St Andrew’s complaint that Rome had

effectively been ‘despoiled, plundered, and ravaged’.

More concrete sources of

resentment are apparent, for example, in increasing levels of royally sponsored judicial
activity and in the unequal distribution of royal patronage among Italy’s governing elite

of warriors and churchmen.

As in Germany, resentment at the monarch’s actions

tended to inspire conspiracies and acts of rebellion. Among Otto III’s enemies, for
example, one can find both great magnates such as Margrave Arduin of Ivrea and
obscure men such as Count Lantbert, an otherwise unidentifiable lord who was declared

a public enemy and dispossessed of his lands.

In Rome itself, the emperor confronted

Crescenzio ‘Nomentano’, the leader of a loosely organized faction of the local
aristocracy, who went so far as to expel Otto’s hand-picked pope (i.e. Gregory V) from

the city and replace him with his own appointee, John Philagathos (Pope John XVI).
Each of these men would have had good reason to find the Ottonian presence disturbing.
Arduin, hindered in his efforts to establish control over the March of Turin, had been

provoked into murdering Bishop Peter III (977–997), an Ottonian loyalist.

Later, with

Otto’s support, Bishop Leo of Vercelli (999–1026) secured the margrave’s condemna-

tion by an imperial tribunal and the confiscation of his property.

Given this rather

substantial benefit, one should not be surprised to find that Leo was also the author of a

poem dedicated to the praise of Otto III’s Rompolitik.

Count Lantbert’s situation seems

to parallel that of Arduin, and in more ways than one. That his confiscated lands were
subsequently added to the endowment at Ravenna, another church favoured by the
Ottonians and especially by Otto III, suggests that the expansion of the archbishops’

Thietmar 4.49. p. 188. A detailed analysis of this passage and plausible identification of the chief

conspirators is provided by Gorich, Otto III, 146–76.

Il Chronicon di Benedetto monaco di S

. Andrea del Soratte e il Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe

Roma, ed. G. Zuchetti. Fonti per la storia Italiano, vol. 55 (Rome, 1820), 186.

The increase in royal / imperial placita, in particular, is noted by F. Bougard, La justice dans le royaume

’Italie de la fin du viiie siecle au debut du xie siecle, Bibliotheque des Ecoles Franc¸ais d’Athenes et de

Rome, 291 (Rome, 1995), 299. See also the studies by Arnaldi and Dupre Theseider cited at n. 39.

Lantbert’s rebellion and the confiscation of his lands are noted in, DO III 330. Both may also be associated

with disturbances in the city of Ravenna itself. See G. Fasoli, ‘Il dominio territoriale’, 117–18.

Uhlirz, Jahrbucher 2, 511–517. The cognomen ‘Nomentanus’, commonly employed to distinguish this

Crescenzio from other persons bearing that name, only appears in later sources. In general see C. Romeo,
‘Crescenzio Nomentano’, in: Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 30, 661–65.

See, G. Sergi, ‘Anscarici, Arduinici, Aleramici: elementi per una comparazione fra dinastie marchionali’, in:

Formazione e strutture dei ceti dominante nel regno Italico

(secc. ix–xii), Istituto Storico Italiano per il

Medio Evo, nuovi studi storici, 1 (Rome, 1988), 11–28, esp. 26.

Arduin’s condemnation by a tribunal and the confiscation of his property are noted in, DO III 323. On Leo’s

career and on the conflict with Arduin consult R. Pauler, Das Regnum Italiae in ottonischer Zeit

Markgrafen

, Grafen und Bischofe als politische Krafte (Tubingen, 1982), 31–45; and G. Arnaldi, ‘Arduino’,

in: Dizionario biografico degli Italiani vol. 4, 53–60.

MGH. Poetae vol. 5.2, p. 477. vv. 1–4.

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

already substantial territory may have been the chief motivation for Lantbert’s

rebellion.

And again, it is worth noting that the see of Ravenna had recently been

occupied by Gerbert ‘of Reims’, author of yet another literary tribute to the Ottonian

Renovatio. Although Ottonian sources tend to place Crescenzio’s attempt to rid himself
of Otto’s pope in a particularly harsh light, a more objective observer might well
conclude that his actions were very much in keeping with those of his northern

counterparts, Arduin and Lantbert.

Indeed, the installation of John XVI was not so

much an act of treachery, as an attempt to reassert the integrity of a local network of

patronage, albeit one in which non-Romans had a vested interest.

Crescenzio’s success

was temporary since he was subsequently captured by imperial forces and put to death in
a manner which will concern us somewhat later in this study.

If ecclesiastical reform is to be considered an integral part of Renovatio, as some

scholars have suggested, one would have to conclude that, even in regard to the Church,

the emperor’s actions would have been as likely to produce discord as harmony.
Indeed, to the extent that they aimed to prevent clerics from using church property ‘to
acquire wealth, benefit their families and gain allies’, the emperor’s efforts to purify the
Church constituted an implicit threat to the status quo of Italian land-holding and social

relations.

It was equally threatening that, in practical terms, those efforts tended to

favour the interests of certain institutions and individuals over those of others. In effect,
reform could function as another form of royal patronage, with all the negative
implications that went with it. By way of an example, we might consider the effect of
Otto III’s intervention on two property disputes involving Abbot Hugh of the monastery
of Farfa, a once prosperous community that had fallen on hard times toward the end of

the ninth century.

With Otto III’s support, Hugh was able to defend his monastery’s

Grundherrschaft against a claim raised by the priests of St Eustachio (998) and
successfully prosecuted a claim of his own against the monastery of Sts Cosma and

Above n. 50.

I refer to the dedication attached by Gerbert to his philosophical tract, Concerning Reason and the Use of

Reason. The text includes the author’s frequently quoted assertion of his and Otto’s possession of a
resurgent empire encompassing Italy, Lorraine, Germany, and the ‘Kingdoms of the Slavs’. De rationali et
ratione uti, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.P. Migne, vol. 139, col. 139. The tracts content and (negligible)
significance for the history of philosophy and logic are discussed by C. Frova, ‘Gerberto philosopus: il De
rationali et ratione uti’, in: Gerberto

. scienza, storia e mito, Archivum Bobiense, Studia, vol. 2 (Bobbio,

1985), 351–77, at 386–74.

The Annals of Quedlinburg, for example, characterize John XVI’s installation as an act of ‘diabolical fraud’.

Annales Quedlinburgensis ed. G. Pertz. MGH. scriptores, vol. 3 (Hannover, 1839) an. 997. p. 74.

Cf. Alhoff, Otto III, 86.

Gorich, Otto III, 269, 277.

MGH. Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, vol. 1, ed. L. Weiland, (Hannover, 1893), nr. 23.

[Capitulare Ticinense]. See also Otto’s complaint that the papacy’s possessions had been alienated to
‘persons of low character’ (D O III 389).

Farfa suffered grievously when Arab raids forced its temporary abandonment. Even after its restoration

(930–933), the community remained in a parlous state with much of its property scattered or in danger of
being absorbed by the noble houses of the Sabine. In general, see R. Ring, The Lands of Farfa

: Studies in

Lombard and Carolingian Italy, Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison (1972), 177–241; and C.B.
McClendon, The Imperial Abbey of Farfa

: Architectural Currents of the Early Middle Ages, Yale

Publications in the History of Art, 36 (New Haven and London, 1987), 9–11.

David A. Warner

Damiano in Mica Aurea (999), each establishment being located in the city of Rome.
The surviving documentation, generated by a papal tribunal, essentially presents these
cases as a victory of imperial virtue and reform over parochial wickedness and fraud.
There is more to it than this, however, especially if we refrain from assuming that the

losing parties were acting in bad faith.

In fact, there is more than a hint of venality and

manipulation in the tribunal’s actions, even if we allow for the relatively low standards
of judicial rectitude prevalent in the tenth-century. The pope himself (Gregory V) was
willing to accept a bribe from Abbot Gregory as payment for a favourable judgement.
Abbot Hugh, clearly the more cunning, tried to intimidate his opponents by proposing
that certain ancillary issues be decided by combat and repeatedly threw the proceedings

into turmoil by demanding to be judged by Lombard rather than Roman law.

The

second strategy had particular success against the brothers of St Eustachio who must
surely have realized that their cause was lost when Farfa’s own advocate, ostensibly the
only resident expert on Lombard law, was invited to join the other judges on the
tribunal. These gambits succeeded primarily because the tribunal repeatedly deferred to
Otto’s will, thereby overturning its own decisions. Whatever grand strategy may have
lurked in the background, it is clear that, in the name of reform, the favour bestowed
upon Abbot Hugh had destabilized the balance of power among the communities

involved.

Replacing the image of Otto III as idealistic reformer with the more mundane one of

the monarch as invasive presence and general nuisance does not necessarily undermine
the basic concept of Renovatio, but it does raise the question of what, if any purpose, it
was intended to serve. If the aim was to provide an overarching framework for the Reich
(i.e. to foster unity), it would seem to be at cross purposes with the reactive and partisan
character of Ottonian rulership. Indeed, in Germany, it appears that Otto’s Rompolitik

received at best an ambivalent reception.

In Italy it can certainly have been no better.

Perhaps, as Gorich has conjectured, Renovatio was simply an isolated theme that came

to the forefront when a specific audience seemed to call for it.

If so, one can go still

further and say that the more important task is to identify the membership of these
audiences. To the extent that it emanated from people who mattered, chiefly the higher
clergy and the leading men among the nobility, Ottonian kings were sensitive to public

DD OIII 278; 339. On the background to these disputes see M. Stroll, The Medieval Abbey of Farfa

: Target

of Papal and Imperial Ambitions, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, vol. 74 (Leiden, New York, and
Cologne, 1997), 32–49.

That the tribunal declared the the losing parties’ evidence to be fraudulent does not, in itself, constitute proof

that it lacked merit, given the fairly clear evidence that the tribunal’s decision was less than dispassionate
(see below).

The use of the ordeal (or trial-by-combat) as a means of intimidation is discussed by S.D. White, ‘Proposing

the Ordeal and Avoiding it: Strategy and Power in Western French Litigation, 1050–1100’, in: Cultures of
Power

: Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T.N. Bisson (Philadelphia, 1995),

89–123, at 96–104. Farfa certainly had the right to be judged according to Lombard law, but this by no
means diminishes the value of the Abbot’s insistence on that right as a means of initimidating his opponents
(cf. Stroll, above n. 61).

C.f. Gorich, Otto III, 256–58.

E.g. Thietmar 4.47. p. 184.

Gorich, Otto III, 269. Along the same lines, see Reuter’s suggestion that Renovatio be seen as a kind of

‘shorthand for a whole complex of ideas, not all of which were consistent with one another’. Reuter, Otto
III, 23.

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

opinion and appear to have made a conscious effort to present themselves in a manner
that would reinforce their loyalty and empathy. Among the individuals and groups that
‘mattered’ to Otto III there were certainly some for whom a persona incorporating the
memory of Rome must have accomplished precisely that goal. Although the relatively
thin pool of evidence would preclude any attempt at a prosopographical approach, we
might at least reckon that, aside from clients such as Gerbert, their number would also
have included men such as Archbishop Heribert of Cologne or Margrave Ekkehard of
Meißen who were responsible for the implementation of the emperor’s policies and

derived personal benefit from them.

It may be significant, then, that the ambivalence

expressed by Brun of Querfurt is absent from Heribert’s biography (compiled c.
1045 / 46–1056) although the Archbishop’s activity as Otto III’s Archchancellor for Italy

is commented on in some detail. For some Italian clerics, Renovatio may have signified
increased support against predators and rivals. Presumably, Leo of Vercelli and Hugh of
Farfa would have viewed it in this manner. Indeed, when Leo attempted to enlist the
support of Otto’s successor (Henry II) against a resurgent Arduin of Ivrea, he dedicated
a poem to the ruler in which he returned to the familiar imagery of Rome and Renovatio.
After invoking the image of regna rushing to do homage and of Rome rejoicing, the
poem concludes: ‘May Henry never rejoice, may he never be happy / If he does not make

Leo the richest bishop / If he does not subjugate his enemies and bind their feet.’

For

Otto’s enemies among the Italian aristocracy and for clerical corporations whose
interests had suffered through his intervention, Renovatio may have been a code for a
more intense and not necessarily beneficial intervention in the politics of property and
patronage. In any case, this more complex relationship between ruler and regna suggests
the value of viewing Otto’s Rompolitik from a wider variety of perspectives. Much the
same might be said in regard to the symbolic aura that has customarily surrounded most,
if not all, of Otto’s gesta.

Symbols, employed alone or in various ritual settings, formed an integral part of

Ottonian political culture, as they did in virtually every medieval polity. Indeed, in the
absence of a central bureaucracy or other formal institutions of government, they were
its most visible and compelling feature. Nor is there any reason to doubt that
contemporaries appreciated their value. One merely needs to recall the eagerness with
which the Rhenish archbishops competed for the right to bestow the royal crown, or the
efforts expended by Otto’s successor, Henry II, to obtain the Holy Lance. Whatever we
may conclude regarding the true character of Renovatio, it seems clear that it must be
considered within the context of this more general trafficking in images and meaningful

objects. This body of evidence is far too important to simply dismiss.

It does however,

According to Thietmar (4.c. 30. p. 167), Margrave Ekkehard’s military support was crucial to the

establishment of Otto’s power in Rome.

Lantbert, Vita Hereberti archiepiscopi Coloniensis, ed. G. Pertz. MGH. ss. 4 (Hannover, 1841), 739–53, at

cc. 5, 7. 743, 745. On Heribert’s career and on all questions regarding the author and text of his vita consult,

H. Muller, Heribert

, Kanzler Ottos III. und Erzbischof von Koln (Cologne, 1977), 133–42; and ‘Die Vita

sancti Heriberti des Lantbert von Luttich’, in: Kaiserin Theophanu

. Begegnung des Ostens und Westens um

die Wende des ersten Jahrtausends, 2 vols., eds. A. von Euw and P. Schreiner (Cologne, 1991), vol. 1,
47–58.

Versus de Ottone et Heinrico, ed. H. Strecker. MGH. Poetae, 5.2. no.19, pp. 480–83.

E.g. Althoff, Otto III, 116.

David A. Warner

present a number of pitfalls and problems which make it exceedingly difficult to use.
One of the weaknesses of Schramm’s treatment of Ottonian ‘Staatssymbolik’ and, in
particular, of Otto III’s Renovatio, was that he tended to examine his witnesses apart
from the specific context in which they were produced or displayed (i.e. without
reference to matters of stage or audience). To be sure, there tends to be a certain abstract
and timeless quality to much of this material. One could scarcely argue, for example,
that the strict and orderly hierarchy represented on the Aachen situla had any
resemblance to the gritty reality of Ottonian politics. And yet, these and other symbolic
statements must have been produced in response to specific stimuli, perhaps even quite
mundane ones. Let us consider a single, but particularly noteworthy instance, the
emperor’s decision to establish a permanent residence in Rome.

Set among the ruins on the Palatine hill, Otto’s palace may well have conjured up

memories of the emperors of classical Antiquity though not necessarily to the detriment

of more recent, but equally resonant figures such as Theodorich the Great.

For anyone

familiar with the Constitutum Constantini, the presence of such a palace may also have
affirmed the secular character of Otto’s Renovatio. After all, that much venerated

document had specifically forbidden secular rulers to live in the city of the Apostles.
Even if the citizens of Rome were obligated to obey the emperor, the city itself, as Brun
of Querfurt observed, ‘had been given by God as the residence of the Apostles (i.e. Peter

and Paul)’.

Nevertheless, a strong case can be made for a more prosaic interpretation

based on the issue of security. Whatever else it might represent, an Ottonian palace had
to provide a secure or at least reasonably defensible place of residence. When it did not,
or did so inadequately, a visiting monarch did well to keep his army close at hand and a

safe place of refuge in mind. Knut Gorich has argued, convincingly, that there was no
more secure location for Otto’s palace than the Palatine hill which was close to
strongholds occupied by one of the few Roman clans that stood firmly within Otto’s

camp and had a stronghold of its own in the Septizonium.

The strength of the

Septizonium, an ancient facade fortified during the Middle Ages, is suggested by the fact
that it provided a refuge for supporters of Pope Gregory VII during Henry IV’s attack on

Rome in 1084 and, in similar circumstances, for Pope Pascal II in 1117.

It is scarcely a

coincidence, then, that Otto and Sylvester II chose a monastic church on the Palatine,
San Sebastiano, as the site for an important synod (13 January, 1001) that met at a time

Schramm, KRR pp. 108–09. That Otto’s palace was located on the Palatine hill rather than on the Aventine

has been established by C. Bruhl, ‘Die Kaiserpfalz bei St Peter und die Pfalz Ottos III. auf dem Palatin

(Neufassung 1983)’, in: Aus Mittelalter und Diplomatik

. Gesammelte Aufsatze, 2 vols. (Munich, 1989), vol.

1, 3–31, at 20–31. On Theodorich’s palace at Rome see B. Pferschy, ‘Bauten und Baupolitik fruhmittelalter-

licher Konige’, Mitteilungen des Instituts f ur Ostereichische Geschichtsforshung, 97 (1989), 257–328, at
281.

Constitutum Constantini, ed. H. Fuhrmann. MGH. Fontes iuris Germanici, 10 (Hannover, 1968), 94–95, c.

18; and KRR, 109–10.

Brun of Querfurt, c. 7. p. 43.

See especially Gorich, below n. 76.

K. Gorich, ‘Die de Imiza-Versuch uber eine romische Adelsfamilie zur Zeit Ottos III’, Quellen und

Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken, 74 (1994), 1–41, at 28–30.

In general, R. Krautheimer, Rome

. Profile of a City, 312 –1308 (Princeton, 1980), 149, 322. Cf. Althoff, Otto

III, 119–20.

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

when local unrest would have made both men rather wary of their situation.

Once

again, the strategic location of the church and its community is suggested by a later
report that the election of Pope Gelasius II was held there because it was considered to

be particularly secure.

Even if it is no longer possible to perceive the circumstances in which the symbolic

manifestations of Renovatio were produced, we might at least give recognition to the
differences inherent in the evidence itself. Can it simply be assumed, for example, that a
royal portrait in a liturgical manuscript and the language of a royal diploma were
formulated with the same audience in mind? And if so, how did it react to them? Royal
portraits could be viewed by at best a small group of people, their effect was passive,
and even in the case of a royal commission the degree to which they reflected the royal

will rather than that of the artist or community that produced them is far from clear.
Thus, while Otto’s portrait in the royally sponsored ‘Reichenau Gospels’ may confirm
that the theme of Renovatio had acquired a heightened currency, it may not tells us
much more than this. The ground becomes much firmer if we turn from portraits to
diplomata. A diploma was a consciously crafted piece of propaganda, its content,
diction, and overall appearance designed to reinforce whatever image of himself the

ruler wished to present.

It is for this reason, for example, that the appearance of new

forms of intitulature in diplomata issued during Otto’s progress to and from Gniezno has

attracted so much scholarly attention.

Even if the precise significance of the new title

(‘Servant of Jesus Christ’) is debatable, it clearly represented a conscious effort to add a
new theme to the emperor’s public persona.

The presentation of a diploma might assume the character of a performance. We

should have in mind the image of the canons of Arezzo, standing silently before Otto III
as he bestowed a diploma confirming their possessions, or of his predecessor, Otto II,
presiding over a crowded church at Magdeburg as the chapter’s newly granted election

privilege was displayed and read aloud. Such occasions appealed simultaneously to two
distinct audiences; the more narrowly defined one which actually benefited from the
grant and a larger, more diverse one comprising individuals unaffected by the grant itself

J.F. Boehmer, Regesta imperii

2. (Sachsisches Haus 919 –1024) /3: Die Regesten des Kaiserreiches unter

Otto III, new ed. M. Uhlirz (Graz and Cologne, 1956), 1396e, 1397a. 1398a, 1400a. The Church and
community were founded around the middle of the tenth century and reformed ca. 987–999. See W.

Buchowiechi, Handbuch der Kirchen Roms

. Der Romische Sakralbau in Geschichte und Kunst von der

altchristlichen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1974), vol. 3, 837–42. The synod was chiefly
concerned with a bitter dispute between Mainz and Hildesheim regarding their respective rights over the

convent of Gandersheim. See K. Gorich, ‘Der Gandersheimer Streit zur Zeit Otto III. Ein Konflikt um die

Metropolitanrechte des Erzbischofs Willigis von Mainz’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung f ur Rechtsges-
chichte Kanonistische Abteilung, 79 (1993), 56–94.

Le Liber Pontificalis, 3 vols., ed. L. Duschesne. (Paris, 1892), vol. 2, 313.

R. McKitterick, ‘Ottonian Intellectual Culture in the Tenth Century and the Role of Theophanu’, Early

Medieval Europe, 2 (1993), 53–74, at 59–60.

I.e. insofar as they emanated from the royal chancery and not from the recipient himself. Out of the abundant

literature on this topic see H. Wolfram, ‘Political Theory and Narrative in Charters’, Viator, 26 (1995),
39–51.

See, e.g. Althoff, Otto III, 136.

Historia custodum Aretinorum, ed. A. Hofmeister. MGH. Scriptores, vol. 30.3 (Leipzig, 1934), 1468–1482,

at 1472–73; Thietmar 3.1, 96–98.

David A. Warner

but open to its representational aspects. In some cases, a clear disjunction between a
diploma’s content and its representational aspects may permit the identity of its second
audience to be defined with greater precision. This appears to be the case with one of the
more noteworthy manifestations of Otto’s Renovatio, an imperial diploma issued, at
Rome, for the Swabian monastery of St Mary at Einsiedeln (DO III 285). Insofar as its
contents are concerned, D. 285. is nothing if not mundane, being essentially a simple
grant of property justified by the emperor’s desire to aid his own and his parents’
salvation. For a community enjoying the king’s favour such a grant would have been

fairly routine and not unexpected.

The diploma’s content is not its most remarkable

aspect, however. Attached to it is a lead seal bearing the phrase Renovatio imperii
Romanorum, seemingly a clear reference to Otto’s Rompolitik. Other aspects of the
document are also worth noting, in particular, the date. Among the formulae employed
in this section, the notary refers to the fact that the diploma was issued in conjunction
with the execution of Crescenzio ‘Nomentano’ (i.e. following the collapse of his

rebellion).

This reference resides rather uneasily among the moral and spiritual

commonplaces that comprised the usual stock in trade of imperial notaries and is so
unusual that one would suspect that the emperor himself had dictated it, as was his

custom on occasion.

To recall such a grim event in conjunction with an affirmation of

Otto’s rulership over an Imperium Romanorum would have had little impact on the
distant monks of Einsiedeln, but quite a bit more on an audience for which it would have
constituted a recent memory. In fact, the death of Crescenzio had been an especially
public event involving not only the execution itself, but also the public display and

humiliation of the corpse.

The effect of Crescenzio’s death, especially in and around

Rome, had been both dramatic and disturbing.

We may conclude by suggesting that

this effect may provide a hint as to how we might give the notion of Renovatio a sense
of audience and, more generally, take account of some of the objections raised by

Gorich et al.

Although never loath to execute persons of low status, Ottonian kings were usually

more careful when dealing with the aristocracy. Aristocratic rebels could typically count
on intermediaries to negotiate a surrender of some sort, with the at least tacit

understanding that punishment would stop well short of any physical injury.

