Download PDF | Vladimir Agrigoroaei - The Culture of Latin Greece_ Seven Tales from the 13th and 14th centuries. 86-Brill (2022).
763 Pages
How This Book Came to Be
It is hard to say what this book is. I can only say what it is not. My primary interest is not the exploration of iconographic series or the stemmatic criticism of textual variants. I do not group cultural acts in categories and I have no pretentions of objectivity whatsoever. The book is not an exhaustive approach to a well-trimmed corpus of examples either. It simply returns to the roots of what research in humanities used to be: nuances and new readings. At a first glance, this is a plain old book, an interpretation of an organic cluster of cultural acts dating from the time of the Latin occupation of Greece. Now, when it is trendy to speak of materiality and immateriality – whatever the second concept may really mean, I am more interested in meaning than form. Meaning is always subject to debate. Regardless of our fascination for items pin-pointed on digital maps, databases, or online facsimiles, neatly classifying items and putting them in boxes is not useful all the time. We spend too much time preoccupied with adjusting our methodology to the syntax of programming languages, reinventing the wheel every half-decade. We live in an age of electronic incunabula – a cradle of interactive babbling, impatiently waiting to see what the future unfolds.
However, this future is still unknown to us. This is why I prefer to draw on our past, to debate our objectivity. I wish to confront my interpretations with those of my peers. Every researcher must acknowledge the limits of her/his own approach, turning that subjectiveness into a method of research. Therefore, my book is intentionally exposed to criticism and engages the reader in constant dialogue with the author. It is an opinion, a demonstration, a suggestion. It speaks of the East-West dilemma, of Westerners and Byzantines ‘meeting on the ledge’, of vernacular and high-prestige forms of cultural interplay, of syncretism, hybridization, or amalgamation, but it approaches all these topics from the perspective of the individual. It does not approach them in opposition, but as an amendment to the socio-political or socio-economic readings that are regularly enforced in the interpretation of those same examples. Every historical interpretation is prone to a subjective narrative of the literary kind. This suggests that one must embrace and make use of her/his own subjectivity, trying to domesticate it until it goes from foe to friend. In the book, I pushed subjectivity to the extreme: I converted my historical interpretations into literature, displaying their exaggerations through a dramatization of the narrative. I used those exaggerations in order to attain a certain degree of falsifiability, in order to evaluate the limits of what one can and cannot understand about the times of old. My goal was never to write tales about Michael Choniates, William of Morbeka, Anna of Villehardouin, Angelo Clareno, Isabella of Lusignan, or Nicholas da Martoni, even though their stories gave structure to the chapters of the book and created a particular rhythm of the narrative. These tales are the by-product of a method of research. I used them in order to slither through an organic maze of artistic and literary examples that cannot be suitably classified, as they are steadily linked in the form of a maze: the cultural conundrum of Latin-occupied Greece. In order to understand why I had to resort to this method, the readers must know the story of this book. Here is how and why I took the decision to write academic tales using fragments of chronicles and literary texts, arranged as collages. For the sake of the genre, my introductory explanation is presented as one of the seven tales of the book.
The idea behind it was born six years ago, when I first came to Athens with a vague plan to study the cultural context of a rara avis, the only medieval translation made from Old Greek into French.1 It was the summer of 2014. Four years before, when I was writing my first PhD dissertation, I noticed that this translation had been produced in a rather strange milieu, at Mount Athos, in the early years of the Latin occupation, at the monastery of Iviron. I wanted to learn more about the period. This was one of the earliest translations into French and the only one made from Old Greek. What I found in the month spent in the library of the French School of Athens was far more stimulating than what I had originally set out to find. The French occupation of continental Greece (Frankokratia) was an incongruous world, full of perplexities. Latin influences were peripheral, often found in rural areas, where no Latins lived. These influences made no sense whatsoever, since they should have been located in an urban context, the social core of the 13th–14th century occupation. I reached that conclusion because I did not look exclusively at the literary corpus. I also looked into art issues. In that short month spent in Greece, I saw a lot of things in Athens and around it, but I also hiked in Methana for two days, and I went to Mani. That one-day visit to Inner Mani, waking up early to take the bus from Kifissos at 5 a.m. and returning after midnight, with the last bus from Areopoli, left a strong impression in my mind. It was very hot in the month of August, I was on foot when I was dropped off in front of the gas station beneath Briki, and a divine hand made me meet a couple of art historians in the church of Saint-Nicholas. It was the first monument that I entered that day. I cannot remember their names, but they had a car and they were willing to help me.
They showed me monuments that were on their list, such as Trissakia, where I was fascinated less by the majestic depictions of holy riders and more by the hole in the sanctuary conch. One could see the mountain range through that hole, flanked by the hands and head of a damaged Platytera. There was also a crack in the depiction of the Last Supper, separating Judas from the rest of the scene. It looked like magic. A land made up of rocks, red earth, thistles of various shapes and sizes, olive trees, donkeys, and more rocks. Next, I entered the churches of Polemitas (Fig. 37a). The old one never fascinated me, in spite of its famous inscription. Instead, I remember entering the church of Saint-Nicholas and contemplating the odd arrangement of saint Kyriaki next to saint George on horseback. It stroke me as incredibly weird, a sort of stimulus diffusion of the scene with saint George and the princess. And for three full years, all sorts of ideas yeasted in the back of my mind. In 2017, when those ideas had risen enough, I returned to Athens and tried to find a way to put them to good use. Evi Platanitou, the secretary of the French School, always helped me. She constantly found a room for me to stay and do my research, even when it was almost impossible. But in that month of November, she also put me in contact with Platon Petridis, who provided me with a list of contacts. The first one on that list was Maria Panayotidi and this is where my Greek adventure began. She probably never believed that my research would contribute something new to the world of art history, but she took a great chance and agreed to be my supervisor for a fellowship grant of the Onassis Foundation. She wrote letters and talked to the administration at the University. Later, I found out that I was lucky enough for my project to be selected by the Onassis Foundation in July 2018. I exchanged a lot of emails with Frédérique Hadgiantoniou, the coordinator of the fellowship. I had the money needed to cover six full months of research in Greece. And I could choose whatever months I wanted. The plan was bold. I knew, from personal experience, that one always forgets something at the end of research, therefore I had to have several ends, to be able to return and mend past mistakes. I divided my stay into three periods: three months at the end of 2018, two before the summer of 2019, and a last month after that summer, in September 2019. It was actually a smart plan.
