The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance-D. S. Brewer (2003)

The Orient in Chaucer
and Medieval Romance
Carol F. Heffernan
D. S. BREWER
The idea of the Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance,
and this new study reveals much about its use and significance, setting the
literature in its historical context and thereby offering fresh new readings
of a number of texts. The author begins by looking at Chaucer’s and
Gower’s treatment of the legend of Constance, as told by the Man of Law,
demonstrating that Chaucer’s addition of a pattern of mercantile details
highlights the commercial context of the eastern Mediterranean in which
the heroine is placed; she goes on to show how Chaucer’s portraits of
Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good Women, read against
parallel texts, especially in Boccaccio, reveal them to be loci of medieval
orientalism. She then examines Chaucer’s inventive handling of details
taken from Eastern sources and analogues in the Squire’s Tale, showing
how Chaucer shapes them into the western form of interlace. The author
concludes by looking at two romances, Floris and Blauncheflur and Le
Bone Florence of Rome; she argues that elements in Floris of sibling
incest are legitimised into a quest for the beloved, and demonstrates that
Le Bone Florence is related to analogous oriental tales about heroic
women who remain steadfast in virtue against persecution and adversity.
Professor CAROL F. HEFFERNAN teaches in the Department of English,
Rutgers University.
Studies in Medieval Romance
ISSN 1479–9308
Series Editors
Roger Dalrymple
Corinne Saunders
This series aims to provide a forum for critical studies of the medieval
romance, a genre that plays a crucial role in literary history, reflects medieval
secular concerns, and raises complex questions regarding medieval reading
and writing, social structures, human relationships, and the psyche. The scope
of the series extends from the early Middle Ages into the Renaissance period,
and although its main focus is on English literature, comparative studies are
welcomed.
Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the
publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt
and informed consideration.
Dr Roger Dalrymple, St Hugh’s College, Oxford, OX2 6LE
Dr Corinne Saunders, Department of English, University of Durham,

Hallgarth House, 77 Hallgarth Street, Durham, DH1 3AY
Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk

CAROL F. HEFFERNAN
D. S. BREWER
© Carol F. Heffernan 2003
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
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First published 2003

D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
ISBN 0 85991 795 9
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
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A catalogue record of this publication is available

from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

Heffernan, Carol Falvo.
The Orient in Chaucer and medieval romance / Carol F. Heffernan.
p. cm. – (Studies in medieval romance, ISSN 1479–9308)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0–85991–795–9 (alk. paper)
1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 – Knowledge – Orient. 2. English
literature – Oriental influences. 3. Romances – History and criticism.
4. Middle East – In literature. 5. Orientalism in literature. 6. Orient
– In literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PR1933.O75H44 2003
821'.1 – dc21 2003007763
This publication is printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Great Britain by

St Edmundsbury Press Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Contents
Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
1 Introduction: Romance and the Orient 1
2 Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer’s 23

Man of Law’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2, and Gower’s
Tale of Constance
3 Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: 45

Cleopatra and Dido
4 Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure 63
5 A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and West: 83
The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur
6 Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East 108
Conclusion 125
Afterword 131
Bibliography 143
Index 157
For Tom, Jeff, and Mom
and in memory of Leo J. Falvo
Illustrations
Plate 1 Mosaics from the façade of the Sala della Fontana, Zisa Castle, 36
Palermo, Sicily. 12th century. The work of Arab artisans. By
permission of the Superintendent of the Historical, Artistic and
Iconographical Treasures of Palermo, Sicily.
Plate 2 The Morgan Casket. One of the most accomplished Islamic 37

works of art in ivory. Sicily or southern Italy, 11th–12th
century. By permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.241).
vii
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Acknowledgments
From where does the idea for a book come? This one may have begun with a
handshake with Lillian Herlands Hornstein who first kindled my interest in
medieval romance literature. Or perhaps the origin is my maternal grand-
mother who was born in Altamura, a small farm village outside the city of
Bari, a port on the east coast of southern Italy. In the early Middle Ages Bari
had been an Islamic emirate, something which made perfect sense to me when
I first learned of it: one afternoon many years ago I heard my grandmother and
some of her lady paesane from Altamura chanting lullabies together about
wolves that snatched lambs in the night. The old songs sounded, in their
up-and-down-the-scale wailing, more Arabic than Barese, the dialect of
Italian that my grandmother spoke.
Whatever its origins, this book about East and West could not have been
completed without the encouragement of my colleagues at the Newark
campus of Rutgers University: Ann C. Watts and John Demaray, who listened
to me talk about various parts of the book as it was in progress; Gabriel Miller,
former Chairman of the English Department, and Steven J. Diner, Provost and
former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, both of whom supported the
sabbatical award that helped me bring the book to completion; and the refer-
ence librarians at the John Cotton Dana Library of Rutgers University who
arranged interlibrary loans for me over a period of several years. For their
interest and stimulation I also wish to thank my students in recent courses on
Chaucer and on Middle English Romance Literature, especially Angela Del
Casale, Jennifer Arena, Carmine Simmons, Azer Kemaloglu, Frank
Nascimento, Paul Rossetti, and Roseanne Alvarez.
For an invitation to speak at the 1995 Modern Language Association
convention in Chicago at a session on European Courtly Literature and the
Orient, I am grateful to Zacharias Thundy. My paper, “The Medieval Tale of
Florence and the East,” was subsequently published in an issue of South Asian
Review (vol. 29 [1995], 1–10) which he guest-edited. An expanded, revised
version of that article became chapter six of this book. I also wish to thank the
editors of The Chaucer Review, especially Robert Worth Frank, for inviting
me to present a paper in a session sponsored by that journal at the 31st Inter-
national Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo. It was published as
“Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: The Poetics of Interlace or the ‘well of English
undefiled’ ” (Chaucer Review 32 [1997], 32–45) and later enlarged to become
chapter four. Thanks are due for permission to print revised versions of these
two articles. Early drafts of sections of chapters one, two, three, and five
began as talks for the Graduate English Program at Rutgers-Newark, various
sessions at several International Congresses on Medieval Studies in Western
ix
Acknowledgments
Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium

on the Crusades at the University of the South (in 2001). For these opportuni-
ties and for helpful comments and criticism I thank Rachel Hadas, Thomas
Bestul, Maldwyn Mills, and Susan Ridyard.
For help with textual problems I am grateful to W. H. Kelliher, Department
of Manuscripts, the British Library; I. C. Cunningham, Keeper of Manu-
scripts, National Library of Scotland; and Jayne S. Ringrose, Under-
Librarian, Department of Manuscripts & University Archives, Cambridge
University Library. I am fortunate to have had access to the Research
Libraries of the New York Public Library, particularly the Rare Book Collec-
tion and the Oriental Division. The librarians of the Photo Library of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Umberto Spigo, Director of the
Aeolian Museum, Lipari Island, Sicily, and G. Davi of the Museum of Islam,
Zisa Castle, Palermo, Sicily were all generous in answering my queries about
medieval Islamic art. Any work on the Orient in the English Middle Ages
must acknowledge a debt to the fundamental work accomplished by Dorothee
Metlitzski in The Matter of Araby in Medieval England.
I am indebted to Caroline Palmer, Editorial Director of Boydell & Brewer,
and to Corinne J. Saunders and Roger Dalrymple, general editors of the series,
Studies in Medieval Romance, for their interest in this book. Special thanks
are also due to Pru Harrison, Vanda Andrews, and Michael Webb for their
careful attention to the numerous details of book production. To Thomas Farel
Heffernan, my husband, Geoffrey Farel Heffernan, my son, and Mary Falvo,
my mother, I owe debts for sustaining encouragement and love that reach far
beyond this project.
x
Introduction: Romance and the Orient
1
T HIS study focuses on a genre and a place – “romance” and the “Orient” –
as they are exemplified in late medieval English literature, especially in
Chaucer.
Nineteenth-century scholars, pointing to Arabic and Middle Eastern
sources and analogues for many medieval romances, virtually suggested that
the romance form emerged from the meeting of Saracen and crusader.1 With
all of medieval reality to draw on, romance writers were fascinated enough by
the Orient, which crusaders, pilgrims, and traders had opened up to them, to
turn it into literature. It is a fact of literary history that the evolution of the
romance genre in Europe followed these East-West contacts. Within the last
decade, there has been an upswing in publication by Postcolonial theorists on
the intersection of West and East and the depiction of the Orient in the western
imagination.2 Inspired by such work are several recent and challenging arti-
cles by medievalists who have looked for the presence of something like
modern instances of Orientalism which they have found in portrayals of the
Orient in medieval texts.3 This study does not press anything like a continuous
argument for medieval orientalism of a Postcolonial stamp, though a
connecting purpose of the six chapters of this book is to show how the Orient
and the people in it are represented in late medieval romance. The study does,
1 The views of such representative nineteenth-century scholars of romance literature as Huet,

Wallensköld, and Mussafia descend from the eighteenth-century medievalist and first historian of
English poetry, Thomas Warton (1728–90). He wrote in an essay at the beginning of The History
of English Poetry entitled, “Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe”: “It is an established
maxim of modern criticism that the fictions of Arabian imagination were communicated to the
western world by means of the Crusades” (Warton, I, i). Despite Maria Rosa Menocal’s 1987
book, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, the relationship of the
literature and culture of the medieval Arabic world to that of western medieval literature remains a
large and poorly mapped problem.
2 A few examples of this emerging postcolonial research include the following: The Postcolonial
Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; Gyan Prakesh, “Orientalism Now”; Bart Moore-Gilbert,
Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics; Jacqueline de Weever, Sheba’s Daughters:
Whitening and Demonizing the Saracen Woman in Medieval French Epic; Benjamin Braude, “The
Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and
Early Modern Period.”
3 See especially Sheila Delany, “Geographies of Desire: Orientalism in Chaucer’s Legend of Good
Women” and The Naked Text: Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’; Kathryn Lynch, “East Meets
West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales”; and Susan Schibanoff, “Worlds Apart: Orien-
talism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.”
1
The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance
however, discuss distinct instances of orientalism, as, for example, in

chapter 3, concerning Chaucer’s depictions of Cleopatra and Dido.
My thesis is that there is remarkable oriental influence discernible in medi-
eval romances, enough, in fact, to call for a reconsideration of the textual
exchanges as well as other cultural interactions linking English (and Euro-
pean) romance literature of the Middle Ages and the Orient. This examination
of romances centers on several of those written in Middle English: “high”
romances by Geoffrey Chaucer such as the Man of Law’s Tale and the
Squire’s Tale and his two legends of Cleopatra and of Dido as well as
“lower,” anonymous examples of the romance genre, Le Bone Florence of
Rome and Floris and Blauncheflur. Aside from Floris and Blauncheflur
which is a thirteenth-century work, all the romances are late – Chaucer’s
dating from the fourteenth century and Le Bone Florence of Rome, the
fifteenth century. The presence, however, of Floris and Blauncheflur in two
late medieval manuscripts (the Auchinleck [1330–40] and Egerton 2862 [ca.
1400]) attests to the wide audience that the thirteenth-century romance con-
tinued to have in the later Middle Ages. Other Middle English romances could
have been chosen, but all of these offer clear opportunities to study portraits of
the Orient or uses of the oriental in fairly representative narratives displaying
intrinsic literary merit. Moreover, several of these works – The Legend of
Good Women, The Squire’s Tale, and Le Bone Florence of Rome – are
under-represented in the critical literature. Even Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale
and the romance of Floris and Blauncheflur are more appreciated than written
about. The term “Orient” is understood, as it was in the Middle Ages, to refer
to North Africa and the Near and Middle East. Sources and analogues are a
concern of this study, but it focuses equally on other aspects of the literary and
cultural interchange between Islamic East and Christian West made visible in
romance texts. These include settings in the Orient, portrayals of Chris-
tian-Saracen relationships, indications (usually tonal) of the way the West
perceived Islam, and even suggestions of medieval orientalism. A related and
relevant concern of this study is to show wherever possible that the subject
matter and other narrative elements of Arabic tales were transmitted to the
Western literary tradition by the Moslems through Arabic Spain and Sicily
and through cultural contacts that accompanied East-West encounters along
pilgrimage routes, in arenas of trade in the Mediterranean and the Levant, and
during centuries of Crusading wars. These historical realities created intersec-
tion points for cultural exchanges between East and West that reveal them-
selves in the details of texts as well as in exchanges of texts themselves. A
clear fact of textual-historical relations, as Lee Patterson puts it, is that “the
historically real cannot exist apart from the textuality by which it is made
known” (Patterson, 63). The literary historian operates in a world of textuality
that cannot evade enclosing the economic, political, and social realities that
constitute real history. The plague, referred to by Boccaccio in the introduc-
tion to The Decameron as the occasion for the escape to the countryside by his
aristocratic characters who tell stories, is the same plague known to have been
2
carried to Europe by rats on Genoese ships that sailed between Italy and the
Orient. Paul Zumthor put the matter another way when he spoke of the text as
a “word act” (“un acte de parole”) that “situates itself among more or less
institutionalized acts” (“se situe parmi d’autres actes, plus ou moins
institutionnalisés” [Zumthor, 8]).4 The study which follows is an effort to
examine the impact of textual-historical encounters on some of the best Chau-
cerian and anonymous English medieval romances, works that reached a wide
circle of readers in their day, as these narratives, written in the vernacular,
were the rough equivalent of today’s popular novels.
Long before the Age of Discovery directed Europe’s attention westward
across the Atlantic, European engagement with the Orient during the Middle
Ages was complex – politically, economically, socially, and philosophically.
Such multi-layered involvement could not fail to leave its imprint on medieval
romance, a genre that, like the modern novel, gives its audience a comprehen-
sive view of how society conducts life. Through the referentiality of its repre-
sentations and its playing out of beliefs that have meaning for its authors and
audiences, romance is the medieval genre that places itself most fully in its
time.
A new literary genre emerged in France shortly after the Second Crusade.
Borrowing subjects from the legends of classical antiquity and the chivalric
realm of King Arthur and his knights, French writers produced verse narra-
tives about love and the pursuit of adventure known as “romances.”
Romances were written in French, the vernacular, not Latin, and were
intended to entertain. The new genre was imitated in all the medieval Euro-
pean vernaculars, including English. All Middle English narratives, written
after 1100, dealing with aristocratic personae and involving combat and/or
love are called “romances.” A typical definition is that of Helaine Newstead
4 This perception of the text shaped Zumthor’s sense of his role as medievalist:
Aucun concept n’échappe ainsi à l’absolue nécessité de spécification historique. . . . Ma
tâche, comme médiéviste, sera de ré-historiser un ensemble concept élaboré “en
théorie,” c’est-à-dire par dés-historisation des faits . . . à valoriser fortement (au point
d’en faire l’élément axia celle-ci) – un certain nombre de facteurs tenant aux conditions
réelles de production de textes à analyser. (Zumthor, 8–9)
[No concept thus escapes the absolute necessity of historical specificity. . . . My task, as
a medievalist, will be to re-historicize a group concept elaborated “in theory,” that is to
say, by de-historicization of facts . . . to valorize strongly (to the point of making it itself
the axis element) – a certain number of factors contiguous to the real conditions of
production of the texts to be analyzed. (my translation)]
Zumthor here draws on the thinking of the postmodern semiotician, Julia Kristeva, whose view of
intertextuality was exceedingly broad and abstract: society as a whole is to be thought of as the
text, so that a text’s participation within the discursive space of a culture may be as significant as
its relationship to prior texts (Kristeva, “Problèmes de la structuration,” 312). Kristeva’s privi-
leging of cultural space over textual artifacts reflected, in fact, a predispostion against the analysis
of putative sources (Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique, 60). As a Chaucer scholar and
medievalist I do not share the hostility of the twentieth-century semiotician’s work to the study of a
text’s relationship to its supposed sources and analogues. This book considers a work’s relation to
prior texts a legitimate concern and, where useful, that dimension of textual interrelationships is
included.
3
in the revised Wells Manual: “The medieval romance is a narrative about

knightly prowess and adventure, in verse or prose, intended primarily for the
entertainment of a listening audience” (Newstead, 11). Correct as it is, the
definition does not suggest how large and varied the genre is nor how
enduring, for it lasted into the sixteenth century and beyond. The Middle
English romances are commonly grouped according to theme and origin, as,
for example, “English and Germanic Legends,” “Arthurian Legends,”
“Charlemagne Legends,” “Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda Legends,”
etc. Neither the definition above nor these thematic groupings indicate the
extent to which political, social, religious, and aristocratic assumptions figure
in the romance genre. Nor would this definition and these groupings suggest
the characteristic of romance that Georges Duby and Daniel Eisenberg point
out, namely, that a large part of the audience of romance was the young,
socially unsettled, still in search of patterns of conduct on which to base their
lives (Duby, 835–46; Eisenberg, 89–90, 93–97). Romance is the medieval
genre in which love, courtship, and marriage, are often at issue.
Chaucer first uses the term “romance” in his earliest narrative poem, The
Book of the Duchess, in attributing the story of Ceyx and Alcioun to “a book,/
A romaunce” (47–48), probably to recall his French sources, Guillaume de
Machaut’s Dit de la fonteinne amoreuse and the Ovid moralisé as well as
Ovid’s Metamorphoses.5 “Romance” as used here refers to works written in
French but also a written source that is not primarily historical. When
Pandarus, in Troilus and Criseyde, a work written near the end of Chaucer’s
career, finds his niece reading with her ladies, Criseyde tells her uncle, “This
romaunce is of Thebes that we rede” (100). Her description of the events cor-
respond with the French Roman de Thèbes, again indicating Chaucer’s associ-
ation of the term with secular narratives written in French. Despite Criseyde’s
speaking of a vernacular text, her snobby uncle goes on to talk about the Latin
Thebiad, an epic in twelve books. The only time the romance genre is named
in The Canterbury Tales occurs in Sir Thopas, a tale that is one of two told by
the pilgrim Chaucer himself. It specifically links itself with “romances” (847,
897). Thopas’s calling for “romances that been roiales” (847) about popes and
cardinals along with “romances of prys” (897) that the narrator specifies as
the tales of Horn, Ypotis, Bevis, Guy, Lybeaus Desconus, and Pleyndamour
suggest an interest in including pious romances along with adventures of chiv-
alry and love. The pious mode, however, does not have much impact on Sir
Thopas which tells “of bataille and of chivalry,/ And of ladyes love-drury”
(894–95).
After this introductory chapter, the next chapter (Chapter 2) studies one of
the romances of the Canterbury Tales, the Man of Law’s Tale, which treats the
legend of Constance. Some attention is given to two analogues of this tale as
told by John Gower, Chaucer’s close friend, and by Giovanni Boccaccio,
5 All references in my text to Chaucer’s work refer to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, 3rd
ed.
4
many of whose works Chaucer had read. These romances provide not merely
an opportunity to view the theme of marriage between Christian and Saracen
but, more importantly, the intersection of faith and commerce in the Eastern
Mediterranean. Chaucer makes the two intersect when his lawyer pilgrim
credits a merchant as the source of his tale. The idea that the Syrian merchant
found in the tale is very likely a Christian, probably an Italian trader living in
Syria, offers a new perspective on the tale’s mercantile dimension. In
Chapter 3 an examination of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women shows that
the poet ostensibly praises two North African (and therefore “Oriental”)
queens, Cleopatra and Dido, as models of true love, while in fact representing
them as models of sexual excess. The tales may thus be seen as loci of medi-
eval orientalism, a subject of increasing interest in recent scholarship. This
chapter is pivotal to further consideration of issues of gender and sexuality in
subsequent chapters, especially 5 and 6. The fourth chapter examines
Chaucer’s long fragment of a romance, the Squire’s Tale. This incomplete
Canterbury tale led nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars inter-
ested in origins to hunt down sources and analogues in Persian and Byzantine
tales as well as in travel literature written by Marco Polo and John
Mandeville. But Chaucer’s structure in this tale is European even though its
content is Oriental; it is a type of poetry of interlace found in medieval French
romance literature and also, according to John Leyerle, in Beowulf (Leyerle,
147). The resemblances between western poetry of interlace and oriental
frame structure are just that – resemblances – not indications of intentional
intermingling of western and eastern aesthetics by the poet Chaucer.
Chapter 5, “A Question of Incest, the Double, and the Theme of East and
West: The Middle English Romance of Floris and Blauncheflur” questions
the assumption, common in most literary criticism about the romance, that
this tale is “ideal” in its portrait of the romantic bringing together of the
Saracen, Floris, and the Christian, Blauncheflur. Chapter 6 places the popular
Middle English romance, Le Bone Florence of Rome, told in numerous
versions in medieval French verse and Spanish prose, within the context of its
oriental analogues, especially those found in the Thousand and One Nights.
This expanded consideration of the oriental analogues, merely cited in passing
in the notes and bibliography to my critical edition of Florence, gains added
importance in relationship to the other romances examined in this study. The
study concludes that contact with strangers is a powerful engine for change in
literature: not just sources and analogues with their plots and themes, images
and motifs, but a whole other culture opened up when East met West and it
intrigued writers of imaginative literature just as did the writings of Eastern
scientists and philosophers. Arabs were respected for their learning in philos-
ophy and the sciences and were regarded as the mediators of Greek and
Byzantine traditions. Arabic medicine, as represented by the writing of such
physicians as Rhazes (865–923), Haly Abbas (d. 994), and Avicenna
(980–1037), transmitted by Byzantine compilers and translated into Latin by
Constantine the African and Gerard of Cremona, became part of the education
5
of university-trained European doctors of medicine. It is said of Chaucer’s

physician pilgrim in the Canterbury Tales, the Doctor of Phisik, that “Wel
knew he the olde Esculapius,/And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus,/Olde
Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen,/Serapion, Razis, and Avycen,/Averrois,
Damascien, and Constantyn” (General Prologue, 429–33). Suggestions of the
influence of Arabic scientific thought are even evident in medieval imagina-
tive literature, as, for example, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the
Book of the Duchess.6
At the outset of this exploration of the uses of the Orient in romance narra-
tives, some fundamental matters pertaining to the interchange between
Islamic East and Christian West should be addressed, namely, the Crusades,
Pilgrimage, and Trade. What follows will supply relevant history establishing
the East-West connection that is essential contextualization for the subsequent
chapters of this book.
Crusades
Contemporaries regarded the crusades as holy wars of Christianity against the

infidel who possessed the Holy Sepulcher of Christ. From 637 until the end of
the First Crusade in 1100, Jerusalem remained in the hands of Mohammedan
rulers. The Latin church in Jerusalem had been tolerated for centuries by Arab
conquerors, but the capture of Jerusalem by the Turks in 1071 from the Arabs
of Egypt changed everything. The lives of Christians became difficult; their
plight proved a clarion call to the Christian West and became the immediate
cause of the holy war. At the western end of the Mediterranean, more than a
hundred years before the First Crusade, wars were already being fought by
Christians to reclaim land taken by Mohammedans: at the instigation of Pope
Benedict VIII, the Pisans conquered Arab Sardinia in 1016; with the blessings
of Pope Alexander II, the Normans fought the Arabs from 1060–1090 before
reclaiming Sicily for Christendom; and in Spain, as early as 970, the war
against the Moors of the Omayyad caliphate was underway. Thus, not only
was Jerusalem a meeting place for two civilizations during the Crusades, but
East and West already had hostile as well as cultural engagements in Sicily,
Sardinia, and Spain.
The First Crusade was Pope Urban II’s answer to the appeals of Michael
VII of Constantinople and of Alexius Comnenus, the Byzantine Emperor, for
military troops to fight various hostile invaders against Eastern Christianity,
especially the Seljuk Turks who were occupying Asia Minor. The Church
transformed their appeal for military support into a holy war to regain Jeru-
salem and the rule of the Holy Land. The Pope’s ambitions coincided with the
economic interests of Italian cities in the eastern Mediterranean and those of
the younger sons of noble households eager to carve fortunes in the East, two
6 See Heffernan, The Melancholy Muse, 38–94.
6
factors that helped secure the success of the First Crusade. Urban II’s sermon
at Clermont made August 1096 the date of departure for crusaders to leave for
their meeting in Constantinople. Brought together there were the interests of
younger sons (like Bohemond of Taranto, son of Robert Guiscard, Baldwin of
Lorraine, and Raymond of Provence) and Italian merchants from the West, on
the one hand, and the condition of Eastern Christians in the Mohammedan
East, on the other. Nicea, in Asia Minor, was captured in 1097; Antioch,
defended during a siege in 1098; and Jerusalem, captured by the crusaders in
1099. Most returned to the West, but several commanders remained:
Bohemund and the Italian Normans at Antioch; Baldwin and the Lorrainers at
Jerusalem, and Raymond of Toulouse and the Provençals in Tripoli. The First
Crusade, preached on French soil in Clermont, had been a mostly French
enterprise.
The loss of Edessa, which fell to the Moslems in 1144, provoked the
Second Crusade. In 1153 Ascalon fell to the Christians and in the 1160s a
series of campaigns penetrated into Egypt as far as Cairo. Victory over
Saladin at Montgesard in 1177 made westerners feel they had divine support.
Then came Saladin’s invasion of 1187. He moved through Tiberius, seized the
relic of the True Cross at the Horns of Hattin, and captured Jerusalem on
October 20, 1187, after two weeks of fighting. Jerusalem was lost again after
just 88 years of Christian occupation. It is said that the shock of the news
caused the death of Pope Urban III. His successor, Gregory VIII, in the encyc-
lical, Audita tremendi, made an appeal for a new crusade. Its center was to be
Acre, the capture of which would lead the way to retaking Jerusalem. Political
dissension among the crusaders, however, contributed to the failure of the
Third Crusade, which ended with a truce between Saladin and the Christians
(that allowed them to hold the coast from Tyre to Jaffa) and with Richard I’s
departure from Acre in October 1192. By August 1198, the new Pope,
Innocent III, issued a new crusade encyclical that brought about the Fourth
Crusade of 1202–1204. This Crusade made Egypt, now the center of Moham-
medan power and trade, the object of attack. The goal of the crusade for
numerous complex reasons became diverted to Constantinople. The crusaders
stormed the city and in May, Baldwin of Flanders became the first Latin
emperor of Constantinople. The doge of Venice was rewarded with more than
a quarter of the Eastern empire. The Fourth Crusade had fallen out of papal
hands into those with a commercial agenda. The Fifth Crusade (1218–24) was
the last to be started by Innocent III. Again, Egypt was the goal of attack, and
the crusade would start with Damietta, an Egyptian city on the eastern delta of
the Nile. The capture of Damietta in 1220 was at first a success, but the
crusaders lost their advantage when the river flooded in August and the
Moslems broke the dykes, causing the crusaders to be trapped. They left
Egypt on August 30th. The Fifth Crusade ended in failure and was to be
followed in 1228–29 by the Sixth, the first and only Crusade not to have the
papal blessing. It was led by Frederick II, who married the heiress of the
kingdom of Jerusalem, and who made the goal of his crusade Jerusalem, not
7
Egypt. By the time he set out for the East, Frederick had incurred the wrath of
Pope Gregory IX, who cursed the enterprise (presumably because Frederick
delayed getting underway for so long). Through negotiations with the sultan
of Egypt, Frederick, nonetheless, entered Jerusalem in triumph on 17 March
and the city remained in Christian hands for fifteen years thereafter. Frederick
had learned, like his Sicilian predecessors, how to make treaties in the East;
thus, the Sixth Crusade, more secular than “holy,” was accomplished by
diplomacy rather than military might. The treaty of Frederick with
Malik-al-Kamil (d. 1238), the sultan of Egypt, ended in 1244 and political
dissension led to the loss of Jerusalem once again. The loss of Jerusalem in
1244 produced the Seventh Crusade, preached by Innocent IV in the council
of Lyons in 1245. St. Louis took up the crusade, mediating between the Pope
and the schismatic Frederick II, against whom the Pope preached a crusade
promising absolution and remission of sins to all who joined. Louis’s mother,
Blanche of Castile, on learning that her son had taken the cross is said to have
mourned as much as if she had seen him lying dead, and well she might have
expected to. The Crusades, ever since the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, were
increasingly associated with failure (Weiss, 2).
By mid-May 1250, St. Louis reached Acre and spent four years in the Holy
Land unable to secure the kingdom of Jerusalem. Dissension precipitated the
fall of Christians in Jerusalem: a commercial conflict grew in the Levant
between Venice and Genoa, which led to the loss of Constantinople by the
Latins in 1261, and other losses followed that (Caesarea and Arsuf fell in
1265; Antioch, in 1268). The crusaders returned home to Europe in 1270 in
defeat which could not be mitigated, not even by the private Crusade of Prince
Edward of England to the Holy Land in spring 1271. He attempted to deal
with the Mongolian powers which had arisen as a new political force in the
area, especially Egypt, and made forays into Acre, all to no effect. When he
returned to England in 1271, he was the last of the western crusaders. Though
isolated enterprises arose, there was no large scale crusade mounted after
1272. The fall of Acre in May 1291, the last bastion of Christian Outremer,
brought to an end the 200–year Christian domination of Syria and Palestine.
The news of the loss of the Holy Land reached Pope Nicholas IV in August
1291, prompting the encyclical Dirum amaritudinis calicem of 13 August,
1291. Sylvia Schein calls this “the first papal acknowledgement of the news
from the East” (Schein, 74). Christopher Tyerman observes that “the 1330s
was possibly the last decade in which the Holy Land and its Mamluk conquer-
ors could be regarded in the West as the primary military target for an eastern
expedition” and notes that “until the late 1330s veterans of Christian Syria,
from the days before its loss in 1291, still haunted the courts of Europe”
(Tyerman, 229).
England, though never as involved in the Crusades as France, was, never-
theless, touched by this long 500–year experience. Many of the place names
in Chaucer’s works bear the imprint of the crusades: Alisaundre, in Egypt,
Lyeys, in southwest Turkey (against which Pierre de Lusignan campaigned in
8
1367), Palatye, a city in Anatolia (associated with the Seljuk Turks),