It was

common, moreover, for the process of surrendering to include forms of ritualized
behaviour which documented the supplicant’s humility and his acceptance of the
monarch’s authority (i.e. a formal deditio). Thus, Duke Henry ‘the Quarrelsome’ of

Einsiedeln’s history and close relationship with the Ottonian house are examined by H. Keller, Kloster

Einsiedeln im ottonischen Schwaben, Forschungen zur oberrheinischen Landesgeschichte, vol. 13 (Freiburg
im Breisgau, 1964), 98–105.

...quando Crescencius decollatus suspensus fuit.

See H. Hoffmann, ‘Eigendiktat in den Urkunden Ottos III. und Heinrichs II’, Deutsches Archiv, 44 (1988),

390–423, who does not, however, discuss this particular diploma.

Bohmer / Uhlirz Regesta, 1259d.

On the effect of Crescenzio’s death, see G. Tellenbach, ‘Die Stadt Rom in der Sicht auslandischer

Zeitgenossen (800–1200)’, Saeculum, 24 (1973), 9–10.

The literature relating to this topic is now quite extensive, see, most recently, G. Althoff, ‘Das Privileg der

deditio. Formen gutlicher Konfliktbeendigung in der mittelalterlichen Adelgesellschaft’, in: Spielregeln der
Politik im Mittelalter

. Kommunikation in Frieden und Fehde (Darmstadt, 1997), 99–125.

Ideals and action in the reign of Otto III

Bavaria, whose crimes included the kidnapping of the king himself, avoided the
consequences of his actions by appearing before the court with an appropriately humble

mien and doing homage to his former captive.

The citizens of Tivoli atoned for an

uprising by appearing before Otto in their undergarments while carrying swords in their
right hands and rods in their left hands, an act signifying complete and total submission

to his power.

That a similar opportunity was not extended to Crecenzio is unusual.

Perhaps the negotiations went bad, or it was felt that an example had to be made of this

particular rebel.

In any case, this does not preclude the possibility that it may also have

had something to do with a kind of Renovatio, especially if we consider that, in
governing, a ruler’s manner was as important as the substance of his actions. Indeed, the
execution of Crescenzio was not the only instance in which Otto displayed his capacity
for cruelty before a Roman audience. This event was accompanied by the equally brutal
though less final punishment of his pope, John Philagathos, who was subjected to
physical mutilation, and a ritualized form of humiliation (i.e. being led through the

streets while riding backwards on a donkey).

According to the testimony of Thangmar

of Hildesheim, a similar act of cruelty concluded Otto’s final speech to the Romans. The
speech, preserved as a brief vignette in Thangmar’s biography of Bishop Bernward of
Hildesheim, is delivered from the top of an otherwise unidentified tower and includes a

widely quoted lament on the apparent failure of Renovatio.

Are you not my Romans? Because of you, I abandoned my homeland and kin. For
love of you, I cast off my Saxons and all of the Germans, my own blood. I led you to
distant regions of our empire, where your fathers never set foot, even when they held
the world in subjection. All of this, that I might spread your name and glory to the
ends of the earth. I adopted you as sons and favoured you above all others. For your
sake, as you were placed above everyone else, I was universally hated and resented.

When read in conjunction with the two chapters preceding it, it is clear that Otto’s

speech, however sad in tone, actually caps a series of successes on Otto’s part.

This

series begins with the surrender of the citizens of Tivoli, which we have already noted,
followed by a similar revolt and surrender on the part of the Romans. Although it
concludes the surrender of the Roman populace to Otto’s authority, the speech could
hardly be described as magnanimous. It concludes, moreover, with what appears to be a

calculated act of intimidation.

Fixing two members of the audience in his gaze, the

emperor complains that his Roman friends seem altogether too friendly with two of his
enemies. Readily discerning the implications of this comment, members of the audience
seize the men, drag them up the stairs of the tower, and throw them naked at the

Annales Quedlinburgensis, ed. G. Pertz. MGH. ss. vol. 3 (Hannover, 1839), 22–90, at an. 985, 67.

Or, more specifically, that he could punish or put them to death as he saw fit. Thangmar, Vita Bernwardi

episcopi Hildesheimensis, ed. G. Pertz. MGH. Scriptores, vol. 4 (Hannover, 1841), 764–82, at c. 23, 769.
See also, Althoff, Otto III, 169–71.

Althoff, Otto III, 105–14.

Thangmar, c. 25, 770.

Althoff, Otto III, 169–81.

Althoff, Otto III, 179.

David A. Warner

emperor’s feet. For an audience whose memory of late Antique and Byzantine
government was still fresh, such moments would have had a particular resonance, and
precisely because they were so out of keeping with the normal practice of Ottonian

rulership.

Clemency was a virtue appropriate to sacral kings whose clerical advisors were

always prepared to remind them of their obligations to God and Christendom. The brutal
treatment of John Philagathos, for example, earned Otto the reproach of no less a figure

than St Nilo of Grottaferrata.

Clemency was also a very pragmatic virtue when dealing

with men of substance whose family and allies were unlikely to forgive a monarch’s
disregard for a prisoner’s honour. In contrast, irresistible and seemingly arbitrary cruelty
was the imperial virtue par excellence. As Ammianus Marcellinus observed, ‘there is no
correcting the depravity of [princes], who believe that whatever they wish to be done

represents the greatest good’.

We might compare this assessment of Valentinian I’s

cruelty with Brun of Querfurt’s comment on the self-destructive rage of Otto III, viz
‘because this is generally permitted to such powers – or rather, it is thought to be
permitted but actually is not – he uttered threats, swearing and furiously affirming that
he would not withdraw . . . until he had seen the city humiliated and had taken vengeance

100

upon his enemies.’

Even more to the point, we might recall the ritualized triumphs of

Roman Antiquity or the famous image, on the Barbarini Dyptich, of a mounted emperor

101

looming over barbarians crouched in supplication below him.

Whatever may remain

of Renovatio as Schramm envisioned it, one might argue that nothing would have more
clearly bound Otto to his Roman predecessors than those occasions when, in the manner
of an ancient triumph, he trampled his enemy in the dust rather than forgiving him.

See A. Nitschke, ‘Der Mißhandelte Papst. Folgen ottonischer Italienpolitik’, in: Staat und Gesellschaft im

Mittelalter und fruher Neuzeit

. Gedenkschrift f ur Joachim Leuscher (Gottingen, 1983), 40–53.

Vita s

. Nili abbatis Cryptae Ferratae, ed. G. Pertz. MGH. Scriptores, vol. 4 (Hannover, 1841), 616–18, at cc.

89–91, 616–17.

Nil autem valet correctio pravitatum apud eos qui quod effici velint maximae putant esse virtutis. Bk

27.7.9. 5 Ammianus Marcellinus, 3 vols., ed. J.C. Rolfe (Cambridge, 1939), vol. 3, 50.

100

Brun of Querfurt, c. 7. p. 44.

101

M. McCormick, Eternal Victory

: Triumphal Rulership in Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the Early Medieval

West (Cambridge, 1986), 96–67.

Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 19–26, 1999



P I I : S 0 3 0 4 - 4 1 8 1 ( 9 8 ) 0 0 0 1 5 - 3

Printed in The Netherlands.

0304-4181 / 99 $ – see front matter 1 0.00

Patriarch Gerold and Frederick II: the Matthew Paris letter

James M. Powell

114 Doll Parkway, Syracuse, NY 13214-1428, USA

Abstract

The controversy over the crusade of Frederick II, which has continued from the thirteenth

century to our own day, has been complicated by problems with the sources. In this article, the
surviving letters of Gerold of Lausanne, Patriarch of Jerusalem and a leading critic of Frederick in
the East, are re-examined. Comparison of the two letters, one directed to Pope Honorius III, and
the other an encyclical to all the faithful found in the Chronica majora of Matthew Paris, along
with internal evidence, supports the view that the latter is a forgery. It is rather the product of later
propaganda.



In the words of David Abulafia, the crusade of Frederick II ‘left a legacy of conflict

and disorder both in Cyprus and in the Holy Land’. Riley-Smith describes Frederick’s
departure from Jerusalem: ‘Its liberator left Palestine not in triumph but showered with

offal’. To be sure, not all recent scholarship is so negative, but criticism of Frederick
has been one way of avoiding the difficult task of sorting out the complex issues and
relationships that were so much a part of the history of the crusades in the early
thirteenth century. In large measure that complexity merely mirrored contemporary
society, which on virtually every level witnessed instabilities emergent on fundamental
shifts in social, economic, political, and religious relationships. Frederick II, who had
early committed to the crusade, finally achieved his goal as the excommunicated king of
Jerusalem. Numerous historians have worked to establish the exact nature of Frederick’s
goals and the manner in which they affected the kingdom, the crusade, and relations

between empire and papacy. The present paper points to one of the difficulties that has
long impeded these efforts: problems with the sources.

Thomas C. Van Cleve made Frederick’s relations with the Patriarch of Jerusalem,

Gerold of Lausanne, the occasion for a contrast of clerical irrationality and imperial

JAMES M. POWELL is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History in Syracuse University, New York. His books

include Anatomy of a crusade

, 1213 –1221 (Philadelphia, 1986) and Albertanus of Brescia: The pursuit of

happiness in the early thirteenth century (Philadelphia, 1992).

David Abulafia, Frederick II

: A medieval emperor (London, l988), 193.

Jonathan Riley-Smith, The crusades

: A short history (London, 1987), 151.

For further discussion and bibliography, see my Anatomy of a crusade

, 1213 –1221 (Philadelphia, 1986),

195–204.

James M. Powell

tolerance.

More recently, Bernard Hamilton has recognized that the Patriarch’s

complaints against the treaty which Frederick concluded with the Sultan Al-Kamil of
Egypt were grounded to a considerable degree in very specific concerns about the
manner in which it affected the interests of the patriarchate. This point is important
because it suggests that the conflict between Frederick and the Patriarch had much more
to do with affairs in the East than with the controversy between Frederick and Pope
Gregory IX that had led to his excommunication. Following this line of thought,
Hamilton suggests that the interdict imposed on Jerusalem by the Archbishop of

Caesarea at the behest of the Patriarch may have been directed toward the same end.

Much of the information regarding the conflict between Frederick and the Patriarch

comes from Frederick’s own correspondence and a letter which Gerold wrote to Pope
Gregory IX. There is, however, yet another letter dealing with these issues and widely
regarded as genuine, addressed by Gerold to ‘all the faithful’. This encyclical is well
known. It appears in the Chronica majora of Matthew Paris under the year 1229, and

was reprinted by Jean L. A. Huillard-Breholles in his Historia Diplomatica Frederici

Secundi. A translation was prepared by Dana C. Munro, which has been reprinted in

Christian Society and the Crusades

, 1198 –1229. Hamilton assumes its genuineness as

does Hans-Eberhard Hilpert in his study of Matthew Paris, who suggests that it is

essentially the same as the letter that Gerold sent to the pope. In fact, however, despite
similarities that we will discuss later, there are important differences between Gerold’s
two letters. Although he may well have written an encyclical letter at this time, or,
indeed, a letter addressed to someone other than the pope, the content of the letter in its

present form is itself sufficient to raise questions regarding its genuineness. But
differences in the content of these letters do not provide the only basis for suggesting
that this letter may be a forgery. For that evidence, we must look at the text of the letter
itself.

There is no question that relations between Frederick and the Patriarch deteriorated

substantially following Frederick’s arrival in the East. Gerold of Lausanne was translated
to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem from the see of Valence by Pope Honorius III in late
June, 1225. Previously, he had been abbot of Cluny. He did not immediately take up his

Thomas C. Van Cleve, ‘The Crusade of Frederick II’, in: A history of the the crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton,

6 vols. (Madison, Wisconsin, 1968–1989), 429–62; esp. 456–62.

Bernard Hamilton, The Latin church in the crusader states (London, 1980), 258–9.

The best edition of Gerold’s letter to Pope Gregory IX is found in Epistolae selectae saeculi XIII, ed. Carl

Rodenberg, 3 vols. MGH

. Ep. saeculi XIII, 1, 384, 299–304. The letter of Gerold to all the faithful is found

in Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, RS, 57:3, 179–184. It was reprinted by J.L.A. Huillard-Breholles,
Historia diplomatica Frederici secundi, 6 vols. (Paris, 1852–61), 3, 135–40.

Christian society and the crusades

, 1198 –1229, ed. Edward M. Peters (Philadelphia, 1971), 165–70.

Hamilton, Latin church, 259; Hans-Eberhard Hilpert, Kaiser- und Papstbriefe in den Chronica majora des

Matthaeus Paris (Stuttgart, 1981), 166. An seiner grundsatzlichen Echtheit ist nicht zu zweifeln: der

Patriarch sandte an den Papst eine Mitteilung ganz ahnlicher Tendenz unmittelbar nach dem Abzug des
Kaisers aus Jerusalem. See also Hans Eberhard Mayer, The crusades (Oxford, 1985), 228–9. The letter is
also cited by Keith R. Giles, ‘The Emperor Frederick II’s Crusade, 1215–1231’, Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Keele (U.K.), l987, 200 and 215, nn. 175 and 177. See also, 206, n. 46, 208, n. 74, and 209a,
n. 91. Although some of the information contained in the letter is verified in other sources, the views
expressed colour their presentation.

Compare, for example, the account in Eracles, RHC

. Occ., 2: 375 and that in Hamilton, Latin church, 259.

Patriarch Gerold and Frederick II: the Matthew Paris letter

new office, but awaited the departure of the new crusade organised by Honorius and
Frederick II and slated to get underway in 1225, but delayed by an additional
postponement as well as Frederick’s marriage to the heiress to the throne of Jerusalem,

Isabella of Brienne, later that year.

Gerold remained in the West throughout this period

and was certainly privy to the negotiations leading up to these events and the
preparations for the crusade. When, however, illness forced Frederick to turn back from
his departure in August, 1227, Gerold went to the East in company with those troops
that Frederick sent ahead to make preparations for his arrival. Thus, he was no longer in
Italy when Frederick was excommunicated by the new pope, Gregory IX, in late

September, 1227.

Naturally, these events put the Patriarch in a difficult position when

the excommunicated emperor set out for the East in June, 1228, all the more so, since
Frederick spent the months from July to November in Cyprus, where he claimed for

himself the regency over the young King Henry.

Frederick’s actions in Cyprus were entirely consistent with his style and manner of

ruling.

He was aggressive in defending what he regarded as his rights. He was slow to

compromise with those he regarded as usurpers. The numerous delays leading up to his
crusade were all traceable to his unwillingness to go to the East until he had settled
matters in Germany and with the papacy over his imperial rights and with his opponents
in the Kingdom of Sicily, whom he regarded as usurpers of royal rights. This same
attitude explains his delay in Cyprus. It also explains, at least in part, the strain in his
relations with the patriarch and the barons in the kingdom of Jerusalem, whose crown he
claimed by virtue of his marriage to Isabella and, following her death in 1228 in
childbirth, for his infant son, Conrad.

The events of Frederick’s crusade are, if not well-known, at least known in general

terms. The Egyptian Sultan, Al-Kamil, anxious to assert his rule in Syria over his brother
al-Muazzam, apparently revived the negotiations for a treaty with the West that had been
dormant since the collapse of the Fifth Crusade, dispatching the emir Fakhr-ad-Din to
meet with Frederick II in 1226. Frederick responded by sending his own representatives,
Archbishop Berard of Palermo and Count Thomas of Acerra to the sultan. Following the
death of al-Muazzam, Frederick determined to secure Jerusalem as the prize of his

efforts. Al-Kamil was at least willing to continue negotiations, since he still faced

opposition to his plans from his brother al-Ashraf and his nephew, an-Nasir. Ultimately,

it may have been fear of an unknown factor that led Al-Kamil to risk his own popularity
among his fellow Muslims by agreeing to hand over Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth,

Hamilton, Latin church, 257; Van Cleve, ‘Crusade of Frederick II’, 442.

But cf. the letter of Frederick II dated June, 1228 at Brindisi, in which he takes the church at Denkendorf

belonging to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre under his protection, ad supplicationis instantiam venerabilis
patris Iherosolimitani patriarche. Gerold was, at this time already in the East and Frederick was about to
depart. We ought not to read too much into this letter, which is a fairly routine act of the chancery, but it

clearly suggests that the excommunication did not affect his view of the partriarch. Huillard-Breholles, 3,
69–70.

Peter Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus and the crusades (Cambridge, 1991), 55–60.

On this point, see my article: ‘Economy and Society in the Kingdom of Sicily: Recent Perspectives’, in:

Intellectual life at the court of Frederick II, ed. William Tronzo (Washington, D.C., 1994), 263–71, esp.
266.

James M. Powell

and various other places, with their environs, to the emperor.

This treaty was in effect

very similar to that which had been rejected during the Fifth Crusade.

The Patriarch could hardly be expected to support this result, especially since it was

obtained by an excommunicated monarch. His letter to Pope Gregory IX, dated March
26, 1229, presents a detailed bill of particulars, commencing with Frederick’s arrival in
Jaffa from Acre. What characterises this letter is not so much its critical tone as its effort

to provide full information about the negotiations and the treaty.

In places where its

contents can be checked with other sources, as for example, Frederick’s own letter to
King Henry III of England, the information appears accurate, even when the interpreta-

tion is strikingly different.

Thus, both agree that, on his arrival in Jaffa, Frederick

began to fortify the town and that he was negotiating with the Muslims, though the

details vary.

Gerold provides details about these negotiations, dilating on the

scandalous statement that the sultan, hearing that Frederick behaved like a Muslim, sent
him some singers, dancers, and comedians to entertain him and his friends. We can be
sure that Frederick was careful to cultivate this image with the sultan for the political

advantages he gained thereby.

It was entirely consistent with his conduct of these

negotiations. Scandal was a small price to pay for a treaty.

Gerold’s description of the treaty reflects this same effort to provide detailed

information. After noting in precise terms those places to be surrendered by the sultan
according to the terms of the agreement, as well as any surrounding areas, he then makes
a special point of the impact of the treaty on the lands of the patriarchate, the church of
the Holy Sepulchre, the hospital, Santa Maria Latina, the Temple, and the monastery of
St Mary in Valle Josaphat. He reports that ‘nothing outside the city is restored save for
those things’ he had named earlier, ‘which, however, are not part of casalia belonging to
someone from the city, save for the house of the Temple, for which some are mentioned,

but few in number and not especially valuable’.

He then describes Frederick’s efforts

to secure approval for the agreement from ‘four of the chief men of Syria’, as well as the
masters of the Military Orders and the English Bishops of Winchester and Exeter, who
were with him. He was especially concerned that the treaty was to be sworn by the
emperor alone (soldanus contentus fuit solo principis iuramento...) He goes on to
describe the enthusiasm of the emperor and his supporters, especially the Master of the
Teutonic Order, for it. Gerold was very concerned that, after the departure of the

emperor, Jerusalem and the other cities might be lost.

He even suggested that he might

Setton, 2, 452–3.

Powell, Anatomy, 195–204.

For a more detailed presentation of the provisions of the treaty, cf. Huillard-Breholles, 3, 85–90.

For Frederick’s letter to King Henry III, see Christian society, 162–165. Rogeri de Wendover Flores

historiarum, RS, 84:2, 365–369. This letter was not printed in Huillard-Breholles. For Matthew Paris’s
version, see RS, 57:3, 173–176.

Rodenberg, 1, 302; Christian society, 161–2.

On Frederick’s negotiations with Al-Kamil, see my article: ‘Frederick II and the Muslims: the Making of an

Historiographical Tradition’, in: Iberia and the Mediterraean world of the middle ages

: Studies in honor of

Robert I

. Burns, S.J., ed. Larry Simon (Leiden, 1995), 261–69, esp. 266–69.

Rodenberg, 1, 301.

Francesco Gabrieli, Arab historians of the crusades (Berkeley, California, 1969), 270. Powell, ‘Frederick II

and the Muslims’, 266–7.

Patriarch Gerold and Frederick II: the Matthew Paris letter

be blamed if that occurred. It would be easy for Al-Kamil or his nephew of Damascus,
especially the latter, who was not a party to the treaty, to renounce it once the emperor
was no longer there, since the treaty was with him and not with the principal men of the
kingdom. In his view, Frederick was going along with malice and fraud and this justified

his prohibition to pilgrims to enter the city or visit the Holy Sepulchre.

Frederick and

his group entered the city and visited the Holy Sepulchre, and, as Frederick himself tells
us in his letter to Henry III, he wore the imperial crown. Gerold was not so much
concerned that Frederick wore the crown as with the circumstances under which he did
so: namely that he was excommunicated and was acting contrary to the commands of the
patriarch.

This letter also describes the efforts of Frederick to establish ground rules for relations

among the military orders, the local nobles, Frederick’s representatives, and the
Muslims. Gerold makes sharp criticisms, sometimes rather telling, about Frederick’s
actions and policies. Frederick very quickly moved to return to Sicily to meet the
invasion of his kingdom by papally-inspired forces. He wanted the Teutonic Knights to
accompany him, but Gerold informs us that they refused to do so because they feared
being excommunicated themselves and because they had no confidence in the weather at

sea.

This letter is in essence a detailed bill of particulars, which raises many specific

objections, often of a legal or technical nature. It is obviously intended to provide the
pope with both a defence of the actions of the Patriarch and ammunition for his own
dealings with Frederick.

Gerold’s letter to all the faithful is of a different type. It is clearly a piece of

propaganda aimed at stirring up popular opposition to Frederick. But we are immediately
struck by the fact that, despite certain similarites with Gerold’s letter to the pope, it is
not really on the same intellectual level or even of the same literary quality as that to the
pope. Moreover, it contains certain statements that are at considerable variance from
statements on the same topics in the latter. For example, the statement that Frederick
came ‘without money and followed by scarcely forty knights’ hardly accords with the

description of Frederick’s arrival in the letter to the pope.

While it is true that later

Frederick claimed that he did not have the money to pursue more ambitious plans and
gave this as a reason for acceptance of the treaty by the nobles of the kingdom, that is
not the impression conveyed by Gerold’s description of Frederick’s fortification of Jaffa
in his letter to the Pope. The encyclical letter also maintains that Frederick did not
consult anyone about the treaty, whereas Gerold’s letter to Gregory described these
discussions in detail. The description of the conflict between Frederick and the Patriarch
over the raising of troops to defend the kingdom, which hinged on the Patriarch’s fear
that the treaty would not last, is at variance with that in the letter to the pope in
significant details, especially Gerold’s supposed statement that ‘the knife was still in the
wound’, referring to the continued threat from the Sultan, a line that we might have

Rodenberg, 1, 303.

Rodenberg, 1, 304.

Christian society, 166. But immediately after, he mentions that Frederick marched to Jaffa with the Christian

army.

James M. Powell

expected him to use in his letter to the pope. There is no mention of Frederick’s
ill-treatment of the Franciscans and Dominicans in Gerold’s letter to Gregory, though it
referred to the prominent role of his penitentiarius, the English Dominican, Walter, in
securing a ‘word for word’ copy of the provisions of the treaty from Hermann von Salza,

Master of the Teutonic Order.

The encyclical letter also dealt extensively with

Frederick’s actions in Cyprus, making note near the end that he sent soldiers there to
raise money. Mention of this latter point suggests that this letter was written by someone
who was not familiar with the arrangements that Frederick had made to farm the regency

of the kingdom of Cyprus to the five baillis shortly before his departure from Acre.

