Ar ticle

Vir t u a l m o b i l i t y : L a n d s c a p e a n d
d r e a m s c a p e i n a l a t e m e d i e va l
a l l e gor y

A n n e F. H a r r i s
Department of Art and Art History, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN.

Abstract Virtual mobility through a Holy Land conjured by a late-medieval allegory

nurtured the fantasy of its Christian possession. The dreamscape of the Triumphe des
Vertuz of Jean Thenaud re-iterated the claim of the French king, Franc¸ois Ier, to a sacred
terrain rendered increasingly complex and unattainable by Ottoman rule. Using Levi
Bryant’s concept of onto-cartography, this article argues that movement and becoming
are intrinsically linked in the cartographic experience of the texts and images of the
Triumphe. Virtual movement generates identities, both for the reader (king) and for his
object of desire (Holy Land). Assemblages of features and figures from disparate places
and times map out a trajectory through the realms of virtues, insisting on a dynamic of
transcultural appropriation and moral edification. At stake in this essay is an under-
standing of the pull and character of the allegorical dreamscape in late medieval
Christian fantasies of the Holy Land.

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2013) 4, 205–218.

doi:10.1057/pmed.2013.5

Tra v e l i ng fr o m L a n d s c a p e t o Dr e a m s c a pe

In 1513, Jean Thenaud, the Franciscan tutor of Franc¸ois Ier, had just returned
from a two-year journey commissioned by his patron, Louise de Savoie, the
young dauphin’s mother (Thenaud, 2006). Traveling throughout Egypt and

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Palestine with a diplomatic embassy, Thenaud served as proxy to Louise’s

devotion, bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh to Bethlehem and gathering
material for the didactic treatise that he had been promising Louise for the
moral education of her two children, Franc¸ois and Marguerite. By 1519,
Thenaud had finished the Triumphe des Vertuz, and the stuff and stone and dust
of his travels had been re-assembled in a monumental allegory that transformed
a diplomatic and pilgrimage landscape into a dreamscape shaped by the four
cardinal virtues: Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance. The text and
images of the Triumphe initiated a virtual mobility that collapsed a
contemporary Palestine of increasingly complex geo-political realities with an
ancient Holy Land of enduring allure. This virtual mobility led its travelers to
places assembled by fantasy and allegory, drawing together a crusading
ambition to the East with a moral edification in the West, and mapping
projected identities onto symbolic bodies.
In its reconfiguration of the Holy Land as a navigable dreamscape for a reader
seeking transformation, the Triumphe performs Levi R. Bryant’s emerging theory
of onto-cartography as ‘a map of spatio-temporal gravitational fields produced
by things and signs’ that prompts a study of ‘how these fields constrain and
afford possibilities of movement and becoming’ (Bryant, 2012). Its chara-
cterization of the Holy Land draws together assemblages that both create and are
created by the conceptual and material pull of Jerusalem: king, sultan, stone, relic,
trade, monster, epistle, exchange, crusade, and salvation are some of the objects
and ideas created by the gravitational field of the Holy Land in the Triumphe.
Bryant’s emphasis on gravity as a force rather than a power calls for an analysis of
networks rather than structures. No object or idea exists and operates alone; each
and all exist in relation to one another (Bryant, 2011, 34–37), and this claim
extends to the holiest of holies. The Holy Land of the Triumphe shimmered
strongly in the late medieval period not because it was an isolated ideal, but
because of the networks – pilgrimage, commerce, crusade, theology and politics –
that moved repeatedly across space and time to create its gravitational field. The
relations of these networks emerge as acts of becoming – as identities for city,
king, sultan – contingent upon the fluctuations of the gravitational field of the
Holy Land itself.
The Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem by Selim I in 1517, as a crucial example
of fluctuation, caused the holy city to recede even more as an object of Christian
possession, and simultaneously worked to increase its gravitational pull as an
idea of Christian reconquest. I will argue that in the act of reading the
Triumphe, Franc¸ois’s movement through the allegorized dreamscape and his
becoming ‘the most Christian king’ interacted intimately. Simultaneously, by
being moved through, the allegorical dreamscape continuously and insistently
becomes the Holy Land, a rhythm of movement and becoming reintroduced
with each new reader of the Triumphe. Two full-page miniatures present
key localities within the onto-cartography of the Triumphe. ‘Genesis’ from the

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Prudence volume requires a complex spatio-temporal movement through its

allegorical dreamscape in its delineation of a trajectory that begins with the
horoscope and ancestry that frame the birth of Franc¸ois Ier and leaves off with
his first moral choice within a world complicated by monsters. The image of the
‘Conquest of the City of Perseverance’ from the Fortitude volume presents a
volatile space simultaneously threatened by invading vices and assuaged by the
fantasy of Franc¸ois Ier as a Crusader king at the head of a global army.