Instead of drowning myself in fresh discoveries for a full six-month period, I took the time to adjust, take a step back, evaluate, and look forward to what I needed to do next. I also benefited from the advice of other colleagues. Anastasia Yangaki met with me several times, even though it was clear that my research had nothing to do with the study of ceramics. Without ever knowing, her doubts about the representations of literary heroes on ceramics were the spark that ignited my questioning of the early stages of Digenis. Demetrios Athanasoulis welcomed me in his office across the Roman Agora, gave me a pile of books, and questioned me about the corpus. Since I was at the beginning of my research, he orally compiled a list of monuments that could interest me. And from that list I found other lists, published by others, building a solid basis in my quest. Michalis Kappas met with me in a kafeneio and was doubtful about what I had in mind, but this did not stop him from providing me with more lists of monuments and useful Greek examples that helped me finish the comparative section of my article about the Transylvanian church of Strei.2 Tassos Tanoulas welcomed me in his home and explained to me in detail the modern history of the carved fragments which came from the former deposit of Thissio. Last but not least, there was Sophia Kalopissi-Verti. She too met with me many times in the teashop of the German Institute, sometimes in the company of Maria Panayotidi. She gave me scientific and practical advice. She even gave me one of the last remaining copies of her PhD dissertation, a book that I greatly cherish.
By the end of the first month, I had already run through most lists of monuments and texts, compiling a good starting point. I also had vague ideas about how to present my findings. In my frequent conversations with Panayotis Katsafados, I explained that I was looking for strange cases. Not necessarily Western in nature, but odd situations from the standpoint of Byzantine iconography. The reason behind this choice was an observation that I had made when studying Demotic literary texts: Western influences were never obvious, they were hidden, as if they had been filtered through a cultural sieve. In fact, most of them belonged to the category of stimulus diffusion, since they were reactions to French or Italian trends. He provided me with an avalanche of examples, each of them more intriguing that the next. Some of those examples were reminiscent of what I had found in literary texts. This gave me the idea to place literary and artistic acts in a sort of balance, in constant comparison. What stroke me instantly when I assembled my Greek corpus was the utter absence of sacred texts in the Demotic language, even though such texts would have been expected, had the Demotic texts been written under the influence of the Westerners.
The similar absence of evident Latin themes in the art of the period suggested to me that the absence itself was the place to start. In medieval French literature, at least one third of the 12th–13th century literary corpus is made up of biblical or hagiographic texts. Their number equals and often exceeds that of chivalric romances or songs-of-deeds(chansons de geste). Since there are traces of Demotic chivalric romances, and since Digenis itself can be compared to a song-of-deeds, one is left to wonder why there are no biblical or hagiographic texts in the Demotic Greek corpus, or very few, if we take into consideration the late and rare productions of Crete (15th century) or the early Comnenian ones (12th century).3 The best interpretation is that cultural exchanges acted at a superficial level, since spiritual matters were carefully considered, thus the absence of sacred texts in the Demotic milieu influenced by the Latins. As for the odd similarities between some religious writings, like the consecutive adaptations of the Byzantine tale of Syndipas and its Western counterpart, Dolopathos or the Seven Wise Men, they could not be of any help, since they stemmed from a previously established tradition. What interested me more was the manner in which a doctrinal dialogue was construed through the acceptance of Byzantine culture by the newly arrived Latins. This odd doctrinal contact became clearer when Maria Panayotidi, Sophia Kalopissi-Verti, and Niki Vasilikou took me to see Omorphi Ekklisia in Galatsi. A cold wind blew through the church when we discussed disruptions in iconography. There was nothing wrong with the scenes themselves, but some depictions were not in their right places and there was also the issue of a tonsured saint in the narthex (Fig. 17). It looked like there was a Latin presence, but it was hidden behind actual Byzantine scenes. As if art and literature changed under the pressure of the Latins, but those changes were in accord with local tradition, not against it.
I still believe that the answer to all these questions lies in a proper linguistic study of the inscriptions of the Peloponnesus in comparison with the earliest Demotic texts, looking for the earliest manifestation of the vernacular language, for possible sociolects, dialects, and for idiolects as well. But, alas, I am not the person to do it, for I am not a linguist. It may be argued that the rift between the old and the new language in the history of Greek originated in these two centuries of Latin occupation. A common-place or ‘received idea’ (still unverified, but not disproven either) states that the genesis of a Demotic Greek language could have been speeded up by foreign rule after 1205. It is common knowledge that Demotic was influenced by Western languages, but these influences are uncertain, ranking from superficial to obscure. However, this is exactly the case with art history and history of literature, so there may be something to this, especially since the disruption in the language’s evolution could lead to the transformation of the Doric dialects of the Peloponnesus into a Tsakonian language. Still, it is difficult to delve deep into such problematic notions, because they may be used in a political way, by adversaries and defenders of traditionalism alike. In fact, nobody can truly observe a connection between the arrival of the Latins in the area and the earliest manifestations of the vernacular language. Real proof of change comes only from a series of Greek romances, but these texts are equally uncanny and their origins predate the conquest of 1205.
One cannot know if their language corresponds to the vernacular manifestations of words, phrases, and even sentences in the 13th or 14th century inscriptions of the same area. This is where the differences between dialects and sociolects become fundamental. The real question is: are we contemplating a geographical distribution of these literary texts? Or is it a distribution across social strata? What was the actual public of these texts? I am tempted to mention an idea shared in private correspondence by Anthony Kaldellis: some of these romances could be written for the descendants of the Greek-speaking French and not by and for the Greeks themselves. Consequently, those Demotic texts would not be written in an actual Greek language, but in a sociolect, not very different but occasionally dissimilar from the idiom spoken by the majority of the population. Nevertheless, I cannot argue that this sociolect would be comparable to what happened in the case of Anglo-Norman religious texts, written in the cloister. Those Old French texts are a proof of a monastic or scholar sociolect, because the vernacular language acted in conjugation with (or under the larger protective umbrella of) Latin in the British Isles. Nor can I compare the Demotic case to what happened in Northern Italy, where the French influence determined the creation of an artificial literary language, the Franco-Italian, restricted to a specific public – people who were in contact or who were imitating French cultural trends. The Greek case seems to be related to these situations, but it is different at the same time, perhaps because we think too much about the Gasmouli, the offspring of mixed marriages between Byzantines and Latins. We fail to see that mixed marriages were not the only manner in which syncretic forms could be attained. People do not need physical contact to borrow an idea. If Orthodoxy and Catholicism were tectonic plates, their clash would be often ‘convergent’, with one of them sliding under the other. This led to subduction, as it happened in medieval Transylvania (but also sporadically in the Peloponnesus). In Transylvania, there were mixed marriages between Vlach and Hungarian elite, but Latin influences appeared everywhere, independently from them. The main difference between Transylvania and the Greek lands is that the Transylvanian Orthodox were mostly located in rural areas, while Catholics lived in urban settlements. But there were many Catholic communities in rural areas as well. This suggests that we should be careful when comparing Transylvania to Cyprus or Morea, where things were quite the opposite, with the Latins restricted to urban settlements and the Greeks occupying both urban and rural areas. From what we see in art and literature, there are instances in which the Greek lands could also be a ‘divergent boundary’, with the plates moving away from each other, but it is impossible to state whether this is a consequence of social policies (or not). There is also the ‘transform boundary’, a case in which the two plates simply stick to each other, without creating or destroying anything.