All

in all, this letter contains errors and distortions that Gerald was unlikely to have made.

Finally, the Matthew Paris letter contains words which seem to be directly related to

those found in Gerold’s letter to Pope Gregory IX. It uses the terms malitia and
fraudulentus in close proximity to one another in its discussion of the truce, where the
letter to the pope speaks of Frederick’s entering into the truce with the sultan

fraudulenter et malitiose.

In fact, however, a passage in the Matthew Paris letter

provides the most convincing evidence that it is a forgery.

The letter is, as we have

noted, addressed to all the faithful. There is no personal form of address anywhere else
in the letter save in this passage, where the writer refers to ‘certain chapters of the truce,
which we caused to be sent to you in writing’. Obviously this text has been interpolated
into the Matthew Paris letter from another source, perhaps a genuine letter of Gerold. As
noted earlier, we know that Gerold had obtained the terms of the truce through his
confessor, the Dominican, Walter, from Hermann von Salza, Master of the Teutonic

Order, and sent them to the pope.

This relationship to the Dominican order will be

followed up later in this paper. For now, it is sufficient to note that the presence of this
text in a form alien to the style of the Matthew Paris letter provides strong evidence of a
substantial reworking of this material. It is also unlikely that Matthew Paris was

responsible or was even aware that this had taken place.

Evidence that this letter, though drawing on some genuine material, is not genuine,

Rodenberg, 1, 302. See below, note 27.

Edbury, The Kingdom of Cyprus, 60.

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, RS, 57:3, 180: Quanta autem fuerit malitia quam fraudulentus tractatus

capitulorum treugae, quae vobis in scriptis duximus transmittenda, cognoscere poteris evidenter. Rodenberg,
1, 302: ...et attendens quod treugae et conventiones, quas cum soldano inierat fraudulenter et malitiose, omni
fundamento veritatis et stabilitates carrarent....

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora

, RS, 57:3, 180. For the translation cf. Christian society, 166. ‘Moreover,

you will be able to see clearly how great the malice was and how fraudulent the tenor of certain articles of
the truce which we have decided to send you.’

Rodenberg, 1, 302: Quo intellecto magister incontinenti per fratrem W[alterum] de ordine Predicatorum,

penitentiarium nostrum, nobis misit supradictum transcriptum; quo retento ac diligenter notato vidimus in eo
inter cetera quedam mirabilia contineri, que sanctitati vestre de verbo ad verbum duximus transmittenda.

Matthew’s remark at the end of the letter would seem to substantiate this point. Matthew Paris, Chronica

majora

, RS, 57:3, 184. Haec autem epistola cum ad audientiam occidentalium perveniret, non mediocriter

famam imperialem obfuscavit, et multorum favorem ademit. Papa autem ad ejus dejectionem diligentius
solito insurrexit, et collectioni pecuniae hiavit avidius. The latter comment clearly indicates that Matthew
did not care for the content of the letter.

Patriarch Gerold and Frederick II: the Matthew Paris letter

does not, however, rest solely on this comparison. Rather, an examination of the way in
which it got into the chronicle and its probable relation to another passage found in
Matthew Paris and concerned with Frederick provides a more adequate explanation of its
origins and meaning.

The Chronica majora down to 1234 was largely drawn from Roger of Wendover,

with various changes by Matthew after he began his task in the mid-1240s.

The letter

of Gerold to all the faithful was not part of the Wendover chronicle.

This is confirmed

in Luard’s edition of the Chronica majora, where it has been printed in larger type, as is
the case with other material interpolated by Matthew Paris. Very likely, its inclusion
came as a result of Matthew’s ability to secure materials relating to Frederick and the
papacy, for which Hilpert and Vaughan have suggested Richard of Cornwall as a

source.

Richard was much involved in the crusade in the late 1230s and was in close

contact with the court of Gregory IX. He, or a member of his court, would have had
access to considerable materials concerning the crusade at this time and could then or
later have passed them on to Matthew. While it is impossible to demonstrate that Richard
was the conduit for this information, the likelihood is great that such a conduit existed.

In my article on ‘Frederick II and the Muslims: The Making of an Historiographical

Tradition’, I was able to show that Matthew had preserved two accounts of the famous
accusation levied against Frederick II, charging him with labelling Jesus, Mohammed,

and Moses as imposters.

While the second of these is actually a letter of Pope Gregory

IX, the earlier account, which differs in significant ways, is an unattributed report, under
the year 1238. The letter of Pope Gregory, Ascendit de mare bestia, was dated 1 July,

1239.

In that discussion, I argued that the version of the story placed by Matthew Paris

in 1238 very possibly originated with the Dominicans, in part because of an implied
accusation of Catharism and in part because of known involvement of Dominicans at the

curia critical of Frederick’s relations with the Muslims of Lucera.

On the basis of the Matthew Paris letter attributed to Gerold, it is now possible to take

these arguments a bit further. The date for Matthew’s revision of the Flores Historiarum

of Roger Wendover falls after 1245.

Matthew began his work at a time when the

papal-imperial conflict under Pope Innocent IV, who had succeeded Pope Gregory IX in
1242, was intense. He was in a position to obtain materials relating to the events of the
1230s. The probability that, at this time, he secured and arranged a body of materials
related to the crusade, the emperor, and his relations to the papacy is good. In 1236,
Gregory IX had written to Frederick at the behest of the Dominicans to complain of his

Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge, 1958), 3 and 21–34.

Roger of Wendover, Flowers of history, trans. J. A. Giles, 2 vols. (London, 1849), 2:527. Wendover, 4,

198–9. For the Latin edition, see RS, 84:2, 364–74, in which Roger treats of Frederick’s crusade.

Hilpert, passim.

Powell, ‘Frederick II and the Muslims’, 261–69.

Rodenberg, 1, 646–54; Matthew Paris, Chronica majora

, RS, 57:3, 520–1; 590–608, and Huillard-Breholles,

5, 327–340.

Powell, ‘Frederick II and the Muslims’, 265.

Vaughan, Matthew Paris, 3 and 34, says that Roger’s account continues to 1236.

James M. Powell

lack of support for their missionary efforts in Lucera.

During this period, as we have

noted, Richard of Cornwall was in close contact with the curia about his own crusade.
What is more pertinent to the present discussion is the fact that Gerold’s letter, as given
by Matthew Paris, contains a complaint that Frederick had treated the Franciscans and
Dominicans violently while in Acre after his visit to Jerusalem: ‘...he caused [them] to
be torn from the pulpit, to be thrown down and dragged along the ground and whipped

thoughout the city, as if they had been robbers’.

This specific mention of the

mendicants does not appear in Gerold’s letter to the pope.

Its presence in the Matthew

Paris letter suggests that this letter has the same origins as the version of Frederick’s
blasphemy found in Matthew under 1238. It further suggests that there was an active
propaganda campaign against Frederick being carried out at the curia by the
Dominicans, which strongly influenced the Pope himself, as we can see from the
inclusion of a version of the tale of the blasphemy without the implication of Catharism
in Ascendit de mare bestia. As for Matthew, it is interesting to note that in introducing
Gerold’s letter, he used the word, dicitur, normally used to introduce rumours, and that
following it, he observed: ‘The Pope, however, worked as usual for his [Frederick’s]

deposition, and aspired more greedily for the collection of money’.

Thus he turned

Gerold’s letter to his purpose, while admitting his own doubt as to its value. Finally, as a
vehicle of propaganda, the chronicle of Matthew Paris has, at least for modern scholars,
been one of the most influential of medieval sources. Its presentation of the crusade of
Frederick II has profoundly distorted the discussion of what were certainly times of
tension and conflict and coloured the descriptions of those who were caught up in them.
If modern scholarship has had its lapses and biases, it has also been the victim of earlier
propaganda wars.

Powell, ‘Frederick II and the Muslims’, 264–5. On Pope Gregory IX’s relations with the Dominicans, see

William Hinnebusch, History of the Dominican Order, 2 vols. (New York, 1966–73), 1, 107–109. See, also,
Jean-Marie Martin, ‘La colonie sarracine de Lucera et son environnement. Quelques reflexions’, in:
Mediterraneo medievale

: Scritti in onore di Francesco Giunta. A cura del Centro di studi tardoantichi e

medievale di Altomonte, 3 vols. (Soveria Mannelli, 1989), 2, 796–811, esp. 805–6 for earlier relations
between Frederick and Gregory on the Muslims of Lucera. There seems to be a certain circularity in the
arguments that view Frederick’s transfer of the Muslims to Lucera as an anti-papal act and then indict
Gregory IX for being anti-Frederick. Since there is no evidence to support the earlier position, it seems
much more reasonable to see Gregory responding to a request for support from the Dominicans working in
Lucera. See my ‘The Papacy and the Muslim Frontier’, in: Muslims under Latin rule, ed. J.M. Powell
(Princeton, 1990), 175–203, esp. 195–6.

Christian society, 169.

The mention of the role of the Dominican, Walter, in securing information about the treaty to be sent to the

pope is certainly suggestive of the role of the Dominicans in this process. Rodenberg, 1, 302.

Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, RS, 57:3.

Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 27–34, 1999



P I I : S 0 3 0 4 - 4 1 8 1 ( 9 8 ) 0 0 0 1 7 - 7

Printed in The Netherlands.

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The representation of the crusades in the songs attributed to Thibaud,

Count Palatine of Champagne

William Chester Jordan

Department of History

, Princeton University, 129 Dickinson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA

Abstract

Thibaud of Champagne (1201–1253) was count of Champagne and, from 1234, king of

Navarre. He was an accomplished poet, and indeed is better known as a chansonnier than as a
statesman, although he was involved in many of the most important political struggles in France
and led a crusade to the East. Several songs attributed to him deal with crusading. A fresh reading
of these poems affords an opportunity to penetrate the mental world of a representative member of
the French aristocracy in the first half of the thirteenth century, and it confirms Jonathan
Riley-Smith’s famous observation that, in the Catholic ethical universe of the time, crusading was
an ‘act of love’.



Keywords

: Chanson; Crusade; Thibaud IV; Jews

Thibaud (or Thibaut) IV, count palatine of Champagne and count of Brie, was the

posthumous son of Count Thibaud III, a crusader who died while on expedition in 1201.
In his childhood Thibaud IV lived under the tutelage of his mother Blanche of Navarre,
whose claim to the inheritance of the crown of Navarre he inherited at her death in
March 1229. (He would accede to the throne in 1234, and is known in the Navarrese

lists as King Teobaldo I. ) But perhaps the heaviest presence in Thibaud’s life before he
came of age in 1222 was the king of France, Philip II Augustus, to whose court his

WILLIAM CHESTER JORDAN is Professor of History and Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for

Historical Studies at Princeton University. His most recent book is The Great Famine

. Northern Europe in

the early fourteenth century (Princeton, 1996).

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 32nd International Congress of Medieval Studies

(Kalamazoo), May 1997, where it profited from the criticisms of the commentator, Professor James Powell
of Syracuse University, and from those of other scholars in attendance. My thoughts on the subject of the
paper have also benefitted profoundly from conversations with my friend, Professor Susan Einbinder of
Hebrew Union College. I wish to thank her, a literary scholar, for graciously sharing her erudition and
sensitive readings of Thibaud’s poems with a historian.

A lavish biography of Thibaud IV is that by Claude Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier

, comte de Champagne

(Paris, 1987). It is unfootnoted and at times speculative, but the endorsement of a scholar as careful as
Michel Bur (12) allays some concern over its reliability.

On the circumstances of the accession, see Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 205–09.

William Chester Jordan

mother sent him at the age of eight for his upbringing. It was in the context of the

French royal court that Thibaud first met the Spanish princess, Blanche of Castille. His
infatuation, if it is genuine and not a fiction of scandalmongering chroniclers, began
then; and gossip about it would later undermine his political standing, for no love was

lost between Thibaud and Blanche’s husband, Prince Louis, who was the heir apparent.
To be sure, both Thibaud and Louis chafed under the control exercised by the

strong-willed Philip Augustus, but their common resentment failed to bring about a
close friendship between the two young men. When Blanche’s husband became king as
Louis VIII in 1223, antagonism between the two lords heated up. Matters got worse after
Louis VIII’s premature death only three years later. Some barons saw Thibaud as a
potential threat to the independence of the monarchy through his influence on Blanche of
Castille who became regent or conversely as a rival to their own efforts to exercise
influence over her son. However strong the infatuation of the younger Thibaud with

Blanche of Castille (and later sources may exaggerate it even if it was real ), his
ambitions gave rise to many rumours, including one asserting the count’s complicity in

Louis VIII’s death.

Thibaud’s reputation as a lover – Platonic or otherwise – was and still is nourished by

his undoubtedly great gifts as a lyric poet and composer whose main subject, based on

his sixty-one surviving chansons, was love.

But Thibaud, like his father, was also a

crusader. He accompanied Louis VIII on his invasion of Languedoc during the

Albigensian Crusade in 1226, although he left in a huff rather early in the campaign,
and in 1239–1240 the count-king also led a crusade to the Holy Land that briefly

brought relief to the kingdom of Jerusalem.

Thibaud’s chansons, especially but not exclusively those that fall into the genre

known as chansons de croisade (‘songs of exhortation and polemic’), provide us with an

Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 36. See also John Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus

Foundations of French royal power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA, and elsewhere, 1986), 197–98.

Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 38.

The matters treated in this paragraph are explored in greater detail in William Jordan, The French Monarchy

and the Jews from Philip Augustus to the last Capetians (Philadelphia, 1989), 97–103, 105, 126.

See William Jordan, ‘Princely Identity and the Jews in Medieval France’, in: Juden und Judentum in der Sicht

christlicher Denker im Mittelalter, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wolfenbuttel, 1997), 264–68.

Cf. the extraordinary passage in the Grandes Chroniques de France, excerpted with translation notes in

Thibaut de Champagne

. Prince et poete du XIIIe siecle, eds. Yvonne Bellenger and Danielle Queruel

(Lyons, 1987), 138–39, according to which a rebellious Thibaud was stunned into capitulation at the sight

of Blanche’s beauty (de la grant biaute de lui il fu tous esbahis).

Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 129–30.

The standard edition is that of Axel Wallenskold, Les Chansons de Thibaut de Champagne

, roi de Navarre.

Edition critique (Paris, 1925). It is rooted in what is sometimes disparagingly called the ‘old philology’;

Wallenskold tried to recreate the hypothetical Urtext of the songs from the various readings in a large variety
of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts. The precise texts he provides are therefore nowhere to be
found in any specific manuscript. Kathleen Brahney, ed. and trans., The Lyrics of Thibaut de Champagne
(New York and London, 1989), works instead from a base manuscript, providing variant readings in notes. I
have benefitted from both their approaches. For a systematic study of Thibaud’s love poetry, see Martha
Dolly and Raymond Cormier, ‘Aimer, souvenir, souffrir. Les Chansons d’amour de Thibaut de Champagne’,
Romania, 99 (1978), 311–46.

Taittinger, Thibaud le Chansonnier, 113–24.

The rather dismissive chapter on Thibaud’s crusade (sometimes numbered the Fifth) in Kenneth M. Setton,

ed., A History of the Crusades, II: The Later Crusades

, 1189 –1311, eds. Robert Wolff and Harry Hazard,

2nd ed. (Madison, 1969), is not to be recommended.

The representation of the crusades in the songs attributed to Thibaud, Count Palatine of Champagne 29

important source for recovering his understanding of love and his conception of the

crusades.

They furnish material that is also relevant to an on-going scholarly project

that medievalists have been pursuing over many years into more general elite or
aristocratic conceptions of the relation between ideas of love, in its multiple meanings,
and the attraction of holy war. That Thibaud’s ‘voice’ is in fact aristocratic – that he
does not assume the persona of a member of a different status group in his poetry – is a
point Menachem Bannitt forcefully made more than thirty years ago by means of a
detailed comparison with the work of Thibaud’s contemporary, the rather more down-

and-out poet, Colin Muset.

This judgement has been confirmed in more recent work,

such as that of Pierre Bec; Thibaud eschewed the more vulgar non-aristocratic themes

that other crusade chansonniers did develop.

We may begin with what is by now a commonplace among medievalists, namely, that

crusading was an act of love. When Jonathan Riley-Smith used the phrase, ‘crusading as
an act of love’, as the title of an article he published in 1980, he was talking primarily

about the view, in his words, of ‘senior churchmen’. But the article, still fresh, brilliant,
and full of wonderfully eye-opening insights on every re-reading, also occasionally

alludes to and quotes poets. Riley-Smith regarded the interchange as a two-way street –
poets could have influenced senior churchmen as much as senior churchmen influenced

them.

And although he concentrated on the period up through the pontificate of

Innocent III, he suggested quite accurately that the theme of love as the motivation for
crusading continued to be vigorously articulated, in sermons, for example, throughout

the thirteenth century.

Riley-Smith’s main sources represented the love that motivated crusaders in various

ways. They sometimes expressed it as the love that naturally springs from a desire to
protect one’s patrimony, the estates that a father intended to pass on to his son. This

Thibaud wrote three songs conventionally classified as chansons de croisade, a modern genre classification.

They might as easily be classified as sirventes (a contemporary category), serious songs with a polemical

agenda (C. Th. J. Dijkstra, La Chanson de croisade

. Etude thematique d’un genre hybride [Amsterdam,

1995], 43 n. 31) or moral, political or introspective flavour (Michael Routledge, ‘Songs’, in The Oxford
illustrated history of the Crusades, ed. Jonathan Riley-Smith [Oxford and New York, 1997], 94). The three

so-called crusade songs composed by Thibaud are nos. 53–55 in the Brahney edition and in Wallenskold’s
as well; cf. Dijkstra, 204–06. Dijkstra (41) queries but ultimately accepts the classification of no. 55 as a

crusade song. Joseph Bedier and Pierre Aubry, Les Chansons de croisade (Paris, 1909), 199–206, also place

no. 19 of Brahney / Wallenskold (no. 18 of theirs, and Dijkstra, 207) in this category as well, but although
no. 19 makes reference to the crusades and provides useful information on Thibaud’s attitudes, it does not
otherwise conform to the rather vague determinants of the chanson de croisade genre. Some scholars find
the category ‘crusade songs’ itself troubling (‘not very helpful’, in the words of Routledge, ‘Songs’, 93).
Others are more indulgent. For further on the matter of genre, see Dijkstra, 3, 29–34. For the description of
chansons de croisade as ‘songs of exhortation and polemic’ (a phrase borrowed by Pierre Bec from Jean

Frappier), see Bec’s discussion, La Lyrique franc¸aise au moyen age

(XIIe–XIIIe siecles), 2 vols. (Paris,

1977), I, 151–52, but note that, following Bedier and Aubry, he inaccurately attributes four songs of the
genre to Thibaud.

Menachem Bannitt, ‘Le Vocabulaire de Colin Muset’, Romance Philology, 20 (1966), 151–67. Bannitt

acknowledges (151) that the insight goes back as far as Gustave Cohen’s work in the nineteenth century.

Lyrique franc¸aise, I, 153–54.

Jonathan Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, History, 65 (1980), 177.

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 179, 181.

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 179 n. 12.

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 180.

William Chester Jordan

lineage-driven, familial or filial love with respect to crusading was grounded in the belief
that crusaders, like other Christians, but perhaps more intently so because of their
willingness to risk their lives, were beloved and dutiful sons of God by adoption. God’s
begotten son, Christ Jesus, had had an earthly patrimony, the terra sancta, that it now

became the duty of his spiritual offspring to recover and defend.

Thibaud of Champagne fully accepts and articulates these notions.

The holy land is

‘the land where God died and lived’ (celle terre ou Dex fu mors et vis).

‘Anyone’,

sings the chansonnier, ‘who has pity and is mindful / Of the Supreme Lord (haut
seigneur), ought to seek vengeance / And deliver His land and His country’ (sa terre et

son paıs).

Elsewhere the Supreme (or perhaps better, Great) Lord who is God is, as

some translators read it, implicitly said to supplant earthly seigneurs. ‘Such a good lord’,
writes the poet in Kathleen Brahney’s translation, ‘I could never find on earth’ (Si bon

seigneur avoir je ne porroie).

Riley-Smith noticed, in a footnote, that a variant on this theme of love of patrimony as

an active principle in the crusades was the invocation of the desire to defend an

inheritance from the mother.

Thibaud does not invoke the love of the Holy Land as an

estate inherited from the Virgin, although he is tireless in addressing the Queen of
Heaven and imploring her help: ‘Sweet lady, crowned queen, / Pray for us, Virgin of

good fortune’ (Douce Dame

, roıne coronee, / priez pour nos, virge bone eurre).

Nowhere do I find, however, that the land (terre, paıs or contree) is conceived as
anyone else’s but the Virgin’s son’s or God the Father’s and, by implication, that of his

adopted sons, baronial crusaders, by right of inheritance in the male line.

As Riley-Smith made clear, the love that undergirded the crusades was not the love of

enemies as found in the quintessential Christian scriptural texts, and he goes to

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 180, 191.

Cf. Dijkstra, Chanson de croisade, 119–22.

Brahney, Lyrics, no. 53, stanza I, line 2. Future references to the Old French versions of the songs will be to

number, stanza and lines, common to both Wallenskold’s and Brahney’s editions. My quotations of the Old

French are to Brahney’s edition (which, as already remarked, differs from Wallenskold’s because of their
contrasting methods). The English translations here and elsewhere, unless otherwise remarked, are those on

facing pages in the Brahney edition. The songs are all undated, but Wallenskold conjectured (as had most
scholars before him; and Brahney concurs) that they have to date from between the time Thibaud declared
himself a crusader in 1230 and his departure to the East in August 1239. Then from internal evidence,

Wallenskold tried to make more precise approximations. No. 19 (not a chanson de croisade, but with
valuable information), he dated 1239–1240 (64); for no. 53, he could do no better than 1230–1239 (185).
Nos. 54 and 55 were more amenable to his techniques. He dated no. 54 (189) to June–August 1239 and no.
55 (193) to 20 March–August 1239.

No. 53, stanza I, lines 5–7.

No. 54, stanza IV, line 31. The modern French translation of Alexandre Micha (Thibaud de Champagne,

Recueil de chansons [Paris, 1991], 133) is to some extent more literal, ‘Je ne pourrai avoir un si bon

maıtre’, except maıtre does not capture the feudal terminology of the original seigneur like English ‘lord’;

Bedier’s modern French translation (194) retains seigneur. See also Routledge, ‘Songs’, 98, and Dijkstra,
Chanson de croisade, 159–63. Cf. the sentiment in a twelfth-century poem quoted by Riley-Smith, namely,
that ‘he who abandons his lord in need [Jesus whose land has fallen to the enemy] deserves to be
condemned’ (’Crusading as an act of love’, 181).

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 191 n. 95.

No. 53, stanza VI, lines 36–38.

For the usage haut Seigneur

... /... son paıs‘, see no. 53, stanza I, lines 6–7; for Biau sire Dex... /... la vostre

contree, see no. 53, stanza V, lines 33–34.

The representation of the crusades in the songs attributed to Thibaud, Count Palatine of Champagne 31

considerable length to show how difficult it was for a few senior churchmen to reconcile
an allegedly Christian love intended to bring death to enemies with an abstract Christian

love of enemies.