Seei ng and Rea ding Vir t ua l Mobi lity

The Triumphe moves its readers through multiplicities of space and time in
assembling an expansive geography of Holy Land sites and allegorical gardens
and cities, and in aligning both historical and legendary figures. The act of
reading initiates these spatio-temporal multiplicities: all four treatises of the
Triumphe are remembered dreams in which Thenaud’s awakening in a parti-
cular place of the Holy Land introduces a journey towards a cardinal virtue.
The text explores the moral lessons to be gained from encounters and places
within the dreamscape itinerary that insistently presses on at all times, and the
images map out the dreamscape by visualizing the networks of figures and sites
in their relation to one another. The acts of reading the multi-layered allegorical
text, and of looking through the assemblages of figures positioned in consis-
tently crowded visual fields, are acts of virtual mobility through a dreamscape
that reinforce the gravitational pull of the Holy Land and are designed to shape
the moral character of the king and any other future readers.
At the start of each book, the ‘Pilgrim’ narrator, in the guise of Thenaud,
falls asleep to awaken as l’Explorateur – a transcultural persona informed by
the contemporary efforts of navigation and colonialism who crosses borders
and whose identity shifts according to the virtue he is pursuing (he is strategic
in the treatise on Prudence, a soldier in that of Fortitude, and so on). Spurred on
by a motivational speech from the ‘Nymph,’ the avatar of Louise de Savoie,
l’Explorateur starts to move through a dreamscape Holy Land, starting on Mount
Sinai and pursuing the Ganges in the volume dedicated to Prudence. By walking
through the seven gardens on the road to Prudence and conquering the seven cities
on the journey to Fortitude, the reader, but notably the young king Franc¸ois Ier,
was to learn an encyclopedic knowledge of precedents and exempla ‘along the
way’ that informed both the roads through the realm of Prudence and through the
Holy Land.
Travel through the dreamscape imagery of the Triumphe thus resonated with
travel through the geopolitical landscape of a Holy Land newly conquered by
the Ottoman Empire. These are dreamscapes shaped by the restlessness of
allegory and the disquiet of lost possessions. The spatio-temporal multiplicities
of the Triumphe make the reader aware of the treatise as both material object

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and moral experience: the manuscript exists simultaneously to be touched and

treasured, and to be read and understood. The spaces and times of the Triumphe
are simultaneously intimate (the narrator is Franc¸ois’s own tutor recently
returned from his travels), and distant (the first dreamscape is the Garden of
Genesis). The Triumphe, as manuscript and as text, allows its reader to criss-
cross space and time repeatedly, creating networks between past and present,
East and West (Latour, 2005, 63–86).
Two transcultural networks move the spectator through the Garden of Genesis:
translated texts and tamed monsters, or, more accurately, texts requiring transla-
tion, and monsters responsive to the civilization process. These monsters and
texts are sampled from other cultures and appropriated into Thenaud’s global
vision of a world formed by Christian virtue. Texts of cryptic Eastern lands and
monsters from the edges of the world inhabit the same dreamscape of the Holy
Land that l’Explorateur and his student must travel. At times, they literally rub
elbows with one another. As a consequence, the spatio-temporal paths charted by
transcultural monsters and texts are not straightforward and insistently create
unexpected assemblages. Franc¸ois’s moral education was global and globalizing:
he was to learn from both the Roman and the Persian, the Greek and the Turk,
past and present. Franc¸ois’s coming of age – and coming to power – within a geo-
politics marked by the quickening pace of Ottoman invasions and the westward
move of Islamic culture pressured Thenaud’s didactic treatise to work simult-
aneously to articulate a good moral character for ‘the most Christian King of
France’ and to prepare its student for a world in which Islam would wield a great
deal of power (Bourrilly, 1913; Schwoebel, 1967).
The visual compositions compress multiple spaces, create strange associa-
tions, and turn in upon themselves to reach then leave summits and centers – an
ebb and flow of desire and conquest, helplessness and moral choice. But in
Thenaud’s Triumphe mobility is salvation: imagining the many stages of the
dreamscape, negotiating the complex spaces of the images, compelled ever
onwards, l’Explorateur can save himself only if he moves. Further, he can only
save the land through which he travels if he moves through it. Here we witness
the self-actualizing principle of onto-cartography: the dreamscape stages
movement and becoming, and in doing so comes alive to its reader, as an
idea, and as an object of desire. Thenaud adds a moral dimension to this travel:
the goal is not just to travel across cultures, but to possess the gifts that Virtues
awaiting the traveler at the end of his journey have to give. The desire to travel
is the desire to possess, but here the riches are allegorical.