Belmarye, in present-day Morocco (in Chaucer’s time ruled by Berbers) –
were all places in which Chaucer’s pilgrim Knight had campaigned. Surrye
(Syria) in southwest Asia Minor is named at the beginning of the Man of
Law’s Tale. A relic of the True Cross from the Holy Land, the cross of
Bromholm, found in Norfolk, is mentioned by Chaucer in the Reeve’s Tale
(4286), one of the fabliaux of the Canterbury Tales. The oldest pub in
England, The Old Trip to Jerusalem (Nottingham), built in 1189, goes back to
the Third Crusade, as does the possibly apocryphal account about Richard I
directing the theater of war at Acre from his sickbed (Tyerman, 5). Among
crusaders on the Second Crusade were English aristocrats such as Hervey of
Glanvil, Simon of Dover, and Saher of Achelle as well as merchants and
burgesses with enough money to afford the journey like Andrew of London,
Roger of Cornhill, Godric of Finchale and the Viels of Southampton
(Tyerman, 11). After the loss of Edessa, Englishmen joined Louis VII of
France, among them, Roger of Mowbray, Philip of Gloucester and Bishop
Roger Clinton of Chester. As part of his penance for the murder of the arch-
bishop, Thomas Becket, King Henry pledged to the papal legates at
Avranches in 1172 to go on a crusade.
The Third Crusade was the first in which English participation was of
major importance. After the disaster at Hattin in 1187 and the issue by Pope
Gregory VIII of the papal bull, Audita Tremendi, both the kings of France and
England took the cross, that is to say, they became crucesignati (those who
promised to fight the enemies of the church in the Holy Land and elsewhere
and who had church approval to do so). In just two months in the spring of
1188, three thousand Anglo-Normans and Welshmen became crucesignati
(Tyerman, 66). Financing these crusade expeditions was costly; in 1189–90,
Richard I’s preparations cost him 20,000 pounds, approximately 70% of his
annual income (Tyerman, 188). In the 1330s, ten years or so before the birth
of Geoffrey Chaucer, the West entered the last decade in which the Mamluk
conquerors of the Holy Land were the target of crusaders. Personal crusades,
however, continued until much later as, for example, that of Sir John
Clanvowe – courtier, soldier, author of the the religious treatise, The Two
Ways – to Tunis.7 This was a Genoese-sponsored attack on the Moslems, led
by Louis II, which attracted many wealthy English knights and squires like
Clanvowe.
Crusading Romances. Numerous Middle English romances of the second
rank concern military confrontation between Saracens and Christians. These
tales are essentially propagandistic and draw mainly on French models of
which they are translations or adaptations, and many are about Charlemagne’s
campaign against the Moors of Spain. The struggle of southern Europe to
shake off the Moslem invader is reflected in the epics of France and the
7 See The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. V. J. Scattergood.
9
romances of Spain and Italy as well as of England. The Saracen makes his
appearance in the earliest of the extant chansons de geste, the Chanson of
Roland.8 The oldest and best of the seven surviving manuscripts of the
Chanson de Roland has “some claim to be considered an English poem in its
own right,” for the Oxford manuscript of the poem was written in England in
the twelfth century (Spearing, 1). It contains a version of the poem dating
from 1100.
The basic situation of the Chanson de Roland continues in the treatment of
the Roland in the other medieval European vernaculars for four centuries: a
Saracen king comes from the South or the East to invade Christendom and it
(represented by Paris) is defended by Charlemagne and his knights. This is the
so-called Matter of France. The Roland poems are about a popular hero placed
in the context of the war between two religious systems. Repeatedly in these
poems the French try to convert the infidel voluntarily or by force of arms.
Their efforts are often aided by the Moslem’s frustration at the impotence of
his own gods. The subject of the conversion of the infidel is a popular theme
in the English Charlemagne romances that appears to develop out of the
underlying assumption of all Middle English crusading romances: the Chris-
tian faith is superior to that of the infidels just as Christian knights are superior
to Saracen warriors.
In one of the Middle English Charlemagne romances containing the
Saracen knight, Otuel, who miraculously becomes a convert to Christianity,
the pagan hero – before his conversion – threatens Charles in his role as a
messenger of King Garcy of Moslem Spain:
And otuel gan to carpe yvylle
To syre charlemayne,
And sayde, “Garcy sent me the tylle,
And sayde, that he wyl thy body spylle,
ffor the wynnyng off Spayne.
By-leue on his god mahoun,
Iubiter, & syre platoun!” (Otuel and Roland, 115–21)
The story of Otinel, as the Saracen knight is called in French, concerning an

episode between two of Charlemagne’s expeditions into Spain, originated in
France about 1200 and the extant Middle English versions are Otuel and Otuel
and Roland. Sent to summon Charles to surrender to the Saracen king, Garcy,
Otuel challenges Charles’s court, duels with Roland, is miraculously
converted and pledges to marry Charles’s daughter after the war is over.
Another Saracen knight, also ultimately converted, who appears in a
Middle English Charlemagne romance is Ferumbras. The Middle English Sir
Ferumbras, in MS. Ashmole 33 (end of 14th century), is a translation of the
French verse Fierebras and the Sowdone of Babylone, another important
8 A useful study of the French chanson de geste is Norman Daniel’s Heroes and Saracens: An Inter-
pretation of the Chanson de Geste.
10
English Charlemagne Firumbras romance, is a translation of the French

Balan. In the Sowdone of Babylone, after Ferumbras is overcome by Charles’s
knight, Oliver, the Saracen knight asks to be christened, his own gods having
proved false:
His bare guttis men myght see;
The blode faste down ranne,
“Hoo, Olyvere, I yelde me to the,
And here I become thy man.
I am so hurte, I may not stonde,
I put me alle in thy grace.
My goddis ben false by water and londe.
(Sowdone of Babylone, 1351–57)
Even though Saracens eventually manage to overtake Oliver and Roland (who
goes to Oliver’s aid), Ferumbras continues to abjure his gods and is baptized
as Floreyn by Bishop Turpin just as soon as his wounds are healed. None
other than Charles of France himself had been so overcome with pity for this
Saracen knight that he had the wounded Ferumbras tended in his own tent by a
surgeon. Throughout the romance, Ferumbras is depicted as a powerful knight
who subscribes to an honorable code. When, for example, the Saracen
discovers that the Christian knight he has knocked to the ground in a battle in
Rome is the Pope, he does not kill: “Shame it were to me certayne/ To sle the
in this bataile” (567–68).
Along with these romances about Saracen knights who convert to
Christianity may be considered another English Charlemagne romance, The
Sege off Melayne, which stresses the superiority of Christian knights, es-
pecially Charles of France. Maldwyn Mills has said of this crusading romance
that it is “in the heroic manner . . .” and “in its subject-matter looks back to an
earlier mode of heroic literature” (Mills, ix). Though Charles is the main
Christian hero –
. . . charles of Fraunce, þe heghe kinge of alle,
þat ofte sythes made hethyn men for to falle,
þat styffely satte one stede (The Sege off Melayne, 4–6)
Charles’s chief adviser, Bishop Turpin, is himself portrayed as an exemplary

Christian warrior who is ready to lead his armed clerics in the march against
Milan, even before the barons of the king. The romance centers on the capture
of Milan by the Saracen, Arabas, and the appeal to Charles for aid by
Alantyne, ruler of Milan.
Archbishop Turpin is a main player in the romance. The Christian knights
are inspired by Turpin’s leadership to accomplish great feats of courage
(1415–26), but archbishop or not, Turpin can sound a little like Saracens
disappointed in their gods when the fight goes against them. After Roland
returns defeated from an encounter with the Saracens, Archbishop Turpin
complains to the Virgin Mary:
11
A! Mary mylde, whare was thi myght,

þat þou lete thi men thus to dede be dighte,
þat wighte & worthy were?
Art þou noghte halden of myghtis most,
Full Conceyuede of þe holy goste?
(The Sege off Melayne, 547–51)
There are numerous chansons de geste in which Saracens are shown doing
violence to images of their gods after learning of the defeat of their forces.
One such scene appears in the Middle English romance, The King of Tars,
wherein a sultan, disappointed that his prayers have gone unanswered,
proceeds to break the heads and limbs of statues of Jupiter, Apollo,
Tervagaunt, and Mahoun (646–57). Though Archbishop Turpin’s rage stops
at a verbal outburst punctuated by his throwing down his staff and miter
(542–3), the characterization of his behavior – suggesting that of the stock
frustrated Saracens found in so many crusading romances – is puzzling. Far
from troubled by the portrait, the early scholar of Middle English tail-rhyme
romances, Trounce, found it to be “the finest piece of characterization in
Middle English literature, with the exception of Chaucer’s best, and, possibly,
of Gawayne in Gawayne and the Grene Knyght” (Trounce, 1. 100–01).
Ultimately Archbishop Turpin leads the French army to rescue the city of
Milan, but the incomplete romance breaks off just as reinforcements for the
battle arrive.
Out of the early years of the thirteenth century and the Third Crusade came
a hero created to hold his own beside Charlemagne and King Arthur: Richard
the Lion-Heart. The crusading king, Richard I of England, was not English but
a French duke whose English holdings conferred upon him the title of king.
The deeds of Richard during the Crusade, real as well as fictional, are put at
the center of the historical romance, Richard Coeur de Lion, which is one of
the most militant about the Christian war against the Saracen infidel. The
focal point of this Middle English romance is the powerful characterization of
Richard and his taking of Acre:
Richard took leue, and leep on stede,

And prycked out of þat ferred.
He rod aboute þe clos dyke
Toward Acres, sykrlyke,
Tyl he come to þe hospytale.
Of seynt John, as j ffynde in tale.
Þere leet he pyȢte hys pauyloun,
And arerede hys Mate-Gryffoun,
þat was a tree-castel fful ffyn
To assaute wiþ many Sarazyn,
þat he myȢt into Acres seen;
He hadde þryttene schpj fful of been.
(Richard Coeur de Lion, 2891–2902)
12
It was from “Mate-Gryffoun,” the name of a siege tower from which Richard
conducted operations, that Acre was bombarded with stones. The romance
contains several descriptions of the use of “Greek fire” (invented by the
Byzantines and adopted in the West), medieval incendiary devices that were
hurled at the enemy and exploded on impact (Hebron, 23). The Saracens are
said to fear him as “the deuell of hell/That was come them to quell”
(2677–78). A highpoint of the romance is Richard’s capture of Acre which
had fallen to Saladin in July 1187 and Richard’s slaughter of 2,700 of
Saladin’s men when the Saracen fails to pay for their ransom (Richard Coeur
de Lion, 3230–756). As in numerous grisly accounts from the Crusades (such
as is found, for example, in the French Chanson d’Antioch),9 Richard cures
his fever, while Christian forces are besieging Acre and Saladin is
approaching from ten miles away, by eating roast Saracen. Later, Richard
serves ambassadors from Saladin roast Saracen heads “al hoot” (Richard
Coeur de Lion, 3512) for dinner when they arrive to negotiate a truce. King
Richard-as-cannibal does not come off so well to the modern reader. Even the
narrator of the heroic romance notes the king’s cold blue eyes watching the
Saracen warriors wailing and grieving over friends and relatives whose
cooked and labelled heads are presented as a feast on Richard’s table. Further-
more, the king is described as eating with gusto as the Saracens sit dumb-
founded and nudge one another, whispering that Richard must be the devil’s
brother (3469–85). His desire to negotiate from a position of strength is
presented in a light so grotesque as to be impossible to finesse away. The
horror of Richard’s cannibalism is commented on by the Saracen messenger
who reports to Saladin that Richard means to “go fforth/ To wynne est, west,
souþ and norþ,/ And eete oure chyldren and vs” (3667–69). The cannibalism
is a significant part of what makes the king demonic to his opponents. The
romance never successfully reconciles the brutality of Richard’s actions with
his role as heroic Christian king. While it is noticed by the narrator of the
romance, it is never criticized. A literary scholar of English medieval romance
literature comments, “The heathens are no longer seen as human beings, but
as personifications of all that is unchristian. . . . Their massacre is an act of
Christian duty . . .” (Mehl, 245). That, however, does not seem altogether
sufficient, for the king’s cook, certainly a Christian, who earlier in the
romance helps cure the king’s fever, is shown to be clearly astonished that
Richard is not horrified nor angry when he discovers that he has been served
Saracen instead of the pork he requested. The king’s delight, moreover, with
the meat’s taste and his decision to keep his troops from hunger by using
Saracen corpses for food is met with evident shock.
English hero or not, Richard’s barbarity as cannibal king exceeds that of
the infidel and is the primary reason for his several times being associated
with the devil. Even before the episodes of cannibalism, the demonic link is
9 See Chanson d’Antioch, Chant v.
13
made in the romance by the German king who attempted to murder Richard
by setting a hungry lion on him. When Richard, having slain the lion, takes
out its heart and eats it before the eyes of the astonished king, the German king
is heard to say, “I wis, as J understonde can,/ þis is a deuyl and no man”
(1111–12). The circumstances surrounding Richard’s birth, as depicted in the
romance, also seem designed to shed some light on the matter of his devilish
barbarity. Early in the narrative, his mother is presented as supernatural and
unable to bear seeing the host at mass. The Queen, named Cassodorien –
mother of Richard as well as of his brother, John, and a sister – is one day
prevented from leaving the church by order of her husband, King Henry,
when the host is elevated at the altar. She flies up through the roof of the
church carrying off her daughter and son, John (whom she drops), and is never
seen again.10
The intent of Richard Coeur de Lion was to show Christian triumph over
the Saracens being accomplished by an heroic English king. Though the
English may be bound to the French as part of a European Christian coalition
pledged to fight the Saracen infidel, from the very opening prologue of
Richard Coeur de Lion, the romance is concerned with separating English
language and identity from the French. Romance accounts of the deeds of
Roland, Oliver, Alexander, King Arthur, Achilles, Hector, and other heroes,
we are told, ‘men maken newe” in English translations because not one in a
hundred men know French anymore (10–25). When the Saracens are finally
defeated near the end of the romance and throw open the gates to let the
crusaders ride in to set the Christian banner on the walls of the city they have
won, the flag is clearly named that of Richard of England (5824–27), a hero
greater than Alexander, Charlemagne, Arthur, Sir Gawain, Hector, Aneas,
and numerous other heroes from history and legend (6727–34). As has been
pointed out by Wells, “In view of the probable French original, of importance
is the English view exhibited in the careful presentation of the French King
and the King of Champagne as cowards and takers of bribes, and in the
author’s deliberate lengthy utterance (3821–37) damning the French as a
nation of braggarts and cowards and covetous rascals” (Wells, 153). The
popularity of Richard Coeur de Lion is attested to by its having survived in
seven different manuscripts.11 This popularity is striking as the romance
10 The legend of Cassodorien and her strange revulsion at the holy sacrament and her magical disap-
pearance through the church roof has its origins in a legend about King Richard’s ancestor, Fulk of
Anjou, who (according to the legend) married a woman of unknown origin who, like Richard’s
mother in the romance, is unable to sit through the eucharistic part of the mass. She, also detained,
is said to have taken flight through the church roof, carrying off her children. While the romance’s
incorporation of the legend of Richard’s ancestor, Fulk of Anjou, recognizes the king’s Angevin
ancestors, it suppresses his actual mother, Eleanor of Acquitaine.
11 MSS Auchinleck (1330–1340; fragments), Egerton 2862 (end of 14th century; 44 leaves), British
Museum Additional 31042 (15th century; 6380 verses), Harley 4690 (15th century; fragment of
1608 verses), Douce 228 (a fragment; late 15th century), College of Arms 58 (H D N 58;
1400–1450), and Caius College Cambridge 175 (1350–1400; 3568 couplets).
14
makes an English hero of a king who spoke little English and was hardly in
England at all. While the extant manuscripts date to shortly after the Hundred
Years War, the romance was probably translated from the French during the
reign of Edward I.
Not all bloody confrontations between Saracens and Christians in Middle
English romances, however, occur because of ideology; in the King of Tars,
for instance, one of the Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda legends, the
Saracen Sultan of Dammas who invades Tarsus and massacres many Chris-
tians does so solely because he has sued for the hand of the daughter of the
King of Tarsus and been rejected. Most conflicts between Christians and
Saracens are, however, presented in medieval English romances as associated
with the Crusades. They are fought in the territories that the legendary English
hero, Beves of Hampton, disguised as a pilgrim, names when he is asked,
“Palmer, þou comst fro ferre:/Whar is pes and whar is werre?” (2257–58).
Beves replies,
“Sire, ich come from Iurisalem
Fro Nazare & fro Bedlem,
Emavns castel & Synaie;
Ynde, Erop and Asie,
Egippte, Grese and Babiloine,
Tars, Sesile and sesaoine,
In Fris, in Sodeine & in Tire,
In Aufrik and in mani empire,
Ac al is pes þar ichaue went,
Saue in þe lond of Dabilent. . . .” (Beues of Hamtoun, 2261–70)
The question about peace and war reveals a preoccupation with the Crusades
in the Middle Ages. The extensive travels of Beves result from his being sold
out of England as a slave. The Saracen was not merely the infidel enemy in
battle but the trader in goods, some of which were Christian slaves. At the
beginning of Beves of Hamtoun, Beves’s mother, after marrying the murderer
of her husband (Guy of Southampton) sells Beves to a Saracen. It is said of her
knights that they,
Þe child hii chepeden to sale,
Marchaundes þai fonde ferli fale
And solde þat child for mechel auȢte
And to þe Sarasins him be-tauȢte. (505–08)
Beves is “þe cristene kniȢt,” a warrior of God. Much of this long romance is
taken up with the hero’s victories against the heathens and includes the abduc-
tion followed by the conversion to the Christian faith of his Saracen
love-interest, Josiane. It is to get Josiane’s husband, the Saracen king, Yvor,
out of the way so that Beves can take her home with him, that he pretends to
Yvor that he has visited many countries and met everywhere with peace,
except in the realm of Dabilent. Beves reports that the king of Dabilent is
15
oppressed by his enemies because Yvor’s brother is that king and Beves
knows that Yvor will depart at once to help his brother. Thus the way to
Josiane is made clear.
The popularity of Sir Beues as a romance about the exploits of a popular
English hero is attested to by the survival of the English romance in six manu-
scripts, the oldest of which – the Auchinleck MS – has 4620 verses. Chaucer
appears to have modelled the meter of one of the Canterbury Tales, Sir
Thopas, on the opening 474 verses of Sir Beues which are in tail-rhyme stro-
phes (aabaab or aabcbc). Beves is throughout presented as a devout Christian
knight and champion of the faith. Early in the tale, for instance, after the evil
mother of the hero has her old husband murdered and her son, Beves, sold into
slavery, he refuses to become a heathen and believe in Apolyn for King Ermin
of Armenia who receives Beves from Saracen slave-traders. Shortly there-
after, when Ermin’s daughter, Josiane, falls in love with Beves, he only recip-
rocates her affection after she agrees to adopt the Christian faith:
“. . . ich will riȢt now to mede
Min false godes al for-sake
And cristendom for þe loue take!” (1194–96)
Numerous obstacles complicate the union of Beves and Josiane, not the least
of which is her marriage to Yvor and, well before that, the hero’s seven-year
imprisonment by one of her other Saracen suitors (Brademond) after Beves
kills a Saracen priest in Damascus where a sacrifice had just been made to the
god Mahoun by a large group of pagan worshippers. The matter-of-fact tone
of the narrator’s description of this massacre suggests that he views Beves as
merely doing the work of a crusader knight:
For him wente sire Beuoun,
Til com to Dames toun;
Aboute þe time of middai
Out of a mameri a sai
Sarasins come gret foisoun,
Þat hadde anoured here Mahoun.
Beues of is palfrei aliȢte
And ran to her mameri ful riȢte
And slouȢ here prest, þat þer was in,
And rew here godes in þe fen
And louȢ hem alle þer to scorn. (1347–57)
The Saracen presence in these popular medieval English romances reflects

a real historical threat and sometimes reminds us, at a lower level, of the reli-
gious passion – and bigotry – of the European West. The Crusades failed in
accomplishing the aim of occupation of the East by the Christian West, but its
cultural effects were profound. By bringing the West into contact with some-
thing different from itself and by enlarging geographical horizons, the
Crusades expanded the vision of Western Europe. A concomitant of the
16
Crusades was the growth of Christian missions which directly affected the
study of Oriental languages. Raymond Lull, in 1311, prevailed upon the
Council of Vienne to open six schools of Oriental languages in Europe. This
helped, in part, to insure that not only the oral but also the written transmission
of new Eastern literary texts to Europe from the East would find an audience,
though such was not Lull’s immediate intention.
Pilgrimage
Crusading and pilgrimage had a way of meeting. War and pilgrimage were,
indeed, associated features of crusading.12 In a kind of inversion, pilgrimages
could turn into mini-crusades, as, for instance, when European pilgrims to the
Holy Land would be called upon to bear arms in the defence of Christian
settlements in the East that came under attack from Moslems (Riley-Smith,
79). It is unclear whether those who travelled under the leadership of Sigurd
of Norway through England, France, Spain, and on into Acre during 1107
were pilgrims or crusaders; in Spain, they fought the Moors and, in Acre, they
assisted Baldwin I in taking the city of Sidon (Riley-Smith, 90). The lines
between crusading and pilgrimage crossed in the order of the Knights
Templar, who, though technically not crusaders, were devoted to the holy war
and had their origins in a religious community dedicated to the defense of the
pilgrim roads to Jerusalem. Their founder, Hugh of Payns, himself led a
crusade in 1128 that unsuccessfully attacked Damascus.
The pilgrim’s interest in Jerusalem was the sites associated with the life of
Christ and mentioned in the Gospels: Constantius’s basilica near Golgotha,
the rock of the Ascension in Gethsemane, the church of the Holy Sepulcher
(which by the fifth century contained the chalice of the Last Supper), and the
church on Mount Sion (which in the sixth century housed the crown of thorns
and the lance that pierced Christ’s side [Barber, 16]). St. Jerome in particular
considered it an act of faith for a man to pray where Christ walked and
suffered and where the relics of his life were still to be found. Pilgrimages
were sometimes conceived as the means to insure an answer to particular
prayers, as in the opening of the French and Spanish versions of Floris and
Blaunchefleur, where a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostela is
undertaken to insure the pregnancy of the Christian woman who becomes the
mother of Blaunchefleur. The medieval church adopted the custom of
pilgrimage from the ancient church and associated the journeys with the expi-
ation of sins and pardon for wrong. Pilgrimage became an act of obedience for
a penitent who, according to medieval books of penance (Poenitentialia) was
12 It was the “goal of Jerusalem that made the crusade a pilgrimage,” Jonathan Riley-Smith reminds
us (7).
17
bound by a bishop or priest to undertake a pilgrimage to offer his prayers at

the tombs of saints or particular churches. By the eleventh century indul-
gences attached themselves to pilgrimages whereby remission of part of the
penance imposed in confession could be obtained by visiting certain
pilgrimage sites. Among the earliest of the English pilgrims was the Anglo-
Saxon bishop Willibald who reached Jerusalem in 724 after travels through
Naples, Syracuse, Ephesus, Asia Minor, and Damascus. As the number of
pilgrims making pilgrimages in the Middle Ages grew, fraternities arose to
serve their needs, like the order of St. John that ran a hospital in Jerusalem, the
Knights of Malta, other orders such as the Knights Templar, mentioned
earlier, and many others established to assist pilgrims in Acre, Cyprus,
Rhodes, as well as other places in the East.
Pilgrimages to the Holy Land created a constant flow of international trav-
ellers: eastern and western Christians all worshipped at the same sites and
Moslems too visited their holy shrines in Jerusalem (though Mecca ultimately
became the site of greatest significance for pilgrims of Islamic faith, as all
Moslems are required to visit Mecca at least once in their lifetime). When the
crusader states fell in 1291, making Jerusalem difficult of access, pilgrimages
to Rome, Santiago, Canterbury, and other holy places became more popular.
It is estimated that 200,000 to 500,000 pilgrims a year travelled the route to
Santiago (Ohler, 187). John Mandeville’s Travels, the most popular travel
book of the Middle Ages, recounts in its first part the pilgrimage routes from
Europe to Palestine. “All good Christians,” Mandeville writes, need to make
the “holy viage” to “chacen out alle the mysbeleuyng men” (Mandeville’s
Travels, 2). Before he begins “To teche . . . the weye out of Englond,”
Mandeville explains his motives for writing his book:
And for als moche as it is longe tyme passed that ther was no generalle
passage ne vyage ouer the see, and many men desiren for to here speke of the
Holy Lond and han thereof gret solace and comfort, I John Maundevylle
knyght, alle be it I be not worthi, that was born in Englond in the town of
Seynt Albones, and passed the see in the yeer of oure lord Ihesu Crist m.ccc.
and xxii. in the day of Seynt Michelle; and hiderto haue ben long tyme ouer
the see and haue seyn and gon thorgh manye dyuerse londes and many
prouynces and kyngdomes and iles; and haue passed thorghout Turkye,
Ermonye the Litylle and the Grete, thorgh Tartarye, Percye, Surrye, Arabye,
Egypt the High and the Lowe, thorgh Lybye, Caldee, and a gret partie of
Ethiope, thorgh Amazoyne, Inde the Lasse and the More a gret partie, and
thorghout many othere iles that ben abouten Inde where dwellen many
dyuerse folk and of dyuerse maneres and lawes and of dyuerse schappes of
men; of whiche londes and iles I schalle speke more pleynly hereafter. And I
schalle devise you sum partie of thinges that there ben, whan tyme schalle
ben after it may best come to my mynde, and specyally for hem that wille
and are in purpos for to visite the holy citee of Ierusalem and the holy places
that are theraboute. And I schalle telle the weye that thei schulle holden
thider, for I haue often tymes passed and ryden that way with gode
companye of many lordes, God be thonked. (Travels, 3)
18
Thus, Mandeville’s book was conceived of primarily as a guide to the Holy