But he also stresses how routinely most of the creators of crusade

propaganda elided these difficulties. To get men to go on crusade, sermonizers
emphasized love of neighbours, of friends and of family, that is to say, love of
subjugated or threatened Christians in the Holy Land, and, without the least gesture

toward the injunction, ‘love your enemies’, lauded the justified slaughter of enemies.

He sees this slippage, this elision, in twelfth-century poets, too.

The songs of Thibaud, like the works of the propagandists and earlier poets, simply

accept the legitimacy of killing the enemies of Christ, the infidel possessors of the Holy

Land, the ‘black foreign dogs’, in the words of one of his predecessors.

Yet, one of the

most interesting passages in the entire corpus of Thibaud’s crusade chansons constructs
the image of a different kind of enemy, Christian enemies. These are internal or fraternal
enemies, ‘the snivelling, the cowardly’ (li morveus

, le cendreus) who ‘remain behind’

while ‘valiant knights (vaillant chevalier)... go forth / Those who love God and the

honour of this world’.

Snivelling and cowardly – these are the two words that open the

poet’s description of the Christian betrayers of the lord Jesus, those who will not fight
for God’s land.

The description continues. The snivelling cowards are blind (Avugle sont) – of that

Thibaud gives emphatic reference by explicitly declaiming his lack of doubt over the

issue (de ce ne dout je mie).

A blind, snivelling coward, he tells us, ‘never aids God

during his life / And for so little loses the glory of the world’.

There is something a bit

jarring at first about these various phrases. A baron who chooses not to go on crusade is
slurred both as a snivelling coward and as a blind man, that is, on the one hand as a
wilful betrayer and on the other as a strangely pathetic figure who scarcely sees in the
sense of understands the divine drama in which he might be privileged to play a virtuous
role. In fact, the explicit internal enemy, the cowardly baron, serves as a calque for a
different internal enemy, the Jew.

There is no doubt that Thibaud hated Jews. Contemporary documents attest to his hard

taxation. In this, perhaps, he was little different from contemporary lords. But in the
brutal threats of mutilation and murder of which he was accused, he exceeded his

contemporaries.

It would not be surprising that he used the derogatory images of Jews,

perhaps unconsciously, to tar the image of those barons who refused to accompany him
on crusade, snivelling cowards and blind, like Synagogue herself in common medieval
representations.

Before rejecting this interpretation as forced, let us look more closely at the

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 185–90.

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 190.

The phrase, cas negres outramaris, is from a song (ca. 1195) of the chansonnier, Gavaudan, quoted in

Routledge, ‘Songs’, 107.

No. 53, stanza III, lines 15–18.

No. 53, stanza III, line 19.

No. 53, stanza III, lines 20–21, qui un secors ne fet Dieu en sa vie

, / et por si pou pert la gloire du mont.

On these matters, see Jordan, French monarchy and the Jews, 99–102.

William Chester Jordan

continuation of the passage under discussion.

There is an abrupt change of tone as the

poet becomes historical. ‘God let himself suffer on the cross for us’, he sings. And then
he puts in the mouth of Jesus praises uttered at the Last Judgement – praises of those
‘who helped me carry my cross’. They ‘(w)ill go where my angels are; / There you will
see me and my mother, Mary’. But those who abandoned Christ (implicitly in Christ’s
own time), unrepentant Jews, were and their offspring remained, in the sensibilities of
the thirteenth-century economy of salvation, damned for eternity: ‘And you from whom
I never received aid, / Will all descend into the depths of Hell’. I do not believe that
anyone hearing this song could have failed to appreciate the anti-Jewish shaping of the
image of the blind, snivelling coward of a baron, one who, like the ancient Jews, should
have been of the familia of Christ but who ignored the suffering servant on the way to

Golgotha and was condemned, like Judas, to hell for his betrayal.

In a word, an

unwilling baron was the moral equivalent of a loathsome Jew.

So much for the self-sacrificing, if in Riley-Smith’s words ‘not truly Christian’, love

that undergirded the crusades in the minds of senior churchmen

and that, as I hope I

have shown, using Thibaud as an illustration, penetrated at least one aristocrat’s
sensibilities so strongly. The second point to be made is that despite this invocation of
love, there is a leitmotif as well in aristocratic sensibilities that bewails the sacrifices –
the sacrifice of petty concerns as well as, and more movingly, the sacrifice of other
forms of love. In other words, if, in Thibaud’s universe of sentiment, to go on crusade
meant the abandonment of physical or carnal love for the love of the Virgin and her son
and his country, still the intensified love of holy things never obliterated the sense of

loss: ‘one must win (conquerre) / Paradise by having discomfort (mesaise)’.

Typical of a lyric poet the fundamental loss the crusader endures and laments is the

abandonment of the physical love and intimacy of his lady.

‘Lady, my most desired

one, / I greet you from across the salty sea (d

’outre la mer salee), / As the one I think of

night and day, / So that no other thought gives me joy’.

The forfeiture of his lady and

of her love recoils on the knight who begins to loathe himself for subjecting himself (and
he generalizes to other crusaders) to a life lived apart from his lover: ‘God!’, he screams,
‘Why does the Holy Land exist (la terre d

’Outremer) / Which will separate so many

lovers / Who, afterward, will have no comfort from love’. Even the memories of the
sweet nights and embraces of tender love will fade (ne ne porent leur joie remenbrer) as
the reality of war and the unlikelihood of their return from battle impinge upon the

crusaders.

For a closely parallel discussion of the ‘chivalric’ passages that I have been discussing, see Routledge,

‘Songs’, 99. But Routledge does not mark the parallelism with images of Jews.

No. 53, stanza IV, lines 22–28.

No. 53, stanza IV, lines 22–28, Dex se lessa por nos en crioz pener

, / et nos dira au jor ou tuit vendront: /

‘Vous, qui ma croiz m’aidastes a porter, / vos en iroiz ou tuit me angre sont; / la me verroiz et ma mere,

Marie

. / Et vos, par qui je n’oi onques aıe, / decendrez tuit en Enfer le parfont’.

Riley-Smith, ‘Crusading as an act of love’, 185.

No. 55, stanza II, lines 23-24.

Routledge, ‘Songs’, 102–04.

No. 19, stanza VI, lines 41–44. For some useful complementary remarks on the song from which this

quotation comes, see Dijkstra, Chanson de croisade, 60–61.

No. 54, stanza I, lines 5–8.

The representation of the crusades in the songs attributed to Thibaud, Count Palatine of Champagne 33

The despair grows as the song continues. The knight cannot endure without the love

(sanz amor) of his lady. His thoughts have no object but his lost love. His heart, the seat
of his deepest emotional commitments (mes fins cuers), cannot forsake the lady of his
desires. Without her he has no solace, no joy, no nothing ( que puisse avoir bien ne solaz
ne joie). Sorrow overwhelms the crusader-lover. And, in a realistic psychological
flourish, he acknowledges that in remembering her ‘gracious words’ (debonaires diz) he

will repeatedly repent going on crusade (m

’en serai repentiz).

The image of the distraught love-lost crusader-knight in the song, conventional as it

is,

may be a bit heavy handed, but the poet cleverly narrates a scene of rededication

immediately afterwards. The crusader turns to God, reminds Him of his forsaking of
earthly love for Him (‘all I’ve ever loved’; ‘My heart and my joy’), but then

reconstitutes his homage and fealty.

‘I am ready’, he sings, ‘and armed to serve you; /

I render myself to you, good Father of Jesus Christ’.

Upon this rededication the two

emotions – joy and sadness – live within the knight. The joy of serving God and the
sadness at forsaking the lady of his desire together constitute a ‘love’ (

[i]ceste amor),

‘surpassingly true and powerful’ (trop fine et puissanz).

True sages (les plus sachanz)

follow the path of this chastening love that brings to the poet’s mind the image of ‘the
ruby, the emerald’, the magic gemstone that heals all wounds, all ‘ugly foul-smelling

sin’ ( guerist les vix pechiez puanz).

And, then, in another abrupt shift the chansonnier invokes the Blessed Virgin. Only

the mighty Queen of Heaven (Dame des ciex

, granz roine puissanz) can sustain his

consecration to the bittersweet but ennobling love that now suffuses him: ‘Greatly’, he
implores, ‘am I in need of succour’. That succour is Mary’s willingness to offer her
spiritual love to the crusader in order to fill the void created from forsaking the earthly
love of his lady. ‘May I be enflamed with love for you? / As I have lost a lady, by a lady

may I be helped’.

The parallelism with the loss of innocence through a lady (Eve) and

its recovery through Mary would have been evident to every listener.

In another song the poet expresses similar sentiments, but he goes further in

describing the reciprocal love between himself and the Blessed Virgin. He likens it to a
strong house into which one voluntarily enters, never wanting to escape; it is a prison

which one never wants to depart while yet alive.

The love he describes is the highest

form of friendship, for which death is a price well worth paying (ainz morrai loaix

No. 54, stanzas II and III, lines 10–24.

Alfred Jeanroy, Les Origines de la poesie lyrique en France au moyen age, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1925), 99–100.

The sentiment is the central theme of another song written by a contemporary of Thibaud who joined the

count on crusade; see Bedier and Aubry, Chansons de croisade, 209–13, and Dijkstra, Chanson de croisade,
59–60.

No. 54, stanza IV, lines 26 (tout

...ce que je tant amoie) and 28 (mon cuer et ma joie).

No. 54, stanza IV, lines 29–30, De vous servir sui touz prez et garniz

; / a vous me rent, biax Peres Jhesu

Criz!

No. 54, stanza V, line 37.

No. 54, stanza V, lines 37–40.

No. 54, stanza VI, lines 41–44. The Old French is not problematic. Brahney translates quant as ‘when’,

whereas I have modified it to ‘as’ in the clause ‘As I have lost a lady’. I think that this preserves the sense
slightly better.

No. 55, stanza IV, lines 30–31 (en l

’ostel, ce m’est a vis, / dont ja issir ne querroie) and 35 ( ja de prison

’istrai vis).

William Chester Jordan

amis).

The mercy and sheer delight of the blessed Queen of Heaven in her acts of

generosity bestow such bounties on the crusader that it would be the crassest folly (de

grant folie) to be found false to a love so sublime.

‘Song’, the poet commands,

personifying the genre itself, ‘proclaim the news’ (Chanc¸on

, va dire): tell other poets,

too, that they should not miss the opportunity to partake of and praise the love of the

heavenly mother for her sinful crusader and of that crusader for her.

Embedded in the chansons de croisade of Count Thibaud of Champagne is a series of

homilies elegantly crafted in order to seduce would-be crusaders into fighting in far-off
lands. Their responsibilty was scripted as a drama of recovery and love – recovery of the
patrimony of their good lord (and Lord) Jesus Christ. Failure to live up to this
responsibility was tantamount to repudiation of the Christian faith. The irresponsible
baron – the baron who did not fight on crusade – was the moral equivalent of a
perfidious Jew. To be sure, the sacrifice of spousal and companionate love in going on
crusade was real, but the willingness to suffer such sacrifice betokened the higher status
of the love owed one’s God and King. Ideology alone, of course – even though
articulated in the exquisite cadences of these songs – cannot explain the continuing
determination of men to go on crusade, but that the sentiments expressed in the songs
must be a significant aspect of any explanation does not seem to be a wholly idle
proposition. Crusading was, indeed, a very troubling, if to the poets a literally
enchanting, act of love.

No. 55, stanza IV, line 36. See also stanza V, lines 41–42 (si me vaut bien un morir / l

’amors qui m’asaut

souvent).

No. 55, stanza V, lines 43–45, and stanza VI, lines 47–49.

No. 55, stanza VI, line 46. The poet orders the ‘song’ to say this to a named poet, Lorent, whom I take to

stand for poets of these matters in general.

Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 35–56, 1999



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P I I : S 0 3 0 4 - 4 1 8 1 ( 9 8 ) 0 0 0 1 8 - 9

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Mothering in the Casa Datini

Joseph P. Byrne, Eleanor A. Congdon

Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw

, Kennesaw, Georgia, USA

Berkshire Community College

, 1350 West St., Pittsfield, MA 01201, USA

Abstract

The Datini archive in Prato, Italy, provides much detailed information about mothers and

children in a merchant-class household of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Tuscany.
Over some thirty years the childless Margherita Datini supervised and cared for children of
friends, relatives and business associates, and her husband’s illegitimate daughter. Letters,
household financial records, and Datini’s business ledgers reveal many aspects of the lives of
Margherita – as surrogate mother – and the children. The data show a fluid environment overseen
by a strong-willed and caring mistress.



Keywords

: Mothers; Children; Households; Datini; Merchant-class; Late-medieval Tuscany

During the later middle ages, one woman’s concern and care for the offspring of

another was a common phenomenon. Both societal and natural factors encouraged
surrogate-mothering practices including wet-nursing, fostering, and step-parenting. The
well-documented Tuscans of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries provide some of
the best information available about these child-rearing patterns. With the wealth of its

JOSEPH P. BYRNE began his work with the Datini archive during research for his dissertation, ‘Francesco

Datini, ‘‘Father of Many’’: Piety, Charity and Patronage in Early Modern Tuscany’ (Indiana University,
1989). He has published articles on Francesco’s participation in the Bianchi movement of 1399 and on the
Datini correspondence. He is currently preparing articles on Datini’s patronage of artists and of Tuscan
Franciscan communities. He is also preparing for publication translations of Marco and Francesco’s wills
and codicils. He is continuing research into Datini’s patronage of early Renaissance artists. His research has
been partly made possible by Kennesaw State University in Georgia.

ELEANOR A. CONGDON uses the Datini archive principally to study late-medieval commerce. Her

dissertation, ‘Venetian Mercantile Presence in the Western Mediterranean, 1398–1405’ (Gonville and Caius
College, University of Cambridge, 1997) looks at how some Venetians wanting to do business in
Aragon / Catalonia contacted, and even worked in partnership, with Datini personnel. She has published
articles on merchants’ use of correspondence to transmit news around 1400, Venetian private ships, the
Venetian merchant network in Syria around 1480, and on imperial commemoration and ritual in one
Byzantine church. She is continuing research on Venetian mercantile networks and private Venetian ships.
Her research on this project was conducted at the same time as her dissertation research, using grants from
the Ellen McArthur Fund and the Prince-Consort / Thirwall Fund, and continues today while she teaches at
Berkshire Community College in Massachusetts.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

surviving documentation, the household (casa) of Francesco (1335–1410) and Mar-
gherita (1360–1423) Datini, based in Prato and Florence, provides researchers with a
wide variety of mothering practices and experiences.

Francesco di Marco Datini was an innovative and successful international merchant

with a predilection for record-keeping. His desire that his heirs keep his personal and
business documents in his house after his death, and much good fortune over the
centuries, have resulted in the survival of over 151,000 letters and several hundred

record-books dating from the 1360s to 1411.

This treasure-trove was preserved

serendipitously by having been sealed away under a stairway in the palazzo that

Francesco built in the 1380s and 1390s. Today, scholars may consult these documents
in the part of this same house that serves as the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, sezione
Prato.

The Casa Datini flourished in a region and during a period that historians have

carefully explored for decades. Despite its value, however, few researchers travel to
Prato to use the Datini collection. Neither Italian nor international scholars have
published much of the material in Datini’s vast archive; the three collections of letters

that bear most directly on this paper are among the few exceptions. The reason for this
neglect is probably the collection’s nature; among all these documents, there is no single
account-book, series of accounts, or set of letters that recites all household expenditures,
features of family life, or even Datini’s business activities. The surviving volumes
overlap, duplicate each other, and contain significant gaps in coverage. Family members
and employees kept household financial records in a great many account books – many

of which included ricordi or ricordanze

– and even scattered throughout the Datini

companies’ ledgers. As a whole – and not withstanding the best efforts of the archivists
– the Datini collection is a difficult maze in which to find information.

The most important published work about the Datini household remains Iris Origo’s

Federigo Melis, Aspetti della vita economica medievale

: Studi nell’archivio Datini di Prato (Siena, 1962), 10,

17–25. The count is not complete because of the number of unidentified fragments and the size of the
collection. Datini’s will is published in: Cesare Guasti, Lettere di un notaro ad un mercante del secolo XIV,
vol. 1 (Florence, 1880), cxi; and Cesare Guasti, Lettere di un notaro ad un mercante del secolo XIV, vol. 2
(Florence, 1880), 273–310. It is translated in: Joseph Byrne, ‘Francesco Datini, ‘Father of Many’: Piety,
charity and patronage in early modern Tuscany’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Indiana University, 1989).

The story of the collection’s survival is related in: Melis, Aspetti, 7–8; Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, ii–iv; Enrico

Bensa, Francesco di Marco da Prato

: Notizie e documenti sulla mercatura italiana del secolo xiv, (Milan,

1928), 2–3; Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato (London and New York, 1957; Milan 1959), 7–8; Gaetano
Corsani, ‘I fondaci e i banchi di un merchante Pratese dell Trecento: Contributo alla storia della ragioneria e
del commercio da lettere e documenti inediti,’ Archivio Storico Pratese, supplemento 2 (1922), 1.

The first of these to be published was Guasti, Lettere. It contains the letters of Datini’s notary and friend,

Lapo Mazzei. Valeria Rosati published Margherita’s letters in installments in the Archivio Storico Pratese in
1974 and 1976; these were then reprinted as a complete set as, Le lettere di Margherita Datini a Francesco
di Marco, vol. 2 of Biblioteca del Archivio Storico Pratese (Prato, 1977). Aside from the odd textual note,
the letters are not annotated. Elena Cecchi has recently published an edition of Francesco’s letters to his
wife: Elena Cecchi, Le lettere di Francesco Datini alla moglie Margherita

1385 –1410), vol. 14 of

Biblioteca del Archivio Storico Pratese (Prato, 1990). Cecchi and Rosati include 424 of the roughly 10,000
non-commerce-oriented letters in the Datini collection; citations for these documents will refer to the
respective printed edition instead of the archival notation.

Ricordanze, or ricordi were short written accounts of important events in the life of an individual or family in

later medieval Italy. These were often kept in one or more large books. They constitute one of the best types
of source for information on personal and family issues during the period.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

The Merchant of Prato. The Archive’s staff continue informally (and rather bitterly) to
characterise the book as un romanzo because of its lack of scholarly rigour. For the
serious student it has two principal flaws: (1) it includes many undocumented or poorly
referenced citations to archival material; and (2) it unfairly characterises certain
members of the Casa Datini without sufficient evidence, especially Margherita, who
comes across as a bitter, shrewish woman hardly capable of love. Origo was writing for
the popular market, not for scholars. She hired several Italians to do her research for her;
she based her portrait of the Datini household on this limited, although well handled,
exploration of the archive’s contents. She glorified the collection without an intimate
personal familiarity with it. The fact that at least one document upon which she relied
heavily – the book of ricordanze that covered the years 1386–1388, which she cites as
Quadernaccii e memoriale di Francesco di Marco proprii

, Quadernaccio A (1386 –

1388) – cannot be located by the archive’s staff makes trust in her conclusions more
difficult. Nevertheless, Origo’s book is almost the only non-Italian-language monograph
on the Datini companies and household. Most English-language discussions of Tuscan
social history which mention Datini and his family have relied, uncritically, on Origo.
Recently, interest in Datini seems to be increasing; the number of English-speaking

researchers studying his papers also seems to be increasing, albeit slowly.

The Casa Datini existed, as a documented household, between 1376 and 1411. At

various times, it consisted of, besides Francesco and Margherita, his illegitimate
daughter Ginevra, friends, relatives, children, staff, and members of his companies.
These people followed as the couple moved between Avignon, Prato, Florence, Pistoia,
and Bologna. The household was not an entity defined by the Datini palazzo in Prato. It
disappears from the historical record with Margherita’s death in 1423, after thirteen
years of widowhood. Its only known descendant was a grand-daughter, Brigida,

The original English and Italian editions included many more citations than the revised edition first printed by

Penguin Books in 1963 and still widely available. In 1986, David R. Godine Inc. reprinted the text and
citation in its 1957 format, with the addition of a forward by Barbara Tuchman. In this article, references to
Origo will refer to the page numbers in the Godine edition.

The following is a list of the works from the last two and a half decades which use material about the Datinis

in discussions of social issues entirely or partly based on Origo, or specifically in reaction to her. Joseph
Byrne, ‘Reading the medieval woman’s voice: reflections on the letters of Margherita Datini, an Italian
housewife on the eve of the Renaissance’, West Georgia Review, 25 (1995), 5–13; Joseph Byrne, ‘Crafting
the merchant’s wife’s tale: Historians and the correspondence of Margherita Datini’, Journal of the Georgia
Association of Historians, 17 (1996), 1–17; Philip Gavitt, Charity and children in Renaissance Florence

The Ospedale degli Innocenti

, 1410 –1536 (Ann Arbor, 1990); Frances and Joseph Gies, ‘Margherita Datini:

An Italian merchant’s wife’, in: Women in the middle ages (New York, 1978), 184–209; Louis Haas,
‘Women and childbearing in medieval Florence’, in: Medieval family roles

: A book of essays, ed. Cathy J.

Itnyre (New York, 1996), 87–99; David Herlihy, ‘Women and the sources of medieval history: The towns of
northern Italy’, in: Medieval Women and the Sources of Family History, ed. Joel Rosenthal (Athens GA,
1990) 133–154 [reprinted in David Herlihy, Women

, Family and Society in Medieval Europe: Historical

Essays

1978 –1991 (Providence, 1995), 13–32]; Thomas Kuehn, Law, family, and women: Toward a legal

anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London, 1991), 363; Lauro Martines, ‘A way of looking at
women in the Italian Renaissance’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 4 (1974), 15–28; James
Bruce Ross, ‘The middle class child in urban Italy, fourteenth to sixteenth century’, in: The history of
childhood, ed. Lloyd de Mause (New York, 1974), 183–228; Natalie Tomas,

‘A Positive Novelty’: Women

and public life in Renaissance Florence (Monash Publications in History: 12, Victoria, Australia, 1992),
14–26; Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980), esp. 132–158.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

presumably orphaned, mentioned as living in a surrogate family in 1427. Throughout
the history of the Casa Datini, Margherita was the centre of the household, dominating
the day-to-day activities of the people who made up the famiglia. Francesco, on the
other hand, was the founder and force behind the Datini commercial enterprises and
wealth; through his professional contacts and his promiscuity, he created the household’s
many instances of surrogate mothering.

The Datini history of foster-mothering began with Francesco himself. He was born in

Prato around 1335. In 1348, the Black Death claimed his father Marco – a taverner –
and mother Mona Vermiglia. Within Prato, his orphaning was not unusual; Klapisch-
Zuber found that the plague’s initial episode, and return visits throughout the second half
of the fourteenth century, reduced the number of households in the town by over seventy

percent. Marco Datini’s will and codicil appointed the cloth merchant Piero di Giunta

del Rosso of Prato to be guardian of his children and administrator of their inheritance.
Mona Piera di Pratese Boschetti, whose blood-relationship to the family is unknown and
who is not mentioned in the will, took Francesco and his surviving brother, Stefano, into
her home after their parents’ deaths. Francesco’s later correspondence shows that he had
at least one aunt, and perhaps other relatives in Prato, with whom both Mona Piera and

Piero were close friends, but who played no discernible role in raising the boys.
Francesco formed strong emotional bonds with Mona Piera and the family of Piero di
Giunta del Rosso. After he left Prato for Florence in 1349, and then left Tuscany in 1350
to pursue a career in Avignon, he often wrote letters to Mona Piera in which he affirmed
that he loved her as he would his own mother. He asked her for advice on such matters
as how to find a wife, shared with her his personal joys such as when he settled on the
girl he would marry, and endured a barrage of letters which demanded that he return

home to Prato and start a family.