P r u de n c e : Vi r t u a l Tra v e l s t hr o ug h t h e G a rd e n of Ge ne s i s

The first dreamscape of the Triumphe de Prudence opens with a universalizing

theme: that of birth (Figure 1). Having been awakened by the nymph-avatar of

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Figure 1: Garden of Genesis from Le Triumphe de Prudence by Jean Thenaud. 1517. Fr. F.v.XV.1 fol.
9r. Reprinted with permission of the National Library, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Louise de Savoie, l’Explorateur sets out from Mount Sinai and wanders the
desert for nine months, whereupon he arrives at the Garden of Genesis,
imagined in the midst of the Holy Land, and generously slaked and bounded by
the giving breasts of Lady Genesis as Humanity. As visualized in the full-page
miniature, the Garden of Genesis utilizes the form and logic of a mappa mundi
to establish a totalizing and universalizing view of the Holy Land for Franc¸ois.
Read in a clockwise arc stretching from the initiatory figures in the top left to
the concluding figures in bottom left, the image ushers Franc¸ois through a
dreamscape of initiatory thresholds that he must cross as he continues his
allegorical journey to Prudence.

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The form of the mapamundi holds a hybrid assemblage of mythological,

biblical, legendary, and contemporary figures in place. The reader moves
through the space guided not by coherent narrative, but rather pulled by the
gravitational fields of onto-cartography created by relations between the
assemblages of astronomy, Gallic ancestry, river mapping, the Aeneid, monsters,
heroic childhoods – to name a few. These assemblages, in their spatio-temporal
relations and juxtapositions, re-iterate and re-mark (upon) the reader’s moral
journey. Perched atop the second threshold that new souls must pass under to
enter the garden of Genesis is Urania, the muse of Astronomy, preceded by a
first archway framed by Lucina (the aspect of Juno associated with childbirth)
and Hymeneus (the god of marriage). Urania holds the initiatory transcultural
text, an astrological chart, which charts the heavens themselves. Her hands
are in the act of writing this otherworldly language, her hair blowing in the
direction of a wind that leads the eye to the farthest reaches of the dreamscape,
deep within the distant valleys marked by mountains. Franc¸ois’s is the one
horoscope to be translated and it considerably expands the temporal and
geographical reaches of the image. Urania delineates his ancestors as Jupiter,
Priam, Hector, Francus, Brennus (a Gallic chieftain of the third century who
fought with Xerxes against the Greeks at Thermopylae), Clovis, Charlemagne,
Jean d’Angoulême (Franc¸ois’s grandfather), and Charles d’Angoulême (his
father); all men who are ‘irreproachable protectors of the catholic faith,’ to
whom will come the ‘rule of lands watered by the Rhone, the Loire, the Seine, the
Gironde, the Pau, the Tiber, the Danube, the Rhine, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the
Nile and the Ganges’ (Prudence, 28–29). The transcultural pull of Urania’s text
encompasses a call to a universalizing genealogy and to a Christian Empire
amplified by the mappamundi format of the Garden of Genesis itself.
In its formal similarity to a mappamundi, which locates Jerusalem in its
center, Thenaud’s Garden of Genesis configures Humanity’s generative body as
an allegory of Jerusalem. Dame Genèse stands central and prized, here beneath
a canopy ‘more sumptuous than that of Octavian or Alexander’s’ (Prudence,
25). Around her are gathered children who were denied expected food, but,
through miraculous feedings and interventions, persevered to become heroes.
Listed in an undifferentiated order in the text are Moses, Saint Nicholas,
Romulus and Remus, Cyrus (the king of Persia, who suckled from a dog after
having been abandoned in the forest by his uncle Astiages), Anidis (king of
Crete), Pelyas (son of Neptune and Tiro), Paris (who was suckled by a bear),
Egistus, Lamissio, Semiramis (the legendary Assyrian queen), Plato and Saint
Ambrose (Prudence, 26–28). These assemblages of spatio-temporal multiplicity
simultaneously gravitate around and create the center. Their movement (walking,
crawling, running) renders the central space lively and draws attention to the
travel and movement outside the milk river boundary, establishing a dynamic
of center and periphery, inside and outside that l’Explorateur, Franc¸ois, or
any reader of the Triumphe must negotiate. Dame Genèse is protected by the