This is the case of the Rus’ lands or of several other Greek situations. Naturally, none of these ideas should be taken as a general rule. But the countless manners in which the Byzantine Commonwealth and Latin West interacted with one another on this wide divide, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, suggested that I include many comparisons in my book: Northern Russia; Western Ukraine and Transylvania; or the Banat and Southern Slavic lands. In these areas, the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue started earlier and lasted longer. From this point of view, the Holy Land and Morea are a bit inconsistent. Only Cyprus, Crete, and the Aegean may be considered to be long-term areas where cultural phenomena occurred with a certain frequency. Since I mentioned these terms of comparison, it is worth noting that French cultural influences manifested early on in the history of Western Europe. Italy, the German lands, and the Iberian Peninsula were under the sway of French cultural trends ever since the beginning of the 12th century. Scandinavian literature soon followed this trend and the Round Table or other French tales reached as far eastward as Poland and Russia. From this standpoint, the Greek lands were a late bloomer and the influences were multifaceted. We should not speak of a French influence, but of a Franco-Italian one, since they formed a cultural conglomerate. In literature, Byzantine romances, well attested in the previous century, during the Comnenian dynasty, multiplied and transmuted in Palaeologan times. One may find Greek translations of French romances, like the War of Troy (Ὁ Πόλεμος τῆς Τρωάδος), adapted from the Roman de Troie, but there are also French tales which arrived through an Italian intermediary, such as Apollonius or Floire et Blancheflor. This happened in later periods, when Demotic literature acquired its own Arthurian tale, the 15th-century fragment of the Old Knight (Ὁ Πρέσβυς Ιππότης). Since this last example translates a French romance written by a Pisan, it is only natural to link it to the fact that Francophile Italians (from Venice, Pisa, Florence, Naples, etc.) formed the largest part of the residents settled in the towns of Frankish Morea. Yet, there are also source texts of a purely Italian nature, like the Theseid of Boccaccio. We can notice an oscillation between French and Italian models, with purely French ones at the beginning and purely Italian ones at the end. In art, on the other hand, circumstances vary differently. One cannot notice an oscillation between French and Italian trends, because art is rarely connected to language in a direct way. Moreover, most directly influenced works of art are now lost, due to an ambiguous damnatio memoriae that may have operated at the end of the Frankokratia. This could also be related to the fact that cultural exchanges acted on a superficial level. Religious themes were weightier and subject to more risks. Perhaps this is why there are only ruins of Latin churches in the Peloponnesus, while the church of Saint-Paraskevi from Euboea is still well preserved, because it was located in an area where Western presence lasted longer. I am not speaking of incidental destructions such as that of the monastery in Isova. I am speaking of the voluntary destruction of Glarentza in 1431. The local church of Saint-Francis was razed to the ground (Fig. 30). Fragments of decoration were found only by archaeological research. There is also a scarcity of Western epigraphic material. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), there are not many Latin inscriptions in the Peloponnesus, contrary to the situation from the islands, where Latin inscriptions are abundant. The only Moreote ones to survive are badly damaged. Not to mention that each example is incomplete and with an unknown original position in situ.4 For example, traditional research considers that the funerary slab of princess Anna of Villehardouin was situated in the church of Saint-James in Andravida, burial chapel of the Villehardouin, but nobody can actually state where that particular church was located. It was destroyed, maybe pillaged by the locals for its stone material, and the church of Saint-Stephen is also unaccounted for. Only the church of Saint-Sophia remains from the entire medieval settlement of Andravida (Fig. 28–29), but most of it is in a dilapidated state as well. Nothing really remains from the Latin occupation of Kalamata either, even though there must have been something there. The same may be said about Patras, Corinth, or Nafplio.
These had to be the centres whence Latin influence irradiated towards the rural examples that I had found, but there was nothing in them. There were some Byzantine churches that had survived the Turkish conquest, meaning that the destruction probably operated on different grounds, since this lack of interest only concerns the state of Latin monuments. If these are exceptions, as some would have us believe, then this may account, by contrast, for a different phenomenon, perhaps similar to the issue of Greek romances: Latins would have built churches in a Byzantine style, like that of Merbaka. Latins from the later generations may have used the Greek language as well. This is partly true, though it cannot be properly argued. The issue is simple: all that is left of these Latins are their castles, and not even those are all accounted for. Nobody knows much about the second, third, and fourth generation Frenchmen, about the progressive Italianization of Morea, or about the ubiquitous but never defined Gasmouli. All that we have are suppositions and recent research has proven that our faulty perspective derives from giving to much credit to the propagandistic reading of history in the Chronicle of Morea. This text “would have us believe that the religious schism between Catholics and Orthodox became a non-issue in Morea under the Villehardouin.” It also implies “the existence of a common language shared by both Greeks and Latins in the Peloponnesus,” a sense of unity, which was possible up to a certain degree, but never to the embellished levels implied by the Chronicle.5 I started wondering whether (or not) the whole situation construed the creation of a vernacular identity, opposed to the Byzantine mainstream Old Greek Koiné. Not a “common language shared by Greeks and Latins,” but the shared use of vernacular languages (Demotic Greek, French, and maybe Italian). The fifth chapter of the book will show that this is highly plausible, since certain Demotic Greek texts were closely linked to the French and Italian texts copied in the Angevin Kingdom of Naples. In any case, it would have nothing in common with the creation of a Greek nation. I am not convinced by the definition of nations and nationalisms as purely social phenomena. In literary history, textual communities, language, and culture play a much more significant part. Hence, I am quite tempted to consider that the Latin conquerors, who were readers of Western romances, shared a common propensity for the vernacular language with the readers of Demotic romances; or for the vernacular manners of expressing culture. For the time being, I will take into account only the working hypothesis that these people were progressively Hellenized and Italianized. To prove this, suffice it to say that direct cultural influences did exist. Certain documents mention works of art, now lost (such as the murals presenting the war of Troy in the palace of the archbishop in Patras), but they were following Venetian models, as I will argue in the fourth chapter. Moreover, these Venetian models were based in their own turn upon Italian translations and adaptations or Franco-Italian renderings of French texts. It is no surprise that the War of Troy, the Greek 14th century poem following the French story, was adapted from one of the late versions of the Roman de Troie, presumably from a version that was read or copied at the court of Naples. Things go in the direction of Italy, just as the rarely preserved works of art do, too. The best example would be the murals from the Akronafplio gate, analysed in the fourth chapter. But there are also cases of indirect influence, like the Digenis representation in Chrysapha (Fig. 57–59) or the Alexander carving from Mystras (Fig. 52), which will be analysed in the penultimate chapter (the sixth one).