Land for pilgrims planning to visit the important pilgrimage sites there.
Mandeville claims to have seen the spear that pierced Christ’s side with his
own eyes and to have examined the crown of thorns at Constantinople
(Travels, 10, 139). He discusses Egypt (a major attraction for pilgrims
taking the southern route to go up through Sinai), Syria, as well as the
customs and manners of the Saracens. He claims first-hand knowledge of
Mamluk Egypt, for he says he gave long service at the sultan’s court in
Babylon, the seat of Saracen rule. Moreover, he recounts that the sultan
“would have married me full highly to a great prince’s daughter, if I would
have forsaken my law and my belief” (Travels, 24). Besides Babylon,
Mandeville identifies Mecca and Carthage (“that Dydo that was Eneas wif
founded, the whiche Eneas was of the cyte of Troye and after was kyng of
Itaylle” (Travels, 30). In chapter 8, he describes a shorter pilgrimage route
that leads by sea from Italy with stopovers in Sicily, Crete, Rhodes, Cyprus,
Constantinople, Alexandria, and Babylon. Like the pilgrims Chaucer speaks
of in the Canterbury Tales who are stirred in springtime “to seken straunge
strondes” and “ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes” (General Prologue,
13, 14), John Mandeville, from the very outset of his Travels, is clearly
curious about the “many dyuerse londes” that he travelled through and about
the “many dyuerse folk” and “dyuerse maneres and lawes and . . . dyuerse
schappes of men” that he encountered (see quotation above). Moreover, by
the end of his travels, Mandeville’s sense of cultural diversity appears to
have moved toward something like religious toleration: “alle be it that
there ben many dyuerse lawes in the world, yet I trowe that God loueth
alweys hem that louen Him and seruen Him mekely in trouth” (Travels,
214).
Trade
Aziz Atiya asserts, “the birth of the economic revolution of the Middle Ages
took place, not in the static agrarian feudal society of Western Europe, but
rather in the dynamism of trade and industry inherent in most of the countries
of the Eastern Mediterranean” (Atiya, 162). The Byzantine Empire had in
Constantinople a metropolis which in the high Middle Ages was a meeting
place for land and sea routes of the Far, Middle, and Near East as well as a
crossroads for Northern and Western Europe. On sale in the markets of
Constantinople were slaves from Asia, Africa, and the Slavic countries;
porcelain from China; spices and jewels from India; ivory and ebony from
Africa; cotton and grain from Egypt; and furs from Russia.13 Trade in the
13 In a Plenary Lecture delivered by the art historian, John Osborne, at the 36th International
Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Osborne argued that artistic evidence
19
Islamic world was another powerful commercial force in the East. The deserts
of Islamic civilization stretching in the south from the Sahara and Nubian
deserts of North Africa to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula and Persia and
in the north from the Volga to eastern Turkestan were bordered by the
Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Caspian waterways on one side and by the
Indian Ocean on the other. The main trade routes by sea went from Alexandria
to Tunisia to Sicily and Spain or by way of Sardinia and the Balearic islands
through the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, Seville, and Lisbon. Land routes
linked Cairo, Tunis, Morocco, Ghana and the Niger. There were also sea
routes to Syria and caravan routes to Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo and
Baghdad. Moslem international trade was facilitated by abundant gold and
silver money and the development of a credit system (Lewis, Nomads, 37).
“Trade with the world of black Africa, where gold, slaves, and ivory were
exchanged for salt and a variety of trinkets and trade goods,” in particular,
produced a favorable balance of trade for Islamic merchants (Lewis, 39). Arab
ascendancy in the world of commerce was undisputed until the advent of the
Normans in Italy during the second half of the eleventh century (Atiya, 169).
The arrival of the Normans in southern Italy together with the reopening of the
route to the East by the First Crusaders gave birth to an East-West,
Moslem-Christian interchange in the Mediterranean which changed the
course of medieval commerce. As a consequence of the Crusades “merchants
from Europe,” Atiya observes, “accompanied the various expeditions or
followed in their steps and opened up fresh markets in every newly conquered
seaport in the Levant” (Atiya, 170).
Among Campanian ports, Amalfi had the geographical advantage of being
the closest to the Islamic world and to the main east-west sea routes. By the
eleventh century Amalfitans had well-established trading with the Arabs.
Prices were generally quoted in tari, the local term for Fatimid quarter-dinars,
suggesting the importance of trade with the East. In the twelfth century
Amalfitan trading colonies were found all over southern Italy.
Venetian trade in the Eastern Mediterranean as early as the eleventh
century included expensive commodities such as spices from Egypt, silk
fabric from Byzantium as well as industrial raw materials needed in the manu-
facture of Italian glass. The treasury of San Marco contains several
tenth-century Fatimid objects, rock-crystal ewers and censers of ornate metal-
work (Amalfi was even better positioned than Venice to import such items).
suggests that along with silks imported to Rome from Byzantium came some of their painters
(Osborne, May 4, 2001). As early as the third quarter of the ninth century, Eastern influence is seen
in Roman murals, such as those found in the Church of San Clemente. These are essentially
“Byzantine,” resembling murals being painted in Constantinople at the same time. Roman painting
in this period, Osborne maintained, is as Byzantine as that produced at the center of this art in the
eastern Mediterranean. It is not the art of Latin Europe represented by Rome and the Carolingian
Empire.
20
Besides luxury trade items, there was less glamorous Venetian trading in
foodstuffs. Cheese, for example, was an essential source of protein in the diet
of travellers, by sea and land (mariners on long-distance voyages, in partic-
ular), the poor who almost never ate meat, and the higher ranks of society with
a taste for high-quality cheeses imported from farflung places in the eastern
Mediterranean (Tucci, 103–45). Coinage tells the story of Venice’s eastern
trade with the Islamic and Byzantine worlds, for the money used to transact
trade was in the coinage of both traditions: “genuine Islamic coins” and
“ ‘saracenate bezants,’ gold coins minted by the crusader kings of Jerusalem”
(Stahl, 129).
The survival of documents relevant to the business records of Domenico
Gradenigo (1185?–1266?) help reconstruct aspects of the life of a represen-
tative Venetian merchant nobleman. Members of the thirteenth-century
Gradenigo family had extensive real estate within the Rialto and partici-
pated in commercial ventures. The Gradenigo of San Giovanni Confessore
took part in the crusading ventures of the early thirteenth century. They also
took part in commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean; in 1168 Guidoto
Gradenigo was “repaid 704 perperi auri veteres pensantes from seven
commercial contracts in Constantinople” (Robbert, 29). On the Fourth
Crusade in 1202–3, one of the Gradenigo, named Giovanni, served as
captain of a galley at Zara and Constantinople. Yet another member of the
family, Jacopo Gradenigo, was a counselor to the podestà of Constantinople
(in 1205 and in 1207) and held the fief of Gallipoli. Jacopo died in the
Crusade of Damietta in August, 1222. Domenico first appears in the records
in August 1205, after the Fourth Crusade’s conquest of Constantinople. He
is described as undertaking a journey to Alexandria, Egypt on behalf of the
wife of Jacoba Mocenigo of Murano who invested “50 lib. den. ven.” (libra
denariorum venetialium, equal to 240 Venetian denari coins) to be repaid by
Easter 1206 (Robbert, 29).
Before the conquest of Constantinople in 1204, the Byzantine emperor,
Manuel Comnenus, ordered the arrest and imprisonment of Venetians in the
empire and the confiscation of their property on March 12, 1171. It is
frequently maintained that capitalistic greed and a desire for revenge led
Venetians to take the cross on the Fourth Crusade which led to the 1204
conquest of Constantinople. Scholars have long argued that the events of 1171
explain the conquest of Constantinople. Venetians in 1171 had reason to fear
their interests would never be secure if Byzantium survived (Ostrogorsky,
413; Vasilliev, 2. 453). Between 1205 and 1213, Domenico Gradenigo made
six voyages on business into the Eastern Mediterranean. Later in 1218, 1222,
and 1223 he travelled to Constantinople to make various investments.
As European trade prospered, trading leagues like the League of Milan, the
Hanseatic League, and the Flemish Hansa of London were established, but all
of them depended on Venice and Genoa for Eastern commodities. These cities
had a virtual monopoly in the Mediterranean with Venice concentrating on
Syria and Egypt and Genoa dealing with North Africa and the Black Sea
21
colonies of Caffa and Tana. European trade with the East flourished through
the fifteenth century, despite the loss of Latin Jerusalem in 1291–92. The rise
of Europe as a commercial force in the mid-to-late Middle Ages is referred to
as “the romance of medieval commerce” by Aziz Atiya, an idea pertinent to
the next chapter (Atiya, 162).
22
Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean
2
Mercantilism and Faith
in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean:
Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Boccaccio’s
Decameron 5, 2, and Gower’s Tale of Constance
T HE impact of continual and steadily increasing interaction between East

and West that occurred during the Middle Ages through travel – whether
it be to pilgrimage sites, to the battlefields of Crusades, or to centers of trade –
is reflected in the romance literature of the time. This chapter examines
Chaucer’s treatment of the legend of Constance, as told in the Canterbury
Tales by the Man of Law, and its analogues in Gower and Boccaccio. Though
told as a pious romance by the lawyer-narrator, characters and setting
combine frequently to produce curious intersections of mercantilism and faith
which reflect the historical reality of the Eastern Mediterranean of the Middle
Ages, a factor as well in Chaucer’s analogues, but a less pervasive one. My
focus on the mercantile dimension of the three narratives, a subject that has
received only slight attention, allows a consideration of the differing
responses to and representations of the Eastern Islamic world by their three
authors. The recent consideration of the Man of Law’s tale and merchants by
David Wallace in chapter 7 of his magisterial study, Chaucerian Polity, is
concerned with merchants in fourteenth-century England; I am interested in
the merchants of the Eastern Mediterranean depicted in Chaucer’s tale
(Wallace, 187–90). An unexpected by-product of my examination is the
discovery of a greater intertextual connection between Chaucer’s romance
and Boccaccio’s tale than has been previously recognized.
The tale of Constance, told by both Chaucer and Gower, and its distant
analogue about Gostanza, in Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2, belong to that large
group of hagiographical romances about female piety and suffering that
emphasize the virtues of patience and fortitude. Among the Canterbury Tales
the tale of Patient Griselda, told by the pilgrim Clerk, also belongs to this cate-
gory of romance along with such other Middle English romances as Emare,
Le Bone Florence of Rome, and the King of Tars. It is generally thought that
Chaucer knew Gower’s version of Constance’s legend; other romances about
beleaguered heroines in Middle English written in the latter half of the four-
23
teenth century (like the romance of Emare and the King of Tars) may have
been known to Chaucer as well. The presence of two romances about pathetic
heroines in the Canterbury Tales suggests that Chaucer was catering to
contemporary taste for such romances. Indeed, the late medieval,
post-Chaucer Le Bone Florence of Rome attests to the enduring public interest
in romances about unfortunate heroines. George Keiser has even speculated
that Chaucer’s “composition of the Legend of Good Women may have been
inspired in part by a desire to explore the pathetic mode . . .” (Keiser, 123). In
the basic Constance story there is an innocent Christian maiden who flees
from an unnatural father or who is banished by him. After arriving at a distant
and foreign land where she marries its ruler, she falls victim to false accusa-
tion, usually of having borne a monstrous child, and again suffers banishment,
this time along with her child or children. The plot involves other trials,
mostly attacks on her chastity by would-be seducers, all of which she evades
through prayer and divine intervention. In the end the heroine is always
reunited with her husband and sometimes her father as well. Romances about
saintly heroines had enormous appeal in their own day but have tended to be
passed over by modern readers. Even Chaucer scholars have written less
about his religious narratives than about those that deal with themes of love
and chivalry or are found among the comic fabliaux. The publication of
Chaucer’s Religious Tales (Benson and Robertson, eds.), a collection of
essays ranging over such critical issues as genre, pathos, Christian prayer, and
spiritual heroism has done much to redress the imbalance. Also significant in
redirecting attention to these tales is V. A. Kolve’s lengthy study of The Man
of Law’s Tale in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (chapter 7) in which
Kolve argues that Chaucer was attracted to the legend of Constance “because
it not only concerned a chapter in the history of his own nation’s conversion to
Christianity, but constituted part of an even larger true history – the spreading
of the faith” (Kolve, 299). His exhaustive examination of the iconography of
the Ship of the Church takes as its points of departure the facts that the image
of the boat floating upon water in this tale is both memorable and powerful
and that Chaucer’s geography “is episodic in the extreme, moving restlessly
from Rome to Syria, Syria to Northumbria, Northumbria to the coast of Spain,
Spain to Rome, Rome to England, England to Rome” (Kolve, 316). Kolve’s
observations are important, and not merely for his argument that Chaucer
transforms these concrete images into something like an allegory of personal
and global salvation; for the principal way Chaucer’s version of the Constance
story is unlike Gower’s is that it begins with merchants (whose activities in
Rome are detailed in three stanzas invented by Chaucer [Man of Law’s Tale,
lines 134–54]).
Though she stresses Chaucer’s concern with the tale as pious legend, Helen
Cooper seems to be responding to its mercantile dimension when she observes
about the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale that the lawyer “seems to
think of story material as a limited commodity, which Chaucer has already
exhausted,” the replenishment for which “he is reliant . . . on a merchant”
24
(Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 124). One might add that the words spoken
here by the lawyer contain a pun on “thrifty” which suggests the profit motive:
“I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn/That Chaucer. . . . Hath seyd hem in swich
Englissh as he kan” (46–49).1 The tale, if he had one, could be “thrifty” in the
moral sense of “worthy of being recalled to mind” or simply “worthwhile,”
“profitable” in the competitive sense of making him the winning pilgrim who
gets his meal paid for by the others. There are still other suggestions of the
mercantile in the Introduction, such as the comparison of lost time and lost
goods (25–29), and the use of the proverbial expression, “Beheste is dette”
(41), which may remind the reader of the lawyer’s right to plead cases of debt
in the Court of Common Pleas.2 Debt is a business difficulty which Chaucer
himself probably had in mind; Thomas Pynchebek, on whom the Man of Law
may be modelled, had the poet arrested for debt on June 4, 1388:
Ricardus . . . Precepimus tibi . . . quod capias Johannem Wodhere . . . et
Galfridum Chauucer esquier ubicumque inventi fuerint in balliva tua et eos
salvos custodias . . . Teste Pynchebek apud Westmonasteruem iiii die Junii
Anno regni nostri undecimo.3
If the fact of Chaucer’s problem with debt is added to an interesting idea

recently put forth by Peter Beidler the result is a partial explanation of the
vexing praise of wealth in the section of the Introduction known as the
Prologue. Alfred David was among the first critics to complain about it,
finding the praise of wealth contradictory in view of Custance’s material
deprivation (David, 127). In a 1995 article, Beidler has argued that the
Prologue is the unrevised text actually read to a group of merchants by
Chaucer in his own persona for the specific purpose of earning a fee (a varia-
tion on his Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse. [Beidler, 1–15]). Chaucer,
according to this argument, praises the wealthy to ingratiate himself with
those from whom he wishes patronage: “Chaucer praises the wealthy as
happy, prudent, noble folks who have won in the game of commerce”
(Beidler, 7). Wealth is the cure for poverty (perhaps Chaucer’s). The specula-
tion is intriguing, particularly if one also recalls that besides having first-hand
money difficulties Chaucer also had ease of access to the merchant commu-
nity. He was a Customs Officer who had risen to be Controller of Customs
and Subsidy of Wools, Skins, and Hides in London (1374) and Controller of
Petty Customs (1382).4
1 The word “thrifty” is repeated in the Epilogue to the tale at line 1165.
2 Patricia Eberle’s explanatory notes in Benson’s edition of Chaucer attribute the comparison to
Seneca the Younger and observe the proverb’s appropriateness in the light of the Sergeant of
Law’s “exclusive right” to plead such cases (Benson, 855).
3 J. M. Manly pointed out the similarities between the Man of Law and Thomas Pynchebek, who had
been a Serjeant-at-Law and had served as Justice in Assize between 1376 and 1388, in which year
he issued the writ for Chaucer’s arrest (Some New Light on Chaucer).
4 While Beidler’s article puts the emphasis on the mercantile in an interesting way, it does not,
however, provide an answer to David’s complaint about the Prologue’s praise of wealth being a
25
Manuscript evidence also seems to invite us to think about Chaucer’s addi-

tion of the mercantile dimension to his version of the Constance tale. Though
it is not the case in the Ellesmere sequence, Fragment II is most usually
followed by the Squire’s Tale, with its setting in the Mongol East, and the
Merchant’s Tale. The Man of Law’s Epilogue (or Endlink) suggests that the
Shipman’s Tale, with its workaholic merchant husband married to the fun-
loving, unfaithful wife, would follow and probably be told by the Wife of
Bath.5 The Epilogue appears in 35 manuscripts and is omitted from 22,
“including the Hengwrt, the Ellesmere, and all those with the ‘Ellesmere’
arrangement” (Benson, 862). The Epilogue, with its echo of “thrifty tale”
(1165) from line 46 of the Introduction, may well have been composed at the
same time.
I propose that the addition of a pattern of mercantile details by Chaucer into
his telling of the tale invites a consideration of these related religious narra-
tives with particular attention to the commercial context of the Mediterranean
world in which the heroine is placed. It is helpful to recall that in Chaucer’s
tale,
The account of merchants, returning to Syria from Rome, about the beauty
and goodness of Custance, daughter of the Emperor of Rome, causes the
Sultan of Syria to want to marry her, sight unseen. A follower of
Mohammed, he is baptized a Christian in order to make marriage possible.
The Pope agrees to Custance’s marriage to the Sultan because the
conversion of Moslems will enlarge the kingdom of Christianity. The
Sultan’s mother, deeply grieved by her son’s conversion, has him murdered
and Custance cast adrift on the seas. She drifts to the shores of Northumbria
where, after a series of complex events, she marries the pagan king, Alla,
whom she converts to Christianity. Angry at her son, Alla’s mother,
Donegild, plots to have Custance and her new infant son committed to the
sea. Eventually they drift to the Mediterranean and arrive back to Rome
where a reunion of Alla, Custance, and their son, Maurice, occurs as does a
reunion with the Emperor of Rome, Custance’s father.
Both the length and enormous detail of Chaucer’s romance suggest a back-
ground in history but the narrative is only vaguely based on historical figures.
The most prominent lived in the sixth century A.D. The Emperor (who in
contradiction in terms of Custance except to conclude that Chaucer never revised or cancelled a
supposed poetry-reading piece.
5 In “The Development of the Wife of Bath,” Robert A. Pratt argues that Chaucer’s “Epilogue origi-
nally introduced the Wife of Bath; and that she originally told the tale of adultery now assigned to
the Shipman” (46). He had earlier made a similar point in “The Order of the Canterbury Tales”:
“The Endlink serves perfectly . . . to introduce the narrative of the merchant’s wife and the monk,
that is, the Shipman’s Tale. . . . Scholars have long recognized the ‘Shipman’s Tale’ was originally
written for a woman, the Wife of Bath . . .” (1154). See also William W. Lawrence’s “Chaucer’s
Shipman’s Tale.” He argues that the original teller of the Shipman’s Tale was a woman – probably
the Wife of Bath – and that the discrepancy in pronouns was not corrected when Chaucer trans-
ferred the tale to the shipman.
26
Chaucer’s source, Nicholas Trivet’s Chronicle, is called Thiberie Constantin)

is based on Tiberius II, who was not a ruler of Rome but of Constantinople, to
which the Empire’s capital had moved. Tiberius II was followed to the throne
by Maurice of Cappadocia in 582 A.D., but Maurice was not a grandson as in
Chaucer’s romance; he was the husband of his daughter who was named
“Constantina.” Constantina was not the wife of Alla of Northumbria.
Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Gower wrote in the century and a half before the
Latin West moved out into the new world in a period of discovery which
began with Columbus and the other great Western European mariners. During
this period and in the centuries immediately preceding, the Islamic world and
the Latin West developed a complex relationship. At a time when Moslem and
Byzantine power approached its height in the tenth and eleventh centuries,
Europe was in turmoil. During the ninth and tenth centuries, England, for
example, endured several Danish invasions alternating with Anglo-Saxon
kings, while, at the same time, Moslems and Byzantines competed over
southern Italy. Ultimately both England and southern Italy ended up under
Norman rule: William of Normandy conquered England in 1066 and the
Guiscard family ruled southern Italy by the mid-eleventh century. Amid such
political turmoil improvements in agrarian technology were occurring at the
same time and were producing surpluses that stimulated urban life and
revived trade. Coincidentally invasions ceased, travel became easier, and
commerce extended to non-European countries. Crusades to the Holy Land
and the reconquest of Spain from the Moslems were part of these global
changes. In the course of the Crusades the Latin West conquered most of
Moslem Iberia, opened the Straits of Gibraltar to northern European trade, and
gained the upper hand in the world of Mediterranean shipping. From the year
1000 onwards, Moslem fleets had blocked maritime trade between the
Mediterranean and the north Atlantic waters by way of the Straits of Gibraltar,
but in Italy during the same period, Venice, Amalfi, and Naples had extensive
commercial ties with Byzantium and Moslem Mediterranean seaports,
including those in Sicily (Lewis, The Nomads, 27–47, 113–37).
Italians had been engaged as traders on the Eastern Mediterranean
seaboard before the Crusades and, although the Latin East had been isolated in
the twelfth century, western merchants from Italian ports had established priv-
ileges there. They had rights of entry and exit from certain ports as well as
property which included administrative buildings, quarters, and public baths.
Such privileges became especially important after the last quarter of the
twelfth century when the spice trade routes from India and the Far East began
to by-pass Egypt and enter Syria. That by the 1190s Venetians had a bajulus
Venetorum in tota Syria in Acre, the Pisans and Genoans two consuls for
Syria in residence there, and that by 1248 Pisans consolidated power in one
27
consul communis Pisanorum Accon et totus Syriae are facts indicating that
these western states enjoyed commercial advantages in the East of great sig-
nificance (Riley-Smith, 190).6 As more and more Latin settlers with trade
interests were integrated into the commercial life of the Moslem East and
Byzantium, “the histories of east Mediterranean trade and east Mediterranean
settlement and crusading became virtually indistinguishable” (Riley-Smith,
187). Syria is named in the very first line of the Man of Law’s Tale. Chaucer’s
concreteness about the place stands out in a tale where he has called attention
to the absence in his source of a place name in the concluding attempted rape
scene and has dropped the name of Bishop Lucius of Bangor (which Gower
includes) from an earlier episode. In Gower’s version the merchants (charac-
terized early on as being from “Barbarie” [599])7 are converted by Constance
and so must have been pagan; there is nothing, however, to suggest Chaucer’s
merchants need be pagan. The merchants in the Man of Law’s Tale are specif-
ically said from the very outset of his tale to travel from Syria – no talk of con-
version here. Instead they have been going about their business in Rome and
just happen to share their news about Custance’s excellence to the Sultan on
their return home. A rather impulsive sort, the Sultan converts on his own in
order to marry her (sight unseen). Chaucer’s merchants could easily be among
those western Christians who live in Syria engaging in East-West trade. Vene-
tians, in particular, would be very likely. Four or five years before the First
Crusade, the commercial treaty Venice made with Alexius, the Emperor of
Constantinople, expressly mentioned Laodicea, on the coast of Syria, as well
as Antioch and the principal seaports of Asia Minor. By the end of the First
Crusade, Venetians had built a church in honor of their patron, Saint Mark, in
the crusaders’ settlement in Syria (F. C. Hodgson, The Early History of
Venice, 241–42). It has, moreover, been observed that while Venice did not
play an active part in the early crusades, her trading vessels were “constantly
sailing to and from Syrian ports” and frequently carrying pilgrims to the Holy
Land besides “the usual merchandise” (F. C. Hodgson, 241).
Commercial concerns of the West in the East might be said to have posed a
greater danger to Christendom than did the Moslems. The crusade against the
Moors in the first decade of the fourteenth century by the kings of Castile and
Aragon, for example, impeded the passage to the East, and, as a consequence,
crusading became stalemated there despite authorizations for preaching and
grants of money (Riley-Smith, 221). The attempted rape at the end of the
Constance story is in Gower firmly placed in “Spaigne” (1088) under the
6 It is unsurprising, therefore, that in a recent lecture, Jaroslav Folda should have spoken of Western
training as discernible in the paintings of Acre of the 1250s, possibly the work of Venetian painters
who were crusaders (Folda, April 6, 2001). See his important study, The Art of the Crusaders in the
Holy Land, 1098–1187. The study of painting in the lands of the Crusaders has deepened with the
discovery of Christian painting in the Islamic East like the frescoes of Mar Musa in the Syrian
hinterland, unconquered by Crusaders in a place that was not ruled by Christians. See the study by
Erica Dodd, The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi.
7 All quotations from Gower’s Tale of Constance are taken from Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A.
Peck (108–36). Line references are noted parenthetically within the body of the text.
28
castle walls of a “hethen Amirall” (1090), precisely this arena of reli-