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boundary that her breastmilk delineates, encircling the world with her succor as
Jerusalem nurtures the world. Allegory’s ability to configure an idea in the space
and time of a body creates a series of relations that enliven Christian sites and
principles, making them ever more present to the treatise’s readers.
For the Garden of Genesis as for the mappa mundi, peripheries are populated
by monstrous races with a variety of monstrous races to the south. Following
the orientation of medieval maps, the Garden of Genesis is oriented to the east,
so that its southern realm is in the bottom foreground of the image. In leaving
the Garden, l’Explorateur must choose between one of three bridges, as only
one will lead to the Realm of Prudence. The bridge to the left of l’Explorateur
(to the right for the reader) leads to the ‘Azemenes,’ those who are not mons-
trous, but ‘contrefaictz.’ Thenaud’s text places the monstrous races ‘towards the
right side,’ thereby positioning the viewer of this Triumphe image inside, with
l’Explorateur (Prudence, 32–33). Franc¸ois would see the world’s periphery
from within its (imperious, imperial) center.
The monsters, all pulled from the writings of Marco Polo and Mandeville,
are portrayed as social beings at the ends of the earth. As such, they are por-
trayed as potential, if problematic, subjects of rule. Within onto-cartography, they
are what Bryant deems ‘dim objects’ – ‘entities that exist and manifest themselves
in an assemblage, but in a very dim fashion, exercising very little influence’
(Bryant, 2012). Their gravity exists to strengthen that of the center, not their
own. The monsters are present to be debated (or feared or conquered), not to
speak and act themselves. Indeed, their lack of movement (and lack of becoming in
that they simply are) creates a sharp contrast to the constant movement of
l’Explorateur and the reader through the visual space and the text. The monsters
are fixed (they remain at the world’s edge) and their existence problematic. In
characterizing the monstrous races as existing ‘in a great multitude, who make us
doubt if they are men of Adam born’ (Prudence, 32), Thenaud evokes the soterio-
logical debate that had surrounded the monstrous races since the early Christian
era: are all creatures on earth (even monsters of the Antipodes) available to
salvation? Augustine had answered this question with a resounding ‘yes’ that
would justify Christian colonialism to the ends of the earth (Flint, 1983).
The monsters inhabit the border space beyond the Garden of Genesis, and
mark the road l’Explorateur must take to continue through the dreamscape, and
through the manuscript, to the next site along the dreamscape’s journey, the
Garden of Hope. Perched atop a column in the desert, Pythagoras holds forth
two scrolls, that in his left hand reading, ‘this bridge exacts punishment and
sends to evil Tartarus’; that in his right, ‘this way to the stars, this way to
Elyseum’ (Prudence, 35). Editor Titia Schuurs-Janssen has identified the Aeneid
as the source for both texts, and the concerns for the foundations of Empire in
that famous text are here embodied within a Christian apocalyptic logic of the
Last Judgment (Thenaud, 1997, 293), which will propel l’Explorateur onwards
to the Realm of Prudence, if he chooses the right path.

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Texts pulled transculturally from classical antiquity frame a moral choice

between a heavenly place and a hellish one. The virtual mobility of the Triumphe
becomes a moral mobility: if the reader chooses the right path, he ascends to a
greater moral understanding. In a compression of visual space, and an obligation
to represent the choice between the heavenly and the hellish within the visual
logic of Christian iconography, the monsters are ambivalently associated with the
heavenly. Beneath the Tartara scrolls stand a refined woman and her court,
‘Volupté’ ‘with many women dressed in the Italian, Greek, and Moorish styles,
dissolute and garish beyond measure’ (Prudence, 35). She seeks to lure a tender
soul her way, but Virtue, clad in rags but virtuous, calls out as well. The site and
sight of these transcultural texts and monsters frame a moral contest for the
spectator guarded over by an ancien père in an Orientalizing turban and costume.
Framed by three monsters, he shows l’Explorateur the way out.