They belonged to a vernacular level of culture, explaining thus the transfer of patterns, not the transfer of texts proper. I was fascinated by these odd cases, therefore I decided to make my preliminary field trips in Laconia. By the end of October 2018, I was already in Sparti, speaking to the colleagues from the local Ephorate. I visited Mystras, Chrysapha, and the churches of Geraki in the rather short time of five days. Since I mentioned these examples, it is worth revealing that Western trends affected Greek culture in an indirect manner. One of the main lines of my research was the analysis of stimulus diffusion: the Greek reaction to the newly arrived cultural trends. Stimulus diffusion occurs when an idea spreads based on its attachment to another concept, when concepts switch cultures, or, simply put, when things are achieved in a different way. Many themes and motifs were ascribed to this French influence – such as the sudden blooming of equestrian saints in murals, but not all these examples should be regarded as actual influences. The military saints on horseback, for instance, appear all over the Mediterranean. The same may be said about motifs on ceramics. In fact, most of the actual cases are still unidentified. My favourite example is the scene with Digenis Akritas fighting Maximou the Amazon in a church from Chrysapha (Fig. 57–59), where the Demotic Greek hero occupies the same place as Roland (the Old French hero) in the churches of Northern Italy. The idea of linking profane tales to sacred representations probably switched sides and was adapted to the Greek culture in a typical stimulus diffusion. This was possible because similar things happened all over Europe when these trends were exported to other languages or literatures. What characterised medieval French trends and their transmission to other linguistic areas was a cultural cocktail best described by Dante at the turn of the 14th century: ‘the Bible with compilations of the history of Troy and Rome, and King Arthur’s most beautiful digressions, and many other stories’ (Biblia cum Troianorum Romanorumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime et quamplures alie ystorie).6 This French ‘spirit’, with a propensity for merging romance and religious subjects, manifested as early as the onset of the 12th century, in a yet unclear relationship between sacred and secular art. It was the result of the circulation of models and ideas between the literary and artistic milieus of the Middle Ages. And it is obvious – I noted this in many studies – in the art of Northern Italy, where Franco-Italian texts were later written in the 13th century. This is my primary reason to believe that the representation of Digenis in the Chrysapha church is influenced by various Western heroes carved or painted in the churches of Italy and France. This is equally why I believe that the siege of Jericho from the Taxiarchis church of Geraki (Fig. 63) may be influenced by similar models, recognisable in depictions from Cressac (Fig. 1) or Clermont. These cultural trends relied on a fusion of sacred and profane, of Bible and chivalric stories, in a very unique way that the book will explore in detail. It is difficult to say what triggered such aesthetic choices, but a safe bet is that one of the chief causes was the inferior status of vernacular sacred texts in comparison with the high-prestige stance of their Latin sources. Vernacular translations started on the margins or between the lines of Latin texts, often accompanying and having a similar value to the miniatures painted in the same manuscripts. This was the proper and un-heretical way of dealing with the transfer of sacred stories from Latin into the vernacular. But this peripheral status also led to the grafting of vernacular themes on sacred subjects. As for the sacred texts, actual translations carried the risk of heresy, except when they were proposed in the form of adaptations, accompanied by sage commentaries of those texts. It is no wonder that the translations and adaptations of the New Testament were rather late-comers in the French literature, since the risk of mistranslations was greater in their cases. It is also not surprising that the large majority of early translations were made from the books of the Old Testament, as most of them were event-driven books of history.
Thus the passion for Old Testament stories, for Old Testament iconography, leading to a fascination with the Old Testament that ended up in the ideology and propaganda of the crusades, with the crusaders walking in the footsteps of their models in the Holy Land. Some of the earliest biblical translations into French were made for crusaders and 12th–13th century French literature is filled to the brim by such tales and adaptations.7 Byzantines could interpret this proclivity for Old Testament stories in light of what they considered to be a Judaizing tendency in Latin culture. They had a similar approach to the Old Testament as a book of history and they often compared themselves to the Jews as a Chosen People, but the position was more nuanced.8 In a diatribe against the Latins, Constantine Stilbès noticed that the members of the Western Church had several common points with heresies that had been recognized and condemned in the past. Latins came under Judaism in several grievances: the unleavened bread, the fact that the bishops shaved their whole body, the quasi-observation of the Sabbath, the ablutions and the purifications, and other things as well.9 His explanation was historical and deterministic: when the Vandals overthrew the power of Rome, they uprooted ancient Romans. Since they shared various heresies – from the fact that they were Arians, Nestorians, Macedonians and who knows what else, they implanted these heresies in Rome. Franks and Germans received them as a sort of cultural inheritance.10 Stilbès voiced a ready-made opinion, an instant reaction, a compulsive rejection, but this did not last very long. The Byzantines undoubtedly assimilated something from the Latin rhetoric of the Old Testament. The 13th century is the time when Old Testament cycles appeared in the narthex of churches.11 I remember explaining this situation to Ioanna Christoforaki upon my return from my first Laconian trip. She did not disagree with my explanation, but she needed to know more about this unexplored topic. This gave me two ideas. On the one hand, I had to concentrate my book on a parallel presentation of what the Western cultural presence could have been and what its reflections in Greek art and literature actually were. On the other hand, I had to put everything into context, recuperating as much as possible from earlier studies about a similar cultural dialogue in the Holy Land, in Cyprus, or in Crete. There was even a linguistic reason behind this. I had never forgotten that the key to understanding the Greek corpus and the effects of French cultural trends would be of a linguistic nature (in the future). I could not work with this subject, because it was too infertile and impossible to link with art, but I knew that the Chronicle of Morea and many French texts written in the Crusader states bore the imprint of the Italian language. This ‘Outremer’ French was a language filled with Italianisms. Even some of its Greek and Arab loanwords were subject to an Italian influence.12 And the Iviron French translation of Barlaam and Josaphat – the starting point of my research – was also possibly written with the help of other Italians, the Amalfitan Benedictines of Mount Athos. Since Greek, Latin, Italian, and French were intertwined in linguistics and in literature, I thought that this maybe also be the situation in art history. This is when I decided to give priority to the artistic corpus, since it probably suffered the effects of a harsher damnatio memoriae. I had to take a deeper look at what had happened in art. In literature, things were easier to spot and trace.