No documentation remains that specifies how much

of a role Piero di Giunta played in finding either Francesco’s apprenticeship in Florence
or his position in Avignon, or whether he played a significant role in the young man’s
slow rise to financial security through traffic in a wide variety of goods, including
armour, religious art-works, salt, and cloth. The quality of Francesco’s relationship with
Piero’s family, however, is suggested by Francesco’s life-long friendship and commer-

Guasti, Lettere, xlvii–xlviii.

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Demographic decline and household structure: the example of Prato, late

fourteenth to late fifteenth centuries’, in: Women

, family and ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), 26.

These are published in: Enrico Bensa, ‘Il testamento di Marco Datini’, Archivio Storico Pratese, 5 (1924),

74–79; Renato Piattoli, ‘Codicillo al testamento di Marco Datini’, Archivio Storico Pratese, 7 (1927),
20–23. The codicil survives as: Florence, Archivio di Stato, Diplomatico R. Aug. Verzoni–Muzzarelli, 19
June 1348.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1114, letter Avignon to Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini to Mona

Piera, 22 March 1372: . . . e chosi quello di Monna Agiuole di ser Biagio e di Mona Christiana e di Mona
Tina mia zia.

Note: throughout this article we will present the Italian as it appears in the primary documents – without

corrections or modernisations.

For example: Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1114, letter Avignon to Prato, Francesco di Marco

Datini to Mona Piera, 7 March 1371, 28 August 1376; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1101,
letters Prato to Avignon, Mona Piera to Francesco di Marco Datini; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini
carteggio 1101, letters Prato to Avignon, Nicolozzo di Ser Naldo to Francesco di Marco Datini; Origo,
Merchant, 20–29; Melis, Aspetti, 45–46.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

cial association with his son Niccolo, and the fact that Piero’s nephew Lionardo
eventually became Francesco’s son-in-law.

Margherita was the youngest of Domenico Bandini’s seven children. Her mother,

Dianora, was from the noble Gherardini family of Florence.

Her father apparently was

a disaffected Florentine Ghibelline in a very Guelf world. His participation in a plot
against the powerful Parte Guelfa resulted in his proscription in 1358 and execution by
the state two years later. Gene Brucker describes the episode as a minor action against

the sitting government.

Francesco, ill-informed or possibly influenced by current

anti-Florentine sentiment in papal Avignon, says, when describing Margherita to Mona
Piera, ‘[Domenico] had his head cut off in Florence some time ago, for having been

accused of wishing to hand it [Florence] over to our Lord [the Pope]’.

After

Domenico’s death, Dianora and her children lived in exile in the papal city of Avignon –
home of many other politically disaffected fuorusciti from Tuscany, as well as of
merchants, clerics, and fortune hunters. While Margherita’s sex and her mother’s nobility
would suggest that she ought to have been wet-nursed and weaned away from the
household, her family’s hardships almost certainly made this impossible. Its poverty – a
result of the confiscation of Bandini’s property in Florence – is evident in the absence of

a dowry for Margherita.

In August 1376, when he arranged his marriage to the sixteen-year old Margherita,

Francesco was about forty years of age and a successful merchant. While this had been a
typical age for a first marriage for a Pratese male during the late thirteenth century, by
the 1370s, thanks in large part to the Black Death and its continued recurrences, the

average age had dropped to twenty-four years for men (sixteen for women).

This

certainly explains his Pratese friends’ concern for his extended bachelorhood, and their
joy at his eventual marriage. Francesco had every right to expect that his and
Margherita’s would be a large family. He had already proven his potency by siring a
bastard son. All that is known about this child is that he was born in the summer of 1375
and died the following January; Mona Piera greeted the baby’s arrival joyfully (although
she could not help but add that Francesco ought to beget a legitimate heir), and mourned

Origo, Merchant, 26; Melis, Aspetti, 48; Bensa, Francesco, 27; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio

1114, letter Avignon to Prato, Fograncesco di Marco Datini to Mona Piera, 28 August 1376:

Io credo che dio ordine quando naqua esio dovese avere mogle che fose fiorentina e pertanto io credo

averlla vol[u]ta una fanculla ch’a nome Margherita...La Madre di questa fanculla a nome Mona
Dianore, seroche

hsic; Bensa suggests ‘sirocchia’j del pelica hsicj Gherardini; rimase di questo

Domenicho 3 fanculle e 3 figliuoli... [one sibling had already died.]

Bensa transcribes this same passage and modernises the Italian. His efforts, however, are not above question:
he writes ‘Lianora’ instead of ‘Dianora’. His solution to the problem of ‘pelica’ is interesting and possibly
correct: he suggests that it is a personal name, ‘Pellicia’; the significance of the reference, however, is not
clarified by this solution.

Gene Brucker, Florentine politics and society

, 1343 –1378 (Princeton, 1962), 185–6.

Origo, Merchant, 26; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1114, letter Avignon to Prato, Francesco di

Marco Datini to Mona Piera, 28 August 1376:

...la quale (Margherita) fue figliola di Domenicho Bandini al quale fue tagliate la testa a Firenza giafe piu

tenpo che fue acholpato che vole a dare Firenze a nostro Signore.

In his will, Francesco clearly states that Margherita brought no dowry to her marriage; Byrne, ‘Father’, 352;

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 2, 286.

Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Demographic decline’, 27–29.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

his early death.

Margherita’s potential child-bearing capability was suggested by the

fact that Mona Dianora had borne seven living children. The couple, however, was to be
disappointed; despite good advice, quack cures, false alarms, and a deep desire on her

part, Margherita proved barren.

Although the topic rarely surfaces in the letters

between them, a critical tension in the household must have been her inability to
conceive. The prescriptive, moralistic and personal writings of the period stress the
importance of bearing and raising children for members of middle and upper classes.
The Christian perspective of the married woman’s role as mother and the procreative
imperative behind licit sexual activities both encouraged conception and child-raising.
Molho has suggested that the Black Death and its recurrences created a secular ‘natalist

mentality’ that encouraged reproduction among Tuscans.

More powerful, perhaps, was

the social pressure on women of the upper classes to provide their mates with heirs.
Klapisch-Zuber declares that, ‘the mistress of the household, we may state, has no other

mission than the governing of her little world and the procreation of children’.

The

Casa Datini, however, was destined to be populated with other women’s children.

In spite of her failure to bear Francesco a child, Margherita’s world still centred

around the household, children, and women. During the long years when she tried
numerous cures and urged Datini to return to her and her bed, and the many
disappointments, as mistress of the household Margherita was rarely without children in
need of her attention. The offspring of relatives, friends, servants, and business
associates, and sometimes the children’s mothers, populated her house and absorbed her
extra energies and affections. David Herlihy, in a discussion of the structure of late
medieval Tuscan households based on the Florentine catasto of 1427, noted the
frequency of this practice,

...the poorer households were consigning many of their children into the care of the
wealthy... Wealthy households were carrying, as it were, disproportionate numbers of
the community’s children during the dangerous years of early life. This top quartile

was rearing nearly one-half of the children.

A sympathetic reading of Margherita’s many letters to Francesco on matters relating to
children, and the testimony of others, show that she conscientiously cared for the
members of her household. Part of this concern, undoubtedly, was anxiety about the
image that the Casa Datini presented to society through these children and women. Part,
however, seems to have been genuine affection.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1101, letter Prato to Avignon, Mona Piera to Francesco di Marco

Datini, 29 January 1376, 6 March 1376; Origo, Merchant, 25.

Origo, Merchant, 165–168; Haas, ‘Women and Childbearing’, 88–91; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta

212, Spese di Casa 1394–5 and 1397.

Anthony Molho, Marriage alliance in late medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 27–28.

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Women servants during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,’ in: Women and

work in preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington, 1986), 69. Natalie Tomas, however,
skillfully shows that Margherita played an important role in Francesco’s business by supplying him with
local information and acting as his agent to certain important people who could influence such things as his
tax assessment: Tomas, Positive Novelty, esp. 20–26.

David Herlihy, Medieval households (Cambridge MA, 1985), 153–154.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

Margherita and Francesco first took on the responsibilities of foster parenting soon

after their wedding in Avignon. In August 1377, one of Datini’s associates, Bonacorso di
Vanni da Prato, died while on a business trip in Rome. His will appointed Francesco to

be the guardian of Bonacorso’s four young children.

Their mother, Caterina, was still

alive, although it is unclear from the documentation whether she lived in the Casa Datini
along with her children. It is unlikely that she was separated from them completely while
they lived with Francesco and Margherita. In August 1379, Francesco wrote to Mona
Piera, saying:

I am still the guardian of the four children of the late Bonacorso di Vanni, brother of
Mona Agostanza. Their father strongly commended them to me both orally and in

writing and left me [as in a bequest] as their guardian.

By January 1380 only the eldest, Maddalena, was still resident in the Datini household;

the others had returned to their mother.

Datini continued to watch over Maddalena’s

needs and her assets until she was married in September 1382. He probably chose her
husband, carried out the marriage negotiations, and saw to it that her wedding gown of

red woollen fabric was properly becoming to her.

Margherita’s role as foster-mother to

the children is not documented by the records; at seventeen when Bonacorso’s children
first moved in, she was only a few years older than Maddalena. Nonetheless, she must
have learned much about fostering other people’s children during the five years that they
lived in her house.

In early 1383, Francesco and Margherita returned to Tuscany; Margherita soon

gathered around her the women and children – some who worked for her, some who
were related, and a few who were just friends – who would form her brigata over the
coming years. The next recorded child to enter her world was her niece Caterina,

daughter of her sister Francesca and Niccolo di Ammanato Tecchini. This Caterina first

Origo claims, although on what grounds is not specified, that these children were not legitimate: Origo,

Merchant, 190.

About his fulfilling of his friends’ bequest, Francesco wrote to Mona Piera:

La chagione di questa lettera si e per mandare chon essa una lettera che va a Mona Aghostanza Pinzochera,

figliuola che fu di Vanni per la quale lettera la significho la morte di Bonachurso suo fratello lo quale e
morte a Roma a di 27 agosto. Io la significho de’fatti suoi di qua pero che ne so e grande parte perche
detto Bonachurso m’amore forte e de lui e suo prochuratore mi lascia quando di que parti e
rachomandomi 4 sue fancielle che gle nostro Signore a be’ miserichordia della sua anima, che buono
uomo...

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1114, letter Avignon to Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini to Mona
Piera, 22 September 1377.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1114, letter Avignon to Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini to Mona

Piera, 21 August 1379:

Io sono rimaso ghovernatore delle quatro fanculle [e] figliuole che furono di Bonachorso di Vanni fratello

di Monna Aghostanza. Il padre loro me le rachomando forte e a bocha e per scrita. e a lasciatomi loro
prochuratore...

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1114, letter Avignon to Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini to Mona

Piera, 20 January 1380:

la magiore fanculla ch’e una bella e buona figliuola...e l’altra [si] ghoverna la madre.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 214, filza 3, Spese di Casa 1384–1392, f. 4v:

4 octobre 1382: pan[n]o rosato di Bersela de picholi per una chotandita per la Madelena quando si

sposa–£12.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

appears in Margherita’s letters to Francesco in 1385 when she is described as being

well.

Five years later, her age still unrevealed by the sources, Caterina was resident in

Prato with Margherita instead of with her parents in Florence. Margherita relates to
Francesco how, when they were out together one day, the precocious girl was asked
whose daughter she was and she promptly replied that she was the daughter of
Francesco di Marco Datini. Margherita continued, possibly with a smile, ‘she has more

arrogance than you and would be better off with her mama’.

Despite Caterina’s

troublesomeness, or at least high spirits, Margherita seems to have enjoyed her presence
and cared about her; she remained within the brigata until at least 1396. As the Tecchini
fortunes gradually declined, Margherita does not seem to have resented paying some of

Caterina’s expenses; in 1396 Niccolo di Ammanato felt sure enough of his sister-in-

law’s good-will to ask her to cover his daughter’s expenses for attending a festival.
Francesco and Margherita may have helped to find a job for her when she reached a
suitable age. By 1401, when her own mother died and her father looked as if he too
would pass away, Caterina was a maid in the Florentine household of Tomaso Piaciti,
who was one of Datini’s business acquaintances. Her plea to Francesco and Margherita
after her mother’s death was appropriate for a poor but beloved relation; she professed to
love them as if they were truly her parents and hoped that they would treat her as their

own child.

Her hope for their protection was not disappointed. Francesco arranged for

Caterina to marry Luca del Sera when he moved home from Valencia in order to become

the partner in charge of Datini’s Florentine office in 1403; he also provided her dowry.
In addition, he gave her an expense account with which to pay off her accrued debts to

Piaciti.

Francesco di Marco’s lifelong friend, Niccolo di Piero di Giunta, also had a daughter

named Caterina – usually called Tina in the records – who frequented the Datini
household. She first appears in the brigata when, as a young child, she accompanied
Francesco and Margherita to Pistoia in order to escape an outbreak of plague in 1390.
Her conscientious father periodically sent her new clothes while she was away from

Prato, instead of taking advantage of Datini’s generosity.

Margherita was quite fond of

Rosati, Lettere, 18.

Rosati, Lettere, 52; Origo, Merchant, 195.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1103, letter Florence to Prato, Niccolo di Ammanato Tecchini to

Margherita Datini, 5 June 1396.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1103, letter Florence to Bologna, Caterina di Niccholo di

Ammanato Tecchini to Francesco di Marco Datini, 10 July 1401:

Charisimo padre, sempre v’o abiato a ticiuto [accetato?] per padre e chosi Mona Margherita per madre, e

pregovi per amore di Messer Domenedio che ora piu che mai mi dobiate acutare [acietare?] per figuolla
chosiderate el mio bisognio e i’o grande fidacua in voi.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 614, Francesco di Marco Proprio, f. 110v, 20 May 1403:

Richordanza che Lucha del Sera stava per noi a Valenza a di 20 di magio 1403 chol nome di dio e

salvamento d’anima e di chorpo chon promise e giuro la Chaterina figluola di Nicholo del Amanato la
quale abbiamo in chasa charta per mano di Ser Lapo Mazi.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 598, Libro Nero A, f. 93v, 1403:

Mona Chaterina figuola di Nicholo del Amanate e dona del Lucha del Sera de e dare di 12 luglio £600

prometemo per lei a Lucha del Sera suo marito per la dota sua in queste.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 598, Libro Nero A, f. 94r, 18 September 1403.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1099, letter Prato to Pistoia, Niccolo di Piero di Giunta to

Francesco di Marco, 29 July 1390:

mando vi 2 chamicie che m’adatte Mona Simone per la Chaterina e piu una paio di pianella per detta

Chatterina.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

Tina and her mother Mona Simona.

In August 1395, she wrote to Francesco, ‘Niccolo

di Piero came here on Sunday in order to collect Tina so that they could go to the
Ghonfienti festival; I didn’t want to let her go because I am alone and because you aren’t

here’.

Tina ceased being a regular member of the Casa Datini sometime before 1400.

In that year she did not accompany the Datini household to Bologna to escape a
recurrence of the plague but remained instead with her family; it was she who wrote to

Francesco and Margherita with the news of her father’s death.

Datini’s ricordanze do

not indicate Tina’s fate after this date. He did not have to look after her marriage or
other arrangements because she had many relatives and because her father had been able
to flourish financially during the difficult 1390s. If Tina stayed in Prato it is likely that
she remained in contact with Margherita.

Margherita fostered both Caterinas, individually and together, for long periods as part

of her household despite the fact that their parents were alive. The exact dates when each
was resident in the Casa Datini cannot be established because they were not always
named specifically but instead were included within Margherita’s brigata. They are very
difficult to separate in the records, except when their parents’ names are mentioned,
because of their identical Christian names and because Margherita and Francesco did not
consistently use nick-names for either of them. Margherita’s treatment of them
apparently did not differ even though they were related to her in different ways. As their
surrogate mother, when they were under her roof she provided for all their needs; the
household expenses from 1397–1400 show similar numbers of undergarments, shoes,

gowns, and other goods bought for ‘Caterina’ as for Francesco’s daughter.

In 1397,

Margherita sent a particularly biting letter to Francesco about the need to make a gown
for Caterina that was befitting to her as a member of the Casa Datini; the reproach
directed at him for the poor quality of the fabric, in comparison with the new gown of
Stroza di Carlo’s daughter, indicates her concern for the image that one of her brigata

presented to Pratese society.

Both Caterinas learned how to read and write, although

whether they did this in the Casa Datini is not established. Margherita learned how to
read and write from the family friend and notary Ser Lapo Mazzei around 1396; this
would have been a good opportunity for the Caterinas although the documentation does
not support or deny their participation in her lessons.

Two other little girls were also attached to Margherita’s brigata for various lengths of

time. Madonna first appears in the household expenses in 1397 when she received
several articles of clothing. She may have been in the household longer than this,
however, hidden and nameless within the group of children for whom Margherita

Origo, Merchant, 198.

Rosati, Lettere, 114.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1103, letter Prato to Bologna, Tina di Nicolo di Piero in Prato to

Francesco di Marco, 3 August 1400.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 212, Spese di Casa 1394–5, 1397, f. 20r, 20v and 21v:

20r: Pani si darano di 17 di magio 1397: 3 chamice di Mona Margherita, 3d; 2 camice dela Ginevra, 2d; 2

camice dela Caterina, 2d.

20v: Pani si darano di 30 di giugno 1397: 4 chamice di Mona Margherita, 4d; 9 chamice di queste

fanciulle, 9d; 1 guarnello della Chaterina, 2d; 2 chamice della Chaterina, 2d; 2 chamice della Ginevra,
2d;.... 2 chamice di Madonna, 1 chamice di Ginevra, 1 chamice de la Chaterina.

21r: lana pani...11 d’agosto 1397: 1 guarnella della Chaterina, 4d; 6 chamicie di Franciesco, 6d; 5 chamicie

della Chaterina, 6d; 4 chamicie della Ginevra, 5d; 3 bavarelli della Ginevra [..].

Rosati, Lettere, 209.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

provided various items of clothing.

The Casa Datini continued to care for her long past

her childhood; between February and April 1408, one ledger records a series of
payments to her by Francesco after the birth of her child; his justification for these is not

recorded.

The other child under Margherita’s supervision for a while was Nanna,

daughter of the Casa Datini’s servants Meo and Mona Domenica. Margherita did satisfy
her needs for clothing, although not as lavishly as for relatives’ children; Nanna was,
after all, part of the brigata that surrounded Margherita and displayed her social

station.

Nanna accompanied Francesco and Margherita to Bologna in 1400–1 when

they moved in order to avoid another outbreak of the plague.

After the journey, she too

disappears from the household records.

For these four children, Margherita acted as a mother, teaching, providing for, and

apparently enjoying their company. Two other children, however, entered this world:
Francesco’s illegitimate offspring. Their presence could only have reminded her of her
inability to bear her husband’s children. Sexual activity outside the conjugal bed was by
no means unknown among males of Datini’s class. Like many, Francesco was away
from that bed for months at a time; moralists and his wife’s relatives notwithstanding,
few contemporaries would have condemned his extra-marital activities. He clearly
consorted with at least two women besides his wife during his marriage. The two
resulting children began their lives outside the Datini household cared for by wet-nurses.
Although the boy died early, the girl, Ginevra, eventually entered the famiglia and thus
provides an example of the mistress of the household acting as step-mother.

The boy, Francesco’s second illegitimate son, was born on 6 September 1387. Origo

must be relied upon for most of the information about this child because she culled her
details about this child from a ledger (Quadernaccio A) which is now missing from the
Datini collection. The mother was a servant-girl of whom Datini had written to
Margherita three years earlier, ‘Ghirigora is a girl of little sense: don’t let her out of your

sight’.

Sexual relations between masters and servants were not uncommon in Tuscan

society of this period: according to Richard Trexler, the resulting children made up a
large part of the children abandoned to foundling homes while the rest were raised as

bastards among the legitimate children.

Francesco’s response to his servant’s preg-

nancy was to marry her off quickly, during her third month, to a young merchant who
sometimes worked for the Datini companies. A ricordanza memorialised the solution to
Ghirigora’s problem: ‘on March 11, 1387, I gave in marriage Ghirigora, who lives with

me – that is, I signed her marriage contract with Cristofano di Mercato di Prato.’

The

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 212, Spese di Casa 1394–5 and 1397, f. 20v and 21v, 17 May 1397, 30

June 1397, 5 November 1397.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 213, Spese di Casa 1408–9, f. 9r–12r. During February and March

1409, Francesco made eight payments totalling 25s 2d.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 218, filza 1401, Spese di Casa, 17 September 1401:

per tre paia di scharpette nero, uno per Ginevra, uno per la Nana, uno per [Margherita] s17.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 613, Quadernaccio Francesco di Marco da Prato proprio, f. 60r, 27 June

1400; Melis, Aspetti, 56–7.

Cecchi, Lettere, 34; Origo, Merchant, 174.

Richard Trexler, ‘The foundlings of Florence, 1395–1455’, The history of childhood quarterly, 1 (1973),

262; Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Women Servants’, 70.

Origo, Merchant, 174.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

sources do not reveal whether her future husband realized that she was already pregnant.
Francesco provided her with a dowry of 165 florins in cash and forty-five florins worth

of clothing and household goods.

According to Klapisch-Zuber, many young Tuscan

women entered domestic service during the later fourteenth century in order to obtain a
dowry; the amount they typically received, however, was about eighty lire (around

twenty florins in 1400).

The amount of Ghirigora’s dowry, therefore, suggests either

that Francesco was being uncharacteristically generous, or that he had to convince
Cristofano to take her as his wife. As soon as the child was born, Datini arranged for
him to be baptised. Francesco noted in a ricordanza that ‘[Ghirigora] says he is the child

of Francesco di Marco [Datini]’.

While the child may not actually have been his, his

willingness to record the event in the manner that he did, and subsequent references to
the child as il fanciullo mio indicate his own belief in his paternity.

Datini immediately arranged for the child to be nursed by the wife of Prato’s miller.

By the mid-fourteenth century, the practice of putting a child out to nurse with a balia

was quite common among the Tuscan middle and upper classes.

This custom gave the

mistress of the household greater freedom to pursue her duties and responsibilities on
behalf of the famiglia; it also made her re-impregnation more likely because the act of
nursing is a very effective form of birth-control. According to Klapisch-Zuber, masters
had enough control over the members of their households to rent out lactating servants
as balie after their own children died, were abandoned, or were sent off to another

nurse.

Ghirigora, however, no longer remained in Datini’s household after her

marriage, and her child survived birth. Why Francesco arranged for its suckling under
the circumstances, except possibly out of fatherly concern, is uncertain since the child
and mother were now another man’s responsibility owing to marriage. Maybe Ghirigora
refused to suckle the child in order to hire herself out as a balia: Ross cites several
Florentine ricordanze in which payments to balie ranged between four and six lire per
month, while Klapisch-Zuber, using a different set of evidence, says that country nurses

received between nine and fifteen florins a year.