Pa use: The Fantasy of Transcultural Epistles

As the transitional figure between the Garden of Genesis and the Garden of
Idleness or Adolescence, the Orientalized ancien père presents an ambivalent
figure of transcultural mobility, at once Other and Orientalized and simulta-
neously familiar and benevolent. He is the reader’s guide to the next realm in his
moral journey through this allegorical Holy Land of virtue, and as such is a
mentor figure. Clad in a rich blue garment with red sleeves, bedecked in an
ermine collar and red and blue turban, the ‘ancient father’ holds up one hand in
warning to Volupté’s seduction, while taking a young boy by the hand, in order to
lead him further along the path out of the Garden of Genesis. Here we see an
Orientalized mentor embodying the dynamic of virtual mobility, propelling the
young king along his moral journey through the seven remaining terrains that will
lead him to the realm of Prudence at the source of the Ganges where her daughter,
Franc¸ois’s sister Marguerite, will be adorned with ‘precious oriental pearls’ and
armed with mirror and compass, the key attributes of Prudence herself.
With this figure of the ancien père, I wish to signal the permeability of
the Triumphe to other texts preoccupied with virtual mobility in the young
king’s growing manuscript collection. The fantasy of an ease of movement not
just through the Holy Land but through any possession of Islamic rulers became
even more pressing for a Christian king with the Ottoman conquest of
Jerusalem in 1517. Letters, real and imagined, embodied that ease and had been
marking networks of Christian desire since those of Prester John in the twelfth
century (Uebel, 2000).
The Epı̂tres du grand turc Mahometes are a series of imagined letters
exchanged between the great Turc Mahometes and his subjects, enemies, and
those about to become his subjects or enemies all over the world (BN ms.fr.
6072). The anonymous author tells us that all of these letters, written in multiple

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languages, were translated into French at the king’s request; indeed, the handsome
frontispiece bears the fleur-de-lys and Franc¸ois’s emblem, the salamander in
flames. The letters defy genre identification: part epistolary travelogue, part
didactic diplomacy, part ethnographic catalogue, they give witness to le grand
Turc’s efforts to maintain an unruly empire as he roams it via an epistolary
network. The gravitational pull of this network expands to the concept of empire,
to the feat of creating a map through letters that subsume nation and ethnicity.
Nations and ethnicities, however, prove insistently resistant to empire, a crucial
lesson for the King of France to read in the context of his own imperial ambitions
(Garrisson, 1995, 133–169).
The virtual mobility of the letters moves the reader swiftly between specific
ethnic stereotyping and a universal diplomatic system of ambassadors, allegiances
and tribute. On one extreme, Mahomet chastises the Tartars ‘who hold by neither
faith nor good form’ (Anonymous, fol. 27r) for not sending ambassadors and
for their raping and pillaging. Their reply damns them more than Mahomet’s
chastisement: ‘If you wish to acquaint yourself with our mores and customs, look
to those of fierce and wild beasts, for we are they or well close’ (Anonymous, fol. 27r).
Onto-cartography is at work again in asserting being through networks, in
working across space and time to re-inscribe relations, real and desired.
The imagined exchange between Mahomet and the Pope is initiated by the
pontiff himself and concerns the treatment of prisoners during wartime. The
Pope accuses le Grand Turc of holding his prisoners susceptible to ‘all kinds of
vices and luxuries’ (Anonymous, fol. 6v–7r). Mahometes replies that the pontiff’s
accusations are misguided, and that ‘victory will favor he who has just cause’
(Anonymous, fol. 7r). In articulating justifications for conquest, and managing
local requests for aid and the needs of his own empire for tribute, Mahomet is a
supple and pragmatic ruler. Virtues, such as the ‘just cause’ he presents to the
Pope, rather than a specific ideology of Islam, justify his conquests.
As an apt ruler, Mahomet is an exemplar for Franc¸ois’s readership of the
Epı̂tres; as le Grand Turc, he is an all-too-real military and political threat.
Throughout the manuscript, le Grand Turc is both mouthpiece of and target of
Western Christian anxieties of empire and virtue, in a fantastic transcultural babel
of voices, wrought loyalties, and possible allegiances. It is this virtual mobility
from foreigner to familiar, and from enemy to ally, that we will need to bring back 1 I will be using the
into the Triumphe text with us to understand the monstrous alliances that English word
Franc¸ois will need to make in order to win Jerusalem in the treatise on Fortitude. ‘Fortitude’ for the
french ‘Force’
because it better
signifies the moral
C i t y of Pe rs e v e ran c e : M ov i ng wi th M o n s te r s virtue in question
and avoids
confusion with the
The Triumphe’s landscape shifts as we enter the landscape of Fortitude,1 more physical
and l’Explorateur awakens on Mount Carmel, at the site of Elijah’s chapel, English meaning of
marveling at all that he has seen in his travels thus far (Fortitude, 7–8). Within ‘Force’.