By early December, I had bought and sent back to France a lot of books. I cannot find the words to thank my dear Anca for lifting up all those heavy parcels. I had most literary texts, I had read them over and over, and I noticed that there was a huge problem in my bibliography. In literary studies, nobody cared that Western influences were evident before the occupation. Nobody questioned the date of Comnenian novels, in spite of the Western trends that were obvious in their structure. Recent research suggests that the Latin occupation did not change the evolution of Byzantine literature and that change is evident only at the middle of the 14th century, leading to two fluid periods (1050–1350 and 1350–1500).13 Only art history arranged monuments and artwork according to a logic that emphasised different features before and after 1205 (the year of the conquest of Boeotia, Attica, and Peloponnesus). This is when I started to question many of those studies in art history. But first, let me explain the secondary reasons for having such doubts. Premature contacts imaginably occurred because Westerners were already under the sway of Byzantine cultural trends. In Carolingian and Ottonian periods, Byzantine influences in art and literature arrived through Rome. But later, the first three Crusades speeded things up and Westerners borrowed a lot of things directly from the Byzantine East. This probably led to a climate in which they were easily predisposed to adapt to Oriental fashions. Some examples are perhaps in order. The best one is the odd Dormition of the Mother of God depicted in the murals of the Chartreuse du Liget, a small round monastic chapel, close to the town of Loches (France; Fig. 5). It dates back to the turn of the 13th century and the scene is not common in Western iconography. Its particular rendition in this chapel is reminiscent of Oriental depictions. However, as it was pointed to me by Maria Panayotidi, the painter reversed the composition on the longitudinal axis and forgot to depict the bishops, who were essential in the Byzantine scene. To me, this is indicative of a cultural phenomenon that I termed ‘Greek whispers’. It is the unintentional distortion of themes or subjects and their consequent use for a different purpose, in an altered context.14 Several features support this interpretation. First, the fragmentary murals of Liget present no traces of two essential Marianic scenes from the Dodekaorton (Nativity of Mary and Presentation of Mary to the Temple). And there is also no Exaltation of the Cross. Yet one may see that other scenes from Byzantine iconography appear.15 This means that the Dormition loses its original significance, does not mark 15 August in the cycle of Great Feasts, and becomes an autonomous subject. The scene was extracted, without any connection to its initial role in the iconography of Eastern churches. This happened because the Liget murals imitated a model without understanding it, and that model was the church of the Holy-Sepulchre.16 It is of no surprise that the favourite terms of comparison for this Dormition scene originate in a Crusader context or in an earlier, Ottonian one, since these were the early contact points with Byzantium.
However, those depictions are accurate, meaning that they likely stemmed from a source that followed the Byzantine template.17 Once again, this is valid for the continental Greek lands as well. Western influences manifested long before 1205. If we take the depiction of the Trinity as it appears on the vault of the portico of the Ai-Strategi church, close to Kastania (Messenian Mani; Fig. 6–7), that scene looks like a New Testament type of Trinity, also known as the Trinity-of-the-Psalter: Father next to the Son, both seated, with a dove representing the Holy Ghost.18 But there is no dove, no orb, and no angel in the Ai-Strategi depiction (Fig. 7), possibly because this is the result of a cultural transfer that took place in c.1185–1195.19 This type of representation was common in early Christianity, but then it persisted only in Western iconography. And since the Ai-Strategi church presents depictions of Last Judgement scenes, placed in odd locations, research initially believed that the murals should be dated to the 13th century. But it was wrong and the discovery of the inscription mended past mistakes. A similar situation concerns the murals of Paleomonastiro, in the gorges of the Evrotas, close to Vrontamas (Laconia; Fig. 3–4). These murals were dated to 1201 on the basis of an inscription, but a recent investigation argued that the spurs of six military saints depicted on horseback on the outer-wall of the cave-church are similar to the spurs discovered in a crusader grave close to Glarentza. After comparing them to crusader depictions from France (Cressac – Fig. 1 – and Poncé-sur-le-Loir – Fig. 2), the revised interpretation argued that there would be two stages in the decoration of the Vrontamas cave-church: the first one in 1201, while the second stage, comprising the six military saints, would have a terminus post quem in 1205.20 However, the depiction of a spur does not need to be based on the actual presence of the object in Laconia, only on the circulation of the patterns and templates used by painters. The reason behind this two-stage interpretation is that it tries to accommodate the Vrontamas case (an exception) to a previous hypothesis which states that military saints were perhaps depicted on horseback as a consequence of the Latin occupation.21 Yet such depictions on horseback appear to be more frequent on Sinai icons than in Western European murals of the 12th century, and they probably rely on Cappadocian models that could equally be the source of the depictions of Vrontamas.22 Last but not least, there is a great difference between the crusader depictions of Cressac (Fig. 1) and Poncé-sur-le-Loir (Fig. 2) and the two groups of three military saints riding towards each other in the murals of Vrontamas (Fig. 4). The French scenes show them charging against enemies, while the scene from Vrontamas is related to scenes from later Orthodox churches, like the Cavalcade of the Holy Cross in the murals of Pătrăuți (Moldavia, 1487).23 If there is something ‘Western’ in the depiction of the cave-church of Paleomonastiro, it cannot be different from the Western influence in the façades of the Saint-Demetrius cathedral in Vladimir (Russia, 1193–1197). The carvings of military saints on horseback date back to roughly about the same time as Vrontamas.24 Nevertheless, this influence was purely formal.