Francesco may have retained enough

control over her because of her dowry to enforce a desire to separate mother and son.

Perhaps he believed that an older woman’s milk would be better for the boy. Maybe he
wanted to control with whom the child bonded, or it is possible that he made these
arrangements simply because they were customary. It seems clear, however, from
Francesco’s level of interference, that he intended to establish custody and raise the boy
as his own.

Francesco made all the necessary arrangements throughout the child’s nursing.

Besides paying for the balia, he also supplied the baby’s clothing needs. He sent a
number of swaddling bands, a cover for the cradle, and a pillow to the miller’s wife for

Origo, Merchant, 175, 302.

Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Women Servants’, 68, 74.

Origo, Merchant, 175.

Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Blood parents and milk parents: wet nursing in Florence, 1300–1530’, in:

Women

, family and ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), 133. Also on this subject, see Shulamith

Shahar, Childhood in the middle ages (New York, 1990), esp. 53–76.

Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Blood Parents’, 141.

Ross, ‘Middle-class child’, 188, 190–2; Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Blood Parents’, 136.

Shahar, Childhood, 56.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

the child.

Providing clothes for a baby when sending it to the balia was customary in

Tuscany; the amount and type depended on the family. Ross notes the items which
Antonio Rustichi – a modest man from a great Florentine family – sent along with his

son Lionardo: lined cloaks, bibs, shirts, robes, and caps.

Fancy wardrobes such as this

one were probably more a means of displaying affluence than providing the child with
usable clothes. By contemporary standards, the small number and value of items
provided by Francesco were appropriate to the child’s illegitimacy.

Francesco kept close watch on the health of the wet-nurse and of the baby. After the

baby had spent three months with the miller’s wife, he decided to change the balia. His
records give no reason for the move; he might have believed that the excellence of her
milk was declining, or the impetus may have come from the woman herself. The quality
of the balia and of her milk, as Margherita explained to Francesco almost ten years later,
had to be very carefully and constantly watched, if the parents wanted the child to
survive. In 1397 the grave condition of Barzalone di Spedalieri’s child provoked an
outburst from her about women who provided milk for children for too long or went for
too long between nursing children: they were dangerous to use as wet-nurses lest the

child be virtually poisoned by their milk.

Changing the balia apparently was not

uncommon. According to Klapisch-Zuber, an average Tuscan child nursed for a year and
a half, and then was weaned over a period of several months. In a study of 318
Florentine babies nursed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, she found that the
average stay with a balia was ten months, or about half the time needed to bring the
child to the age of weaning. She also found that one third of the babies had two nurses,

while eight percent had three.

The second nurse which Francesco chose lasted only ten

days; the third, two and a half months. Unfortunately for Francesco, the unnamed boy
died on 6 March 1388 in Prato after contracting ‘the accursed sickness’ at six months of
age. This child was later re-buried in a grave beside his father inside the church of San

Francesco.

What of Margherita’s response to her husband’s illegitimate child? The records are

silent. During the child’s last months, Margherita was living in Florence; Francesco was
drawn back to Prato from Pisa by the news of the baby’s illness. Margherita’s silence is

probably explained by the fact that she herself was sick at this time.

She did, however,

make a gesture of grief after the child had died by making a coverlet for it and giving

twenty-five lire on Ghirigora’s behalf to the nuns of Sanmichele.

The story of Ghirigora has an epilogue. In 1390, the Datini household moved to

Pistoia in order to escape a particularly virulent outbreak of the plague. While there,

Francesco received a letter from Niccolo di Piero di Giunta in Prato informing him that
Cristofano di Mercato, Ghirigora’s husband, was dying and that she was suckling a child

and would need help if her husband passed away. Niccolo reminded Datini that he had

Origo, Merchant, 175.

Ross, ‘Middle-class child’, 191, 195.

Rosati, Lettere, 174.

Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Blood Parents’, 145, 153–4.

Origo, Merchant, 175.

Cecchi, Lettere, 49.

Origo, Merchant, 175–6.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

brought Ghirigora to Prato (probably from Florence) and given her a dowry; Niccolo
suggested to his friend that for his honour’s sake he should not leave her without means
of subsistence. He offered to look after her for some time, on Francesco’s behalf, if need

be.

Francesco’s answer to this plea does not survive. Niccolo continued to report

Cristofano’s condition; a month later he implied that he was improving and likely to

live.

Thereafter, Niccolo does not mention the matter again. Cristofano did recover;

two months after the illness began, he himself wrote to Datini begging for aid on his and

Ghirigora’s behalf.

Again Datini’s response, if any, has not survived. No mention of

Ghirighora appears in the documentation after this date.

The last of Francesco’s known children, Ginevra, was born during the spring of 1392.

Although nothing in any of the Datini papers directly substantiates her maternity, Guasti
(copied by Origo, and therefore by everyone else) states that the mother was a young

slave named Lucia. In 1392, she was about twenty years old and had been in the Datini

household for at least three years.

Klapisch-Zuber states that one of the most important

functions of female slaves in Florentine households was the satisfaction of the master’s

sexual needs, as well as those of his sons or of family friends.

Unlike his affair with

Ghirighora – a servant – the slave Lucia’s pregnancy would have brought no shame to
the merchant in society, and should not have been viewed as reprehensible by
Margherita’s family. If Lucia was the mother, Margherita was not upset by the fact. Her
surviving letters suggest that she and Lucia were quite close. The latter often
accompanied her mistress on trips between Florence and Prato, such as in November

1398,

and in April 1399 when Francesco instructed Margherita to come to Florence

with Lucia and a few others, but to leave Caterina and Ginevra behind in Prato.

Even

after marrying one of the Casa Datini’s servants, Nanni di Martino Pagni da Prato, in
1399, Lucia remained a part of the household. Francesco and Margherita manumitted her

before her marriage, and apparently gave her a dowry.

Lucia and Nanni accompanied

the Datini household to Bologna in 1400. It was probably there that their first child was

born in May 1401; Francesco covered all the expenses for this baby.

Origo, Merchant, 176; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1099, letter Prato to Pistoia, Niccolo di

Piero di Giunta to Francesco di Marco, 28 September 1390:

...e pertanto ditte quello che vi pare ch’io abia a fare della Ghirighora se’lla mene a chasa vostra o alla mia,

o se’lla ista cholla elle altro fanciullo a Prato, se’lle i’lascia o se’lle il tiene ele in sara maltratta e ara
charo d’avere del panne...io vi richordo l’ammo e’l’tuo onor vostro; voi suette sanio sapette quello
diliberette ch’io facia farro.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1099, letter Prato to Pistoia, Niccolo di Piero di Giunta to

Francesco di Marco, Prato to Pistoia, 2 October 1390, 6 October 1390, 22 October 1390.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1103, letter Prato to Pistoia, Cristofano di Mercato to Francesco di

Marco, 20 November 1390:

...in tutti l’altri miei debitori sono venuti a me a proferemesi datare i voi guatate didi farmi m’a’tanto vi

dicho che se dio il suo male; io ista male, la Ghirighora fate bene.

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, xlvii; Origo, Merchant, 177.

Cecchi, Lettere, 52; Rosati, Lettere, 42.

Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Blood Parents’, 141.

Rosati, Lettere, 254.

Cecchi, Lettere, 260.

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, xlvii. Lucia was a beneficiary of a moderate sum in both the 1400 and 1410 versions

of Datini’s will: Byrne, ‘Father’, 344.

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, 353 n. 1. He references a ledger which cannot now be located in the Datini collection.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

Margherita’s response to Francesco’s last illegitimate child – whoever actually was

the mother – was to take her for her own, and mother her. Her reaction was probably
conditioned by final acceptance that she was barren. As far as can be seen through the
scanty documentation, Ginevra’s life in the Casa Datini was full of love, not the
resentment of a cruel step-mother.

The precise details about when and where Ginevra was born, and what her immediate

fate was, are unknown. During May 1392, Francesco was resident in Florence. On the
15th of that month, he recorded in his company’s ledger that he bought a cover for a
cradle, an outer-garment, and six under-shirts for ‘his girl-child which was being sent to
village of Montelupo’ to be suckled. The entry does not name the mother and child,

record the date and place of birth, or identify the balia.

That this entry refers to

Ginevra is confirmed only by later records specifying where she was fostered, and by
what is known about her age.

Before sending her to the care of a wet-nurse, Francesco apparently kept this baby in

Florence for a short time. A passage in the 1400 recension of his will indicates that
Santa Maria Nuova in Florence was the site of this interlude; he left a dowry of one
thousand gold florins in the care of this hospital for the marriage of ‘a certain girl who
was placed in secret with the overseer of that hospital’. His notary, Ser Lapo Mazzei,

also knew that she had been placed there in secret.

This passage has caused Origo, and

most scholars since, to assume that Ginevra was abandoned – left as a foundling – at

Santa Maria Nuova, and only later reclaimed and placed with the balia in Montelupo.
Tuscan custom and a slave child’s position in the household make such an interpretation
seem plausible. Richard Trexler, in his study of Florence’s foundlings, established that

parentage by a slave-girl was reason enough to warrant abandonment.

Girls born to

slave mothers were far more likely to be abandoned than boys because, even if they
were legitimated, they could not carry on the father’s name or bloodline; Herlihy and
Klapisch-Zuber found that in the Florentine Catasto of 1427, reported male bastards

under the age of thirteen outnumbered females two to one.

Ginevra’s stay at Santa Maria Nuova, however, probably was not necessitated by her

mother – whoever she was – being a slave; several other reasons for the association

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 557 Libro Nero di Francesco di Marco e Stoldo di Lorenzo in Prato

1390–94, f. 79v; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 613, Quadernaccio Memoriale Ricordanza Proprio
Segnata A, f. 176r:

Francescho di Marcho proprio de dare a di 15 maggio 1392 56s paghamo per uno copetta e uno ghuarnelo

e 6 chamice per la fanciula sua mandamo a Monte Lupo 14s 8d.

Gavitt, 45; Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, xvv; Guasti, Lettere, vol. 2, 283, no. 2.

Item: reliquit Hospitali Sanctae Mariae Novae de Florentia, pro nubendo quandam puellam, quam

Hospitalario dicti Hospitalis posuit in secreto... item etiam mihi notario infrascripto, et cuique ipsorum
idem dixit et posuit in secreto.

Origo, Merchant, 177.

Richard Trexler, ‘Infanticide in Florence: new sources and first results’, History of Childhood Quarterly, 1

(1973), 101. Klapisch-Zuber and Boswell also found that slave-mothers heightened the chance that a child
would be abandoned. Christine Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Childhood in Tuscany at the beginning of the fifteenth
century’, in: Women

, family and ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1985), 104; John Boswell, The

Kindness of strangers

: The abandonment of children in western Europe from Late Antiquity to the

Renaissance (New York, 1988), 419–20.

David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and their families

: A study of the Florentine Catasto

1427 (New Haven, 1985), 146; Trexler, ‘Foundlings’, 101, 261, 270–1.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

with this house prior to being sent to the wet-nurse are much more compelling. First,
Francesco may have wanted to wait to see whether the child would survive its earliest
days; the infant was a girl, not a possible heir, yet she still was his daughter. Secondly,
by the time of her birth, it seems likely that he already had decided to send her ‘out into
the healthy countryside’ to Montelupo; a trip through this hilly terrain would last at least
one day and require that the baby have more strength to endure the hardships than was
usual for newborns. Presumably, somebody in Santa Maria Nuova – the infant’s mother
or another woman – suckled her for the first days. Thirdly, this particular house was a
strange choice for the deposit of any child, abandoned or claimed, secretly or publicly.
The Entrata and Uscita records from Santa Maria Nuova reveal no evidence that it
accepted children at this time; it was, in fact, an institution for the care of old people

nearing death.

Margherita resided in the house for just this reason when near death in

1423.

In his 1400 will, Datini left no bequest specifically to Santa Maria Nuova to pay

for services for children; he did, however, leave significant amounts to the two primary
Florentine ospedali for foundlings operating at this time – Santa Maria di San Gallo and
Santa Maria della Scala – and in his 1410 will he founded the Ospedale degli

Innocenti.

His charity for abandoned children later in life, however, should not be used

as proof that Ginevra was abandoned; it arose at a time when he was increasingly aware
of his own mortality, his sins, and of the miseries of poor people in the society around
him. Fourthly, the connection cannot be explained by an association with the intended
balia; Santa Maria Nuova’s records produce no evidence that anyone in Montelupo was
involved with the house.

Ginevra’s stay in this house, however, is very easily explained by the reference to

Datini’s notary, trusted neighbour, and good friend, Ser Lapo Mazzei; he was the

full-time notary for Santa Maria Nuova.

Because the child was born in Florence,

Francesco may have asked Mazzei to help find medical care for the baby among the
Santa Maria Nuova’s doctors or tenants capable of acting as mid-wife. Mazzei certainly
knew that Francesco was nearing sixty years of age, that he and Margherita were
frustrated at the lack of legitimate children, and the extent of the Datini fortune. He was
the couple’s chief advisor on religious and ethical matters; it is difficult to imagine that

Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 4446, Libro di Entrata (1391–3); Florence,

Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 5038, Quaderni di Casa (1391–3); Florence, Archivio di
Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 5740, Poderi e Casa.

Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 4473, Libro di Entrata (1422–4), f. 4r, July

1423.

Boswell, Kindness, 415–17; Gavitt, Charity, 43–44. Enrico Bensa perpetrated a barely forgivable fallacy

when he claimed Datini chose Santa Maria Nuova because the most famous of all the foundling hospitals,
the Ospedale degli Innocenti, had not yet been built (non era sorto): Bensa, Francesco, 39.

Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 4446, Libro di Entrata (1391–3); Florence,

Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 5038, Quaderni di Casa (1391–3); Florence, Archivio di
Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 5740, Poderi e Casa; Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa
Maria Nuova 60, Testamenti; Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 68, Testamenti;
Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 69, Testamenti.

There is no evidence that the child was in Prato before being sent to the nurse, whereas these notices in

Datini’s Florentine register and will substantiate that she was born in Florence. Prato’s foundling hospital
was founded in 1333. Boswell, Kindness, 415, n. 55.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

he, as a friend, would not help Francesco with the best possible care for this child, even
though it had turned out to be a girl.

Francesco chose Montelupo as the site for his daughter’s nursing for several reasons.

First, another recurrence of the plague was expected in Florence during the spring and

summer of 1392.

Francesco probably sent his daughter out to the countryside in order

to protect her health by getting her away from the crowded city environment of both
Florence and Prato where, as Klapisch-Zuber notes, the mortality rate for infants was

very high in comparison.

Secondly, Datini knew that the wife of Piero di Strenna was

available to act as wet-nurse. Why she was available and lactating is not discussed in the
records. She probably had just given birth to a child of her own; it may have died a few
days after birth, or her husband may have placed it with someone else so that she could
offer her services as a balia. Strenna was a retailer of metals; he occasionally supplied
Datini’s companies with lead. His house in Montelupo was close to one of the main
routes between Florence and Pisa; Datini agents, and possibly Francesco himself, several
times stopped over there when making the journey between the two cities. The small
consignment of lead which he sold to Datini’s agent in 1392 may have been intended for
the use of the painters working on Francesco and Margherita’s palazzo in Prato, which

was nearing completion.

Ginevra’s absence from the household accounts during her first few years of life

should not be viewed as surprising. Origo and others have interpreted the lacuna in
Francesco’s records as proof of a conspiracy on his part to keep Margherita from
knowing about her, or to keep the unwelcome girl out of the house. The reason for her
absence in the records, however, is that a balia usually took care of most of the baby’s
requirements during its first few years. The father chose the nurse, decided when to
change, and provided a basic wardrobe, but the nurse looked after the child in all other
ways. Relating to Ginevra, one of the balia

’s duties may have been to baptise her at an

appropriate time; that she is not named in the 1392 ledger-entry, and that she probably
did not face any life-threatening illnesses in her first few days – if she had, she would
certainly not have been taken all the way to Montelupo – suggest that she was not
christened before being placed in the Strenna household. Piero di Strenna’s wife proved
to be a good nurse; Datini saw no need to move his daughter to someone else, unlike
Ghirigora’s son. According to the customs of wet-nursing, Ginevra normally would have
returned to her true family in 1394. She remained in Montelupo, however, for another
two to three years, necessitating that Francesco provide a small amount of very

expensive blue and scarlet cloth to di Strenna, possibly for making new dresses.

Her

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 619, filza 4, Quadernaccio e altra mutili, f. 13r, 24 June 1392.

Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Blood Parents’, 151.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 557, Libro Nero di Francesco di Marco e Stoldo di Lorenzo in Prato

1390–94, f. 106v, 29 April 1394; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1086, letter Prato to Florence,
Franceco di Marco to Stoldo di Lorenzo, 4 September 1391; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 619, filza
4, Quadernaccio e altra mutili 1383, 1395–8, f. 13r, 14 April 1384; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio
669, letter Florence to Montelupo, Piero di Strenna to Francesco di Marco.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 613, Quadernaccio Memoriale Ricordanza Proprio Segnata A,

Francesco di Marco Proprio, f. 184r.

De dare a di 10 marzo 1394: F12 14s 4d, sono per bracia 1 2 / 3 d’azurino per Nanino manovale, e braccia 2

1 / 3 di scharlatino per mandare e a mandare a Monte Lupo.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

extended stay in Montelupo may have been caused by Margherita’s chronic poor health

during the mid-1390s.

The presence of the Caterinas in the Casa Datini, however,

suggests that this was not the only cause; other plausible ones might be the state of the
palazzo, Margherita’s feelings towards very young children, Francesco’s conviction that
the country was more healthy for a baby, or at di Strenna’s request. In 1395, Piero wrote
a letter to Datini, expressing his own and his wife’s affection for the child; he sent it

along with Ginevra when she made a visit to Prato of unknown duration.

Origo, citing

the missing Quadernaccio A, says that in 1394 Datini paid Piero di Strenna twenty-six
florins for Ginevra’s wet-nursing. In the surviving Datini ledgers, no mention is made of

this payment.

If this sum was a payment for Ginevra’s nursing, it probably did not

represent the whole cost for her stay in Montelupo because she lived there through 1396.
She remained in Montelupo, for whatever reason, at least until she was almost five years
old.

Ginevra’s arrival in the Casa Datini is undocumented. The first record of her physical

presence in the household appears in an expense account for 13 April 1397 when

Margherita bought her two under-shirts.

Throughout her first year in Prato, Margherita

bought shirts, shoes, shifts, stoles, and other items for Ginevra and Caterina, although
the surviving documents do not reveal a buying spree that would suggest her

homecoming.

These notations also do not show any marked disparity in the number of

goods bought for her versus Caterina; as far as can be seen from these accounts,
Margherita provided them with equal amounts of new clothes. The amount of second-
hand or rebuilt clothing which each had, however, cannot be ascertained. Ginevra first
appears in Margherita’s letters to Francesco in June 1398 in a request that he buy silver

buttons for a coat for her.

This incident shows that she was already demanding that the

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1090, letter Florence to Prato, Giovanni di Banduccio da Prato,

physician, to Francesco di Marco, 17 May 1396.

Melis, Aspetti, 48; Origo, Merchant, 198; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1109, letter Montelupo to

Prato Piero di Strenna to Francesco di Marco, 8 August 1395:

Riceveti vostra lettera ch’io ve ne mandassi Ginevra vostra figliuolla... l’amore che la dona mia ed io

l’avamo... era chome fosse nostra figliuollo per piu chagioni e perche ll’e buona fancella e de molto
paurossa... a Firenze faremo insieme.

Origo, Merchant, 177; Ross, ‘Middle-class child’, 195.

The ledgers do contain two substantial payments to di Strenna, in April and May 1394; one of these, however,

is specifically for lead, while the other is not the amount mentioned by Origo: Prato, Archivio di Stato,
Datini busta 557, f. 106v, 107r:

106v Piero di Stenna

hsicj da Monte Lupo de dare adi 29 1394 d’aprile F7 hsicj 16s i quali sono per pionbo

gli mando da Pisa a Francescho da Marcho chome al meno.

107r Piero di Stenna da Monte Lupo de avere a di 6 di magio 1394 F27 16s i qua dar abiamo posto che

debe dare a Libro rosso.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 218, filza 1397, Spese di Casa, f. 1 April 1397, 13 April 1397:

2 chamicie della Ginevra, 2d.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 218, filza 1397, Spese di Casa, f. 1 April 1397, 13 April 1397, 11

February 1398, 3 May 1398; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 212, Spese di Casa 1394–5 and 1397, f.
20v, 21v, 26v, 17 May 1397, 30 June 1397, 5 November 1397, 11 August 1397.

Rosati, Lettere, 216–7.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

child be dressed exceedingly well; the buttons, which Margherita deemed unsatisfactory,

cost Francesco £8 4s 8d.

Ginevra’s upbringing at the hands of her step-mother does not seem to have differed

significantly from that of the household’s other children. Margherita seems to have taken
up the task of step-mothering with gusto and lavished her attention on the growing girl.
In December 1398, the six year old developed a throat ailment and a head injury.
Margherita hovered over the child, during this illness. She wrote to Francesco, who
understandably was quite concerned about his only remaining child:

Don’t worry yourself over Ginevra because I believe that that [problem] with her
throat, with luck, will not get any worse. And there’s no need for me to have told
you, because I know that you are certain that I look after her better than if she were
my own; indeed, I consider her to be mine. I did not want to tell you anything about
her illness because I know you have other worries. Besides, there is no more need for
you to fear for her now. The broken head is a small thing; my fear, however, was for
this problem with her throat. The doctor told me he did not believe it would get any
worse. We are following his directions; she has not had a fever or any other bad

signs.

Throughout the household accounts there is evidence of Margherita’s concern over the
provision of good food under her own roof, especially because of the children. She also
was concerned about their diet even when they were living in another woman’s
household. In April 1399, Ginevra and Caterina were staying in Florence with the
latter’s mother, Francesca. Margherita sent the ingredients for a special dish (zanella)

made with onions, almonds, twelve eggs and strong herbs for them.

This reference

shows that Margherita was not averse to allowing the children in her brigata to live in
someone else’s brigata for periods of time, the same way the Caterinas did with her; this
practice allowed mothers to have time with their children and to be foster parents to
other children.

The Datini records give few details about what children learned, how they spent their

time, and how they interacted with grown-ups as they grew. Play was indulged in and
allowed. Ginevra and the Caterinas had a few toys; in August 1398 a tambourine costing

£2 10s was purchased in Florence for them from one Paganino.

She had the two

Caterinas to play with, although they were much older than she was, and the young

Nanna. Margherita had taken her niece, Caterina di Niccolo di Ammanato Tecchini, to a
dinner party in 1394 where the children of the noble Florentine Chavigliati and Strozzi

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 613, Quadernaccio Memoriale Ricordanze Proprio, Segnata A, f. 69v, 7

June 1398.

On buttons as a signifier of wealth and taste in fourteenth-century Italy, see Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, ‘La

disciplina delle apparenze. Vesti e ornamenti nella legislazione suntuaria bolognese fra XIII e XV secolo’, in:

Disciplina dell

’anima, disciplina del corpo, e disciplina della societa tra medioevo et eta moderna, ed.

Paolo Prodi (Bologna, 1994), 763.

Rosati, Lettere, 260; Origo, Merchant, 198.