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Fortitude’s dreamscape, the young monarch will mature into a Crusader king
and have to make a new sense of Orientalized, Turkish, and Islamic figures.
Here, the reader is asked to make sense of both the ancien père of Prudence and
the demonized Turkish forces we see in Book 5 of the treatise on Fortitude
where Franc¸ois promises that he will conquer ‘not only the Holy Land but also
Egypt and all that the Nile quenches: apostate Mamelukes, deserters of our
sacred law, as well as Turks and Persians will die’ (Fortitude, 114). Ambiva-
lences about the sophisticated and militaristic Turkish court abounded in French
culture (Cohen, 2001; Isom-Verhaaren, 2006), but within the Triumphe, the
reader is asked to negotiate these within one volatile dreamscape.
There is a restlessness in the militarism of the entire treatise of Fortitude, as
l’Explorateur, instead of visiting gardens or climbing mountains as in Prudence,
here sets out to conquer seven cities on his way to the realm of Fortitude, serving
in the army of le Dictateur, a figure whose title resonates with Louise de Savoie’s
habit of referring to her son as ‘my Caesar’ (Orth, 1982). The landscape itself
is shifty. ‘Consider the skies,’ says the nymph-avatar of Louise de Savoie to
l’Explorateur, initiating his second allegorical journey, ‘who go from the occident
to the orient against the prime mover which is so powerful that during a natural
day he makes them turn from orient to occident’ (Fortitude, 13). On the one
hand, le Dictateur must conquer and subdue the entire landscape before him; on
the other, this dreamscape shimmers between occident and orient.
This shimmering on a perpetual horizon of conquest aligns the Triumphe’s
Holy Land with the ‘spectral objects’ of Bryant’s onto-cartography: those ‘we
treat as being real entities, but which are really a sort of simulacrum’ (Bryant,
2012). As the possibilities of a reconquest of Jerusalem receded with the
powerful Ottoman rule of the city (and the increasing scale and complexity of
alliances and warfare on European soil), the geopolitical landscape of the Holy
Land became a dreamscape of Christian presence, a spectral object assembled by
multiple fictions and desires. That Franc¸ois Ier would become one of the most
committed enthusiasts for Pope Leo X’s call for Crusade to Jerusalem in 1517
(Lecoq, 1987, 259–324) and the king who formed an alliance with the Ottoman
sultan Suleiman the Magnificent starting in 1529 (Garnier, 2008) demonstrates
the fluctuations of Jerusalem’s gravitational pull: networks as varied, even
contradictory, as crusade and diplomacy were deployed in Christian attempts to
reclaim Jerusalem and the Holy Land. ‘While these entities are fictions,’ states
Bryant, ‘they nonetheless have real gravitational effects on practice’ (Bryant,
2012). Images through the manuscript of Fortitude present the fiction of le
Dictateur’s conquests flecked with Crusading imagery in flags and costumes,
painting a picture of the practice the Pope so ardently wished to put into place at
the time of the manuscript’s production (Figure 2).
The conquest of the City of Perseverance in Book 8 of Fortitude demands the
virtue that is its goal. Le Dictateur is close to the realm of Fortitude when his
army abandons him upon sighting fire-breathing dragons. Le Dictateur tries to

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reassure his troops that these are but apparitions sent by Fortune who wishes
to teach them Perseverance, but to no avail. Le Dictateur finds himself with
no coherent army under his command. ‘Exagonus’ steps forth, a being whose
presence is a transcultural tour-de-force. Schuurs-Janssen identifies him as
‘Euagon’ from Pliny’s Historia Naturalis (Thenaud, 2002, 271), a member of
the Ophiogenes people from the isle of Cyprus, itself a locale between worlds.
Upon an embassy to Rome, Euagon was ‘tested’ by the consuls by being thrown