The most obvious explanation is that it took after the Latin habit of representing riders on church façades, all while conferring a different meaning to those representations. It was nothing more than a circulation of forms. Thus, since the Rus’ lands were not conquered by crusaders, the military saints on horseback from Vrontamas have no direct reason to be interconnected to the presence of crusaders either. When I reached this conclusion, I was already in France, teaching the first version of my seminar for the MA students of the Centre for Medieval Studies in Poitiers. In Greece, in the month of December, I was still undecided. On the one hand, I was fascinated by the possibility that certain subjects be of aLatin origin: not only the depictions of saints on horseback, but also hunting themes in hagiographic cycles, like the scene with saint Eustace and the stag. My subconscious was seemingly trying to help me expand (and aggrandize) the number of depictions of the corpus. Particularly since I had studied similar scenes in Western iconography, some of which – the hunt of saint Giles – were related to the existence of vernacular texts.25 On the other hand, I knew that these ideas were unclear, perhaps even wrong. Such scenes appeared at the same time in the Greece, in the Western lands, in Northern Russia, and in Georgia. In fact, many of them seem to originate in the land of Georgia, where they were probably reinterpreted from earlier Cappadocian themes. When the Ephorate of Western Attica gave me the permission to visit some of those monuments, Panayotis Katsafados and Dimitra Petrou took me on a short trip to Keratea-Megali Avli, to the Dagla Hill, and to other places close to Markopoulo. I could see with my own eyes that I was wrong. Not in the dating of the murals of the church of Saint-Kyriaki in Megali Avli (Fig. 40–42; my dating proposition was right, but for other reasons). I was wrong in ascribing a Latin character to the depiction of saint Eustace on the northern wall of the church (Fig. 40). There was nothing Latin about this saint: it was only a weird assortment based on the iconography of saint George. The painter had simply put a stag in heaven. And then it stroke me: my research had to follow these disruptions and disturbances in Byzantine iconography, from Omorphi Ekklisia in Galatsi to Saint-Kyriaki in Megali Avli, and even further and farther away, as I would later discover, in the church of Sotirianika, in Mani. The same may be said about saint George and the princess which could be the source of the odd depiction of saint George on horseback accompanied by saint Kyriaki in the murals of the second church of Polemitas, in Mani (Fig. 37b–38). This could be a variation of the older theme of saint George and the dragon, with representations in Georgia and in Northern Russia. I became more and more convinced that such things happened because wider trends were already present in Western and Eastern Europe. Georgian literature also presented similitudes with (or influences of) Western models, much in the same way as the Byzantine one embraced Western trends during Comnenian times. But this general climate could not be necessarily French or Franco-Italian. It could start as a basic effect of the crusades and it probably became French only when the French adopted it as a definitive trait of their culture early in the 12th century.
As for the assimilation of such trends in Italy, it may be a consequence of this shared heritage with the French. Nonetheless, this poses a problem. It suggests the possibility that certain Western trends may not be Western, in spite of their presence in the Peloponnesus during the Frankokratia. They could be shared subjects and themes from the 12th century. It is therefore reasonable to imagine that the Greek reaction was prepared by previous encounters with the West. Latins and Byzantines were already imitating each other before the 12th century. What happened in the 13th and 14th centuries was just an acceleration of a cultural process. Thus the constant dilemma addressed by the book: what is Western and what is Eastern, in shape or in meaning, and what belongs to both of them at the same time, as a shared heritage or as a result of earlier contacts. The trouble is that a large body of the previous research never took the time to define these nuances. Because the hunt for Western influences was ineffective, some tried to attribute Latin origins to every odd thing. The funniest examples is the bizarre and rather primitive carving of a warrior, now inserted in the façade of a private villa from Parori, in the vicinity of the Mystras (Laconia). Nobody can convincingly argue that the piece dates back to the time of the Latin occupation (pre-1262 in the case of Mystras). It could just as well be dated to the 6th or 17th century. Yet its odd nature and elusive significance contributed to its inclusion in the corpus of Frankish oddities, where it is both nonsensical and incompatible with the rest of it.26 This interpretation tried to blur the difference between general and specific. It was not a fault of the positivism characterising the turn of the 20th century, when the Parori interpretation was made. It may just as easily occur at the turn of the 21st century. A similar misjudgement occurred in the interpretation of a ring with a depiction of Alexander carried by griffins. The object is inlaid with multi-coloured enamel and it could have been buried in Thessalonica during the Latin occupation, along with fourteen other rings.27 However, research wished to demonstrate that the piece was Byzantine, pre-1204. Arguments were drawn from Eastern art history and history of literature, purposely ignoring the matching use of the same legend in the West.28 This was not new. The same thing happened with the medieval Demotic romance of Alexander, which is said to derive from Old Greek sources, even though several details could find their origin in Western texts. The ambiguity of medieval Alexander stories comes from the fact that both Western and Eastern ones stem from Pseudo-Callisthenes. As for the second part of the demonstration that the ring was Byzantine, it was based on a list of Byzantine Alexanders in art: the one carved in Mystras (to which I will return in the penultimate chapter), a spolium in Venice, and the Southern Italy mosaics. But none of those examples is actually convincing, since they are found in culturally ambiguous contexts.
The only sure thing is that research felt the need to wager a constant battle for the Hellenicity of Alexander, ignoring that his story was a pan-European bestseller. To me, the Thessalonica ring with the ascent of Alexander could just as well be made in the first years of the occupation. To prove or disprove this interpretation, we would need to understand its exact meaning, but that is impossible. In such a case, arguing that this particular Alexander on a ring was Eastern or Western is a manipulation of the corpus, since the subject is a theme shared in both Eastern and Western art. The same may be said about the representations of Joshua in the murals of Crete, very different in character from the one in the Taxiarchis church of Geraki (Fig. 63), even though based on similar models. I will return to this last example in the last chapter of the book. For the time being, I will state only this: the very fact that these cultural acts were placed together in two piles, in the form of a Latin list and a Greek list, does not help at all. Because of the strong need to identify something as Greek or Latin, nuances are often left aside. Consequently, research stagnates in the field of cultural studies. In fact, each case needs to be dealt with according to its particular nature. The conclusion to which I arrived at the end of my first three months of Greek research, in late December 2018, was that the biggest setback had been the corpus itself. It was never properly assembled. Even though cases were extremely variable, the only manner in which they were approached was that of an unclassified list. By mixing up cultural acts without paying attention to their specific context, research got stuck in a loop: it identified its premise with its conclusion (that a Latin case was Latin or that a Greek example was Greek). However, most examples had an ambiguous nature. Since all of them belonged to a mixture of Greek and Latin cultural contents, they were either interpreted according to the Greek context or according to the Latin one. So, the first thing to do was to cease this tossing of monuments, texts, and artwork into unclassified lists. When I reached this conclusion, the assemblage of the main corpus was done. But I did not want to make a new list out of the several existing ones. I could not put together apples and oranges. Nor multiply them by raspberries. Therefore, I compiled separate lists for each type of ‘fruit’ and I announced in my monthly report to the Onassis Foundation that I had found the solution to the problem of corpus analysis. There were at least four different corpora of cultural acts. The first one could be identified with a perfectly Byzantine context, that is, they were made by the Greeks for the Greeks (with or without a premeditated Western influence). The second corpus assembled those made by the Greeks under a Latin cultural umbrella. The third one – by the Latins for the Greeks. And the fourth one – by the Latins for the Latins, meaning those cultural acts pertaining exclusively to a Latin context (with or without a Byzantine influence). When looking at these four different corpora, one sees that they belong to very different contexts and mixing them up does not help at all. They should be treated separately. When I returned to France, I was convinced that they provided the solid basis for the main chapters of a book. But I was wrong, because I soon discovered that the real efforts for creating hybrid cultural acts were on the side of the Latins, at least in the second half of the 13th century, whereas Greeks did not create mixed cultural acts as much as they borrowed patterns, which they used according to the particularities of their culture. Confessional compromises were probably the work of the Latin occupants who strived to integrate in the strange otherworld that they settled in. Were it permitted to make associations with horticulture, I would compare this situation to a ‘graft-chimaera’. It is not a true hybrid, but a mixture of cells, each of them presenting the traits of both parent plants. As often happening with graft-chimaeras, this short-lived hybrid was unstable and it easily reverted to the state of one of its parents. But while it lasted, it bloomed with the traits of both cultures, the scion retaining only parts of the original cultural pattern, while the rootstock remained entirely pure and unaltered.