Rosati, Lettere, 283–4.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 613, Quadernaccio Memoriale Ricordanza Proprio, Segnata A, fol. 70v,

10 August, 1398; Origo, Merchant, 199.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

families argued over their social standing in reference to each other;

this type of party

was an important tool for teaching children about their place in society and she took
Ginevra to similar ones. Ginevra learned to read between the years 1399–1402; she
probably also learned to write, although nothing in her hand has been found in the
archive. In 1399, Ginevra was being taught by Mona Mattea, ‘who lives in Santa Maria
Novella’ in Florence; in 1401, while the family was in Bologna, one Madonna Orosini
continued her lessons; Datini omitted her next Florentine teacher’s name in a payment

entry from 1402.

Other than reading, we know very little about what she was taught or

how she spent her days.

Margherita only mothered her for ten years. Ginevra was fifteen when, on 24

November 1407,

she married Lionardo di Tommaso di Giunta, nephew of Niccolo di

Piero di Giunta and grandson of Francesco’s guardian Piero di Giunta. According to

Niccolo, a marriage broker first approached Lionardo about this match in February

1401.

In the following years, the young man matured while working within the Datini

companies, spending most of his time in Prato under the tutelage of Barzalone di
Spedalieri. He continued working for Datini until 1410, when Francesco made him a
partner in the Florentine branch for five years with a stake of 500 gold florins and named

him as one of his will’s five executors.

On his engagement to Ginevra, Datini set up an

expense account with which Lionardo was to pay for the goods in her trousseau. He
purchased many rich fabrics for gowns, household fabrics, furniture, rings with
diamonds, pearls, and other precious stones, and a host of other beautiful and costly
goods which he bought between April and November for ‘his woman’. By the wedding,
fewer than 200 of the original 1000 florins remained to be paid in cash to the young man

as her dowry.

Whether Margherita influenced his purchases in any way cannot be

ascertained from Datini’s accounts, although it is tempting to suggest on the basis of her
past actions concerning her brigata that she specified what would be fitting possessions
for a wedding which united the Datini and di Giunta houses.

The surviving correspondence between Francesco and Margherita during the last three

years of his life is taken up with preparations for hosting some of the delegates to the
1409 church council in Pisa. Margherita’s voice falls silent about children in her
household. Nonetheless, she continued to have an important relationship with Ginevra
and Lionardo. The young couple lived close to the main house, and Lionardo continued

Rosati, Lettere, 110.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 613, Quadernaccio Memoriale Ricordanza Proprio Segnata A, f. 23v,

31 October 1399; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 614, Francesco di Marco Proprio, f. 5v, 20 February
1403; Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, xlv; Origo, Merchant, 199.

Origo, Merchant, 201–5, Bensa, Francesco, 49; Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 189, Libro da Prato, A,

Debitore e Creditore, de Barzalone di Spedalieri (1406–8), f. 155r:

Lionardo di Ser Tomaso di Giunta chol nome di dio questo di 24 d’aprile 1407 e’l di di San Giorgio di

Domenicho dopo adesmarte in San Francescho in Prato giura e chonpromisse la Ginevra nostra figluola
di Francescho di Marcho con promise si in Luca del Sera e Barzalone di Spedaliere la deta charta a per
mano di Ser Lapo Mazzei notario fiorentino al modo Firenze.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini carteggio 1110, letter Prato to Florence, Niccolo di Piero di Giunta to

Francesco di Marco, 14 February 1401.

Byrne, ‘Father’, 354–5.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 599, Libro Bianco B, f. 329v, 344v, 383v, 397v; Origo, Merchant,

202–3, 296–8.

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

in his role as an important Datini employee: it is his hand that recorded the payments to
Madonna, once a member of Margherita’s brigata, in early 1409. Shortly after that, he
stopped keeping the household records in Prato because he, and probably Ginevra,

joined Margherita in Florence.

They were all living in Prato together, however, when

Francesco died in August 1410. The household inventories made at that time show that
Ginevra retained her own room in the palazzo, although the absence of clothing in the
inventory, and of a room assigned to Lionardo, show that she was not living full-time

100

with her step-mother, now about 50 years of age.

Datini’s will gives the main house to

his heir, the ‘Ceppo di Francesco di Marco Datini da Prato’, a charitable trust to be

101

headquartered in the Datini palazzo.

He did, however, provide Margherita and

Ginevra with ‘a house for them in which to live in Prato, for as long as they shall live,

102

with the household goods truly necessary’.

Whether mother and daughter ever shared

the residence is not known. Ginevra is occasionally mentioned in the records made
during the liquidation of Datini’s vast commercial enterprise; the last recorded payment

103

to her was made in 1417.

She must have been alive in 1421 in order for Guasti’s

report of her daughter Brigida to be accurate. The last record of Lionardo is dated to 21
May 1421 when he was recorded as owning land alongside a piece the Ceppo was

104

procuring.

Both may have died in that year or the next because of the plague.

Margherita apparently outlived them. She died in Santa Maria Nuova in Florence – the

105

hospital for old people without family who could care for them – in July 1423.

Guasti

affirms that she hired Tommaso di Pieragnolo di Cioni, the notary of Santa Maria
Novella in Florence, to draw up her will on 25 June 1423; this document cannot now be
located. He also claimed that her tomb was placed in Santa Maria Novella, along with
the rest of her family; if these claims are true, it is strange that she would choose to die
in one religious house but be buried in another, without choosing to be buried in Prato

106

with her husband.

Soon after her death, Luca del Sera, husband of her niece, Caterina,

wrote to the Ceppo informing the organisation of her death and listing the few goods

107

that she had possessed at the end which were being brought to the palazzo in Prato.

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Datini busta 213, Spese di Casa, f. 17r, August 1409.

100

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Ceppo Nuovo 1618, f. 56v, 20 August 1410: Nela camera di Mona Ginevra: una

lertiora con predelle interno dale due faccie, due cassapanetre catuuna atee screami, mecco saccone tra
biancho e vermiglio, una matarassa bi bordo di sorto di panno lino rosse . . .

101

Gavitt, Charity, 45–56; Melis, Aspetti, 7; Bensa, Francesco, 51–54; Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, cxxx–cxxxvii;

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 2, 270–310.

102

Byrne, ‘Father’, 349–52.

103

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Ceppo Nuovo 1579, Libro, f. 143v, 29 October 1417.

104

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Ceppo Nuovo 2340bi, filza 2, Ceppo di Francesco di Marco in Prato, f. 17v, 19

May 1421.

105

Florence, Archivio di Stato, Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova 4473, Libro di Entrata (1422–4), f. 4r, July

1423:

– Dare dita di Mona Margherita fue di Francesco di Marcho di Matteo

hsicj da Prato £25 9s 6d rico

Alesandro d’Antonio nostro che gli trovo in casa levati dal quaderno segnato S a carta 145 it di poste
ala redita a le libro nero aventari a carte 122.

– Da dessa redita per vino vendite uglimecione li nati daesso quaderno as 14 per tutto £5 11s 6d e desa

inventar a carta 122.

106

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, cxxxvii n. 2; Origo, Merchant, 387, 175. Origo argues away this seeming incongruity

by accusing Margherita of resenting Francesco; the more likely explanation, however, is that Guasti made an
error in saying ‘Novella’ instead of ‘Nuova’.

107

Prato, Archivio di Stato, Ceppo Nuovo 1785, filza 1, Florence to Prato, Luca del Sera to the Rettore del

Ceppo, 11 August 1423.

Mothering in the Casa Datini

And what about Brigida? Francesco di Marco Datini’s grandchild was raised mostly

by distant kin. Ginevra and Lionardo apparently were dead by the time the 1427 Catasto

108

recorded that she was six years old and living in the household of Nanni di Bertino.
The plague may have made her an orphan, as it did her grandfather eighty years before.
Guasti notes that her relative Meo di Nanni di Giunta, and Andrea di Gino, whose
relationship to her still has to be established, administered her assets. These included

109

land worth 462 florins and a dowry from her mother valued at 628 florins.

In spite of

these riches, all three of her overseers apparently were poor; Prato’s economy seems to
have suffered when Francesco Datini died, and his companies closed. What was
Brigida’s experience in a surrogate household? Was she cared for and loved by a stern
but warm woman such as Margherita? Did she receive all the clothes, food, and other
things she needed? Or did the administrators take advantage of her youth and
powerlessness to use her assets for their own needs? On these matters the documents fall
mute.

The history of mothering in the Casa Datini provides examples of wet-nurses, foster

mothers, and a caring step-mother. Clearly the household membership, and thus the role
of its mistress, was constantly shifting. Relatives, friends, servants, her husband’s
business associates and even his mistresses presented Margherita with children for
whom she had to care. Some of these, like the Caterinas, moved in and out, their own
mothers reciprocating by caring for Ginevra from time to time. Although Margherita’s
own barrenness made her an unusual mistress of such a household, the fluidity of its
make-up seems to have been typical for the time and for Tuscany. The deaths of
Ghirigora’s baby, as well as Francesco’s son from before his marriage, were not
unusual; infant mortality was relatively common. Amid the clatter of construction, the
periodic relocations of the Casa Datini, the frequent absences of her husband and his
extra-marital affairs, and the press of every-day business from the Datini companies
spilling over into her household, Margherita is never recorded as displaying resentment,
anger or ill will towards her charges. While the records of the Datini archive give a far
from complete picture, from what they do tell Cinderella had no counter-part in the Casa
Datini. Instead, over its life the household contained several bundles of youthful energy
for Margherita to channel and teach. The types of mothering illustrated in the Datini
letters were not necessitated by the need to train the children – as, for example, one

110

finds in English sources for the late middle ages such as the Paston letters

– but

instead by the health of the mothers and offspring, and the still vital Tuscan sense of
famiglia.

108

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, xlviii. Guasti cites ‘Archivio di Stato. Catasto. Porto Gualdimare e Porta Leone di

Prato, 656.’

109

Guasti, Lettere, vol. 1, xlvii–xlviii.

110

For example, compare to the children’s experiences portrayed or prescribed in: The Paston Letters and

Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971, 1976); The Babees Book, ed.
Frederick Furnivall (London and New York, 1969); Manners and Household Expenses of England in the
Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

; Illustrated by Original Records, ed. Beriah Botfield (London, 1841).

Joseph P. Byrne and Eleanor A. Congdon

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge and thank the staffs at the Archivio di Stato di Firenze,

sezione Prato and the Archivio di Stato di Firenze for access to their collections and for
guidance and good cheer while we were doing our research. In particular, we are
grateful to ‘la Signora’ of the A.S.P., Elena Cecchi, and to Mr. Gino Corti who
generously provided much expertise and good advice for this and our other projects.
Support, critique, and interest from Dr. David Abulafia, Dr. Caroline Barron, and Ms.
Carmela Byram fuelled completion of this project. Our greatest debt, however, is to
Prof. Bonnie Wheeler; her interest in the topic brought us together and caused our
collaboration.

Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 57–65, 1999

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The State of Research

Cyprus under the Lusignans and Venetians, 1991–1998

Peter W. Edbury

School of History and Archaeology

, Cardiff University, P.O. Box 909, Cardiff CF1 3XU, UK

In March 1991 the twenty-fifth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies held at

Birmingham University had as its theme ‘The Sweet Land of Cyprus’. The title was
taken from the most important work of history relating to Cyprus to have been written in
Greek in the middle ages, the early fifteenth-century Recital concerning the Sweet Land
of Cyprus by Leontios Makhairas. In the event 1991 turned out to be a particularly good
year for publications on medieval Cyprus with the appearance of three major mono-
graphs. Annemarie Weyl Carr and Laurence Morrocco’s A Byzantine masterpiece
recovered

. The thirteenth-century murals of Lysi, Cyprus (University of Texas Press)

describes how the magnificent frescoes prized off the walls of a small church in the
Turkish controlled part of the island were reconstructed and discusses their significance
for understanding the artistic and cultural milieu of the early years of Latin rule. Catia
Galatariotou’s The making of a saint

. The life, times and sanctification of Neophytos the

Recluse (Cambridge University Press) examines a central figure in Byzantine Cypriot

monasticism whose career coincided with the beginnings of Frankish rule, and my own
The kingdom of Cyprus and the crusades

, 1191 –1374 (Cambridge University Press)

(noticed ante, 17 (1991), 175) provides the first full-scale account of these years since
the appearance of the second volume of Sir George Hill’s History of Cyprus in 1948.
This review article sets out to survey some of the more important publications relating to
Cyprus under Frankish and Venetian rule (1191–1571) to have appeared since 1991.

PETER EDBURY is Reader in History at Cardiff University of Wales. He has written widely on the history of

the Latin East. He is currently re-editing the treatise on the assises, customs and good usages of the Latin
Kingdom by John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa and Ascalon, and writing a book on the Third Crusade.

Abbreviations employed in this article: CAC: Cyprus and the Crusades, eds. N. Coureas and J. Riley-Smith

(Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre / Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, 1995); CMA

Coloniser au Moyen Age, eds. M. Balard and A. Ducellier (Paris: Armand Colin, 1995); EKEE: Epeteris (or
Epeterida) tou Kentrou Epistimonikon Ereunon (Nicosia); ICMM

: Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval

Mediterranean, ed. B. Arbel (London, Frank Cass, 1996) ( 5 Mediterranean Historical Review, 10 (1995));

: Kyprios character. Quelle identite chypriote?, ed. P. Gontier (Paris: Histoire au present, 1995); LO: Les

Lusignans et l

’Outre Mer (Poitiers: Conseill regional Poitou-Charente / Universite de Poitiers, 1995); OO:

Oriente e occidente tra medioevo ed eta moderna

. Studi in onore di Geo Pistarino, ed. L. Balletto (Genoa:

Brigati Glauco, 1997); SLC

: ‘The Sweet Land of Cyprus’. Papers given at the 25th jubilee spring

symposium of Byzantine studies, eds. A.A.M. Bryer and G.S. Georghallides (Nicosia: Cyprus Research
Centre / Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, 1993).

See also C. Galatariotou, ‘The bishop and the hermit. Church patronage in action in twelfth-century Cyprus’,

EKEE, 18 (1991), 85–103.

Peter W. Edbury

Virtually all the primary material relating to the first century of Frankish rule is

available in print, but it is particularly pleasing to find that three major texts have now
been made available in reliable and scholarly editions. Pride of place here belongs to The
cartulary of the cathedral of Holy Wisdom of Nicosia, edited by Nicholas Coureas and
Christopher Schabel (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1997). The cartulary of Nicosia
cathedral is the only cartulary from any Latin religious institution on the island to have
survived. In the nineteenth century Louis de Mas Latrie published most of the
documents, and John LaMonte added a few more in 1930. But there are a number that
have remained unedited, and the piecemeal manner in which the earlier editors worked
had the effect of obscuring the way in which the cartulary was structured. The
importance of this text cannot be overstated, and the editors of this new edition have
maintained a high standard. In the 1240s the Venetian bailo, Marsilio Zorzi, reported on
the extent and condition of Venetian properties in the Latin East. The nineteenth-century
edition of the Cypriot section of his account was careless in the extreme, and so the new
edition of the whole text with copious notes, Der Bericht des Marsilio Zorzi

. Codex

Querini-Stampalia IV

3 (1064), ed. O. Berggotz (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991),

is particularly welcome. The list of Venetian properties, or rather, former Venetian
properties in Cyprus perhaps raises more questions than it answers, but it is nevertheless
an invaluable source. In the 1880s the unique fourteenth-century manuscript of the
historical compilation known as Les Gestes des Chiprois was discovered, transcribed
and then lost to view. The editions of 1887 and 1906 were both based on the
transcription. Now for the first time we have an edition of the central section, Philip of
Novara’s famous narrative of the struggle of the powerful Ibelin clan against the
Emperor Frederick II and his agents, based directly on the fourteenth-century manuscript
which, unnoticed by all historians of Frankish Cyprus, turns out to have been sitting all
the time in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin. Philip’s version of these events is edited by
Silvio Melani as Guerra di Federico II in oriente

(1223 –1242) (Naples: Liguori

Editore, 1994).

Interest in Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus both in Cyprus itself and more generally

shows no sign of flagging. The 1991 Birmingham conference was perhaps stronger on
the earlier Byzantine period and on Byzantine hagiography, but it included some
important papers on the Frankish period, notably by Demetra Papanikola-Bakirtzis,

Gilles Grivaud, Anthony Luttrell, Costas Constantinides, and Catia Galatariotou. They
were published in a handsome volume: ‘The Sweet Land of Cyprus

’. Papers given at the

25th jubilee spring symposium of Byzantine studies, edited by Anthony Bryer and
George Georghallides (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre / Society for the Promotion of
Byzantine Studies, 1993). Several other papers which could not be included appeared in

volume 19 (1992) of the Epeteris of the Cyprus Research Centre. In 1994 the Cyprus

D. Papanikola-Bakirtzis, ‘Cypriot medieval glazed pottery. Answers and questions’, 115–30; G. Grivaud, ‘Sur

le Comerc chypriote de l’epoque latine’, 133–45; A. Luttrell, ‘Sugar and schism. The Hospitallers in Cyprus
from 1378 to 1386’, 157–66; C.N. Constantinides, ‘Poetic colophons in Medieval Cypriot Manuscripts’,
319–80; C. Galatariotou, ‘Leontios Machairas’ Exegesis of the Sweet Land of Cyprus

’, 393–413.

Including G. Calofonos, ‘St Neophytos the Recluse in the sweet land of dreams’, 187–95; N. Coureas, ‘To

what extent was the crusaders’ capture of Cyprus impelled by strategic considerations?’, 197–202; D.
Holton, ‘Cyprus and the Cretan renaissance. A Preliminary study of some cultural connections’, 515–30.

Cyprus under the Lusignans and Venetians, 1991–1998

Research Centre, this time in collaboration with the Society for the Study of the
Crusades and the Latin East, hosted a conference in Nicosia with the title Cyprus and
the Crusades. Twenty-four papers, published under this same title and edited by
Nicholas Coureas and Jonathan Riley-Smith, appeared in a similarly lavish volume in
1995. There have been a number of other gatherings at which papers on Frankish and
Venetian Cyprus have featured, notably the Cypriological Congress held in Nicosia in
the spring of 1996, the proceedings of which are, at the time of writing (August 1998),
still awaited, and a meeting held in Poitiers in 1993 to mark the 600th anniversary of the
death of Leo V of Lusignan, the member of a cadet branch of the royal house of Cyprus
who had the doubtful distinction of being the last king of Cilician Armenia. This
attracted some fine papers on both Cyprus and Armenia, but the publication, Les

Lusignans et l

’Outre Mer (Poitiers: Conseill regional Poitou-Charente / Universite de

Poitiers, 1995) fell well below the editorial and production standards we might
reasonably expect.

Both Cyprus and the Crusades and Les Lusignans et l

’Outre Mer are dedicated to the

memory a remarkable man, Count Wipertus Rudt de Collenberg, whose researches,
mostly in the Vatican archives, into the prosopography of the elites in both secular and
ecclesiastical society on Cyprus have opened up many new possibilities. He died in
1993. What will probably turn out to be his last posthumous publication appeared in
volume four, part one, of the massive collaboration Greek-language Istoria tis Kuprou
edited by Theodoros Papadopoullos and published by the Archbishop Makarios III

Foundation in Nicosia. This volume, which covers the Lusignan and Venetian periods,
appeared in 1995 and is the first in the series to have seen light of day. It runs to almost
900 pages. The editor assembled a strong international team of scholars, and their work

will doubtless remain a major work of reference throughout the Greek-speaking world.
When the project was set up it was hoped that an English version would follow in due
course, but whether that will happen remains to be seen.

In any field of medieval history, certain topics will always attract greater attention

than others. For example, Cypriot ecclesiastical history has a particular importance as it
will inevitably bring the whole question of the relations between Latins and Greeks,
rulers and ruled into focus. How the Catholics and the Orthodox related to one another
and how far there was assimilation or acculturation are major themes. Here the
monograph by Nicholas Coureas, The Latin Church in Cyprus

, 1195 –1312 (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 1997) is a significant achievement. We have to go back to 1901 and the famous
study of the Orthodox Church in Cyprus by J. Hackett to find anything in English on a
comparable scale. Coureas examined the secular Latin church, the regular Latin church
and relations between Latins and Orthodox in turn, and, while we might regret that he
chose not to follow his themes on into the later periods, there is much here that is of

Among Rudt de Collenberg’s other last publications on Cyprus are: ‘Janus, Eugenio et Juan, les fils

illegitimes du dernier roi de Chypre, Jacques II. Les personnages les plus tragiques de la dynastie’, LO,

260–75; ‘Les premiers Podocataro. Recherches basees sur le testament de Hugues (1452)’, Thesaurismata,
23 (1993), 130–82.

Other contributors: B. Arbel, M. Balard, M. Bompaire, P. W. Edbury, G. Fedalto, G. Grivaud, R. Irwin, D.

Jacoby, A. Luttrell, Ch. Maltezou, C. Morrisson, Th. Papadopoullos, J. Richard, M-R. Richard, A. and J.
Stylianou.

Peter W. Edbury

value. It is good to see that those two veterans of Cypriot scholarship, Jean Richard

and Costas Kyrris, also contributing to this subject.

In his monograph Coureas has a lengthy chapter on the Military Orders in Cyprus.

This is a subject that has definitely come alive in recent years. A conference held in
London in 1992 on this topic attracted several contributions relating to Cyprus. A.H.S.
(Peter) Megaw pointed out the striking similarities between the design of the concentric
Hospitaller castle of Belvoir in Israel and the smaller and rather later (c. 1200) fortress at
Paphos, although his suggestion that the Paphos fortress too may have belonged to the
Order seems to me to be unlikely. By contrast, Alan Forey, Anne Gilmour-Bryson, the
late Annetta Ilieva, and myself all directed attention to the Templars. These papers and
many others are edited by Malcolm Barber as The Military Orders

. Fighting for the

Faith and Caring for the Sick (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994).

The Templars are of

interest, partly because of their brief period of rule in the island in 1191–92, and partly
because of the importance of the trial documents from Cyprus for our understanding of
the Order’s suppression. Recently Jean Richard has looked again at some of the issues

surrounding the Templars’ tenure of the island,

and more recently still Anne Gilmour-

Bryson has published the fruits of what must have been a most prodigious effort, a

complete translation of the trial documents from 1310–11.

In Cyprus the Templars

were not tortured and did not confess; more remarkably, the lay witnesses, several of
whom had no particular reason for supporting the Order, failed to incriminate them. With
the suppression of the Templars and the transfer of most of their estates on Cyprus to the
Hospitallers, the Knights of St John became the wealthiest ecclesiastical institution on
the island and their Cypriot lands their richest commandery. Anthony Luttrell, whose
name has long been synonymous with the history of the Hospitallers on Rhodes (1310–
1522), has examined the effects of the papal schism of 1378 on the Order and its

interests and personnel on the island. It is an unedifying tale of selfishness and intrigue.

The role of the Military Orders in the struggle against Islam in the eastern

Other studies by the same author on the church in Cyprus include, ‘The Cypriot Reaction to the Establishment

of the Latin Church’, KC, 75–84; ‘The Genoese and the Latin Church of Cyprus, 1250–1320’, OO, 165–75;
‘The Orthodox monastery of Mt Sinai and papal protection of its Cretan and Cypriot properties’, in: Autour

de la premiere croisade, ed. M. Balard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 475–84.