gious-economic conflict. Chaucer, on the other hand, in his version of the
episode, while speaking of “an hethen castel” (904) and implying that
Custance’s attacker, the lord’s steward, is a Moorish convert who has abjured
the Christian faith (“A theef, that hadde reneyed our creance” [915]), prefers
not to get any more specific. In fact, in introducing the scene at the castle, he
calls attention to the omission (“Of which the name in my text noght I fynde”
[905]). John of Gaunt’s marriage to Costanza (Constance), heiress of Castile
and Leon, in 1371, might have necessitated that Chaucer be careful about the
feelings of his patron’s wife, particularly if one were to assume an early rather
than a late date of composition for The Man of Law’s Tale.8
Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Decameron 5, 2 and Gower’s
Tale of Constance are analogues – while the English tales are very close,
Boccaccio’s is more distant. All have Italian settings that reach into the
Moslem world. In the light of the growing long-term commercial ties between
the Latin West, especially Italy, and the nearby Islamic world which began in
the early Middle Ages and reached their height during the lifetimes of
Chaucer, Gower, and Boccaccio, readers should be, perhaps, less surprised
than they have been by the presence of merchants in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s
Tale. At the very outset of his tale, Chaucer’s lawyer describes the rich
chapmen from Syria as “sadde” (135) – the same word Shakespeare reserves
for his merchant, Antonio, who opens The Merchant of Venice with the
familiar anxious sigh of the businessman, “I know not why I am so sad”
(I, i, 1). None of the basic student editions of the Canterbury Tales, however,
translates “sadde” in Chaucer as Shakespeare does. The Riverside Chaucer
glosses the word as “trustworthy;” so does Robert A. Pratt’s 1974 edition of
the tales (The Tales of Canterbury, 114). John Fisher offers “serious” in his
gloss to the line (The Complete Poetry and Prose, 85). Still, in the light of the
Prologue’s discussion of poverty, which culminates in merchants who are
rich, it seems that other overtones of the word sadde may be involved. If not
exactly the anxiety of Shakespeare’s Antonio is at work, a lingering sugges-
tion of Old English saed, meaning “sated,” “full,” can be felt here. It would be
like Chaucer to play with the ironies created in the paradox of the satiety of
rich merchants and their fear, nonetheless, of poverty. The rich, clear-headed
merchant of Chaucer’s comic Shipman’s Tale – a tale involved in the vexed
8 It has been suggested that the tale is an early work composed independently of the other Canter-
bury Tales (W. W. Skeat, ed. The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, III, 382; W. P. Ker,
Essays on Medieval Literature, 96–7; G. H. Cowling, “A Note on Chaucer’s Stanza,” 317; Nevill
Coghill and Christopher Tolkien, eds. The Man of Law’s Tale, 41). Cowling, who thought it might
have been written in 1372 as a compliment to John of Gaunt’s wife, Constanza of Castile, hedged
his bets, however: “Possibly it was begun early, left unfinished, and completed for The Canterbury
Tales.” Most scholars assume a date of composition around 1390. The first full argument for a later
date appeared in John S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer’s Works,
172–88. Robert Lewis has argued that Chaucer worked simultaneously on his translation of Pope
Innocent III’s De miseria and the Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale during the period 1390 to 1395
(De miseria condicionis humane, ed. and trans. Robert E. Lewis, 16–31).
29
manuscript debates surrounding the Epilogue to the Man of Law’s tale9 – has
no doubt about how intimately his identity is linked with money: “But o’thyng
is ye knowe it wel ynough,/ Of chapmen, that hir monie is hir plogh,/ We may
creaunce whil we have a name” (1477–80). Might not the Man of Law’s
puzzling discourse on the fearfulness of poverty in the Prologue to his tale,
beginning, “O hateful harm, condicion of poverte” (99), arise out of the same
sort of business anxieties? The apostrophe to Poverty leads up to “riche
marchauntz” (122) who, after all, toil to avoid it. Though none of the three
tales to be examined make explicit or extended use, thematic or otherwise, of
this commercial setting, implicit in the Chaucerian tale is surely the idea that
the travels of Custance, compared to those of the Syrian merchants and
possibly even to the pilgrimage of the Man of Law (as well as of other Canter-
bury pilgrims), yield spiritual, not material profits, both for herself and for
those whose inner lives she affects.
Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale immediately enters the mercantile world of
the Mediterranean where profits depend on travel, and travel takes time. The
urban world of this tale is one in which the Moslem city is not merely serving
as a market center for itself and other cities of the Islamic world but emerging
as a source of goods for the world beyond its borders, to which it is linked by
maritime and terrestrial routes. Merchants, we are told in the Prologue to the
tale, gain their riches by travel on land and sea: “Ye seken lond and see for
yowre wynnynges” (127). Also in this Prologue, the lawyer gives the source
of his tale as one of those “fadres of tidynges/And tales” (129–30), a merchant
transmitter of stories who had been away on business travels for several years:
I were right now of tales desolaat,
Nere that a marchant, goon is many a yeere,
Me taughte a tale, whiche that ye shal heere. (131–33)
Even the Man of Law’s Tale proper opens with a description of a group of
merchants in Syria. They export spices and luxurious satin and gold fabrics to
faraway places:
In Surrye whilom dwelte a compaignye
Of chapmen riche, and therto sadde and trewe,
That wyde-where senten hir spicerye,
Clothes of gold, and satyns riche of hewe. (133–36)
The lawyer tells us their goods were so appealing that everyone wanted to
trade with them: “Hir chaffare was so thrifty and so newe/That every wight
hath deyntee to chaffare/With hem, and eek to sellen hem hire ware”
(138–40). It was, therefore, probably more for business than for pleasure that
9 It is likely that the Epilogue was originally intended to introduce what is now known as The
Shipman’s Tale. The unidentified speaker who interrupts the Parson speaks of a joly body, words
which are used as well at line 1613 of The Shipman’s Tale where they suggest a female narrator,
probably the Wife of Bath. Cf. note 5 above.
30
this company of merchants travelled from Syria to Rome where they stayed
long enough to hear reports of the extraordinary qualities of the daughter of
the Emperor of Rome. Indeed, the accounts are said to have come over and
over again for days:
Sojourned han thise merchantz in that toun,
A certein tyme, as fil to hire plesance.
And so bifel that th’excellent renoun
Of the Emperoures doghter, dame Custance,
Reported was, with every circunstance,
Unto this Surryen marchantz in swiche wyse,
Fro day to day, as I shal yow devyse. (148–54)
The lawyer stresses time; merchants are gone “many a yeere” to buy and sell
their wares. As a consequence, they are rich not merely in rare spices and
fabrics but in stories, for they live in places long enough to speak with people
and learn their languages and traditional tales. The bags of merchants bulge
with their winnings not merely in terms of the gamble of trade, which the
lawyer likens to the risky business of dice-throwing – “Youre bagges been nat
feld with ambes as/But with sys cynk, that renneth for youre chaunce”
(124–25) – but also in terms of collections of stories. This turns out to be a
happy circumstance for the Man of Law, who thus has a chance to be a
“winner” himself as a result of learning a tale drawn from one such
merchant’s bag of winnings. As the host, Harry Bailly, reminds him in the
Introduction, the lawyer has entered into a competition for a prize to be
awarded to the best tale-teller:
Telle us a tale anon, as forward is.

Ye been submytted, thurgh youre free assent,
To stonden in this cas at my juggement. (34–6)
The merchants from Syria who pass on the tale to the Man of Law are
clearly calculating businessmen who are in the habit of verifying their infor-
mation. They make a point of seeing Custance with their own eyes. But
mostly the merchants tend to their business affairs in Rome:
Thise marchantz han doon fraught hir shippes newe,

And whan they han this blisful mayden sayn,
Hoom to Surrye been they went ful fayn,
And doon hir nedes as they han doon yoore,
And lyven in wele. . . . (171–75)
The Sultan of Syria, we are told, was on good terms with these merchants and
was in the habit of visiting them, when they returned from their travels, to
learn news of farflung places – a reminder of the importance of merchants to
the medieval world as transmitters and communicators at a time when few had
access to the world beyond their immediate surroundings:
31
Now fil it that thise marchantz stode in grace

Of hym that was the Sowdan of Surrye;
For whan they came from any strange place,
He wolde, of his benigne curteisye,
Make hem good chiere, and bisily espye
Tidynges of sondry regnes, for to leere
The wondres that they myghte seen or heere. (176–82)
The account of the exceptional qualities of Custance qualified as the “big

news” from Rome (“Amonges othere thynges specially,/ Thise marchantz han
hym toold of dame Custance” [183–84]) and inflames the Sultan to know her.
Here there is a reversal of western categories – normally it is the East that is
associated with the marvelous. In a recent article, Kathryn Lynch takes a
view of commerce in the tale more metaphoric than historic. The East is to
be seen broadly “as a symbolic location” associated with “extreme open-
ness” that has an economic valence extending to verbal exchange. Against
this is juxtaposed the western, “binary quality” of the lawyer’s tale with its
emphasis on the conflict between “opposing religious ‘laws’ ” (Lynch,
“Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy,” 410).10
Religious difference between Christian Rome and Moslem Syria is
addressed directly by Chaucer in the matter of the Sultan’s desire for
marriage; he has the lawyer-narrator directly say that it will ultimately cause
his death: “he for love sholde han his deeth, allas!” (193). The advisors of the
Sultan point out the “diversitee” (220) between Christian and Moslem law as
an insurmountable impediment to marriage:
Thanne saw they therinne swich difficultee
By wey of reson, for to speke al playn,
By cause that ther was swich diversitee
Bitwene hir bothe lawes, that they sayn
They trowe that no “Cristen prince wolde fayn
Wedden his child under oure lawe sweete
That us was taught by Mahoun, our prophete.” (218–24)
The solution in the tale is the conversion to Christianity of the Moslem sultan
and all the members of his court by international arrangement that is negoti-
ated by the Pope himself. The narrator sympathizes with Custance for, among
other things, having to travel to the pagan world:
10 From this contrast between Eastern openness and western narrowness emerges what she considers
Chaucer’s main concern: “to use cultural difference as a way of talking about large issues of
freedom and constraint in storytelling” (Lynch, 410). Cf. Schibanoff who, on the other hand,
argues for “the unique congruity” that Chaucer establishes between Syrians and Romans (78). (I
suggest that the most probable explanation for the perceived congruity is factual: the Syrian
merchants mentioned at the beginning of the tale are probably Italian traders living in Syria).
Schildgen, however, sees “rigid lines. . . between Islam and Christianity” (49).
32
Allas, what wonder is it thogh she wepte,

That shal be sent to strange nacioun
Fro freendes that so tendrely hire kepte. (267–69)
Speaking for herself, Custance reveals how upset she is about entering a
non-Christian realm:
“Allas, unto the Barbre nacioun
I moste anoon, syn that it is youre wille;
But Crist, that starf for our redempcioun
So yeve me grace his heestes to fulfille!” (281–84)
Christian-Moslem tensions are further displayed in the words of the mother of

the sultan who wishes to become a convert. Calling the lords of the Moslem
court before her, she declares,
“Lordes,” quod she, “ye knowen everichon,
How that my sone in point is for to lete
The hooly lawes of our Alkaron,
Yeven by Goddes message Makomete.
But oon avow to grete God I heete,
The lyf shal rather out of my body sterte
Or Makometes lawe out of myn herte!” (330–36)
She proposes that they all feign conversion to Christianity and get even at the
feast she arranges for the marriage celebration. All Christians attending are
slain except Custance, who is set out to sea in a rudderless boat and told to
learn how to sail back to Italy.
She, in fact, ends up travelling as much as any merchant who spends years
gathering goods in farflung places for trade. Custance floats in the
Mediterranean for several years:
Yere and dayes fleet this creature
Thurghout the Sea of Greece unto the Strayte
Of Marrok, as it was hir aventure. (463–65)
Finally driven out into the Atlantic Ocean, she is pushed northward to the far
reaches of England:
She dryveth forth into our occian
Thurghout oure wilde see, til atte laste
Under an hoold that nempnen I ne kan,
Fer in Northhumberlond the wawe hire caste (505–08)
The narrator underscores language difference along with geographical shifts

from place to place; Custance’s language – probably vulgar Latin – is
different from the language of the “constable of the castel” (512) who
discovers her when she is finally swept ashore: “In hir langage mercy she
bisoghte/. . . . A maner Latyn corrupt was hir speche” (516–19). But the great-
33
est difference is in faith. The constable, his wife, and all the other inhabitants
of Northumberland are pagan, all Christians having been conquered by
Saracen pirates travelling along the English coast:
In al that lond no Cristen dorste route;
Alle Cristen folk been fled fro that contree
Thurgh payens, that conquereden al aboute
The plages of the north, by land and see.
To Walys fledde the Cristyanytee
Of olde Britons dwellynge in this ile. (540–45)
These pagans may well refer to Vikings who sailed freely along Atlantic
shores in the tenth century (Lewis, Nomads, 47). Chaucer, thus, would be
suggesting a time-frame in the very early Middle Ages at this point in the tale;
whereas, the opening with its merchants trading between Syria and Rome
must suggest the Mediterranean of the later Middle Ages.
Custance eventually accomplishes the conversion of the constable and his
wife and even King Alla of Northumberland when a slanderous accuser of
Custance is struck blind and a miraculous voice is heard to say, “Thou hast
desclaundred, giltelees,/ The doghter of holy chirche. . . .” (673–74). Marriage
to the king follows, as do the evil machinations of a mother-in-law which
cause Custance and her son by Alla to be cast out to sea in a rudderless boat –
Custance’s second such experience. Once again Custance travels great
distances over long stretches of time. “Fyve yeer and moore” (902) she floats
in the open seas:
Forth gooth hir ship thurghout the narwe mouth
Of Jubaltare and Septe, dryvynge ay
Somtyme west, and somtyme north and south,
And somtyme est, ful many a wery day. (946–49)
The specificity about the exact length of time spent in travel may recall Harry
Bailly’s concern with time in his words to the pilgrims in the Introduction to
the Man of Law’s Tale. It is only the second day of the journey and the
pilgrims have already been wasting time and have delayed getting underway
their travels to the shrine in Canterbury. Time wasted on the road to salvation
“wol nat come agayn” (29). It is, Harry admonishes the pilgrims, more valu-
able “than gold in cofre” (26); whereas, “Los of catel may recovered be” (27),
time, idled away, is lost forever. The host juxtaposes time to material things
and judges time more valuable. Linking it to the process of getting to Canter-
bury, Harry views time as part of the realm of the spirit and the pilgrims,
within this frame of thinking, seem to be getting nowhere. Custance’s travels,
by comparison, are productive: she makes converts in both those travels
which have been planned, like the trip to Syria to marry the Sultan, and those
that were unplanned, like the trip in the rudderless boat which brings her to
Northumberland. Even the second experience travelling in a rudderless boat
brings her providentially to a series of important reunions. As she drifts, as it
34
were, aimlessly, another traveller by sea happens to encounter Custance’s

boat and helps accomplish a return to Rome, reunion with her husband Alla
(who has found his own penitential route to Rome) and also with her father,
the Emperor of Rome, who leaves his throne to Custance’s son, Mauricius,
whose crowning as Emperor is “Maad by the Pope” (1122). Repeating again
the mercantile pun from the Introduction, Harry Bailly, in the Epilogue, calls
the lawyer’s tale “a thrifty tale for the nones” (1165) and thus ends on a seem-
ingly curious note this tale about the suffering of a pious woman and the
working out of Providence.
Though it has been suggested that Chaucer may have written this tale as an
independent piece, certain intertextual considerations, namely the poet’s use
of Innocent III’s De miseria and Nicolas of Lynn’s Kalendarium, have led
most recent scholars, including Helen Cooper, to accept 1390 as the date of
composition (Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 125).11 It is of interest, however,
that Cooper points to two details as a possible link with Boccaccio’s
Decameron 5, 2: its opening on the theme of poverty as well as the parallel
between Boccaccio’s Gostanza’s speaking “latino” and Custance’s “Latyn
corrupt” (519; Cooper, 128). These details could conceivably have been
known to Chaucer much earlier than 1390, as Boccaccio began work on his
Decameron in 1348 and finished it in 1353, early enough for Chaucer to have
become acquainted with the work in his travels to Italy during 1372 or 1378.
Be that as it may, what is of interest in this presumably distant analogue is
how much Boccaccio’s depiction of the medieval Mediterranean world
resembles Chaucer’s. But unlike Chaucer’s Custance, who is the daughter of
the Emperor of Rome, Boccaccio’s Gostanza belongs to southern Italy, a
factor which intensifies the Islamic presence in the tale. Though Gostanza
herself is not rich or highborn, southern Italy was both prominent and pros-
perous in antiquity, and as early as the ninth and tenth centuries Byzantium,
the Islamic world, and the Latin West intersected there. The island home of
Boccaccio’s Gostanza is Lipari, off the northeast coast of Sicily. In the early
Middle Ages that island was geographically near powerful eastern powers:
the Fatimid Caliphate of North Africa, the Byzantine Empire, and the
Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, but most obviously, the city of Palermo,
capital of Moslem Sicily. The Arab remains of Palermo are rich. One of the
most magnificent Arab-Norman buildings in the world is found in Palermo:
Zisa Castle. Its name derives from Arabic (‘al-aziz = noble, splendid) but the
building itself was erected during the reign of Guglielmo I (1154–1166).
Placed within the royal park, Genoard, it opened on to a garden with a pool
fed by an underground water source which flowed from a marble, canal-like
conduit system in the first floor Sala della Fontana (Fountain Room). The
Islamic style of the mosaics found on the walls of this room (see Plate 1) are
11 See R. E. Lewis’s review of the scholarly positions in his edition of De miseria, 16–31, and see
note 8 above.
35
Plate 1. Mosaics from the façade of the Sala della Fontana, Zisa Castle, Palermo, Sicily. 12th century. The work of Arab artisans.
Plate 2. The Morgan Casket. One of the most accomplished Islamic works of art in ivory.
Sicily or southern Italy, 11th–12th century.
so striking that it is unsurprising that well into the nineteenth century La Zisa
was thought to be Arabic (Caconia and Noto, 29). According to a Sicilian
legend, an emir built three palaces, one for each of his three daughters: one is
La Zisa, another is La Cuba, but there is no trace of a third. Also, one of the
most accomplished works of medieval Islamic art in ivory is thought to be
Sicilian, the so-called “Morgan casket,” carved in the eleventh or twelfth
century (see Plate 2). Recent archaeological excavations at Lipari castle, on
the island off the northeast coast of Sicily, named in Boccaccio’s tale, are
beginning to turn up ceramic bowls like many from medieval Syria on view in
the Islamic collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A fifteenth-century
bowl decorated in cobalt blue recently unearthed at the site in Lipari appears
to be a local work modelled on Islamic ceramics found in twelfth-century
Tunisia (another place named in Boccaccio’s tale; Lesnes, 44, figure III, 1).
Despite the destruction and death which came with Arab raids during the
eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, the relationship of southern Italy with the
Islamic world of the Mediterranean gradually brought increased prosperity
(Kreutz, 20). Archibald Lewis observes that in the late tenth century few
Islamic traders in the west “went north of Sicily or Naples or traded beyond
Tortosa, Saragossa, Toledo, or Lisbon” (Lewis, Nomads, 36), a fact which
suggests the Chaucerian picture with merchants moving between Syria and
Rome depicts a somewhat later medieval scene than that in Boccaccio’s tale.
Important items of trade during this early period were wool and hides from the
Maghreb and specialty textiles: “silks woven in Persia, Khorasan, Syria,
Al-Andalus, and Sicily, the cottons from northern Iraq, Persia, and Khorasan,
and the linens and brocades made in Egypt” (Lewis, Nomads, 38), the sort of
textiles that suggest the crafts Gostanza engages in with the Saracen women
artisans whom she joins in the first half of Boccaccio’s tale, as we shall
shortly see. There is varied evidence that shows traders from Amalfi circu-
lating in the Moslem Mediterranean as early as the tenth century; surely
evidence of a longstanding Amalfitan presence is their eleventh-century
hostel founded in Moslem Palestine (Lewis, Nomads, 83). In terms of
Gostanza’s home on the island of Lipari in Decameron 5, 2, it is of particular
interest that “a Byzantine source reported that when the Arabs, moving across
Sicily, threatened the island of Lipari, Amalfitans sailed there” (Kreutz, 81).
Besides the urban centers in Italy where trade was active like Amalfi and, of
course, Venice and Naples (which were, perhaps, more Byzantine in character
than Western European), other Italian towns were growing increasingly
important in commercial life (Rome and Milan, for example).
The emphasis on the importance of money in Decameron 5, 2 arises out of
the mercantile ethos of the medieval Mediterranean world. Even though
Gostanza and Martuccio are obviously in love, Gostanza’s father, when asked
for her hand in marriage, tells Martuccio that he is rejected because of his
poverty. For his part, Martuccio decides to leave Lipari and not return until he
has made his fortune as a pirate, robbing those who are weak:
38
. . . il qual rispose lui esser povero, e per ciò non volergliele dare. Martuccio,
sdegnato di vedersi per povertà rifiutare, con certi suoi amici e parenti giuro
di mai in Lipari non tornare se non ricco; e quindi partitosi, corseggiando,
cominciò a costeggiare la Barberia, rubando ciascuno che menò poteva di
lui. (455–56)12
[. . . he replied that Martuccio was poor and would not let him have her.
Martuccio was enraged to find himself refused on account of poverty, and
swore with certain of his relatives and friends never to return to Lipari unless
he were rich. He went away and coasted the shores of Barbary as a pirate
robbing everyone weaker than himself. (318)]13
Evidently very greedy, Martuccio and his men keep robbing even after they
had amassed great wealth. As a result, they end up imprisoned after a Saracen
attack:
Ma non bastandogli d’essere egli e’ suoi compagni in brieve tempo devenuti
ricchissimi, mentre che di trasricchire cercavano avvenne che da certi legni
di saracini, dopo lunga difesa, co’ suoi compagni fu preso e rubato, e di lor la
maggior parte da’ saracini mazzerati e isfondolato il legno, esso, menato a
Tunisi, fu messo in prigione e in lunga miseria guardato. (456)
[But it was not enough for himself and his companions that they had become
very rich in a short time; they wanted to be extremely rich and so it happened
that after a long battle certain Saracen ships captured and robbed him and his
companions, most of whom were massacred by the Saracens. The ship was
sunk, and Martuccio was taken to Tunis. . . . (318)]
By the year 1000 Tunisia was an Arabic-speaking center of the Islamic world
(Lewis, Nomads, 29). Arab incursions into southern Italy began as early as the
820s. It has been observed that “the Annales Regni Francorum tell of pirates
in the year 820 seizing merchant ships en route from Sardinia to the Italian
mainland. Although those particular pirates may or may not have been
Moslem, Arabs undoubtedly were among those taking advantage of the anar-
chic maritime situation in this period” ( Kreutz, 25). Boccaccio’s depiction of
Gostanza’s treatment when her boat washes up on the shores of Susa suggests
a world wherein Christians and Moslems have learned to live side by side.
The Saracen who finds Gostanza speaks Latin to her, recognizing that she is a
Christian from her manner of dress:
. . . all’abito conosciutala che cristiana era, parlando latino la domandò come
fosse che ella quivi in quella barca cosi soletta fosse arrivata. (457)
[She realised from the girl’s clothes that she was a Christian, and asked her
in Italian how it happened that she arrived there all alone in the boat. (319)]
12 All quotations from the Italian tale refer to Tutte Le Opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Branca,
vol. 4 (Decameron). Pages cited are indicated parenthetically.
13 The English translation is by Richard Aldington. Parenthetical page references refer to his The
Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio.
39
The Saracen woman takes Gostanza to the home of another Saracen woman
who, together with others, works at Moslem handicrafts which Gostanza
comes to master along with their language:
. . . e poi per la mano nella sua casa ne la menò, nella quale ella con alquante
altre femine dimorava senza alcun uomo, e tutte di diverse cose lavoravano
di lor mano, di seta, di palma, di cuoio diversi lavori faccendo . . . . di tempo,
mostrandogliele esse, il lor linguaggio apparò. (458–59)
[. . . led by the hand into her house, where she lived with several other
women but no men, and where they all worked at handicrafts, some in silk,
some in palm and some in leather . . . in a very short time she learned their
language from them. (320)]
Perhaps the most striking sign of how much the distance between Italy and the
Islamic world has shrunk in the world of Decameron 5, 2 is that Gostanza’s
lover, Martuccio Gomito, a Christian from Italy, knowledgeable about the
ways and language of the “barbaresco” (459), is able to advise the King of
Tunis about how to defend his land against incursion from rival Saracen
forces from Granada. This leads ultimately to the mutual rediscovery of
Gostanza and Martuccio, who end up “winners,” each of them given gifts as a
prelude to marriage and being wished an entrepreneurial prosperous wind
(“prospero vento,” 462) to carry them back to their island homeland in Lipari.
The concluding expression about the prosperous wind creates an interesting
echo placed beside the host’s comment about the lawyer’s “thrifty” tale at the
end of the Man of Law’s Tale. This echoing between the two conclusions
together with the parallel concerns with poverty voiced at the beginning of the
two tales, as well as the relevance to the medieval Mediterranean of the
picture of women at work on handicrafts for East-West trade in Boccaccio’s
tale, suggest that this “analogue” of the Man of Law’s Tale may well be one
with which Chaucer was acquainted. Derek Pearsall believes that it would
have been in Bernabo Visconti’s libraries that Chaucer might have had his
first opportunity to have a long stretch of time (at best, six weeks) with the
writings of Boccaccio (Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer 108). The
mission to Italy that took Chaucer to Milan occurred in 1378. Chaucer started
work on the Canterbury Tales around 1387, some nine years later. Nine years
is a long time to retain verbal details, but assuming Chaucer had time subse-
quently to reread Boccaccio and refresh his memory, it may not be too
far-fetched to point to the play of Chaucer’s “thrifty” against Boccaccio’s
“prospero” as one reason among others to think the English poet knew the
Italian analogue. If so, this may even add further weight to the speculation
shared by some scholars that the Man of Law’s Epilogue represents an early
stage in the composition of the Tales (Benson, 862). More generally, Chau-
cer’s handling of the Constance legend reminds us that the romances the poet
wrote in the last decade of the fourteenth century were written by a court poet
who was also in constant contact with the city life of London. Furthermore, it
40
seems likely that besides having knowledge of the French literary tradition the
English poet was acquainted with the Italian writers of the trecento, notably
Boccaccio. Chaucer developed an international style which broke away from
the popular romances of the English thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.14
In Gower’s Tale of Constance we also encounter the interaction of Latin
West with Islamic Mediterranean, but the encounters in Gower’s tale are more
intimate – perhaps to a fault. While his Constance, for example, is given a
father who, as in Chaucer, appears to be an emperor – his name is “Tiberie
Constantin” (a Byzantine ruler) and we are told “The Sceptre hadde forto
rihte” (589) – Gower suggests that he is in God’s service, “A worthi kniht in
Cristes lawe” (588). Perhaps he is a crusader. Gower’s Constance, like Chau-
cer’s, achieves conversions to Christianity, but God and profit are shown to be
more hand-in-glove: Gower’s Constance manages to achieve conversions
while actually trading with merchants, “the greteste of Barbarie” (599).
Apparently without intending to, Gower makes conversion achieved by his
Constance the result of a fine mix of Christianity and commerce:
Of hem which usen marchandie,
Sche hath converted, as thei come
To hire upon a time in Rome,
To schewen such thing as their broghte.
Whiche worthili of hem sche boghte,
And over that in such a wise
Sche hath hem with hire wordes wise
Of Cristes feith so full enformed
That thei therto ben all conformed,
So that baptesme thei receiven
And all here false goddes weyven. (600–10)
Even though Gower says Constance accomplishes these conversions because

she “was ful of feith” (598), by showing her engaging in commerce, as Chau-
cer’s heroine does not, Gower makes his Constance seem worldly. And he
does so without irony. This Constance is less “unwemmed” (flawless, proper)
than Chaucer’s, whom R. A. Shoaf calls “the ideal sign or marker or medium
. . . for merchants . . . and for lawyers” (Shoaf, “Unwemmed Custance,” 287).
Gower’s tale provides a rare exception to the literary convention that romance
characters are never shown as “involved in the world of commerce” (Eberle,
165). We see here a reflection of what Shoaf, discussing Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, described as the fourteenth century’s reconciliation of
“Christian traditions” and “contemporary economic realities” (Shoaf, Green
Girdle, 3).
When Chaucer’s merchants return to Syria and chat with the Sultan they
talk in rather general terms about Custance’s virtues (and nothing is said about
14 These were written in the tail-rhyme stanza and four-stress couplet mocked by Chaucer in the Tale
of Sir Thopas. See A. McI. Trounce, “The English Tail-Rhyme Romances”.
41
their having been converted to Christianity by her). Moreover, the decision to

become a convert by Chaucer’s Sultan is made to seem a desperate maneuver
by a man obsessed by the desire to marry a woman whom he hasn’t even seen
but about whom he has heard marvelous things which inflame his passions.
While Chaucer indicates that elaborate negotiations (which include even the
Pope) are needed to facilitate the conversion of the Sultan, Gower focuses
exclusively on Constance, the religious crusader, sent out with two cardinals
as part of a personal entourage. (The Prioress in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,
the head of a convent, is only accompanied by priests.) Gower makes the con-
version of the Sultan in the land of Barbarie seem the mission that Constance
was born for. In Chaucer the conversion seems the accidental achievement of
garrulous merchants, probably Venetian Christians living in Syria.15 The
greater emphasis on the missionary zeal of Gower’s heroine as compared to
Chaucer’s Custance may be necessitated by the former’s need to make his
Constance a magnet for the “clos Envie” (684) of the Sultan’s mother – envy
being the sin illustrated by the Tale of Constance within the frame of the
Confessio Amantis – and by the importance of giving Constance enough
strength to balance out a Saracen mother-in-law from hell. (She is called “This
olde fend, this Sarazine” [705].) Gower also gives more emphasis than does
Chaucer to the presence of the ecclesiastical power structure in the matter of
the conversion of the second pagan husband, Elda, who decides to marry
Constance after she is vindicated in her ordeals in the pagan north:
Ther cam a Bisschop out of Wales
Fro Bangor and Lucie he hihte,
Which thurgh the grace of god almihte
The king with many an other mo
Hath cristned, . . . (904–08)
Chaucer drops Bishop Lucius’s name entirely.