I was not sure that medieval Greeks were aware of what they were doing. And there was something else. Some of these acts could not be included into one of the four categories. They could belong to as many as three categories at the same time. In the springtime of 2019, my seminar at the Centre for Medieval Studies in Poitiers forced me to better organize my ideas. I ended up noticing that my problems did not have anything to do with wrong datings or wrong attributions of cultural acts to different categories, but with the delicate balance between form and meaning. This was the issue that bothered me the most.
I returned to Greece on 1 May 2019. Athens had its yearly transportation strike on that day. When I managed to get close enough to the centre of the city, I pushed the suitcase up the lower slope of Lycabettus. This time I was not staying in the capital. I did not need more bibliography. I had made lots of electronic copies during my previous stay. I needed basic contextualization, to see the monuments. So I made my headquarters in Sparti and the next day I took the bus to Laconia. I thought that I had found a solution to the problem of form and meaning and I devised a ‘cunning plan’. In order to understand the cultural context, I had to identify incongruous cases in the lists of my predecessors and pursue them until I had understood them well. Not only from the lists of monuments dating back to the time of the Frankokratia, but from among the earlier monuments as well. The idea was to find potential Western influences or reactions to Western trends. When identified, I would plunge deep into the subject, seeing as many monuments of the neighbouring area as it was physically possible. And it was not a bad plan. Half of those new study cases did not get me anywhere. Contextualization identified similar patterns in nearby monuments, in accordance with Byzantine aesthetics. But the other half soon yielded interesting results. This plan was born out of a rather simple observation. A careful look at the contents of N. Drandakis’ monograph about the Byzantine carvings of Mani had revealed a series of odd details.29 The 11th century, covered by 137 pages, had nineteen monuments (two signed and dated, four signed but undated, and thirteen undated).
The 12th century covered the largest part of the book, 176 pages, and counted 44 examples (three of them dated and 41 undated, with approximate datings based on analogies only). But the sculptures of the 13th century, presented in no more than three pages, counted two examples, both of them undated and believed to be of the 13th century because they were crudely carved. Last (and least) the sculptures of the 14th century contained two more examples, on one page and a half, both of them perfectly dated by inscriptions.30 Nothing was known about the 15th century and the entire chronology looked very suspicious, as if the ‘crudely carved’ examples were thrown in the 13th century category to fill a blank space until the arrival of the 14th century ones, which contained strong chronological references and could not be dated otherwise. The trouble is that, irrespective of whether they date back to the 11th or the 14th century, many of these carvings are quite similar in style, proving that there was a strong continuity and that local workshops produced those reliefs for a very long period of time. The 12th century is therefore completely disproportionate and the situation looks like the one from the Ναοδομία of Ch. Bouras and L. Boura, where many 13th century churches were thrown in the category of the 12th century ones.31 Perhaps several Maniot carvings dated by N. Drandakis in the 11th and 12th centuries would date back to the 13th or 14th centuries, especially those that interested me the most. These carvings presented odd subjects, unparalleled and undocumented for an early period. And the first layer of murals from their churches often dated to the 13th or 14th centuries. It would be rather weird to invest a lot of financial means in carvings with ‘catachronistic’ subjects, but not a single penny in paintings, leaving those church walls barren for centuries to come.
I therefore decided to take a closer look at the churches of Mani. The idea was not new. I used to think about it in October 2018, but everybody failed to see my point. Inner Mani had been occupied by the Latins for a very short period of time, in mid-13th century, and was a conservative place, with strong Byzantine allegiances. However, Mani was also the area with the highest concentration of painted churches in the entire Peloponnesus, so it was the perfect place to practice contextualization. Besides, I was aware of several oddities in the Late-Byzantine paintings of Mani. Panayotis Katsafados had already shown me a photo of a heraldic eagle from the sanctuary apse of Karynia (Fig. 27). We talked about it for weeks, months, and even years, until he prepared an article and published it in the fourth issue of my journal, in 2020.32 I also had to see the church of Kaphiona. Its epigrams were a perfect counterpart to a contemporary medieval poem by Rutebeuf. And the bibliography spoke of unclear Western features in the church of Saint-Peter close to Pyrgos Dirou or in many other churches of Mani, always peripheral in nature. In fact, formal Western features were mentioned here and there in many Maniot churches.
I could not help thinking that phenomena such as acculturation, hybridization, transculturation, integration, and all other –ations were not linked to political boundaries. They occurred fluidly across borders, therefore I had to take a closer look at Mani in its entirety. Perhaps something happened there that was different from the rest of the Peloponnesus. My first idea was that the Western trends arriving in Mani were not subject to later destructions, as they were not linked to the presence of the Latins. In certain cases, I was not wrong. They were undoubtedly assimilated under Byzantine control, being easily accepted by the local communities. However, the trouble with the corpus of N. Drandakis was not its chronology, but the fact that it enslaved meaning to form. His datings were a consequence of a quest for better carvings that he dated to an earlier period.