Figure 2: Battle for the city of Perseverance in Le Triumphe de Force by Jean Thenaud. 1517. Fr.
F.v.XV.1 fol. 162. Reprinted with permission of the National Library, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

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into a large vat filled with snakes; to the wonder of all assembled, the snakes
merely licked him. Euagon emerges in Pliny in a chapter devoted to ‘Remedies
Derived from Man’; he is one of dozens of monstrous races whose nature pro-
duces wondrous and frightening talents, such as consorting with snakes with
impunity. It is this figure of transcultural mobility, himself an ambassador from
an island liminal to both the East and the West, who presents himself again as
ambassador to le Dictateur by declaring that he, for one, fears no dragons and
certainly no snakes. The fictions of the Triumphe’s dreamscape are genera-
tive, merging fantasy and natural history with military strategy.
The monstrous races that had stood on the external periphery of the Garden of
Genesis are now aligned outside the walls of the city of Perseverance. Le Dictateur
and what is left of his retinue at first stand stunned, but then quickly ‘pray him
[Euagon] to march first with those races he knows to have powers against
dragons and serpents for their undoing’ (Fortitude, 185). A veritable procession of
monstrous races emerges: the Tentires, like Euagon, from Cyprus, whose voices
terrify crocodiles; the Oblogenes, whose touch heals serpent bites; the Psilles and
the Marses, whose bodies contain a poison for snakes, and the Indians and
Ethiopians, who ‘know how to enchant and kill dragons’ (Fortitude, 185). Along
with Franc¸ois’s ‘knights of the cross,’ they fight a slew of monsters: larves, spirits
from antiquity who died violently or were murdered; melurs, haunting specters;
as well as nigromentiques, lions, tigers, wolves, fire-breathing dragons, angry
elephants, voracious crocodiles, and vicious unicorns. These beasts turn out to be
but a prelude to the ‘horrible captains’ of the seven deadly sins that follow.
It will be Saint Francis of Assisi, the founder of Thenaud’s own Franciscan order,
who will give the rousing sermon that emboldens Franc¸ois’s army to conquer the
city of Perseverance. The status of the Franciscans as Custodia Terrae Sancta
amplified the Franciscan Thenaud’s recent travels to the Holy Land and provided a
reference point for the Crusader iconography visible in the image. We see the
standards of the Crusaders, marked by the Crusading cross and held by le Dictateur
in his fleur-de-lys finery inserted in an allegorical landscape, as he holds the banner
reading ‘You alone possess all our praise’ [‘Solus habes laudum quicquid
possedimus omnes’] (Fortitude, 274).We follow his confident ascent through the
upward winding space of the image as his monstrous allies ascend heavily to serve
with him, gesturing to the creatures they understand because of their own fantastic
natures. Thenaud’s virtual mobility has here resulted in the strangest of alliances,
between a Crusader king and monstrous races, perhaps only possible in a
dreamscape of phantasms, but also already re-imagining a new geo-political fiction.

Leavi ng the Dreamscape

The onto-cartography of the Holy Land in the late Middle Ages operates in the
networks drawn across the multiple spaces and times of the Triumphe des

216 r 2013 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 4, 2, 205–218
 Virtual mobility

Vertuz. The act of reading the manuscript re-iterates those networks, assembling
a Holy Land whose pull on the late medieval Christian imagination produced
complex allegories and a dreamscape perpetually open to virtual mobility.
Pilgrimage, crusade, diplomacy, commerce, kingship, and moral education
are all navigable networks of fictions and practice nurtured by allegory
that reconfigure the landscape of the Holy Land into the dreamscape of
the Triumphe. Moving through the Holy Land – as pilgrim, as student, as
conqueror – amasses the sacred dreamscape into a spectral object: a fiction that
shapes practice, a map that makes. The manuscript entered these networks as a
gift towards the moral edification of a young king, engaging him, and every
reader after, in a dynamic of movement and becoming across a dreamscape
shaped by virtual mobility.

About t he Auth o r

Anne F. Harris is Associate Professor of Art History at DePauw University

where she teaches courses exploring gender, race, class, sexuality, and ecology in
medieval art. Early work on stained glass and popular culture (‘Stained Glass
Window as Thing: Heidegger, the Shoemaker Panels, and the Commercial and
Spiritual Economies of Chartres Cathedral in the 13th century,’ Different Visions,
2008) continues to shape questions of materiality and reception in multiple
realms, from the Roman de la Rose to the Holy Land (E-mail: aharris@
depauw.edu).

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