Gower’s Constance is all in all much more a “take charge” heroine. Her
handling of the attempted rape, in a scene which occurs near the end of the
tale, is a feat of ingenuity (as well as of prayer); by comparison, Custance in
Chaucer’s parallel episode seems reduced to fisticuffs. In Gower, Constance’s
boat blows eastward to Islamic Spain where a “hethen Amirall” (1090) and
his steward (with the Byzantine-sounding name of Thelous) see her from their
castle wall. When the steward comes to her at night threatening sexual assault,
Constance, with ready pluck, requests that he check first that there is no one
outside who might see them. She appears to be pretending something between
resignation to her fate and compliance:
Sche sih ther was no other weie,
And seide he scholde hire wel comforte,
15 Cf. David Wallace, however, who sees Chaucer’s tale as joining other works like “Piers Plowman
attempting to find their way between theological systematizing and mercantile wealth” (182).
42
That he ferst loke out ate porte,

That noman were nyh the stede,
Which myhte knowe what thei dede,
And thanne he mai do what he wolde. (1112–17)
The steward is delighted: “He was riht glad that sche so tolde,/And to the
porte anon he ferde” (1118–19). When he is blown overboard, the result
seems nearly as much a reward for Constance’s cleverness as the answer to a
prayer (indeed, “Sche preide god” [1120] too). Gower’s Constance never had
to lift a finger against her attacker, but no favorable wind helps Chaucer’s
Custance. There is just “strugglyng wel and myghtily” before “The theif fil
over bord” (921–22).
It may be that for Gower there was nothing inappropriate about a saintly
woman converting merchants while doing business with them. And equally it
may be for Chaucer there was every likelihood that even a wealthy lawyer or
merchant could appreciate the virtues of someone like Custance. The tale
which the Man of Law learned from a merchant is, as it were, a merchant’s
tale. The difference between the poets comes in their art. With his gifts of wit,
irony, and mirth, Chaucer could make the juxtaposition of opposites come
alive. In the Introduction to The Man of Law’s Tale there is unmistakable
satire in the paradox of a lawyer who praises material wealth going on to tell a
tale about the treasures of spiritual poverty. Presented as an admirer of
improving, didactic literature, he tells a tale centered on a heroine who is
repeatedly called “hooly.” She is the “doghter of hooly chirche” (675), a
“hooly mayde” (692) with “hooly entente” (867) who practices “hooly
werkes” (980) and “hooly almus-dede” (1156). Still, by the tale’s end, when
the host stretches in his stirrups and judges the profitable tale to be “thrifty,”
there lingers a hint of satire around that word for any reader who has
responded to the contrast between the mercantile ethos of the world in which
Custance moves and her religious piety. Furthermore, when in the Epilogue
the host replies to the Parson’s rebuke for swearing with, “I smelle a Lollere in
the wynd” (1173), the reference to Lollards couldn’t be more appropriate in
light of the tale which has just been concluded. Lollardy was a reform move-
ment which responded to what John Wycliffe saw as a clash between the
increasingly worldly aims of the church hierarchy and rulers of the state and
the humble religious ideals found among parish priests like the parson and
self-sacrificing laity like Custance. If it is surprising to find suggestions of a
dichotomy between elitist secularism and popular piety in Chaucer’s
hagiographical romance, it may be equally surprising to discover that in his
Legend of Good Women, a collection of tales about pagan women (“good,”
because true in loving, though not Christian like Custance), there are two
famous queens whose “oriental” sensuality ironically undercuts their claim to
virtue, as we shall see in the next chapter. Before concluding this chapter,
however, it should be observed that the Man of Law mentions this most recent
work of Chaucer’s in the Introduction to his tale of Custance, referring to it as
43
The Seintes Legende of Cupide. Why has Chaucer made the Man of Law name
it? Perhaps, to help characterize him as “snobby,” someone who wanted to
show himself off as up on all the latest court poetry, a kind of writing about
which only a few of the other pilgrims could have knowledge, but also to
signal to all those who did know the Legend of Good Women that they should
expect to hear the lawyer tell a certain kind of tale – a legend – about a noble
woman. John Lydgate, a follower of Chaucer in the next generation of poets,
described Chaucer’s reason for writing the Legend this way:
This poete wrot at request of the queene,
A legende of parfit hoolynesse
Off Goode Women to finde out nynteen
That did excelle in bountee and fayrnesse,
But for his labour and his bisynesse
Was inportable his wittes to encumbre
In al this world to fynde so greet a nombre.
(Fall of Princes, Prologue to Book I, 330–36)
Chaucer, as court poet, had been charged by the queen herself to write a kind
of martyrology of Cupid’s saints. Within the frame of the Canterbury Tales
we have a pilgrim lawyer attempting to oblige Harry Bailly with a tale; he
chooses a saint’s legend about Dame Custance, the embodiment of faith,
purity, and patience. In many ways his presentation of the Constance legend is
appropriate to a cupidinous lawyer, one of many Canterbury pilgrims with an
interest in money. While his preliminary words on the evils of poverty appear
to be at odds with the pious tale they precede, the conflict is no more than that
between the monk’s vow of stability and his love of riding expensive horses or
the friar’s vow of poverty and his cultivations of society ladies (“worthy
wommen of the toun,” General Prologue, 217).
44
Cleopatra and Dido
3
Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer’s
Legend of Good Women: Cleopatra and Dido
C HAUCER’S portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good

Women reflect another side of the Orient: here we find not the rich
trading landscape of the Man of Law’s Tale, but the locale of secret pleasures
and sexual excess. This chapter discusses the legends of these two oriental
queens whose claim to sainthood, even in terms of the religion of Cupid, is
ambiguous.
Unlike The Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, those long versified
romances that he had already written, Chaucer makes the Legend a collection
of short narratives on the order of the Canterbury Tales (which he wrote after
the Legend). According to the Prologue, the reason for brevity is the many
stories the narrator has to tell: “For whoso shal so many a storye telle,/Sey
shortly, or he shal to longe dwelle” (F 576–77). The ten stories of Cleopatra,
Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and
Hypermnestra (eleven, if Alceste is counted) ostensibly offer a defense of the
merits of women presented by the poet-narrator, Chaucer, in the fiction of this
work, to make amends for his portrait of the unfaithful Criseyde. A playful
disclaimer in Book 5 of the Troilus seems to anticipate a collection of lives
about “goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves,/ That weren trewe in lovyng al
hire lyves” (F 484–85):
Bysechyng every lady bright of hewe,

And every gentil womman, what she be,
That, al be that Criseyde was untrewe,
That for that gilt ye be nat wroth with me.
Ye may hire gilt in other bokes se;
And gladlier I wol write, if yow lest,
Penelopees trouthe and good Alceste. (5. 1772–78)
Chaucer’s collection of exemplary pagan women is later, in the Canterbury

Tales, referred to as “the Seintes Legende of Cupide” (Introduction to the
Man of Law’s Tale, 61). The lawyer’s title underscores an important point: the
pagan women of the collected tales are true followers of the god of Love, not
the Christian God of the saints whose lives are gathered in the famous
45
thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea. Had there not been so many tales of

martyrs to Cupid’s religion to tell, the poet-narrator presumably could have
made any one of them into a full-blown “pious” romance, if he wanted to. As
in nearly all courtly romances, the pagan women of the legends, true in loving,
are aristocrats betrayed by men who are royal and from a warrior class. Also,
the legends, like many romances, are aimed at a female audience, at least if we
assume that Cupid’s imposition of the writing of this palinode on the
poet-narrator, Chaucer, reflects the female reaction to Troilus and Criseyde at
court and, if we believe that Chaucer did, indeed, present the Legend of Good
Women to Richard II’s wife, Anne of Bohemia, at one of the royal residences
“at Eltham or at Sheene” (F 497).1 Not all the romances concerned with the
problems of love are as long as the Troilus (8,239 lines); Sir Orfeo, for
example, is only 601 lines long, about the length of the Prologue (F 579 lines;
G 545 lines) or somewhat longer than The Legend of Dido (443 lines).
Earthly not heavenly love is to be celebrated. In the Prologue, the best
known part of the Legend of Good Women, we encounter the idealized lady
dressed in green and white whom the god of Love identifies to the narrator as
Alceste of Thrace, she who sacrificed her life for her husband, Admetus:
She that for hire housbonde chees to dye,
And eke to goon to helle, rather than he,
And Ercules rescowed hire, parde,
And broght hir out of helle agayn to blys. (513–16)
Not only do the facts of Alceste’s life fit the hagiographical mold imposed on
Chaucer by Cupid, but they make of her an analogue of Christ in Cupid’s reli-
gion of love. It is, therefore, appropriate that Alceste be associated with the
daisy or marguerite that so closely follows the sun, closing its petals at night
and opening them in the morning. Drawing on the French courtly tradition of
paying tribute to one’s lady as the fragile marguerite, Chaucer stresses the
flower’s connection to the sun:
And whan that hit ys eve, I renne blyve,
As sone as evere the sonne gynneth weste,
To seen this flour, how it wol go to reste,
For fere of nyght, so hateth she derknesse.
Hire chere is pleynly sprad in the brightnesse
Of the sonne, for ther yt wol unclose. (60–65)
While the brightness of the daisy, so intimately associated with the sun, is an
appropriate emblem for the sacrificial wifely love of Admetus, what are we to
make of the pagan women whose lives follow in the legends themselves? The
legends are ostensibly intended to defend the merits of women, but here we
1 On the characteristics of romances written for female patrons see Ferrante, “Whose Voice? The In-
fluence of Women Patrons on Courtly Romances,” 3–18.
46
Cleopatra and Dido
encounter women whose claim to being considered worthy of praise is less

unambiguous than Alceste’s (i.e., Medea murdered her children, Cleopatra
was cruel, greedy, and promiscuous). It is difficult to take the defense at face
value when the contrast between the life of Alceste and some of the others is
so striking.
Cleopatra and Dido, North African queens from Egypt and Carthage
(modern-day Libya) respectively, are two of the most famous. Chaucer
subverts their praise by focusing on sexual excess as the dominant quality in
both portraits of female desire and suffering. Despite their being figures from
antiquity with strong ties to Roman history and legend, the medieval west
would have, to some degree, found it easy to associate them with Islam and
western perceptions of the special lubricity of Moslems which had been
taking shape ever since the First Crusade of the eleventh century. Roger
Bacon, for example, thought Islam evolved out of pre-existing paganism
which made it the lex venera.2 Latin writers believed Mohammed was
successful in destroying the Church in Africa by authorized sexual license
(Southern, 31). Moreover, Latin Christians, who believed in indissoluble
monogamy, were especially critical of polygamous Islamic marriage. Still
another subject of attack during the Middle Ages was Islam’s perceived
encouragement of unnatural intercourse between people of the same or oppo-
site sex.3 Such historically real cultural attitudes bear witness to a medieval
orientalism which recent scholarship has begun to locate in Chaucer.
More than twenty years ago, the literary critic and cultural historian,
Edward Said, proposed in his well-known book, Orientalism, a three-fold
classification of the term: the first type is the academic study of the place
known as the Orient; the second type recognizes a distinction between
“oriental” and “occidental” as imaginative styles; and the third, “modern
orientalism,” Said argues, developed in the eighteenth century as a tool for
Western control of the East – that is, orientalism as a branch of post-
Enlightenment Colonialism (Said, 1–2). It is the second type that is useful
here, the Orient as an imaginary category of difference against which the
Occident can define itself. Of this second mode, imaginative orientalism, Said
observes that “certain associations with the East not quite ignorant, not quite
informed always seem to have gathered around the notion of an Orient” (Said,
2 Baconis Operis Majoris Pars Septima seu Morales Philosophia. Post F. Delorme OFM critice
instruixit et edidit E. Massa (Zuerich, 1953), 4.1.111.5 and I.VI. Cited by Daniel, Islam and the
West, 145.
3 On this subject Peter of Poitiers warns his Cluniac abbot in a letter, “Do not let the chapter that is
there (i.e. in the headings sent to Peter the Venerable as material) de uxoribus turpiter abutendis
scandalise you in any way, for it truly appears like this in the Qur’an, and, as I heard for certain in
Spain, both from Peter of Toledo, whose colleague I was in translating, and from Robert, now
archdeacon of Pamplona, all the Muslims do this freely, as if by Muhammad’s command.” The ref-
erence is to Peter of Poitiers’s Capitula ad domnium Petrum abbatem in the Toletano-Cluniac
corpus. The heading reads quod insuper rem Sodomicam atque turpissimam docuerit, praecipiens
in Alchorano suo, et velut ex persona, Dei, si loquens: “O viri. . . . This is cited by Daniel, Islam
and the West, 141 and n. 17, p. 356.
47
55–56). In this category orientalism is viewed as “a style of thought” which

had an effect on how Latin Christian Europe saw, internalized, and created
images of the Orient. This orientalism acted as a kind of lens through which
the world of the East was seen by the world of the West.
Kathryn Lynch has found Chaucerian orientalism in “the centrality of the
Oriental motif to the Squire’s Tale” – the romance discussed in the following
chapter – which she argues “wraps itself in an aura of exotic alterity” in a
sense that she relates to Said’s examination of modern orientalism (Lynch,
“East Meets West,” 530–51). Though Said’s Orientalism includes the
academic study of the Orient, it is primarily concerned with contrasting styles
of imaginative thought – East/West difference – and especially the West’s
perception of Eastern difference as inferior (Said, 31–110). Sheila Delany has
also located orientalism in Chaucer, specifically in the Legend of Good
Women. She has proposed that besides “the woman as Other” there is “another
target than woman” in this work: “the foreigner” from the Orient (Delany,
“Geographies of Desire,” 2–3 and her The Naked Text, 64–65). Racial and
gender difference in the text, she argues, allows the European reader to come
to terms ultimately with the dangerous unruly element deep within himself.
My readings of the legends of the two oriental queens against parallel texts,
especially in Boccaccio, benefit from the attention she has given to the exis-
tence of a medieval orientalism.
Western perception of the sensual indulgence of the Orient coincided with
the tradition of anti-feminism that descended from antiquity to the Middle
Ages. A central charge of medieval anti-feminist clerical writing was that
woman’s nature was inherently sensual. Robert Brunne’s manual of moral
instruction, Handlyng Synne, warned that even a chaste man alone with a
woman would fall into lechery (Brunne, 240). Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, proud
of being “al Venerien” (609) and having “a coltes tooth” (602), is particularly
annoyed at old clerics who argue that women are incapable of chastity:
The clerk, whan he is oold and may noght do
Of Venus werkes worth his old sho,
Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage.
That women kan nat kepe hir mariage. (Prologue, WB, 707–10)
Even the conventional medieval view of human embryology reinforced anti-

feminist attitudes; it was believed that life is produced when the spirit of the
male imposes order on the chaos of the matter that is woman. Drawing on
Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas writes that generative energy “is based on the
(vital) spirit in the semen which is frothy, as is attested by its whiteness. In
which spirit, moreover, there is a certain heat derived from the power of the
heavenly bodies, by virtue of which the inferior bodies also act towards the
production of the species. . . .”4
4 Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, Part One, Q 118, A1, Rep.3. For fuller discussion see Heffernan,
The Phoenix at the Fountain, Chapter 3, “The Conception Sequence”, 68–81.
48
Cleopatra and Dido
Cleopatra
According to the Legend of Good Women, the rule of Egipt (581) passed to
Cleopatra after the death of her father (Ptolemy Auletes [d. 51 B.C.]). As a
North African, she would have been considered “oriental” by Chaucer and his
contemporaries; they viewed peoples from the Near and Middle East together
with those from North Africa as being from the “Orient.” But she, perhaps, as
an Egyptian had greater claim to being called oriental – at least, in the
common sense of the term – than other “oriental” women from the Legend,
such as Thisbe of Babylon or even Dido of Carthage. Until the time of
Ptolemy I, who reigned from about 311–285 B.C., Egypt was considered part
of Asia (Magoun, 116). It was Ptolemy I who designated the isthmus of Suez
and the Red Sea the dividing line between the continents of Africa and Asia.
Ever since, Egypt has been considered part of Northeast Africa.
The life of Cleopatra, the first figure in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women,
famously illustrates the dangers of sexual excess, particularly to those lovers
who came under her spell. Though Cleopatra appears in such classical sources
as Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, Florus’s
Epitome of Roman History, and Horace’s Epodes, among others, Chaucer
probably drew on the accounts in the Speculum Historiale, by the thirteenth-
century Dominican, Vincent of Beauvais, and Boccaccio’s mid-fourteenth
century work, Concerning Famous Women.5 Both Pauline Aiken and William
K. Wimsatt, Jr. point to the same passage from Vincent as one of Chaucer’s
likely sources:
Hereafter when the lustful Anthony was corrupted by love of Cleopatra, the
queen of Egypt, he forsook the sister of Augustus, joined himself in marriage
to Cleopatra, and declared war on Augustus. But Augustus at the first signs
of revolt moved from Brundisium to Epirus with three hundred ships.
Anthony occupied the Greek coast, but when the battle started, the fleet of
Augustus began to throw Anthony’s ships into confusion. Cleopatra the
queen immediately took flight in her ship with golden stern and purple sails,
and Anthony followed her. Augustus pursued closely. Seeing this, Anthony
took his life with his own hand. The queen threw herself at the feet of
Augustus and appealed to him, but, being spurned, despaired. When she
realized that she was going to be displayed as a trophy, she took advantage of
an inattentive guard, and in the odorous mausoleum lay down next to her
Anthony, held serpents against her body, and lapsed into death.6
5 Plutarch, Life of Caesar in Lives, 7, Loeb Classical Library, 99, 48.3–49; Orosius’s History
Against the Pagans, 6.19, 307; Florus, Epitome of Roman History, 2, Loeb Classical Library, 231,
13.56–60, 14.4–5, 21.1–3, 8–12; Horace, Epodes, Loeb Classical Library, 33, 9.11–16; Vincent of
Beauvais, Speculum Historiale, 7.53; Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris, 344–57 [Latin and Italian
translation] and English translation in Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, 192–97.
6 The Latin text as found in the Strassburg edition of 1473 is as follows: “Porro cum esset lascivius
anthonius correptiues amore cleopatre egipti regine. repudiata augusti sorore ipsam sibi
49
Vincent’s version is a summary of the account in Florus’s Epitome of Roman

History, once thought to be the direct source for Chaucer’s Legend because it
contains the detail of the purple sail of Cleopatra’s ship and, like Chaucer’s
version, has Antony stab himself immediately after the defeat at Actium
(instead of delaying a year before a death in Alexandria). Vincent’s abridge-
ment contains all the details needed for Chaucer’s legend: the representation
of Octavia as Antony’s wife; the purple sail of Cleopatra’s ship; the repudia-
tion of Octavia and the declaration of war; the earlier date of Antony’s
suicide; the spice-filled shrine; the use of serpents for Cleopatra’s suicide;
and, most especially, the unsuccessful attempt by Cleopatra to seduce
Augustus, leading directly to her suicide (according to Vincent, to avoid being
exhibited in Rome as a trophy rather than out of love for Antony – a matter
discussed at greater length by Boccaccio).
It is highly likely that the more derisive account of Cleopatra in
Boccaccio’s Concerning Famous Women (De Mulieribus Claris) was also
known to Chaucer. A strikingly harsh chapter on Cleopatra describes her as
“almost the prostitute of Oriental kings” and begins by stating, “She gained
glory for almost nothing else than her beauty, while on the other hand she
became known throughout the world for her greed, cruelty and lustfulness.”7
Her ancestry is traced back to Ptolemy, King of Macedonia (making this
Queen of Egypt a Greek princess); she is said, because of political ambition,
to have poisoned the fifteen-year-old brother to whom she had been incestu-
ously married; she is described as having drawn “Caesar, the conqueror of the
world, into lustfulness” who rewarded her with the kingdom of Egypt.8 Later
in his account Boccaccio explains how she uses sexual wiles to gain parts of
the kingdoms of Syria and Arabia from Antony, her new lover after the death
of Caesar, who begins his adulterous relationship with her by agreeing to kill
her sister, Arsinoe. Boccaccio’s tone may owe some of its harshness to atti-
tudes shaped towards what was known in his day as “the domestic enemy,”
cleopatram matrimonio copulavit. et augusto bellum indixit. sed augustus apud prima novorum
motuum signa. cum tricentis navibus a brundusio in epyrum transmeavit. Anthonius vero
occupaverat atticum litus. sed ubi ventum est ad prelium et augusti classis cepit anthonii navigium
turbare. cleopatra regina cum aurea puppe veloque purpureo prima fugere cepit. et ilico insecutus
est eam anthonius. instare vestigus augustus. Quod cernens anthonius propria se manu interemit.
regina vero ad pedes augusti provoluta temptavit oculos ejus sed spreta ab eo desperavit. Que ubi
se triumpho servari cognovit et incauciorem nacta custodiam. in mausoleum odoribus refertum
juxta suum se collocavit anthonium. Deinde admotia sibi serpentibus morte sopita est.” The
passage is the subject of two authoritative articles: W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., “Vincent of Beauvais and
Chaucer’s Cleopatra and Croesus,’ and Pauline Aiken, “Chaucer’s Legend of Cleopatra and the
Speculum Historiale.” Its rather difficult Latin is translated somewhat differently by Alastair
Minnis, The Shorter Poems, 354–55.
7 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 192; “quasi scortum orientalium regum
facta,” and “nulla fere, nisi hac et oris formositate vere claritatis nota, refulsit, cum e contrario
avaritia crudelitate atque luxuria omni mundo conspicua facta sit,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 348
and 344.
8 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 198; “accessit et auspicata sibi regnum si in
suam lasciviam domitorem orbis contraheret,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 346.
50
Cleopatra and Dido
Eastern slaves used as servants in great merchant and noble households.

During the fourteenth century they were brought from Africa and the Black
Sea to northern and central Italy (Origo, 321–66). In an age when poison was
a common weapon, slaves were frequently charged with administering
poisons to their masters. Court records indicate that they were also sometimes
thought to be guilty of theft, assault, attempted murder, and rape. Masters
were often fearful of household slaves. A woman from Naples writes to her
son that her domestic slave threatens her but she cannot get rid of her lest she
malign the reputation of his sister with her malicious gossip: “She pays no
more heed to me than if I were the slave and she the lady, and she threatens to
harm us all, so that Lisandra [her daughter] and I are afraid of her. . . . I must
first get Lisandra out of the house because of her [Cateruccia’s] evil tongue.”9
Women were at times suspicious of young, pretty slaves. Origo cites a letter
from the Archives of Francesco Datini, a merchant from Prato, written to him
by a friend, Aglio degli Agli: “I had a very good [slave] but, for her misfor-
tune, she became pregnant and had a boy child – and since the father could not
be found, I took it and sent it out to nurse. But Monna Lucia was seized with
jealousy, and said it was mine; and though I told her it was only mine as a calf
belongs to the man who owns the cow, she still will not believe me, whether I
swear or coax . . .” (Origo, 344). Fathers worried about their sons being
attracted to household slaves. The advice comes from one gentleman
slave-owner, “Let them keep instead an old woman or old man, or a boy to
cook for them – so that by your kindness, my son and yours may not be
destroyed.”10 In short, many of the charges brought against Eastern slaves in
fourteenth-century Italy are the same ones levelled at the Eastern Queen,
Cleopatra. Particular emphasis, in both cases, is given to their sexual wiles. If
Delany is correct about the high concentration of sexual innuendo in Chau-
cer’s much admired alliterative amplification of Vincent’s brief entry about
Actium (with the poet’s turbulent meeting of ships, movement of trumpets,
guns, stones, and men an extended metaphor for copulation), it is likely that
the vitriolic tone of Boccaccio’s account of Cleopatra helped shape the direc-
tion Chaucer may have taken in his expansion of Vincent.11 Delany’s argu-
ment for an erotic reading of Chaucer’s Actium passage, especially her
assertion that the peas poured on the ship’s deck suggest seminal fluid, gains
support in T. W. Ross’s Chaucer’s Bawdy, which notes that the word cuppe in
Chaucer must mean “vagina” (Bawdy arranges words alphabetically as in a
dictionary). Thus the lines,
He bryngeth the cuppe and biddeth hem be blythe;
He poureth pesen upon the haches slidere (647–48)
9 A letter from Alessandra Strozzi quoted by Origo, 343.