The meaning of the sculptures was not that interesting. For instance, in the case of an architrave from the church of Saint-Nicholas in Lagia, more time was spent describing the ornamental features than the eight (or nine) animals carved in mid-relief. But the lack of symmetry in the positioning of the animals is quite different from the usual arrangement of animal figures on templon slabs, and this suggests the presence of a story. Furthermore, the two groups of animals of the architrave are separated by a peculiar cross, which is exactly the cross recercelée of the Villehardouin arms represented on a capital from Andravida, in the Camden Roll of c.1280 (Prince de la Morree, l’escu d’or od un fer de molyn de sable), or on the shields parted quarterly per cross from the mural decoration of the church of Saint-Francis in Glarentza.33 This suggests that the slab should be dated to the mid-13th century, when William of Villehardouin controlled Mani, not to the 12th century, as it was proposed. One cannot be sure of its initial location either, since it does not resemble any other carvings from the church of Lagia, but it was certainly not a lintel of the entrance from the narthex to the nave. Research noted that the style of the slab had a folksy aspect, so it was made by a different carver, possibly at a different time. Therefore the dating of the other carvings, based on an inscription from 1121, does not apply to it.34
It is a working hypothesis. I can build on it, speaking about the destruction of a church built during the short rule of Villehardouin and of the later reuse of the slab in a different church, but I cannot be sure of its relevance, since I regrettably noticed this carving much later, when I had finished my field trips in Greece. I should point out that other crosses of this recercelé type appear on two iconostases or templon fragments in Saint-Demetrius in Liberdo and Saint-Nicholas in Glezou. Both of these churches have murals dating back to the 13th century,35 but this does not automatically imply that the presence of recercelées crosses dates the carvings to mid-13th century as well. They could be dated even later in the same century, since those particular crosses are found among many other decorative patterns (including crosses). The Villehardouin cross from Saint-Nicholas in Lagia is nevertheless huge, displayed voluntarily at the centre of the piece, to be seen and recognised instantly. And it is also flanked by an animal story that does not fit well Byzantine logic of such a decoration. It is a sort of disturbance in the decoration of the church and it also resembles the animal carvings from the church of Saint-John stou Koraki in Mina, now on display at the museum of the Pikoulakis tower in Areopoli.36 This brings me to the heart of the problem: my interpretation is based on the possible meaning of these sculptures – as will become evident in the sixth chapter, where I will discuss the animal stories carved in Nomitsi (Fig. 60) and Charia (Fig. 61), not on formal aspects, which are hard to sustain when the entire chronology of Maniot carvings is based on seven cases dated by inscriptions against sixty-two undated monuments. I cannot be sure that the cross recercelée from Lagia is connected to William of Villehardouin – I would need to identify more similar cases, but this option is preferable, as it makes more sense.
When I decided to stop chasing after forms and follow mostly their meaning, I reverted to my old method of dealing with complex corpora. I could quote in the following pages the manner in which I dealt with Western artistic representations or with the vernacular texts translating the books of the Bible, but it would be too self-centred and vain. So I will quote very different examples instead. So different, that the first one comes from Africa. For instance, the stone, terracotta, and bronze sculptures of Ile-Ife date roughly to the same period as the themes analysed in my book (12th–14th centuries) and were compared to sculptures of the Renaissance (those of Donatello in particular). Even though the intentions behind such comparisons were noble in nature, they were based on a logic of comparing other cultures to the Western European one: the same logic that dictates that certain tribes of Amazonia still live in the ‘Stone Age’ – a heritage of the medieval ideas of translatio studii and translatio imperii. Post-colonialist discourse strove to rectify past mistakes, but mixed ethnography, customary when interpreting African tribes, with social anthropology. Since the latter interprets archaeological finds through the lens of socio-economic ideas, the Ile-Ife sculptures were regarded as basic technological advancements possible only in the context of a complex society. In other words, a postulate (valid in the limited context of socio-economics) was mistaken for an axiom (valid in all branches of science).37 And everything reverted to the study of forms, linking the formal evolution of those sculptures with the economics deduced from archaeological research. Yet, is socio-economics capable of providing an interpretation of those sculptures?
I do not contradict the assumption that the Ile-Ife society was complex, nor that it was based on tribal models, for this is beside the point. My point is that the lack of written evidence perverts our understanding of those cultural artefacts, drawing them further away from their original background, into a vague grey area where research mistakes its premises for its conclusions. And this does not concern only the ‘archaeological’ levels of cultural history. A similar error was made by the Surrealists who used the 13th century Old French fatrasies and resveries in a retrospective (and anachronistic) conjecture. Because of the changes in the French language in the space of seven centuries, Georges Bataille ditched the metrical and rhyming constraints of those medieval poems when he translated them into contemporary French in 1926. The end result gave the false impression that the old poems were surrealistic avant la lettre, a sort of liberation of the unconscious mind, even though the medieval verses were a product of a very different aesthetic.38 This becomes ever more evident when we look at the Rothko-like celestial turquoise, blue, grey, and green horizontal stripes painted in a miniature depicting the contemplation of God in the 11th century Evangeliary of Saint-Andrew in Cologne (Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, AE 679, fol. 126v).
This image was often compared with the paintings of abstract expressionism and it uses abstract means in quite the similar way, but it is once again the product of a different aesthetic, not lower or higher than contemporary art on a scale of abstract versus concrete, but based on an entirely different notion, that of a ‘spiritual eye’.39 Examples such as these go to show that similarity of form cannot be taken as proof of a shared origin, of a similar content, or of chronology. At least not in the absence of other pieces of evidence. Form needs to be interpreted according to the cultural background of its time, not based on learned assumptions deduced from formal comparisons. It matters less if a character like Palamedes is mentioned in Byzantine Koiné texts. This does not guarantee that those texts were the source we are looking for. What matters most is the manner in which the character is presented in the Demotic narrative. If this manner were Western, Palamedes would be borrowed from the tradition of Old French romance.40 On that account, I am not at all inclined to follow the logic dictating that the 14th–15th century Demotic literature is a naturally-occurring incipient form of the future Modern Greek literature. Recent research has invalidated the claims that the slayers of monsters depicted on ceramics would be representations of Digenis.41 The idea behind this hypothesis is not very different from the formal chronology of Maniot carvings, the Ile-Ife sculptures, or the abstract nature of the fatrasies. It is a retrospective conjecture. Besides, I do not regard the Digenis Akritas as a product of an oral tradition (dictated by folklore) and societal change (dictated by socio-politics). The penultimate chapter will argue that the dialogue between Byzantine and Western cultures shaped a 14th-century Digenis, very different from the ethnographic and socio-political assumptions of mainstream research. Consequently, I believe that the place given to Western influences in the history of Demotic literature was incorrectly restricted to the formally coherent group of translations made from Italian source texts dating to the Trecento and Quattrocento (Florios and Platziaflora, Imperios and Margarona, the Apollonius, etc.).
The same may be said about art history. These ideas need to be challenged. Because Western influence did not act as a sheer ‘displacement’ in the fabric of Byzantine culture. Such is just the tunnel vision created by the reading of the corpus in a societal and anthropological key, very similar to the tunnel vision dictating the ethnographic and socio-economic interpretation of the Ile-Ife sculptures. Since my examples are drawn from literary and art history, I argue that cultural displacement, dialogue, imitation, and syncretism may be identified individually, in pairs, or in indistinctly tight knots – impossible to disentangle, in both Western and Eastern settings from the Latin-held lands of continental Greece. I was more and more convinced of this when I returned to the rocky lands of Laconia in May 2019. Yet, for research to work out well, each cultural act has to be considered unique. The solution to the problem was to focus on exceptions, not on general trends. The unique character of those exceptions binds them together and creates an organic structure in the corpus, in stark contrast with the notion of categories. I liked this idea, because I do not believe in categories. I have often fallen between categories, never properly fitting any one of them in real life. Therefore I tend to see the distinctiveness (or matchlessness) of every person, text, or artwork.
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