The Rise of Vernacular Greek Historiography in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract Within the historiographical output of those territories of the eastern Mediterranean under western occupation, the Copenhagen manuscript of the Chronicle of Morea (H) was not the first text to present the encounter between conquerors and conquered as resulting in the negotiation of a new identity. An antecedent of sorts had already been provided over two hundred years previously. In the course of the twelfth century, the establishment and subsequent fate of the Crusader States in Syria and the Holy Land had been recorded not only by westerners whose presence in the area was more or less temporary, but also by a few permanent residents. Of the extant works produced by the latter, one of the earliest was the Gesta Francorum Iherusalem Peregrinantium or Historia Hierosolymitana by Fulcher of Chartres, a participant in the First Crusade who settled in Palestine as chaplain to Baudouin I, the lord of Edessa and first of the crusader kings at Jerusalem, dying there in old age c.1127. In his account of the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Principality of Antioch, and the Counties of Edessa and Tripoli, Fulcher was concerned to stress the coming together of diverse ethnic elements in the foreign land which the crusaders had made their own. Thus, he drew attention in the penultimate pages of his Historia to a process of assimilation, noting that, as the incomers became more rooted in the locality and their descendants multiplied, the old homelands had been forgotten (‘obliti sumus nativitatis nostrae loca’, III.xxxvii.3). Those who had emigrated to the Levant, he explained, no longer spoke of their birthplaces, while the new generations had no first-hand knowledge of the West.