10 A letter from Ser Lapo Mazzei, undated, quoted by Origo, 344.
11 W. H. Schofield, “The Sea-battle in Chaucer’s “Legend of Cleopatra,” 139–52 and N. F. Blake,
“Chaucer and the Alliterative Romances,” 163–9. But see Delany, “Logic of Obscenity”, 192.
51
become a reference to sexual congress, not merely a description of pouring

peas upon the deck of a warship to make it slippery against being boarded by
the enemy.
Ultimately Boccaccio shows Cleopatra’s greed for power is so great that
she asks Antony for the entire Roman Empire, as if it were his to give, and
when all is lost after the defeat of Actium, “Cleopatra tried in vain with her old
wiles to make young Octavian desire her, as she had done with Caesar and
Antony.”12 Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century portrait is hostile throughout and
contains many of the unflattering details that are contained in the classical
tradition. Boccaccio’s version claims that the Egyptian queen made the
Roman general “effeminate.”13 Though the Cleopatra of Boccaccio’s
Concerning Famous Women becomes the “wife” of Antony, as she is in
Chaucer’s Legend, the marriage seems the last gesture in a long life of
debauchery:
To bring covetous Cleopatra to his embraces, effeminate Antony gave her,
as she approached, the captive king [of Armenia] in all his regalia, as well as
all the booty. The greedy woman, happy at the gifts, embraced the ardent
man so seductively that he made her his wife with great love, after
repudiating Octavia, the sister of Octavian Caesar.14
In Sheila Delany’s discussion of Chaucer’s Legend of Cleopatra as a prime

instance of medieval Orientalism, Antony’s defeat at Actium becomes exem-
plary of “the debilitating or depoliticizing effect of foreigners, Orientals . . .
their ability to distract a hero from his (in this case explicitly colonial)
mission, generally through sensual erotic pleasures” (Delany, The Naked
Text, 174). She sees the “story of Cleopatra” as “the other side of the coin to
the romantic exoticism represented in the Squire’s Tale. The Orient is no
longer a realm of fantasy fulfilled, but one of hope and ambition undone, for
the Chaucerian version is a cautionary tale if ever there was one” (Delany, The
Naked Text, 174). However true that may be, Chaucer actually gives less
emphasis to sexual excess and sensuous voluptuousness than Boccaccio.
Chaucer passes up, for example, the opportunity to give the details of the
revelry which attended Cleopatra’s marriage to Antony:
The weddynge and the feste to devyse,
To me, that have ytake swich empryse
12 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 196; “cum Cleopatra ingenio veteri in vanum
tentasset, uti iam dudum Cesarem et Antonium illexerat in concupiscentiam suam, sic et iuvenem
Octavianum illicere,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 354.
13 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 194; “effeminatus,” De Mulieribus, ed.
Branca, 350.
14 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 194; ‘avidam in suos amplexus provocaret,
effeminatus venienti captivum regem cum omni regio ornatu atque preda deiecit in gremium. Quo
leta munere cupidissima mulier adeo blande flagrantem complexa est, ut, repudiata Octavia,
Octaviani Cesaris sorore, illam totis affectibus sibi uxorem iungeret,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca,
350.
52
Cleopatra and Dido
Of so many a story for to make,

It were to longe, lest that I shulde slake
Of thyng that bereth more effect and charge;
For men may overlade a ship or barge.
And forthy to th’effect thanne wol I skyppe,
And al the remenaunt, I wol lete it slippe. (616–23)
Boccaccio, on the other hand, launches into a lengthy account of the revelry
which makes vividly concrete Cleopatra’s lack of mesure. He uses to partic-
ular effect the story, borrowed from Pliny’s Natural History (9. 58. 119–21),
about Cleopatra’s dissolving a fabulously valuable large pearl in vinegar and
drinking it:
As Antony gluttonously stuffed himself continuously with delicacies, he
asked what magnificent thing could be added to the daily banquets, as if he
wanted to make his dinners for Cleopatra more splendid. The lewd woman
answered that, if he wanted, she could have a dinner costing more than one
hundred thousand sesterces. Antony thought that this could not be done;
nevertheless, wishing to see and devour, he asked her to try it. Lucius
Plautus was called to be the judge. The next day, when the food did not
exceed the customary, and when Antony was already ridiculing her
promises, Cleopatra ordered her servants to bring the second course.
According to the instructions they had received beforehand, they brought in
only a goblet of strong vinegar. Cleopatra immediately took a pearl of great
value which she wore as an ornament on one of her ears, according to the
custom of Oriental women, dissolved it in the vinegar, and then drank it. As
she was taking an equally valuable pearl from her other ear to repeat what
she had done, Lucius Plautus immediately declared that Antony had lost,
and so, the queen having won, the second pearl was preserved.15
Chaucer instead concentrates on Cleopatra’s treatment of her dead lover’s

corpse as a prime instance of the queen’s excess. She places Antony’s
embalmed body in an opulent shrine made of rubies and other precious stones:
[Cleopatra] made hire subtyl werkmen make a shryne
Of alle rubyes and the stones fyne
In al Egypte, that she coude espie,
15 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 194–95; “cum magnificis assidue
saginaretur ingluviosus homo epulis, in verba venit, quasi Cleopatre convivia extollere vellet, quid
magnificentie cotidianis cenis posset apponi. Cui respondit lasciva mulier se cena una centies, si
velit, sextertium alosumpturam. Quod cum minime fieri posse arbitraretur Antonius, tamen
videndi avidus atque ligurriendi, fecere periculum, sumpto Lucio Planco iudicis loco. Que postero
die dum non excessisset eduliorum consuetudinem et iam sponsionem Antonius, iussit Cleopatra
ministra ut secundam mensam afferrent illico. Qui premoniti nil aliud quam vas unum aceti
acerrimi attulere. Ipsa autem confestim ex altera aurium unionem inexcogitati pretii, quem,
ornamenti loco, orientalium more, gestabat, summens, aceto dissolvit et liquefactum absorbuit; et
cum ad alium, quem altera in auricula eque carum gerebat, iam manus apponeret, illud idem
factura, extemplo Lucius Plancus victum esse Antonium protulit; et sic secundus servatus est,
victrice regina,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 353.
53
And putte ful the shryne of spicerye,

And let the cors enbaume, and forth she fette
That dede cors, and in the shryne it shette. (672–77)
Her own suicide is included in this excess since Chaucer does not give her just
an asp or two, but a pit dug next to Antony’s shrine which is heaped with “alle
the serpentes that she myghte have” (677). There Cleopatra enters naked to be
stung to death:
Among the serpents in the pit she sterte,
And there she ches to have hire buryinge.
Anon the nadderes gonne hire for to stynge. (697–99)
The manner of death is as grisly as that of any martyred saint; indeed, D. D.

Griffith has pointed out that snake pits commonly appear in medieval
hagiographical literature (Griffith, 401). But Cleopatra’s naked body keeps
the emphasis on the sensual and anticipates the eroticism of Renaissance
portraits of Cleopatra’s death wherein she is painted naked with serpents used
as sensual accents coiled on her arm or applied to a breast.16 There seems to be
a good deal of irony in her death speech at this point in the Legend when she
refers to her ‘Unreprovable . . . wyfhod” and declares that there ‘Was nevere
unto hir love a trewer quene” (691, 695). Seeming to catch the need for clarifi-
cation at this point, Cleopatra adds, “I mene yow, Antonius” (684). Chaucer,
in fact, does not make grief over Antony’s death the motive for Cleopatra’s
suicide, for her first response to her husband’s suicide is to try to arrange a
peace accord with Octavian: “His wif, that coude of Cesar have no grace,/ To
Egipt is fled for drede and for destresse” (663–64). These lines, with
Octavian’s sexual indifference to Cleopatra suggested in the words “no
grace,” recall her attempt at the seduction of Octavian as found in both
Vincent of Beauvais and Boccaccio.
In choosing the Legend of Cleopatra as the first to be told, the god of Love
demonstrates his own lack of understanding of Alceste’s request for portraits
of women which offset Chaucer’s earlier unflattering portraits of women such
as the inconstant Criseyde who Cleopatra far surpasses in faithlessness. In
this, Chaucer’s portrait of Cleopatra partakes of that same medieval view of
her sexual excess seen in Boccaccio’s Of Famous Women, Vincent of
Beauvais’s Speculum Historiale, and, of course, Dante’s Divine Comedy,
wherein Cleopatra is found in the circle of hell reserved for the lustful who
subject reason to desire. There she is seen by the poet in the company of other
pagan women renowned for sexual excess: Semiramis, Dido, and Helen of
Troy. As the wailing ghosts of these women are seen beaten by black winds,
Virgil explains to Dante who they are,
16 Kolve, “From Cleopatra to Alceste;” see figures 1–4.
54
Cleopatra and Dido
“La prima di color di cui novelle

tu vuo’ sapir,” mi disse quelli allotta,
“fu imperadrice di molti favelle
A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta,
che libito fe licito in sua legge,
per torre il biasmo in che erra condotta.
Ell’ è Semiramis, di cui si legge
che succedette a Nino a fu sua sposa:
tenne la terra che ‘l Soldan corregge.
L’altra e colei che s’ancise amorosa,
e ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo;
poi è Cleopatràs lussuriosa.
Elena vedi, per cui tanto reo
tempo si volse, . . .” (Inferno, v, 52–65 [50])
[The first of these of whom you wish to know”
he said to me then, “was empress of many tongues.
She was so given to lechery that she made lust
licit in her law, to take away the blame she had
incurred. She is Semiramis, of whom we read that she
succeeded Ninus and had been his wife: she held the land which the
Sultan rules. The next is she who slew herself for love and
broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus; next is wanton
Cleopatra. See Helen, for whom so many years of ill
revolved; . . .” (Inferno, 51)
It is notable that in Chaucer’s legend 82 lines are concerned with the baleful
effects of the love of Antony and Cleopatra; whereas, only 44 lines introduce
the lovers and discuss their love. The only positive thing Chaucer can say of
Cleopatra in introducing her is to comment rather tritely and unconvincingly
that “she was fayr as is the rose of May” (613), applying to the sultry Egyptian
queen a simile of the sort usually reserved for medieval ideals of womanhood
like Emelye. The conventional metaphor for a courtly lady is so unsuitable
that the following line adds ironically, “to make shortly is the beste” (614),
and, indeed, the narrator adds nothing further to his introduction of her.
Though they die for love, these saints of Cupid – very different kinds of
martyrs from those typically found in medieval legendaries – their love is
presented as “pathological.” Chaucer implies that Antony’s suicide is an act
of despair committed by a man who has lost everything – reputation, honor,
respect – with the defeat at Actium which was precipitated by love for
Cleopatra:
And whan that Antony saw that aventure,

“Allas,” quod he, “the day that I was born!
My worshipe in this day thus have I lorn.”
And for despeyr out of his wit he sterte,
And rof hymself anon thourghout the herte. (657–61)
55
Antony, driven mad for love, becomes a suicide – the act of a man who has
lost his “wit.”
Within this frame of events, it is apparent that Octavian, the opponent of
Antony and Cleopatra, overthrows this couple that so challenges the Roman
Empire at a point in time shortly before the birth of Christ and the flowering of
Rome under the peace of Augustus. This historical moment, offering two
ideals of behavior, contributes to the humorous irony of the narrator’s
reminding us that the infamous love story of the lascivious pair “is storyal
soth, it is no fable” (702). Octavian’s position within the events recounted in
the Legend of Cleopatra gives weight to the orientalism of the tale as under-
stood in terms of a comment Edward Said made about orientalism in seven-
teenth-century literature: “European culture gained in strength and identity by
setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground
self” (Said, 3). The Chaucerian tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra, then,
becomes a cautionary tale about the dangerous oriental bent in all of us.
Dido
Dido, like Cleopatra, was an African queen who threatened to get in the way
of a Roman and his imperial destiny. Her name, “Dido” (“the refugee”), is
better known than Elissa, her earlier name. As Elissa, she led refugees from
Tyre to Carthage, the ancient Phoenician colonial city on the northeast coast
of Africa, which she founded about 850 B.C. Located near the modern city of
Tunis, the North African city of Carthage is used by Chaucer to define Dido’s
orientalness as well as her queenship. In the Legend of Good Women,
Carthage is referred to as a “cite” (1049, 1051), a “toun” (1016), as well as the
“noble toun of Cartage” (1008). The nearby region of Libya is called the
“contre of Cartage” in the House of Fame (224) which refers to Carthage as a
“faire toun” (432), much as in the Legend. When Aeneas seeks harbor in what
Chaucer calls the “haven” (LGW, 963), the poet may have in mind the ancient
harbor of Cothon, and the “temple,” which is the meeting place of Aeneas and
Dido, mentioned at lines 1024, 1036, 1052, 1270, and specifically called the
“mayster temple” (“main temple”) at line 1016, is probably meant to indicate
the famous temple of Tanit, palladium of Carthage (Magoun, 113). As queen
of this wealthy North African city, Dido lives in opulent splendor. She has a
“royal paleys” (1096) surrounded by vast wooded countryside full of game
and lions known as the “reyne of Libie” (992) – Dido’s realm: Libya,
centering on Carthage. Immediately outside the palace is a stylish courtyard
(“court,” 1194) and within there are ballrooms (“daunsynge chaumberes ful of
paramentes,” 1106) and suites of rooms (Aeneas’s is mentioned at 1111). For
Chaucer, Africa (“Afrike”) is virtually synonymous with Carthage or Libya.
For example, in Boece 2, pr. 6, l. 71, “men of Affryke” are Carthaginians
taken prisoner during the First Punic War.17
17 This usage reflects the original application of the ethnic name “Afer” to the people of Carthage or
56
Cleopatra and Dido
As a North African, then, Dido, like Cleopatra, would have been thought of
as “oriental.” Boccaccio considered Dido African, not merely in terms of the
geography of Carthage but even with respect to her Phoenician origins. Thus
he writes of Dido, at the beginning of Chapter 40 in Concerning Famous
Women,
Dido, who early in her life was called Elissa, was both founder and the queen
of Carthage. . . . To start rather far back, the peoples of Phoenicia, famous for
their industry, as is well known, came from almost the farthest part of Egypt
to the shores of Syria, and there they built many famous cities, of which
Agenor, famous in our times as well as in his, was king. It is believed that the
glorious line of Dido descends from him.18
Boccaccio then launches into the tale of Dido’s conflict with her brother,
Pygmalion, and her flight from Phoenicia. In this version of the Dido story,
which comes not from his secular writing but rather from his late prose work
in Latin, Boccaccio focuses on a portrait of Dido as Phoenician exile and
founder of Carthage. Not only is the Virgilian tradition of the erotic love affair
between the Trojan Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage excluded, but
Boccaccio depicts her as a chaste widow who devises an elaborate scheme
whereby she evades an unwanted marriage as she casts herself into a fire
declaring her devotion to her dead husband, Sychaeus. Whatever habits of
thinking from Roman antiquity that might be referred to as “orientalism” that
might have been inherited by Boccaccio from Virgil are displaced, in this
work, on to the king of Musicani. Boccaccio has him ask the elders of
Carthage for permission to marry Dido not merely because of her beauty,
virtue, and chastity, but because “the people of Africa are greatly inclined
towards sensuality.”19
About the relationship of Chaucer’s Legend of Dido to this portrait by
Boccaccio, Marilyn Desmond asserts, in her study of the Dido tradition,
“Although Chaucer almost certainly used Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris
in his adaption of the legends of good women, he nowhere shows an aware-
ness of the non-Virgilian Dido who never meets Aeneas and who died to
preserve her status as a ‘chaste widow,’ so thoroughly embraced by
Boccaccio in his Latin works” (Desmond, 161). For the Legend of Dido
Chaucer’s guides are Virgil and Ovid:
Libya. “Afrike” eventually came to refer to the whole continent of Africa as in the House of Fame,
1339.
18 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, 86; “Dido, cui prius Elyssa nomen,
Cartaginis eque conditrix et regina fuit. . . . Et ut altius in suam gloriam aliquantisper assumman,
Phenices, ut satis vulgatum est, populi industria preclarissimi, ab extrema fere Egypti plaga in
syrium venientes litus, plurimas et pleclaras ibidem condidere urbes. Quibus inter alios rex fuit
Agenor, nostro, nedum suo, evo prefulgidus fama, a quo genus Didonis inclitum manasse creditum
est,” De Mulieribus, Branca, 168.
19 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, p. 88; “cum in libidinem pronissimi homines
Affri sint,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 172.
57
Glorye and honour, Virgil Mantoan,

Be to thy name! and I shal as I can,
Folwe thy lanterne, as thow gost byforn,
How Eneas to Dido was forsworn.
In thyn Eneyde and Naso wol I take
The tenor, and the grete effectes make. (924–29)
Chaucer’s emphasis on the falseness of Aeneas as a lover and the passion of

Dido, together with her feelings of shame, are traceable to Ovid’s Heroides,
VII, the Epistle of Dido to Aeneas. For details about Aeneas Chaucer goes to
the first four books of the Aeneid.20
In the Legend of Dido we see Aeneas from the point of view of Dido –
“The queen saugh” (1061) – so that Chaucer may interpret the process of her
falling in love. Aeneas appears to Dido “lyk a knight,” “suffisaunt of persone
and of myght,” “lyk to been a verray gentil man,” and he is “formed wel of
braunes and of bones” (1066–71). Finally, the narrator announces that Aeneas
must have appeared to the queen to have been a chip off the old block, his
mother, Venus: “For after Venus, hadde he swich fayrnesse/That no man
myghte be half so fayre, I gesse.” (1073–74). This is a somewhat different
presentation of the motivation Chaucer gives in the House of Fame where
there is the divine manipulation of Venus –
She made Eneas so in grace
Of Dido, quene of that contree,
That, shortly for to tellen, she
Becam hys love, and let him doo
Al that weddynge longeth too (240–44)
acting in combination with a woman’s bad judgement in falling for a

good-looking foreigner: “Loo, how a woman doth amys/To love him that
unknowen ys!” (269–70).
Chaucer’s Legend gives emphasis to the sensual disposition of Dido, “This
fresshe lady” (1035), this queen “So yong, so lusty, with hire eyen glade”
(1038), living in the epicurean splendor of her Carthaginian court, so that it
may be understood how such a woman can be brought down by sexual desire.
It is what makes her “sely Dido”:
. . . ther gan to breden swich a fyr
That sely Dido hath now swich desyr
With Eneas, hire newe gest, to dele,
That she hath lost hire hewe and ek hire hele. (1156–59)
20 Edgar F. Shannon was the first to argue in detail that Chaucer manipulated the Virgilian narrative
to extol Dido and blame Aeneas, blending the factual details of the Aeneid with the spirit of Ovid’s
seventh letter in the Heroides. (Shannon, 196–208).
58
Cleopatra and Dido
Robbed of health and hue and as pale as lovesick Arcite moaning for Emelye,
Dido suffers the torments of the sleepless lover:
This noble queene unto hire reste wente.
She siketh sore, and gan hyreself turmente;
She waketh, walweth, maketh many a breyd,
As don these lovers, as I have herd seyd. (1164–67)
This portrait of the dangers of sexual excess is one of the ways in which
Chaucer does follow Virgil, who speaks of Dido’s love for Aeneas as patho-
logical in Book 4 of the Aeneid (300–01). Virgil’s position owes something to
his conflation of Dido with his historical contemporary, Cleopatra, who
offered such a threat to Roman dominance, particularly in the events leading
to Antony’s defeat at Actium. But in Chaucer all of this appears to be
softenend by the fullness of heart with which Dido responds to Aeneas’s
narration of his flight from Troy (940–45), abbreviated as it is from Virgil’s
account in Books 2 and 3 of the Aeneid. The verses describing her response –
“Anon hire herte hath pite of his wo,/ And with that pite love com in also”
(1078–79) – is remarkably close to a line generally thought to be Chaucer’s
favorite, “Pitee renneth soone in gentil herte,” which he uses in the Prologue
to the Legend of Good Women (503) as well as in four other places (the
Knight’s Tale, 1761; the Merchant’s Tale, 1986; the Squire’s Tale, 479; and
the Man of Law’s Tale, 660). If, however, one looks at the various contexts in
which this line appears in Chaucer’s works, overtones of irony are always
present and, with only one exception (the Man of Law’s Tale), the line is used
in conjunction with ideas about the pain and suffering of love. In the Knight’s
Tale, for example, the line refers to the compassion of Duke Theseus who
takes no action against Palamon, escaped from prison, nor against Arcite,
banished from Thebes, when he discovers them fighting in his forest. He real-
izes these men, covered with bloody wounds, are rivals in love whose god
they serve. There is more than warm objectivity – irony, perhaps – in the
duke’s comment, “Se how they blede! Be they noght wel arrayed?/ Thus hath
hir lord, the god of love, ypayed/Hir wages and hir fees for hir servys!”
(1801–03). In the Merchant’s Tale, the line is spoken of May, who after a
night of lovemaking with her old husband, January, has decided to have
mercy on the lovesick squire, Damian. Again, there may be more than a little
irony about her pity and her decision to love the poor squire, “Though he
namoore hadde than his sherte” (1985), since Chaucer insinuates that the
young wife has not enjoyed her husband’s amorous attentions: the merchant
says he cannot relate whether May thought January’s lovemaking “Paradys or
helle” (1964) because he might anger the fastidious in his audience! In the
Squire’s Tale, the line is the opening verse of the mournful lady falcon’s
account of her unhappy love story to Canacee, the daughter of a Mongol king
who is able to understand the language of birds because of a magic ring – a
fanciful, even slightly amusing, situation which does not lend itself to high
tragedy. In the Man of Law’s Tale, the line describes the compassion of King
59
Alla at the very moment he devises a plan to test a knight who has accused
Custance, the heroine of the pious romance, of murdering her friend,
Hermengyld, with a knife. The false accuser is asked to swear on the Gospels;
as soon as he does, he is struck dead by a mysterious hand while a voice rises
out of the crowd, in Cecil B. DeMille cinematic-style, accusing him of slan-
dering an innocent woman. Finally, in the Prologue (F) to the Legend of Good
Women, the line is spoken by the God of Love to describe the lady who gave
the poet, Chaucer, such light penance for having written so unkindly of
Criseyde: that is, to spend the greater part of the remainder of his life writing
tales about women true in loving.
In the Legend of Dido, Chaucer seems to demonstrate that the same
compassion that makes the queen sympathize with the trials through which
Aeneas passed after the Fall of Troy is also the compassion that makes her the
target of seduction when, later in the tale, Aeneas declares his love in the cave.
There, while a storm rages outside, Aeneas plays on her sympathy, promising
to be true “as a fals lovere so wel can” (1236). And she is completely taken in:
That sely Dido rewede on his peyne,
And tok hym for husbonde and becom his wyf. (1237–38)
A natural inclination toward sensuality combined with a compassionate heart

take Dido to her pathetic end; Aeneas, once his “hote ernest is al overblowe”
(1287), deserts her to conquer Italy. For the conclusion of the Legend of Dido
Chaucer translates the opening of the elegiac seventh epistle of the Heroides,
which Dido presumably wrote before falling on Aeneas’s sword:
“Ryght so,” quod she, “as that the white swan
Ayens his deth begynnyth for to synge,
Right so to yow make I my compleynynge.
Not that I trowe to geten yow ageyn,
For wel I wot that it is al in veyn,
Syn that the goddes been contraire to me.
But syn my name is lost thourgh yow,” quod she,
“I may wel lese on yow a word or letter,
Al be it that I shal ben nevere the better;
For thilke wynd hath blowe awey youre fey.” (1355–65)
As in Ovid, Dido realizes that her appeal is useless: she is throwing her words
away just as she has lost her reputation through Aeneas. The narrative closes
with two lines advising that the reader who wishes to read the whole letter go
find it in Ovid. An explicit follows immediately afterwards: Explicit Legenda
Didonis martiris, Cartaginis Regine. While the concluding letter may be
interpreted as a presentation of evidence of Dido as a true lover, the perfunc-
tory tone of the advice to read the fuller account in Ovid together with the
brief explicit noting Dido’s martyrdom suggest that Chaucer is too mature to
suffer the fools of love gladly anymore. At this stage of his career he is ready
to go beyond the courts of love; he is ready for the infinite variety of the
60
Cleopatra and Dido
Canterbury Tales and the broader audience for which it was written. Lisa
Kiser observes of it that “the eleven lines of Dido’s letter end her legend with
solemnity and grace” (Kiser, 145); John Fyler believes that Chaucer has taken
Dido’s side “wholeheartedly,” pointing to Chaucer’s abandoned Dido, preg-
nant (1323) like Ovid’s heroine, not merely, as in Virgil, wishing for preg-
nancy (Book 4, 328–29).21 Taking a somewhat idiosyncratic position,
Florence Percival views Chaucer’s Dido as “a sentimental and pathetic figure
. . . Eneas’s dupe” whose plight is “portrayed as the inevitable consequence of
her own feminine gullibility and susceptibility” (Percival, 248). To the extent
that one can gauge tone in works so brief as the legends, Percival’s position
seems to me the closest to capturing Chaucer’s attitude toward his subject.
Chaucer’s verse is subtler, more nuanced, than Boccaccio’s prose; hence,
the greater uncertainty about his real intentions and the possibility of the pres-
ence of irony. When Boccaccio compiled Of Famous Women he called the
work pious in his Preface even though all the subjects were pagan not Chris-
tian.22 Pagan women deserved special notice for achievement, he believed,
since they reached their goals without Christian illumination. Moreover, since
they accomplished difficult deeds despite being women, “almost all of whom
are endowed with tenderness, frail bodies, and sluggish minds,” Boccaccio
thought they deserved to be praised as famous men had been praised by
ancient authors and by his contemporary, Petrarch.23 His misogyny is
palpable. There will not be merely accounts of Penelope, Lucretia, and
Sulpicia, chaste matrons all, but also “very strong but destructive characters”
like Medea, Flora, and Sempronia who gained fame through deeds which
were not virtuous.24 Boccaccio promises his reader that he has been rigorous
and thorough, pulling “back the reins a bit from evil” as well as restoring
“what seems to be missing from the disgrace of certain women’s loveli-
ness.”25 With Chaucer there are even questions about whether he threw the
whole project up: Are some of the manuscripts of the Legend lost? Did he stop
writing legends out of boredom with the whole enterprise of praising women
true in loving? Chaucer’s collection of legends is not just a compilation of
stories in praise of pagan women; it is a palinode, a poetic recantation,
according to Chaucer’s rhetorical construct, for having drawn such an unfa-
vorable portrait of Criseyde that he must in this new poetic work specifically
praise women true in loving all their lives. However, after the portrait of the
21 Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 112. Cp. Frank, 77.