‘The Cistercians in Cyprus’, in: The Second Crusade and the Cistercians, ed. M. Gervers (New York: St

Martin’s Press, 1992), 199–209; ‘A propos de la Bulla Cypria de 1260’, Byzantinische Forschungen, 22

´ ˆ

(1996), 19–31; ‘Les eveques de Chypre et la chambre apostolique. Un arret de compte de 1369’, in The
crusades and their sources

. Essays presented to Bernard Hamilton, eds. J. France and W.G. Zajac

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 181–94.

‘L’organisation de l’eglise orthodoxe de Chypre pendant les deux premiers siecles de l’occupation franque’,

Epeterida tis etaireias vizantinon spoudon, 48 (1990 / 91), 327–66.

P. Megaw, ‘A castle in Cyprus attributable to the Hospital?’, 42–51; A. Forey, ‘Towards a profile of the

Templars in the early fourteenth century’, 196–204; A. Gilmour-Bryson, ‘Testimony of non-Templar
witnesses in Cyprus’, 205–211; A. Ilieva, ‘The suppression of the Templars in Cyprus according to the
Chronicle of Leontios Makhairas’, 212–19; P. W. Edbury, ‘The Templars in Cyprus’, 189–95.

J. Richard, ‘Les revoltes chypriotes de 1191–1192 et les infeodations de Guy de Lusignan’, in: Montjoie

Studies in crusade history in honour of Hans Eberhard Mayer, ed. B.Z. Kedar, J. Riley-Smith, R. Hiestand
(Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), 123–8.

A. Gilmour-Bryson, The Trial of the Templars in Cyprus

. A complete English edition (Leiden: Brill, 1998).

A. Luttrell, ‘Sugar and schism. The Hospitallers in Cyprus from 1378 to 1386’, SLC, 157–66; ‘The

Hospitallers in Cyprus after 1386’, CAC, 125–41.

Cyprus under the Lusignans and Venetians, 1991–1998

Mediterranean is well known. The Lusignan kings of Cyprus too knew that they had to
take active measures to fend off Muslim attack. In fact until the fifteenth century, Cyprus
remained remarkably free from Muslim incursions, and my own essay, published as a
pamphlet with the title, The Lusignan kingdom of Cyprus and its Muslim neighbours,

attempts to answer the question of why that should be.

For substantial periods in the

fourteenth century the kings of Cyprus, far from sinking into a passive policy of
appeasement, were active in taking the war to the Muslim enemy. This policy had as its
climax Peter I’s sack of Alexandria in 1365, and, although Peter’s reign seems not have
attracted much attention recently, several papers read at the 1994 meeting on Cyprus and

the Crusades examined other aspects of Cypriot warfare in this period.

What enabled the kings of Cyprus to adopt a fairly aggressive stance was the wealth

that they derived from the island’s commerce and the fact that commercial considera-
tions meant that there were plenty of Italian and other ships they could charter when
need arose. It is no accident that the heyday of Cypriot commercial prosperity in the
fourteenth century and the period of tough military policy against the Muslims more or
less coincided. Various scholars have examined trading and political relations with

nearby Cilician Armenia

and with distant Catalonia.

The development of Cypriot

trade and trading facilities in the thirteenth century, however, is an elusive subject,
though there is much still to be learned from the Genoese notarial instruments from

Famagusta dating from the years either side of 1300.

Much of the international trade of Cyprus seems to have been in goods in transit, but

the local ceramic and sugar industries have both been attracting serious attention. It is
now clear that Cypriot pottery was exported in considerable quantities during the
Lusignan and Venetian periods, and indeed recent work on this subject has meant that
archaeologists can now use Cypriot wares as a valuable dating tool when examining

(Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, 1993). Reprinted in Kupros apo tis proistoria stous neoterous

chronous (Nicosia: Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, 1995), 223–42.

A. Forey, ‘Cyprus as a base for crusading expeditions from the West’, 69–79; J. Richard, ‘L’etat de guerre

avec l’Egypte et le royaume de Chypre’, 83–95; M. Balard, ‘Chypre, les republiques maritimes italiennes et
les plans de croisade (1274–1370)’, 97–106; N. Coureas, ‘Cyprus and the naval leagues, 1333–1358’,
107–24; N. Housley, ‘Cyprus and the Crusades, 1291–1571’, 187–206 (all in CAC ). See also J. Richard,

‘Les marchands genois de Famagouste et la defense de Smyrne’, OO, 1059–71.

N. Coureas, ‘Lusignan Cyprus and Lesser Armenia’, EKEE, 21 (1995), 33–71; C. Otten-Froux, ‘Les

relations economiques entre Chypre et le royaume armenien de Cilicie d’apres les actes notaries (1270–

1320)’, in: L

’Armenie et Byzance. Histoire et culture (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1996), 157–79.

A. Luttrell, ‘Notes on Cyprus and Aragon, 1306–1386’, EKEE, 18 (1991), 129–136; J. Plana i Borras, ‘The

accounts of Joan Benet’s trading venture from Barcelona to Famagusta: 1343’, EKEE, 19 (1992), 105–68;
L. Balletto, ‘Presenze catalane nell’isola di Cipro al tempo di Giacomo II d’Aragona’, Medioevo

. Saggi e

Rassegne, 20 (1996), 39–59; N. Coureas, ‘Profit and piracy. Commerce between Cyprus and Catalonia from
1291 to 1420’, EKEE, 23 (1997), 27–55.

For the thirteenth century, N. Coureas, ‘Western merchants and the ports of Cyprus up to 1291’, in: Cyprus

and the Sea, eds. V. Karageorghis and D. Michaelides (Nicosia: University of Cyprus, 1995), 255–61. For
the topography of ports and harbours, P. W. Edbury, ‘Famagusta in 1300’, CAC, 337–53; R. Gertwagen,
‘Maritime activity concerning the ports and harbours of Cyprus from the late 12th to the 16th centuries
(1191–1571)’, CAC, 511–38. For studies based on the registers of the Genoese notary, Lamberto di
Sambuceto, P. W. Edbury, ‘Famagusta society ca. 1300 from the registers of Lamberto di Sambuceto’, in:
Die Kreuzfahrerstaaten als multikulturelle Gesellschaft, ed. H.E. Mayer (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1997),
87–95; ‘The Genoese community in Famagusta around the year 1300. A historical vignette’, OO, 235–44.

Peter W. Edbury

medieval sites in the Holy Land, Syria and Anatolia. The major centres of production
have now been identified. What is striking, if somewhat disturbing for a historian such as

myself, is the absence of documentary materials for this trade.

The sugar industry was

evidently extremely profitable,

and developments in Cyprus in certain respects

prefigured later activity in the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. It was an industry that
clearly required major investment, and the remains of sugar refineries are currently being
investigated by archaeologists. The work of Franz Georg Maier and Marie-Louise von
Wartburg at Kouklia has done much to explain how the refining process worked, and
more recent excavations at Episkopi and Kolossi are adding further to our

understanding.

Visitors to Cyprus mentioned the use of slave labour on sugar

plantations, and Benjamin Arbel has surveyed what is known of slavery generally on the

island.

The prosperity of Cyprus until the third quarter of the fourteenth century is also

reflected in the high quality of the island’s coinage. Michael Metcalf of the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford has vastly expanded our knowledge of this subject. In particular his
work on the silver gros which were introduced towards the end of the thirteenth century
and continued as the principal denomination until the end of the Lusignan period has
yielded important results including indications of the quantities of coins being minted,
the location of the mints, and the effectiveness of the authorities in excluding foreign
coin from circulation. Andreas Pitsillides has collaborated with him on some of this
work, and together they are editing a three-volume corpus of Lusignan coinage of which

the first volume (volume 2) has now appeared.

In 1373 the Genoese invaded Cyprus and they occupied Famagusta, the principal port,

from then until 1464. The war of 1373–74 marked the end of the island’s prosperity,
although it was not the sole cause of economic decline. What happened in the 1370s has

D. Papanikola-Bakirtzis, ‘Cypriot medieval glazed pottery. Answers and questions’, SLC, 115–30; E. Stern,

‘Export to the Latin East of Cypriot manufactured glazed pottery in the 12th–13th century’, CAC, 325–35;

M-L. von Wartburg, ‘Mittelalterliche Keramik aus dem Aphroditeheilgtum in Palaipaphos’, Archaologischer
Anzeiger (1998), 133–65.

A. Luttrell, ‘The sugar industry and its importance for the economy of Cyprus during the Frankish period’,

in: The development of the Cypriot economy

. From the prehistoric period to the present day, ed. V.

Karageorghis and D. Michaelides (Nicosia: U. of Cyprus, 1996), 163–73.

For an overview of the sugar industry in the East, B. Poree, ‘Les moulins et fabriques a sucre de Palestine et

´ ´

de Chypre. Histoire, geographie et technologie d’une production croisee et medievale’, CAC, 377–510. F.G.
Maier, ‘The archaeology of the royal manor house at Kouklia’, EKEE, 19 (1992), 251–262; M-L. von
Wartburg and F.G. Maier, ‘Ausgrabungen in Alt-Paphos. II Die mittelalterliche Rohrzucherraffinerie von

Couvoucle-Stavros’, Archaologischer Anzeiger (1992), 586–97; M-L. von Wartburg, ‘Design and Technolo-
gy of the Medieval Cane Sugar Refineries in Cyprus. A case study in industrial archaeology’, in: Paisages

del azucar

. Actas del quinto seminario internacional sobre la cana de azucar, ed. A. Malpica (Motril:

Diputacion provincial de Granada, 1995), 81–116; ‘Production de sucre de canne a Chypre. Un chapitre de

´ ´

technologie medievale’, CMA, 126–31.

‘Slave trade and slave labor in Frankish Cyprus (1191–1571)’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History,

14 (1993), 151–90.

D.M. Metcalf, The silver coinage of Cyprus

, 1285 –1382 (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre, 1996). Among

other publications, D.M. Metcalf and A.G. Pitsillides, ‘Studies of the Lusignan coinage’, EKEE, 19 (1992),
1–104; D.M. Metcalf, Coinage of the crusades and the Latin East in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford, 2nd
edn (London: Royal Numismatic Society / Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East, 1995);
‘Money in the Sweet Land of Cyprus’, in: Kupros apo tis proistoria stous neoterous chronous (Nicosia:
Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, 1995), 243–69.

Cyprus under the Lusignans and Venetians, 1991–1998

rightly attracted attention,

as has the later history of Famagusta under Genoese rule.

Indeed the Genoese archives have much material on this subject, and it is only fairly
recently that scholars, notably Catherine Otten-Froux, Michel Balard and Laura Balletto,

have been systematically exploiting their potential. The Venetians too were interested in
trading with Cyprus, and our knowledge of the activities of their merchants and their
state galleys throughout the Lusignan period but especially in the fifteenth century have

been considerably enhanced thanks to the research of Doris Stockly.

To return to the beginnings of Frankish rule: Jean-Claude Cheynet and Gerard

Dedeyan have both contributed important papers which help answer the question of what
Cyprus was like on the eve of the Frankish conquest, while Claudia Naumann, in her
study of the crusade of the Emperor Henry VI, has provided an exhaustive analysis of

the circumstances of the establishment of the Lusignan monarchy in 1196.

Various

Frankish legal texts that relate to Cyprus have been considered by Marie-Adelaide
Nielen-Vandevoorde, Jean Richard and myself, while Michael Metcalf has scrutinized

crusader seals from the island.

Nicola Coldstream has pieced together what can be

known of the development and topography of Nicosia, and Kristian Molin has examined

the fortifications of the Lusignan epoch and their function.

Gilles Grivaud and I have

tackled different aspects of the structure of Frankish society and government,

and,

P. W. Edbury, ‘The Aftermath of defeat. Lusignan Cyprus and the Genoese, 1374–1382’, LO, 132–140; C.

Otten-Froux, ‘Le retour manque de Jacques 1er en Chypre’, LO, 228–40; L. Balletto, ‘Tra Genova e Cipro
nel 1373–74’, EKEE, 22 (1996), 57–67.

C. Otten-Froux, ‘I maonesi e la maona vecchia di Cipro’, Storia dei Genovesi, 12 (1994), 95–118; ‘Les

relations politico-financiere de Genes avec le Royaume des Lusignan (1374–1460)’, CMA, 61–75; ‘La ville

enclave, un cas particulier de ville frontiere. L’exemple de Famagouste au XIVe–XVe siecle’, in: Les villes

frontiere

(moyen age –epoque moderne), ed. D. Menjot (Paris and Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1996), 197–208.

M. Balard, ‘Note sull’amministrazione di Cipro nel Quattrocento’, Storia dei Genovesi, 12 (1994), 83–93;

‘La place de Famagouste genoise dans le royaume des Lusignan’, LO, 16–27; ‘Les Genois a Famagouste

(XIIIe–XVe siecles)’, KC, 85–94. L. Balletto, ‘L’isola di Cipro nell’anno della caduta di Constantinopoli’,
Anuario de estudios medievales, 22 (1992), 205–31; ‘Ethnic groups, cross-social and cross-cultural contacts

on fifteenth-century Cyprus’, ICMM, 35–48; ‘Les Genois dans l’ ıle de Chypre au bas moyen age’, LO,
28–46.

D. Stockly, Le systeme de l

’Incanto des galees de Venise, fin XIIIe – milieu XVe siecle (Leiden: Brill, 1995);

‘Hommes d’affaires – armateurs et ‘diplomates’ venitiens a Chypre’, LO, 281–9; ‘Le transport maritime

d’Etat a Chypre. Complement des techniques coloniales venitiennes (XIIIe–XVe siecles). L’example du

sucre’, CMA, 131–41; ‘Le film de la navigation venitienne vers Chypre (fin 13e–milieu 15e siecle)’, EKEE,

´ `

23 (1997), 57–74; ‘Commerce et rivalite a Chypre. Le transport du sucre par les Venitiens dans les annees

1440 d’apres quelques documents genois’, OO, 1133–44.

J.-C. Cheynet, ‘Chypre a la veille de la conquete franque’, LO, 67–77; G. Dedeyan, ‘Les Armeniens a

Chypre de la fin du XIe au debut du XIIIe siecle’, LO, 122–131; C. Naumann, Der Kreuzzug Kaiser
Heinrichs VI (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994).

M.A. Nielen-Vandevoorde, ‘Un livre meconnnu des Assises de Jerusalem. Les Lignages d

’Outremer’,

Bibliotheque de l

’Ecole des Chartes, 153 (1995), 103–30; J. Richard, ‘Freedom and servitude in Cyprus and

Rhodes. An Assize dating from 1396’, ICMM, 272–283; P. W. Edbury, ‘John of Jaffa and the kingdom of
Cyprus’, EKEE, 23 (1997), 15–26; D.M. Metcalf, ‘The iconography and style of crusader seals in Cyprus’,
CAC, 365–75.

N. Coldstream, Nicosia – Gothic city to Venetian fortress (Nicosia: A.G. Leventis Foundation, 1993); K.

Molin, ‘Fortification and internal security in the kingdom of Cyprus, 1191–1426’, in: From Clermont to
Jerusalem

. The crusades and crusader societies, 1095 –1500, ed. A.V. Murray (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998),

187–99.

G. Grivaud, ‘Formes byzantines de la fiscalite fonciere chypriote a l’epoque latine’, EKEE, 18 (1991),

117–27; ‘Les Lusignan et leurs archontes chypriotes 1192–1359’, LO, 150–58. P. W. Edbury, ‘Le regime
des Lusignans en Chypre et la population locale’, CMA, 354–8.

Peter W. Edbury

moving on into the fifteenth century, we find that the politics and court culture of that

sometimes neglected age have not entirely been forgotten.

I have already mentioned the importance of ecclesiastical history in any discussion of

relations between Greeks and Latins on Cyprus. The wider subject of cultural awareness
and the self-imaging of both Greeks and Franks continues to attract a variety of

approaches,

as does the artistic heritage of the Frankish and Venetian periods. Here the

work of three scholars in particular has caught my attention, Athanasios Papageorgiou,

Annemarie Weyl Carr, and Jaroslav Folda,

and their ability to see the achievements of

Cypriot artists in the larger contexts of Byzantine and western traditions and identify
points of cultural interchange are especially welcome. Costas Constantinides and Robert
Browning’s work on Greek manuscripts from Cyprus has deservedly been well received,

and their findings offer interesting possibilities for future research.

Finally we come to the Venetian period. Here two scholars, Benjamin Arbel and Gilles

Grivaud, have in recent years established themselves as leading authorities. From his
researches in the Venetian archives Arbel has shown conclusively that under the
Venetians the population rose, after falling steadily since the mid fourteenth century, and
the economy quickened accordingly. The older view of stagnation has to be rejected, and

a more positive view of Venetian colonial rule emerges in consequence.

Grivaud has

examined aspects of governmental and ecclesiastical affairs, and has been able to shed

N. Christofidou, ‘Images de la vie de la cour du roi Janus’, LO, 78–88; F. De Caria and D. Taverna, ‘Les

Lusignan et la maison de Savoie. Le mariage entre Louis II et Anne Lusignan de Chypre, 1432–1462’, LO,

112–21; J. Paviot, ‘Les ducs de Bourgogne et les Lusignan de Chypre au XVe siecle’, LO, 241–50; J.

Richard, ‘Des Lusignan mythiques au mythe des Lusignan. Un ‘petit Lusignan‘ au XVe siecle’, LO, 251–9.

C. Asdracha, ‘Les Lusignan a Chypre. Langue et osmose culturelles’, LO, 11–15; K. Ciggaar, ‘Le royaume

des Lusignan. Terre de litterature et de traductions. Echanges litteraires et culturels’, LO, 89–98; G.

Grivaud, ‘Eveil de la nation chyproise (XIIIe–XVIe siecles)’, KC, 105–116; A. Ilieva, ‘Crusading images in

Cypriot history writing’, CAC, 295–309; ‘L’image des Lusignan dans l’historiographie chypriote. Heros et

anti-heros’, LO, 159–62; ‘Francus contra Graecum? Some notes on identity in Cypriot history writing
during the thirteenth century’, in: Visitors

, immigrants and invaders in Cyprus, ed. P. Wallace (Albany:

Center for Cypriot Studies, 1995), 114–24; C.P. Kyrris, ‘Greek Cypriot identity, Byzantium and the Latins,
1192–1489’, EKEE, 19 (1992), 169–85 (slightly revised in History of European Ideas, 19 (1994), 563–73);

J. Richard, ‘Culture franque, culture grecque, culture arabe dans le royaume de Chypre au 13e et au debut du

14e siecle’, Universite de Saint-Joseph

. Annales du Department des Lettres Arabes, 6 (1991–2) [1996],

235–45.

A. Papageorgiou, Icons of Cyprus (Nicosia: Holy Archbishopric of Nicosia, 1992); ‘Crusader influence on

the Byzantine art of Cyprus’, CAC, 275–94. A.W. Carr, ‘Images of medieval Cyprus’, in: Visitors

immigrants and invaders in Cyprus, ed. P. Wallace (Albany: Center for Cypriot Studies, 1995), 87–103; ‘Art
in the court of the Lusignan kings’, CAC, 239–74; ‘Byzantines and Italians on Cyprus. Images from Art’,
Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49 (1995), 339–57; J. Folda, ‘Crusader art in the kingdom of Cyprus, c.
1275–1291. Reflections on the state of the questions’, CAC, 209–37.

C.N. Constantinides and R. Browning, Dated Greek Manuscripts from Cyprus to the Year

1570 (Nicosia:

Dumbarton Oaks / Cyprus Research Centre, 1993). See also C.N. Constantinides, ‘Poetic colophons in
Medieval Cypriot Manuscripts’, SLC, 319–80.

B. Arbel, ‘The reign of Caterina Corner (1473–1489) as a family affair’, Studi veneziani, 26 (1993), 67–85;

‘Greek magnates in Venetian Cyprus. The case of the Synglitico family’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 49

(1995), 325–37; ‘Regime colonial, colonisation et peuplement. Le cas de Chypre sous la domination

venitienne’, KC, 95–104; ‘Venetian Cyprus and the Muslim Levant, 1473–1570’, CAC, 159–85; ‘The
economy of Cyprus during the Venetian period’, in: The development of the Cypriot economy

. From the

prehistoric period to the present day, eds. V. Karageorghis and D. Michaelides (Nicosia: U. of Cyprus,

1996), 185–92; ’L’eredita genovese a Cipro’, OO, 21–40.

Cyprus under the Lusignans and Venetians, 1991–1998

considerable light on the refortification of Nicosia in the 1560s. All this came to an end
with the Ottoman invasion of 1570–71, and Grivaud, together with Nasa Patapiou, has

edited the account of the War of Cyprus by Pietro Valderio.

The history of Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus is flourishing. That much is clear from

the bulging footnotes to this review. To those colleagues who have somehow got left
out, I can only apologize. The one major dimension that I have not attempted to cover is
the growing number of books and articles published in Greek. Looking to the future I
have no doubt that the Cypriots will want to claim their history for themselves. It is easy
to think of Cyprus in these centuries in terms of its place in the history of the crusades or
as a port-of-call in the Italian-dominated commercial network in the Mediterranean or as
part of the Venetian colonial empire and lose sight of the Cypriot people and forget that
the island, for all its political upheavals, remained part of the Greek world and formed

part of what Nicolae Iorga in his memorable phrase dubbed Byzance apres Byzance. One
particular facet of this is clearly apparent. Interest in the language and patterns of
thought of Leontios Makhairas as shown in his Recital concerning the Sweet Land of

Cyprus is growing. Professor Mikhalis Pieris of the University of Cyprus is preparing a
new critical edition based on all the surviving Greek manuscripts. He has also written a
play based on Leontios’s account of the murder of King Peter I (1369) – a reminder to
his audience that, though the ’Sweet Land’ had its darker side, the cultural and literary

heritage of these centuries is something to be cherished.

´ ´

G. Grivaud, ‘Nicosie remodelee (1567). Contribution a la topographie de la ville medievale’, EKEE, 19

(1992), 281–306; ‘Ordine della Secreta di Cipro. Florio Bustron et les institutions franco-byzantines

afferentes au regime agraire de Chypre a l’epoque venitienne’, Meletai kai ipomnimata, 2 (1992), 531–92;

‘Venise et les questions religieuses a Chypre. La querelle de l’abbaye Notre-Dame Acheirpopaiitos
(1527–1535)’, Epeterida Kentrou Meleton Ieras Mones Kykkou, 2 (1993), 219–44. On the fortifications at
Nicosia, see also G.M. Perbellini, The Fortress of Nicosia

, prototype of European renaissance military

architecture (Nicosia: A.G. Leventis Foundation, 1994).

Pietro Valderio, La guerra di Cipro, eds. G. Grivaud and N. Patapiou (Nicosia: Cyprus Research Centre,

1996).

For a full bibliography, M. Pieris and A. Nikolaou-Konnari, ‘Leontiou Makhaira, Exigisis tis glukeias khoras

Kuprou i poia legetai Kronika toutestin Khronikon’, EKEE, 23 (1997), 75–114. For a major recent study,
C.P. Kyrris, ‘Some aspects of Leontios Makhairas. Ethnoreligious ideology, cultural identity and historio-
graphic method’, Stasinos, 10 (1993), 167–281.

Leontios Makhairas

. Khroniko tis Kuprou (Nicosia: Th.E.Pa.K., 1998).

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