22 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, xxxix; “pio,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 28.
23 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, Guarino, xxxvii; “[mulieres] quibus fere omnibus a
natura rerum mollities insita et corpus debile ac tardum ingenium datum est,” De Mulieribus, ed.
Branca, 24.
24 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, xxxvii; “pernitiosum forte fuit ingenium,”
De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 24.
25 Boccaccio, Concerning Famous Women, tr. Guarino, xxxviii; “inde ignavos habenis ab infaustis
paululum retraxisse, sed id restaurasse quod quarundam turpitudinibus venustatis opusculo
demptum videtur,” De Mulieribus, ed. Branca, 26.
61
tragic plight of the true wife, Alceste, the other tales about suffering heroines
are treated with a constantly alternating tone: now sympathetic, now cynical,
now flip, now bored, and so on. Chaucer’s view is that of a more- or less-sym-
pathetic medieval male who sees the female’s limitations and finds no remedy
for misfortune in love except greater exercise of both will and reason – diffi-
cult for humankind, in general, for women, especially, and most particularly
for women from the Orient like Cleopatra and Dido, doomed by blood to be
inclined to sexual excess. In the fragment of the romance found in the Canter-
bury Tales known as the Squire’s Tale, the subject of the next chapter, there is
an account of a forlorn lady abandoned by a heartless male, but they are both
birds, a fact which gives the pathetic a comic edge; furthermore, the story of
the unhappy affair is subordinated to the unfinished tale of the exotic marvels
of the Mongol East which the Crusader Knight’s young son is engaged in
telling.
62
Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure
4
I F there is orientalism to consider in the Squire’s Tale, it is different from

that examined in the preceding chapter. Here we find the more conventional
“academic” sort, for this tale is remarkable for its wide variety of Eastern
sources and analogues. The elements of these – motifs, details of plot and
setting, etc. – may be thought of as “content,” though the striking feature of
this romance is its form, a matter that throws light on the romance’s
westernness. While the content of the unfinished Squire’s Tale may be
oriental, its structure appears to be European, a type of poetry of interlace
found in medieval French romance literature and even the English epic,
Beowulf. It could be said that the interlaced form of romance with which
Chaucer experiments relates to Eastern frame narratives (albeit at some
distance), but it is impossible to be conclusive about this.
Oriental Content or “Academic” Orientalism
Compared to the voluminous studies of many other Canterbury tales, the crit-
ical notice taken of the tale told by the squire is relatively slight. A study
which has helped renew interest in the squire’s fragmentary tale is Jennifer R.
Goodman’s 1983 article, “Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale and the Rise of Chivalry”
(Goodman, 127–36). Her essay offers a genial appreciation of the tale,
arguing that it resembles other late Middle English romances like Partonope
of Blois, Valentine and Orson, and Generides, all characterized by an interest
in exotic Oriental detail, complex plots involving numerous characters, magic
blended with realism, and family plots (some, Generides and Huon of
Bordeaux, for example, that even provide instances of averted incest, a
subject that has engaged recent scholars).1 Goodman’s article begins by
1 Lillian Hornstein grouped these romances with those she labelled “composites of courtly
romance.” See Hornstein, “Composites of Courtly Romance,” 147–58. On the subject of incest in
romance literature, John Fyler has argued that the theme is linked to such common features of the
genre as “questions of identity, complicated by disguise or ignorance; distinctions between self
and other” and, most important, for his focus on romance’s preoccupation with incest, “the reluc-
tance of romance narrative to reach its ending” (“Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire’s Tale,”
63
reminding us that once there was significant interest and taste for such works.
Milton, it will be recalled, expresses regret at the incomplete state of the
Squire’s Tale by referring to Chaucer without naming him, as if his summary
of the tale would be sufficient to place it in the mind of any reader of lines
109–20 of Il Penseroso:
Or call up him that left half told
The story of Cambuskan bold,
Of Camball, and of Algarsife,
And who had Canace to wife,
That own’d the virtuous Ring and Glass,
And of the wondrous Horse of Brass,
On which the Tartar King did ride;
And if aught else great Bards beside
In sage and solemn tunes have sung,
Of Tourneys and of Trophies hung,
Of Forests, and enchantments drear,
Where more is meant than meets the ear.2
Goodman’s stress on motifs the tale shares with other late medieval English
romances contrasts with past scholarship, much of which has concerned itself
with the romance’s Orientalness. Eminent scholars of the nineteenth century
and of the first forty years of the twentieth century sought Oriental sources
and analogues for such details as the magical gifts (i.e., the ring, mirror, and
horse of brass), the characters named by Milton, and the setting as if mining
for diamonds. The accumulated weight of their findings gave emphasis to the
extent of the tale’s eastern sources and analogues among Persian, Arabic, and
Byzantine texts.
A. W. Pollard wrote in the introduction to his 1899 edition of the Squire’s
Tale that Chaucer seems “to have read or heard several Eastern tales, and to
have formed the ambitious project of combining them into a single story,
which would have required many thousand lines for its proper development”
(Pollard, vii). Skeat was convinced of Chaucer’s indebtedness to Marco
Polo’s Travels for his conception of the setting of Cambyuskan’s Mongol
Empire, a view which Manly rejected, subscribing instead to the view that
Chaucer had access to romances about Genghis Khan: “I can hardly resist the
conviction that Chaucer found all his characters named and his scene laid in
the source – written or oral – from which he derived his plot.”3 H. S. V. Jones
2). More recently, Elizabeth Scala has written about how the story of incest goes untold in the
Squire’s Tale (“Canacee and the Chaucer Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables,” 15–39).
2 Il Penseroso in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, 74–5. The last five lines of this
passage appear to refer broadly to other poets (“great Bards beside”) who have also written of such
things (“aught else”) as worthy to be summoned. Milton probably had Spenser in mind: certainly
the forests of the Faerie Queene qualify as full of “enchantments drear/Where more is meant than
meets the ear.”
3 Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 3. 471–73; Manly, “Marco Polo and the Squire’s
Tale,” 349.
64
argued that Arabic and derivative Old French tales belonging to the
Cléomadès Cycle, especially the version by Adenès le Rois and, to a lesser
degree, the Méliacin, by Girard d’Amiens, offered parallels to Chaucer’s tale,
most especially the model for the magical horse.4 The tale of the flying horse
from the Arabian Nights as summarized by Jones for his section on the
Squire’s Tale in Bryan and Dempster is remarkably close to both thirteenth-
century French romances.5 The provenance of the Cléomadès story which
provided a model for Chaucer does, then, appear to be Arabic. Written at the
request of Blanche of Castile, the king of France’s sister, and, after 1275,
widow of Ferdinand of Cerda, infanta of Castile, the Romance of Cléomadès
by Adenès le Rois with its tale of the enchanted horse is thought to have been
based on a Spanish version of the Arabic tale (presumed to be the source of
Méliacin as well).6 The similarities between the Arabic tale and the
Cléomadès are striking. As in the Arabic version, three kings make a visit to
another king’s court on a day of feasting and arrive bearing gifts. In
Cléomadès, the feasting celebrates the birthday of Marcadigas, son of Caldus,
King of Sardinia, who is the father of Cléomadès and three beautiful daugh-
ters. The gifts of the three kings are remarkably like those in the Arabic tale: a
golden hen and three golden chickens that walk and sing; a man of gold who
blows a horn at the approach of treason; and an ebony horse controlled by
pins. The French romance also contains the request of the three kings to marry
the beautiful daughters. The two daughters of Marcadigas given to the hand-
some kings are content, but the third, whose lot it is to be given to the ugly
king, Crompart, asks for the intervention of her brother, Cléomadès. Like the
brother in the Arabic tale, Cléomadès is confounded by the gift of the mechan-
ical horse. After mounting it, his inability to handle the control pins causes
him to ascend and travel far until he is finally able to descend, at which point
he lands on the palace of the beautiful princess, Claremondine. Again, as in
the Arabic version, an angry father threatens the intruder who saves himself
only by mounting the mechanical horse and flying into the sky from whence
he came. In Cléomadès, the prince finally lands in Seville. After a time, he
returns for the lady he longs for and rejoins her only to have her snatched
away, as in the Arabic tale, by the ugly suitor who finds her unattended
outside the city while her lover is making travel plans. The ugly Crompart
whisks her away on the flying horse and the remainder of the French romance
is taken up with Cléomadès’s adventures in regaining the beautiful
Claremondine whom he eventually takes back to Seville. The plot of Méliacin
is very close to Cléomadès, the major difference being that it is set in Asia, not
Spain. The main features that Chaucer has borrowed from the Cléomadès
4 Jones, “The Cléomadès and Related Folk-Tales,” 557–98; “Some Observations upon the Squire’s
Tale,” 346–59; “The Cléomadès, the Méliacin, and the Arabian Tale of the Enchanted Horse,”
221–43.
5 See Appendix.
6 Hasselt’s Introduction to Li Roumans de Cléomadès by Adenès le Rois, vol. 1, xv–xvi, xix, xxi,
xxvii.
65
seem to include the details of the operation of the horse by means of pins, the
occasion of a royal birthday feast, and the gift that has the power to reveal
treason (a magic mirror in the Squire’s Tale; a golden man in Cléomadès).
Notable among the many differences are that instead of three kings bringing
three gifts to the three daughters of the king of Seville, Chaucer’s Squire’s
Tale has one knight with four gifts for the Tartar king and his one daughter
and that the Cléomadès has no episode like that of Canacee and the falcon in
Chaucer’s romance. That bit of the Squire’s Tale has an analogue found in yet
another oriental tale.
Haldeen Braddy points to the tale of Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya,
translated by Burton for his edition of the Arabian Nights, as the source of the
episode of the peregrine falcon lamenting its desertion by a male companion –
that is to say, whatever earlier version of this tale Chaucer could have known
(Braddy, “The Oriental Origin,” 11–19). Though the tale in the Arabian
Nights collection may have been too late to be the one Chaucer used, Braddy
locates several similar extant stories among very early oriental tales
concerning talking bird couples, the male of which is faithless as in, for
example, the Persian tale collection known as Touti-Nameh which contains a
tale wherein a princess, having seen a male peacock desert his female partner
when lightning strikes their nest, decides never to marry. In the tale translated
from the Arabian Nights, Princess Dunya is turned against marriage because
of a dream in which she has seen the loyal action of a female pigeon who risks
her life to free her male partner from a snare repaid by his abandonment when
she is snagged by a fowler’s trap. The human male suitor, Taj al-Muluk,
whose female beloved has rejected marriage because of her dream, devises a
stratagem to cure her disdain of the male sex: he sets up a series of paintings in
the lady’s garden which reveals that the reason the male pigeon failed to
rescue the female caught in the snare is that he had been snatched up in the
claws of a huge bird of prey before he could return to free his mate. Braddy
effectively makes the link between Chaucer’s falcon episode and this oriental
analogue by pointing out that the episode in the Squire’s Tale begins when
Canacee awakens the ladies to accompany her for a walk in her garden after
her sleep has been disturbed by a vision. This dream opens the episode in
which the princess gets a lesson about men and their attraction to
newefangelnesse from the talking falcon who has been abandoned by her
mate. In a subsequent article, Braddy further suggests that the Canacee-falcon
episode might have been intended as a frame for a series of short related narra-
tives along the lines of the so-called “box within a box” story common in
Persian and Arabic tales wherein there is a principal story followed by
numerous intercalary incidents. These might have been, in the incomplete
Squire’s Tale, the three episodes named but not recounted involving 1.
Cambyuskan, 2. Algarsif and Theodora, and 3. Cambalo and Canacee. Had
the squire not been cut off by the franklin, other developments in the plot pre-
sumably would have illustrated Canacee’s misfortune in having acquired a
faithless lover (Braddy, “The Genre,” 279–90). As Braddy reminds us, “it
66
seems perfectly clear that the fable of birds was to carry over to the affairs of
Canacee, because what occasioned the dream leading to the discovery of the
hawk was the magic mirror” that possessed the power to reveal to any lady
bright (137) the future tresoun (139) of any false new love (Braddy, “The
Genre,” 281).
As late as 1977, Dorothee Metlitzski adds to these eastern analogues a
Byzantine epic, Digenes Akritas, which, like the squire’s tale, is a romance
about a family; the tale seems also to offer a connection to the falcon episode:
Digenes encounters a woman abandoned by a faithless lover (Metlitzki,
144–52). Basilius Digenes Akritas was a Byzantine national hero of the tenth
century. His story is told in six extant manuscripts written in medieval Greek
of the eleventh century found in libraries from Northern Turkey to Greece,
Italy and Spain. While Digenes Akritas is generally unknown to even serious
students of English literature, Kimon Friar – translator of Kazantzakis’s
modern Greek, The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel – says, “Every Greek has heard
of it!”7 A broad overview of the medieval epic makes clear why Metlitzski
called it a romance about a family. The major character of the first part of the
story is an Arab emir who is the father of Digenis. On a raid in Byzantine
Cappadocia, the emir captures a highborn Greek young woman. After being
defeated by her brother in combat, the emir decides to be baptized, to marry
the woman, and move to the Byzantine side of the border. Digenis is born of
the Arab father and Greek mother and, like his father, grows up to steal
himself a Greek bride from a Byzantine castle. He leads the life of a border
guard of land located in the east of the Byzantine Empire. After building a
palace by the Euphrates, Digenis dies young. Chaucer’s romance also
concerns members of a family: Cambyuskan and his Queen Elpheta, their two
sons Algarsif and Cambalo, and their daughter Canacee. They live further
east, however, than the Byzantine family. The detail about the abandoned
woman that Metlitzski points to as parallel to the falcon episode of the
Squire’s Tale is the subject of Book 5 of Digenis Akritas, a work in 8 books. In
other words, the book about the deserted bride is a significant episode just as
is the Canacee-falcon portion of the Squire’s Tale as we have it (though, if
Chaucer’s squire had been left alone to tell a tale as long or longer than that of
his father, the knight, the Canacee-falcon episode might look much less
significant). In the medieval Greek epic, Digenis, who comes upon the
wailing maiden abandoned by her unfaithful lover, also becomes the catalyst
for bringing the cruel knight to repentance and to reunion with the girl. In
Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, the falcon found by Canacee – the daughter, not the
son of a king – is also reunited with her false lover, not by the princess who
found her, but by her brother, Cambalus:
7 Quoted by Denison Hull in the Preface to his translation of Digenes Akritas, x.
67
. . . this faucon gat hir love ageyn

Repentant, as the storie telleth us,
By mediacion of Cambalus,
The kynges sone. . . . (654–67)
Even if most of the findings of scholarship are correct about the many
disparate elements of oriental tales that Chaucer appears to have combined in
the Squire’s Tale, the resulting composite romance still can be said to be
Chaucer’s own. So far, no one tale has ever been found that contains all the
parts that Chaucer brought together for the squire. Interestingly, the most
recent major article concerning the Squire’s Tale returns to this venerable line
of stressing the romance’s Oriental affinities. Not primarily concerned with
narrative form but with the theme of “love, power, and the negotiation of a
settlement in the prolonged war between the sexes” (found in Fragments IV
and V of the Canterbury Tales), Kathryn Lynch argues, however, that both the
squire and the franklin associate “female sexual power” with “the exotic East”
(Lynch, East Meets West, 530, 531). This connection, I think, is made more
emphatically in the legends of Dido and of Cleopatra where, though Chaucer
also writes short texts – one slightly longer, the other somewhat shorter than
the Squire’s Tale, there can be no mistaking his intentions. Within the
gendered and cultural context which concerns her Lynch finds the primary
focus of the squire’s tale to be “its Orientalism,” exploring not only the
responses of past scholars to the tale and the thinking of Edward Said on the
nature of western views of the Orient, but the clever female raconteur of the
frame element of the Arabian Nights Entertainment as well to make her point
(Lynch, East Meets West, 531). Some of these matters, particularly the power
of the storytelling Shahrazad, bear on the late Middle English romance of Le
Bone Florence of Rome, the subject of chapter 6, and will be taken up there.
Interlace as European
In turning to what may be seen as western, European, perhaps even English,

about the Squire’s Tale – its structure as an interlaced romance, three sections
of Part Two of the tale will be particularly important to my analysis: the
playful description of the kiss (lines 347–52) which has bothered some critics,
the passage about the knotte (lines 401–08), presumably a reference to the
main idea of the tale which the falcon episode illustrates, and the bit of sign-
posting that concludes the secunda pars (lines 661–70).
At the outset, I would like to recall the lines that Edmund Spenser wrote
about the Squire’s Tale in Book Four of the Faerie Queene. Here he attempts
to complete one of the threads thrown out and then dropped in the fragmentary
tale. Spenser’s continuation concerns the battle of three brothers with Cambell
to win the hand of his sister, Canacee. In stanza 31 of Book IV, Canto ii, of the
Faerie Queene, a squire is sent to see who is approaching and returns with the
news that “Two of the prowest Knights in Faery lond,” Cambell and
68
Triamond, are at hand. In the stanza that follows Chaucer is proclaimed in no

uncertain terms as a poet of epic stature who is English:
Though now their acts be nowhere to be found,
As that renowned Poet them compyled,
With warlike numbers and Heroicke sound,
Dan Chaucer, well of English vndefyled,
On Fames eternall beadroll worthie to be fyled.8 (4. 2. 32)
To see the most striking western feature of The Squire’s Tale it is necessary to
pull away from the close examination of individual details of plot, proper
names, and matters of general atmosphere to gain enough distance to view the
romance’s overall structure, incomplete though it is. We have first, 346 lines
concluding, “Explicit prima pars,” organized around a royal birthday feast
held at court for a king who has ruled for twenty years. His family – two sons,
a wife, and daughter – is briefly introduced. After the feast’s third course, he
calls for his minstrels to entertain, when suddenly a knight bursts on the scene
with four marvelous gifts from “the kyng of Arabe and of Inde” (The Squire’s
Tale, 110): a steed of brass that can fly and a sword which no armor can with-
stand, capable of healing the wounds it inflicts (for the king); and a mirror
wherein one can see future adversity, in particular, the falseness of lovers, and
a ring enabling its wearer to understand and speak the language of birds (for
the king’s daughter). The sword and mirror are immediately placed for safe
keeping in the castle tower, the ring is given to Canacee to wear, and, after
refreshing himself, the emissary knight is given considerable space to explain
to king Cambyuskan how the operation of various mechanical pins causes the
brass horse to ascend, descend, or disappear. Having sent the horse’s bridle to
join the other gifts placed in the tower, Cambyuskan and his court return to
feasting until the wee hours of the morning.
Part One is followed by lines 347–670, stretching from “Sequitur pars
secunda” to “Explicit secunda pars.” This second part opens with a great
splash: an open-mouthed French kiss that is at once playful and vulgar,
The norice of digestion, the sleep,
Gan on hem wynke and bad hem taken keep
That muchel drynke and labour wolde han reste;
And with a galpyng mouth hem alle he keste,
And seyde that it was tyme to lye adoun,
For blood was in hys domynacioun. (347–52)
8 Citations to Spenser’s verse refer to The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E.
De Selincourt. The editors do not number lines of verse for the Faerie Queene; divisions refer to
book, canto, and stanza.
69
The break in tone and decorum has bothered some critics.9 It seems to me,
however, an eminently medieval intrusion. The bold stroke of Sleep’s open
mouth is reminiscent of the open beaks of birds and heads of serpents that
interrupt the intertwining coils of countless Celtic and Anglo-Saxon designs
in manuscript illuminations, decorative stone, and metalwork, some of which
even appear in devotional contexts like the familiar illuminations of The Book
of Kells. More important, this passage, so ostentatiously calling attention to
itself at the start of Part Two, doubles back, in the manner of many European
medieval romance plots, on the central thread of the action of the immediately
preceding section (the feasting of Part One), tying up loose ends to create a
knot, so to speak. (We shall shortly return to this matter of “a knot.”) In the
concluding three lines of the first movement of the tale, the narrator had taken
leave of Cambyuskan and his lords who continue feasting “in lust and jolitee”
for a long stretch of time – “Til wel ny the day began to sprynge” (346). The
revellers are no sooner left to sleep it off at the end of Part One, than the king’s
daughter takes center stage, just fifteen lines into Part Two. Here, as well, a
threading back to the preceding unit may be seen to occur. In Part One the
narrator had declined to describe her beauty – “But for to telle yow al hir
beautee,/ It lyth not in my tonge, n’yn my konnyng” (34–5) – focusing atten-
tion instead on her father the king who is described at length,
. . . he was hardy, wys, and riche,
And pitous and just, alwey yliche;
Sooth of his word, benigne, and honurable;
Of his corage as any centre stable,
Yong, fressh, and strong, in armes desirous
As any bacheler of al his hous.
A fair persone he was and fortunat,
And kept alwey so wel roial estat
That ther was nowher swich another man. (19–27)
We should, nonetheless, not be surprised that the king’s youngest child

becomes the focal point of Part Two; the narrator has prepared us. The king
may have worn the crown for twenty years, the birthday feast may be his, but
when the magical gifts are presented in Part One, two out of four go to
Canacee. Furthermore, when the gift-bearing knight, once he has removed his
armor and taken refreshment, is taken to king Cambyuskan, he is described as
dividing his attention between father and daughter,
This noble kyng is set upon his trone.
This strange knyght is fet to hym ful soone,
And on the daunce he gooth with Canacee. (275–77)
9 See, for example, Miller, “Chaucer’s Rhetorical Rendition of Mind,” 220 and Stillwell, “Chaucer
in Tartary,” 179–80.
70
The allegorical figure of Sleep, having kissed the king and all his lords at
the start of Part Two, causes them to “sleep it off” while the thread back to
Canacee of Part One is pulled out to reassert and develop itself as the second
twist of the tale. Canacee has had the good sense to try to get a decent night’s
sleep,
She was ful mesurable, as wommen be;
For of hir fader hadde she take leve
To goon to reste soone after it was eve. (362–64)
She has gone to bed so excited, however, about her magical ring and mirror
that she has a dream that causes her to awaken before dawn and rouse her
maid and ten or so other ladies of the court before taking a morning walk. As
soon as she hears birds singing, the ring works its magic and she realizes that
she can understand their language. It has taken the narrator fully 54 lines to
double back to catch the Canacee thread and thus break off from the male
world of kings and knights in Part One to enter the female world of Canacee
and her ladies in Part Two. By way of apology for having taken so long and
before introducing the episode of the peregrine falcon, the narrator makes a
statement about overlong approaches to the “knotte” of a tale. Presumably the
knotte refers to the main idea of the tale which the falcon episode is about to
illustrate:
The knotte why every tale is toold,
If it be taried til that lust be coold,
Of him that han it after herkned yoore,
The savour passeth ever lenger the moore
For fulsomnesse of his prolixitee;
And by the same resoun, thynketh me,
I sholde to the knotte condescende
And maken her walkyng soone an ende. (401–08)
The passage does several things at once. It apologizes for taking so long in
twisting from thread one – king and knights – back to thread two – Canacee, it
alerts the reader to the importance of the falcon’s complaint about to get
underway, and it draws attention to the narrative technique of romance inter-
lace, conspicuous for complexity and length, by using the term “knotte.” The
Middle English word contains the sense of a “tie” or “link” which derives ulti-
mately from the Old Germanic verb knutton meaning knit. In interlace tech-
nique at its best an intertwining of the parts fastens them together in a manner
which secures some form of meaningful unity. The falcon’s lament about her
faithless lover ends with Canacee taking the bird home to heal it with medic-
inal herbs, and the narrator finally moves into “Incipit pars tercia.”
After only two lines,
Apollo whirleth up his chaar so hye
Til that the god Mercurius hous, the slye – (671–72)
71
the Squire is cut off by the franklin’s, “In feith, Squire, thow hast thee wel
yquit.” The romance is prematurely and permanently ended. We have, none-
theless, enough to identify the overall design of the romance’s structure; we
even know where the squire was heading before the franklin stopped him
because of the bit of signposting that concludes the secunda pars:
First wol I telle yow of Cambyuskan,
That in his tyme many a citee wan;
And after wol I speke of Algarsif,
How that he wan Theodora to his wif,
For whom ful ofte in greet peril he was
Ne hadde he ben holpen by the steede of bras;
And after wol I speke of Cambalo,
That fought in lystes with the bretheren two
For Canacee er that he myghte hire wynne.
And ther I lefte I wol ayeyn bigynne. (661–70)
The squire was consciously, even, perhaps, self-consciously, trying his hand
at an interlaced romance, planning to return to characters named earlier and
never given a part to play (Algarsif and Cambalo) or intending to pick up a
thread of action which had been temporarily dropped, that of Cambyuskan.
He had been left asleep at the conclusion of Part One; however, since he had
initially been described as still “in armes desirous” (23), he would understand-
ably be active enough to have his victories in battle recounted somewhere in
the course of the squire’s tale. The franklin correctly observed of the squire
that he had acquitted himself “gentilly,” for he was employing a narrative
form associated with the world of chivalry. In her book, The Structure of the
Canterbury Tales, which painstakingly demonstrates how the tales have their
own distinct individual features yet gain in meaning by the reader’s exam-
ining interrelationships between tales, Helen Cooper makes the following
observation: “There is also one mediaeval genre that operates on a structural
pattern closer to the interweaving of plot and sub-plot. This is the interlaced
romance, where the simultaneous adventures of various heroes are followed
by pursuing each for a section of narrative and returning to him later”
(Cooper, Structure, 71). Further on, in the course of her book, she does clas-
sify the Squire’s Tale as such a romance.10
The notion of interlace structure was used first to describe the complexity
of thirteenth-century French prose romances, most especially those of the
Arthurian cycle (i.e., L’Estorie del Graal, L’Estoire de Merlin, La Queste del
Saint Graal, La Mort le Roi Artu). The term was later applied to some Middle
English romances of the fourteenth century, Malory’s fifteenth-century Morte
10 Donald Baker points out in his variorum edition of the tale, “the only Chaucer scholar, as far as I
am aware, to see SqT as (a bad) interlaced romance is Cooper . . . who is more concerned with
adapting the idea of interlace structure to the themes of CT as a whole.” See Baker’s edition of The
Squire’s Tale, 58.
72
D’Arthur, and finally Spenser’s sixteenth-century Faerie Queene. Speaking

for many a student who has become exasperated by the plethora of characters
and episodes woven into the fabric of the Faerie Queene, C. S. Lewis
observed, “Everything leads to everything else, but by very intricate paths. At
every point the question ‘How did we get here?’ arises” (Lewis, The
Discarded Image, 194). John Leyerle, in an attempt to account for the rapid
shifts in subject and time in the early medieval epic, Beowulf, argued that the
Old English poem was composed in an interlace structure by analogy to
eighth-century interlace decoration of Anglo-Saxon art from the English
North and Midlands which had reached a highpoint of complexity at the time
of the epic’s composition. In a way which brings to mind the squire’s passage
about the audience’s imagined impatience with tales that take too long getting
to the knotte, Leyerle defines interlace structure in Anglo-Saxon art as being
. . . made when the bands are turned back on themselves to form knots or
breaks that interrupt, so to speak, the linear flow of the bands. (Leyerle, 147)
He is here referring to the serpentine coils of Anglo-Saxon decorative art;

nonetheless, it may be said of Beowulf that, like such art – constantly recoiling
on itself – linear in design with clear beginning, middle, and end is what
Beowulf is not. Similarly, Eugéne Vinaver likened the ribbons of Romanesque
art, also without clear beginnings or ends, to the centerless constructions of
thirteenth-century French romance writers. An echo of the squire’s passage
about getting to the “knot” of the matter and the delays of prolix narratives is
heard again in Vinaver’s reference to Wilhelm Worringer’s description of the
intertwined patterns of the gothic as being “brought together as in a chequer of
knotting and plaiting.”11
The falcon episode in Part Two of the Squire’s Tale is fully female and thus
contrasts sharply with the maleness of Part One. Here, if anywhere, Chaucer
had an opportunity to create meaning and hence give the interlace structure a
functional purpose. As has been well observed of interlace at its best, “We
digress, or seem to, and then come back, not to precisely what we left but
something we understand differently because of what we have seen” (Tuve,
363). The difference between men and women and their interdependence
might have been developed in the unfinished Squire’s Tale. The falcon
episode, as we have it, represents a company of women – Canacee, her elderly
maid, and other ladies of the court – providing a circle of compassion for the
suffering of a lady falcon who, deserted by a false tercelet that has taken up
with a kite, has made herself faint with bleeding from self-inflicted wounds.
While the peregrine falcon prepares to begin her story of seduction and aban-
donment, Canacee weeps “as she to water wolde” (496), illustrating the
familiar Chaucerian principle which is stated in this tale at line 479, “pitee
renneth soone in gentil herte.” At the conclusion of the 131-line account, the
11 Cited in Vinaver, The Rise of Romance, 77, n. 2 (Wilhelm Worringer, Form in Gothic, 54).
73
feeling of compassion has expanded to include all the attendant women:

“Greet was the sorwe for the haukes harm/ That Canacee and alle hir wommen
made” (632–33). The bird is taken home to court, placed in a velvet-lined box,
and ministered to by Canacee with bandages, salves, and herbs. Then with an
abruptness utterly typical of interlace, the narrator drops the thread and
weaves back to pick up an earlier one.
The female world is done with,
Thus lete I Canacee hir hauk kepyng (651)
and the speaker re-enters that of men,

. . . hennesforth I wol proces holde
To speken of aventures and of batailles. (658–59)
To the squire-narrator the male world of chivalry is more full of marvels than
the one we have just left. Even though it was provided with a woman who
could understand the language of birds and speak it, too, and a bird had been
shown to have had a human experience with love and loss, all that seems to
pale for this narrator beside the account he is about to embark on:
To speken of aventures and of batailles
That nevere yet was herd so grete mervailles. (659–60)
And when the further weaving of the plot does cause him to return to the
female world, he announces that it will be to explain how the unfaithful
tercelet repented and returned to the lady falcon and how this was accom-
plished through the agency of a man who had already been introduced in the
preceding male world of Part One:
. . . Cambalus,
The kynges sone, of which I yow tolde. (656–57)
This forecast, of course, begins the section of plans that go unrealized in the
fragmentary tale. Besides hearing about him, more will be said, we are told,
about Cambyuskan and Cambalus’s brother and how he won his wife. We
learn this from the passage of signposting quoted earlier in this chapter (p. 72).
It is that passage which also contains the infamous lines generally interpreted
to mean that while Cambalus’s brother will be shown winning Theodora, the
later development of the marvelous chivalric thread will contain an account of
the incestuous winning of Canacee by her brother, Cambalus. And probably
that is what the following lines mean:
And after wol I speke of Cambalo,
That fought in lystes with the bretheren two
For Canacee er that he myghte hire wynne. (667–69)
The subject of incest is indisputably more sensational than the linguistic
74
phenomenon of being able to converse with birds in bird language. Whether

incest here should be seen or not as a sign of Chaucer’s association of the
sexually deviant with the East, sexual perversion being an element of western
perception of the East, according to Edward Said’s familiar study, Orien-
talism, Spenser takes pains to remove it in the Faerie Queene.12 In Spenser’s
continuation of the chivalric thread Chaucer left dangling, a woman healer is
added to the scene of battle where Cambel fights the brothers. Her skill must
surpass what Chaucer’s Canacee can offer the peregrine falcon, for she carries
a cup containing a medicine said to be potent enough to make everything
come out right:
Nepenthe is a drinck of souerayne grace
Deuized by the Gods for to asswage
Harts grief, and bitter gall away to chace,
Which stirs vp anguish and contentious rage:
In stead thereof sweet peace and quiet age
It doth establish in the troubled mynd. . . . (4. 3. 43)
She extends the cup to wounded Cambel and her brothers with the result that
all wounds are healed – both physical and spiritual. Even incest is averted:
Triamond marries Canacee and Cambel gets the lady healer whose name
suggests more than a little mirroring,
And Cambel took Cambina to his fere. (4. 3. 52)
Chaucer, it seems to me, is not parodying interlaced romance in the

Squire’s Tale; nor am I convinced, though some scholars argue the case, that
he means to satirize the squire as a poetaster.13 Rather, it appears that the poet
Chaucer, sometime in the course of a writing career which explored every
variety of narrative form, tried his hand at interlaced romance. He very
quickly discovered interlace was not his forte. His two great successes, after
all, among his romances, the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, are not
structured that way. Trying to account for why the poet left the Squire’s Tale
incomplete, Furnivall long ago had this to say:
The completion of the Squire’s Tale would have taxt Chaucer’s utmost
power even when he was at his best. The subject is one into which he could
have imported little humanity. The Continuation would have been a constant
strain on his invention and fancy. The work wouldn’t have repaid the effort,
and so the Poet turned it up . . . (John Lane’s Continuation, Part 1, xii)
The squire-narrator, however, is created as a storyteller whose intention

was to go on undaunted with his tale, fashioning it in a courtly form that was à
12 Said, Orientalism; see especially pp. 31–110 on exotic alterity.

13 Robert Miller, for example, thinks the tale’s “artistic infelicities . . . are Chaucer’s means of repre-
senting dramatically the as-yet-unstructured mind of the narrator,” 221.
75
la mode. We have his outline at the end of Part Two as proof. The squire is
doing his performance “straight.” He is trying hard to get it right and keeps at
it. I believe his text is one Chaucer himself began seriously and then dropped,
recognizing his talents in the romance genre to rest elsewhere. The reason
Chaucer stopped writing was practical; the reason he gave this little experi-
ment to the squire is also practical – comparable to Joyce’s giving an old
villanelle written in his youth to Stephen Dedalus (Joyce, 223–24). The effect
achieved by having the franklin cut the squire off may be satirical. Chaucer,
however, is also allowing himself a private little joke on an implausible other
poetic self. Unlike the squire and happily for us, Chaucer’s English voice
found another key in which to sing. If Chaucer had bothered to make the time
in which to complete his Squire’s Tale, as he doubtless could have, the
finished tale would have been so long as to cause most readers of The Canter-
bury Tales to avoid it. Thus, Chaucer would have accomplished causing the
tale to go unread for a reason opposite the one for which we know it to go
mostly unread today: the tale would be complete (instead of incomplete).
Indeed, among readers of The Canterbury Tales to be found in the general
reading public there is little patience for even a superb romance of the length
of The Knight’s Tale. High among the reasons admirers of the Knight’s Tale
give for praising the romance is Chaucer’s having given the tale a strong
philosophical dimension. Viewed against more typical Middle English
romances of the day, the tale told by the noble knight, with its concern for
issues of fortune, fate, providence, love, and the human condition, is some-
thing of an original. These concerns and the way Arcite’s rivalry with his
sworn brother, Palamon, is fit within them, move the romance to the edge of
tragedy, especially when Arcite’s death becomes the necessary door, opening
on to the union of Palamon with Emelye. If – to adapt an idea of Furnivall’s
mentioned above – the Knight’s Tale may be said to offer Chaucer the oppor-
tunity that the Squire’s Tale did not, to “import . . . humanity,” that is not
accomplished through realistic characterization; rather, the long philosophical
passages having to do with Boethian themes of fortune, fate, love, and provi-
dence give the poet a chance to express his deep understanding of the sadness
in life. It is in this sense that Chaucerian humanity can be said to enter the
Knight’s Tale. The tale expresses philosophical ideas poetically. Compare
Arcite’s use of the metaphor of the drunk mouse which embodies his own
blindness to the way to find true happiness, for example, with a more pedes-
trian expression of man’s blindness contained in Chaucer’s translation of
Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. First, we have the passage in the tale,
We faren as he that dronke is as a mous.
A dronken man woot wel he hath an hous,
But he noot which the righte wey is thider,
And to a dronke man the wey is slider.
And certes, in this world so faren we;
We seken faste after felicitee,
But we goon wrong ful often trewely. (Knight’s Tale, 1261–67)
76
Place beside it, the following lines in which Lady Philosophy addresses
Boethius:
The corage alwey reherceth and seketh the sovereyne good, al be it so that it
be with a dyrkyd memorie; but he not by whiche path, ryght as a dronke man
not nat by whiche path he may retourne hom to his hous.
(Boece, III. prose 2. 83–8)
As to overall structure in the Knight’s Tale, the main lines of the tale are
handled in a chronological order even when the narration is complex. Chaucer
did not use the convoluted patterns of interlace, though he does digress from
the main narration from time to time to fill in an account from the past or to
describe events which run parallel to a portion of the unfolding narration. In
Chaucer’s other great romance, Troilus and Criseyde, tragedy also combines
with romance. The movement of the love story through Books I and II
towards the heights of consummation and suffisaunce in love at the midpoint
(Book III) is followed by a sharp decline in the final two books which move
through separation, disenchantment, and death. The shapely rise and fall of
the five-book structure follows Troilus’s inward experience of “wo to wele,
and after out of joie.” Again, Chaucer wrote a highly focused tale structured in
an uncluttered, direct, linear fashion. Moreover, he endowed the three central
characters – Troilus, Criseyde, and Pandarus – with strongly defined features
allowing them dramatic potential that is felt whenever they are given dialogue
to speak. This is much less the case with Palamon, Emelye, and Arcite. Chau-
cer’s two major romances, then, are linear in design and part of their origi-
nality may be seen to derive from the introduction of the tragic into the genre.
Any experiment within a romance form popular in Chaucer’s day resulting
in intentional parody by Chaucer was not to play itself out in the romance of
interlace. That was destined to occur in Italy of the sixteenth century in
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and in England of the nineteenth century
once Byron shook off the dark mantle of Manfred (1817) to don the lighter
cloak of Don Juan (1823). As with Byron’s Don Juan, when Chaucer has
parodied a form the fact is unmistakable:
Sire Thopas wax a doghty swayn;
Whit was his face as payndemayn,
His lippes rede as rose;
His rode is lyk scarlet in grayn,
And I yow telle in good certayn,
He hadde a semely nose. (Sir Thopas, 724–29)
In The Tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer trots out all the cliches of popular
tail-rhyme romances and then his merry joke is over. When the Host inter-
rupts, it is unquestionably time, for all the stylistic tricks have been nimbly
displayed. No more is needed. Such is not the case when the franklin cuts the
Squire’s Tale off.
One final question should be asked about the romance of interlace and the
77
Squire’s Tale in view of the long history of searching for its sources and
analogues in the Orient: has such structure been found to be a feature, say, of
the tales in the Arabian Nights? The first interpretive study of the whole work
in English, Mia Gerhardt’s The Art of Storytelling: A Literary Study of the
Thousand and One Nights, has much to say about European interest in the
work, but does not raise the issue of interlace structure. A more recent book by
David Pinault, however, Storytelling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, seems
to concern itself with the subject without using the term “interlace.” Instead he
writes about something he calls “thematic patterning” which he defines as
“the distribution of recurrent concepts and moralistic motifs among the
various incidents and frames of a story” (Pinault, 22). His analysis of The City
of Brass in chapter 4 of the book suggests that interlace might be a factor here
as minor episodes are demonstrated to reinforce the theme of the major narra-
tive in this tale. From the point of view of the romance of interlace as found in
the western tradition, however, what appears to be missing is the disappear-
ance and reappearance of characters that weave or interlace through a number
of episodes. Instead, in the eastern technique of frames, episodes seem to open
and definitively close even as they reinforce a major theme.
In the course of his article, “The Genre of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale,”
Haldeen Braddy, in arguing that Chaucer was following an Oriental mode and
that it was, therefore, reasonable to assume that the Canacee-falcon episode
was to be an oriental framing device to contain a series of other “intercalated”
episodes, differentiates between two different types of Oriental framing tales.
One type, illustrated by the Arabian Nights, he said, “opens with a situation
returned to by the narrator as often as tributary incidents are finished”
(Braddy, “The Genre,” 283). Braddy presumably takes the individual tales
told by Scheherazade each night in order to save herself from execution as the
“tributary incidents” and the “situation returned to by the narrator,” the scene
in the bedroom where Scheherazade recounts her stories to the Eastern king
who distrusts all women. The other type of frame tale, according to Braddy,
“begins with a principal story for the frame and is followed by several interca-
lary incidents before the framing tale is resumed and closed” (Braddy, “The
Genre,” 283). Braddy’s example for this second type of Oriental framing tale
is the Persian Thousand and One Days. Here the principal story is that of Prin-
cess Farruknaz who refuses to marry because of a dream that revealed to her
the faithlessness of men. The intercalary incidents are the thousand and one
stories of faithful lovers told to her by a nurse who is determined to restore her
sense of trust. The Thousand and One Days concludes with the Princess’s
acceptance of a suitor. It would seem that this moment constitutes the return to
the principal story, now altered by what has intervened. Interestingly, the
storytelling did not bring about the change in the Princess. That was caused by
paintings on a wall that told a story which reversed that in the Princess’s orig-
inal dream that had convinced her never to trust men. Braddy surmised that
the Oriental atmosphere and motifs of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale would have
inclined the poet to structure his tale in an Oriental way; thus, he regarded the
78
Canacee-falcon episode as the principal story of what he thought would

become – if the Squire had finished his tale – Braddy’s “second type” of
Oriental framing tale (after the style illustrated by the Persian Thousand and
One Days).
The most recent scholarly argument bringing Chaucer and the Oriental
frame tale tradition together is Katherine Slater Gittes’s Framing the Canter-
bury Tales: Chaucer and the Medieval Frame Narrative.14 She argues that the
Canterbury Tales as well as other medieval European framed collections of
tales (such as the Disciplina Clericalis, the Decameron, and the Confessio
Amantis) derive their form from a frame tradition that originated and devel-
oped in Asia. This is the way she describes the structure of the eighth-century
Indian-Arabic work known as the Panchatantra:
Besides the Arabic outer framing story, each book of the Panchatantra has
an Indian boxing tale of its own. The outer framing story (level A) encloses
the entire work; the boxing tale of each individual book (level B) encloses
tales (level C) that can enclose still other tales (Level D).
(Gittes, Framing, 10)
The result can be three or more levels of narration all going on at the same
time, clearly a complex situation; nonetheless, the “outer framing story does
not interfere with the collection of tales, and each of the five books of the
Panchatantra can exist as a complete narrative” (Gittes, Framing, 14).
However the Oriental framing device is described, it is clear that the struc-
ture can have variations and some examples are more intricate or more
successful as narratives than others. Furthermore, different scholars view the
matter of Oriental frame tales differently. Braddy, for example, took the view
of the Arabian Nights that there were “tributary incidents” (the tales), each of
which, when finished, returned to the Scheherazade frame. This work of the
first type of the two types of Oriental framing tales which he distinguished had
no related intercalary episodes (as did his type two). I, however, in studying
Eastern versions of the chaste wife story, analogues to Le Bone Florence of
Rome (discussed in chapter six), found that their appearance in the Thousand
and One Nights was thematically significant to the frame story about King
Shahrayar’s misogny and that they were also linked to surrounding tales
concerned with ideas about justice – civil and domestic. In other words, the
chaste wife stories contained in the Thousand and One Nights seem to me to
function in the meaningful way of intercalary episodes, the sort that Braddy
found only in his type two.
How accurately to describe what the classical Oriental framed tale is and
what variations there may be of such a tale is no easy matter. The same holds
true for medieval Western tales structured as interlaced romances. At their
14 The book is an extension of her PMLA article, “The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame
Tradition.”
79
best both Oriental and western structures are capable of producing subtle nar-
rative counterpoint reflecting sophisticated artistry. What looks like
“Western” romance narrative of interlace to one reader could look like the
Oriental framed tale to another (i.e., myself and Haldeen Braddy viewing the
form of Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale). Whatever literary scholars call such early
complex narratives, many of which have long histories in oral transmission –
the Thousand and One Nights, for instance – both Eastern frame narratives
and western interlace narratives at their best do what Rosemond Tuve said
was accomplished by true interlaced romances:
One must distinguish entrelacement from the mere practice, ubiquitous in
narrative, of taking one character through a series of actions, then deserting
him temporarily – often with the object of introducing suspense – while
another character is given primary attention, then returning to the first and so
on . . . But events connected by entrelacement are not juxtaposed; they are
interlaced, and when we get back to our first character he is not where we left
him as we finished his episode but in the psychological state or condition of
meaningfulness to which he has been pulled by the events occurring in
following episodes written about someone else. . . . (Tuve, 362–63)
This idea can be applied equally to the pilgrim Chaucer (and some of the other
pilgrims who made the journey to Canterbury with him) and to King
Shahrayar. The great narrative art of both the western and eastern traditions
achieves a complete and satisfying resolution of the issues – some of which
may be psychological – that have arisen in the course of a tale. As for the
pilgrim squire, he is left for all eternity at the point where he was just getting
started.
If Haldeen Braddy is correct in his speculation that had the franklin not
interrupted the squire, a series of box-within-box stories would have been told
to fit within the frame story of the peregrine falcon’s complaint, then The
Squire’s Tale could be said to stop at precisely the point where an eastern nar-
rative structure might have been expected to start. In that case, the rupture in
storytelling might suggest that the fledgling poet, trained in the western tradi-
tion, is not up to coping with eastern difference – an idea almost too tidy to
entertain. On the other hand, if I am correct in seeing the incomplete tale as
structured from the very start of Part One as western interlaced romance until
it stops after just two lines of Part Three, then the squire can be seen for what
he is: a young European poet and knight-in-the-making asserting his western
self in the world of the East which he has imagined. Finally, let us indulge in a
hypothetical question: that is, if, within the fiction of The Canterbury Tales,
we were to imagine that it was the Crusader Knight, with his extensive travel
in the East, who passed on to his son and travelling companion a complex
eastern frame-story that he had heard in the Orient which the squire would
then retell as The Squire’s Tale, how would the squire handle the problem of
imitating the tale’s structure? I suggest that the young squire-poet (as well as
his father, the Knight, and imagined source) would express the complexity of
80
the eastern frame structure by drawing on his knowledge of the most compli-
cated narrative structure with which he was already familiar: the interlaced
structure of medieval French romances so popular at court. That, I submit, is
what the poet Chaucer did with whatever oriental tales he read or heard and
then combined into The Squire’s Tale.
Appendix: The Tale of the Flying Horse
Jones summarizes the tale of the flying horse as it appears in the Breslau
Arabic Text edited by Habicht and Fleischer, a version he considered the best
and fullest. The Arabic tale appears in Lane’s 1927 translation of the Thou-
sand and One Nights (Pickwick) as “The Story of the Magic Horse,” 523–40,
but, as these are some differences in detail, I quote Jones’s summary from
Bryan and Dempster’s Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales by permission of the University of Chicago Press:
On a feast day a king of Persia, who was a great lover of philosophy and
geometry, is visited by an Indian, a Greek and a Persian. The Indian presents
the king with an image of a man with a golden trumpet. Should a spy enter
the city, the man will immediately blow his trumpet and the spy will fall
dead. The Greek’s gift is a silver basin in the middle of which sits a golden
peacock surrounded by twenty-four young ones; at the passing of each hour,
the mother-bird marks the time of day by pecking one of its young and at the
end of each month it shows a moon in its mouth. The Persian, in turn, offers
an ebony horse adorned with gold and precious stones and furnished with
splendid harness; in a day by flying through the air it will carry its rider a
year’s journey. The king tests the virtues of the presents and is so pleased
with them that he promises to grant any request that his visitors might make.
Taking him at his word, they ask for his three daughters in marriage.
The youngest of the three daughters of the king is deeply distressed
because the Persian, to whom she has been promised, is as ugly as she is
beautiful. Her brother, siding with her, remonstrates with his father and
insists that the gift of the ugly suitor be tested. He will mount the horse
himself. The ugly suitor, resenting this opposition to his marriage, acquaints
the Persian prince only with the pin that causes the horse to ascend,
purposely omitting to teach him how to come down. When, after a long
flight, the Persian prince succeeds in mastering the horse, he descends on the
roof of the palace of a foreign king whose daughter, a princess of marvelous
beauty, he finds sleeping in a room close by. She mistakes him at first for the
suitor to whom she had been promised, but is soon disabused when the king
her father, rushing into her room, demands angrily what the stranger is doing
there. The prince of Persia rejoins that he will confront on his horse the
whole army of the king, but once mounted he loses no time in making away,
to the great consternation of the assembled host. At home again, he cannot
control his longing to revisit his princess, and on this trip she is glad to return
with him that he might make her his bride. Unfortunately, he leaves his
81
beloved unprotected outside the city in order to have proper arrangements

made for her reception by his father. In his absence the ugly suitor,
representing himself as the prince’s messenger, persuades her to mount the
horse with him and takes her off to China. The king of that country rescues
her but promptly takes over the role of the importunate and unwelcome
suitor. She now feigns madness for her self-protection and when her lover,
after a long journey, has discovered her whereabouts, he is admitted to her
presence disguised as a physician. While pretending to exorcise a demon
from the magic horse in order to make permanent the cure of the princess, he
once more transports her to his native land, where he makes her his bride and
lives with her happily ever after.
(H. S. V. Jones, “the Squire’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues, 364–65)
82
Incest, the Double, and East meets West
5
A Question of Incest, the Double,
and the Theme of East and West:
The Middle English Romance of
Floris and Blauncheflur
A CCORDING to Haldeen Braddy, Chaucer left the Squire’s Tale

iincomplete because he discovered that the Arabic analogue, Taj
al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya, belonged to a cycle of romances that
included an incest motif.1 Chaucer, he argued, “as a man . . . would not
tolerate the idea of incest, because as a poet he certainly speaks against it in
the Pardoner’s Tale: ‘Lo, how that dronken Looth, unkyndely,/ Lay by his
doghtres two, unwityngly;/ So dronke he was he nyste what he wroghte’
(485–87)” (Braddy, “Genre,” 289). The Middle English romance of Floris
and Blauncheflur is an obvious place to study the oriental theme in medieval
romance but a surprising place in which to discover a question of incest,
particularly in the light of the long history of viewing this romance as a
portrait of idyllic young love. What prompts the question is the absence in all
of the extant English manuscripts of that part of the tale relevant to the birth of
the heroine, Blauncheflur, for a reader of the English romance is immediately
introduced to the romantic relationship which arises between a Spanish
Saracen prince and the daughter of a Christian slave, raised as if brother and
sister, while at the same time the mother of the young girl is presented without
a husband or a past. In the absence of any explanation of Blauncheflur’s
parentage, it is natural enough for the reader to wonder if Blauncheflur might
have been fathered by her mother’s master, the Saracen King of Spain. This
chapter will consider the question of sibling incest, previously unnoticed in
Floris and Blauncheflur, and discuss its relationship to the romance’s
symmetrical structures and repetitions as well as to the theme of East and
West.
1 Braddy, “Genre,” 287–88. The analogue is part of a series of stories about the household of King
Omar bin al-Nu’uman, his two sons, Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan, and his daughter, Nuz hat
al-Zaman. The cycle includes sibling incest, as Princess Nuz hat al-Zaman marries her brother
Sharrkan.
83
A Question of Incest
The main lines of the action of Floris and Blauncheflur, composed around
1250, concern the difficult love that springs up between Floris, the Moslem
son of the King of Spain, and Blauncheflur, a daughter born to a captive
Christian slave in Floris’s household. In an effort to avert the growing
romance between the two young children, Floris’s parents send their son away
and sell Blauncheflur to merchants who, in turn, sell her to a Babylonian
potentate who installs her in a harem. Returned to Spain, Floris is told that
Blauncheflur is dead. He threatens suicide, and at this his parents relent and
give their son all that he needs to set out in search of his lost love. His quest
involves the bribery of porters, an adventure in a Babylonian tower containing
harem women, threats of execution for sleeping with one of them
(Blauncheflur), a magic ring, and ultimately, reunion.
For the most part, scholars have been inclined to see the tale as an idyllic
love story set in the exotic East. Wells set the direction of future scholarship in
1916 by writing that “The tale is not of passion, but of tender, gentle, devoted
love” (Wells, I. 146). Lillian Hornstein’s 1967 updating of the Manual’s
assessment of this romance concurs, “The tale is not of combat, nor of
passion, but of an idyllic love” (Hornstein, “Floris and Blauncheflur,” 1. 146).
Dorothy Metlitzski places the romance within an East-West, Chris-
tian-Moslem context and stresses the nobility of a love that unites warring
cultures (Metlitzski, 250). The wind of change may have appeared with
Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s self-styled “darker reading” of the romance in which
she suggests that “the fact that Blauncheflur is a slave is essential to the poem”
which she views as anything but “idyllic” (Kelly, 102). This feminist reading
of the romance focuses on the use of women in the Middle Ages as barter in
the maintenance of social order.2 Had Wells in 1916 been more self-conscious
about his own observation, “The piece rests on the charming presentation of
the essential need of the children for each other: love is all in all; there is
nothing without the loved one,” he might have seen something at least as dark
as obsession (Wells, 1. 141). I will try to shed light on yet another area of
darkness in this romance.
All four of the extant English manuscripts of Floris and Blauncheflur are
missing the beginning of the romance, as has been noted repeatedly in the
scholarship.3 This is a matter of consequence for it leaves the identity of
2 On incest and woman as barter, see Levi-Strauss, “The Family,” 278 and also see chapter 3 in
Dinshaw’s Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, which discusses incest in the Man of Law’s Tale within the
context of medieval mechanisms of marriage and the exchange of women.
3 861 lines of the romance appear in the Auchinleck manuscript, “now unanimously assigned to the
period 1330–40” (introduction to The Auchinleck Manuscript, Pearsall and Cunningham, vi.) The
romance appears in the middle of the manuscript, being item 19 as it now is, item xxvi in the orig-
inal numbering. It is on ff. 100–4 where its first line is, “I ne kan telle you nocht/ Hou richeliche the
sadel was wrout,” corresponding to line 385 in the Hausknecht critical edition. Before this a whole
84
Blauncheflur’s father unclear. Is he the deceased husband (found only in other

European versions of the tale) of the Christian slave who is Blauncheflur’s
mother or is he her captor, the Spanish, Saracen king, Floris’s father? Could
an incest motif have been part of the missing opening and suppressed much as
Chaucer in the Man of Law’s Tale calls attention to incest only to turn away
from treating it? The English text’s silencing or suppression of the subject of
incest, its structural symmetry, most notably the virtual identity of the lover’s
names, and even meaning can be illuminated, I would suggest, by reconsid-
ering the love story as an instance of the double, commonly linked in literature
(and psychoanalysis) with incest. I would also suggest that possibly inces-
tuous young lovers are allowed to reunite by the end of Floris and
Blauncheflur because their union suggests something about the antinomies
which the romance presents: East/West, Christian/Moslem, etc.
A central pivot of the plot’s action involves the strenuous objections
Floris’s parents have to the romantic attachment between their son, the
Saracen prince, and Blauncheflur, the daughter of a Christian slave. While the
differences of faith and social class alone provide more than enough for the
gathering is missing, presumably containing the beginning of the romance. The preceding work is
The Seven Sages of Rome, whose ending is missing. A slightly earlier manuscript (ca. 1300), MS.
Cambridge University Library Gg. 4. 27. 2. contains 824 lines. Gg. 4. 27. 2. is a single quire of 14
leaves, formerly MS. Gg. 4. 27. 1. The whole contents were edited by J. R. Lumby for EETS, but
the original order of works in the MS. was not made plain. The contents are Floris and
Blauncheflour, beginning imperfectly from the point where Floriz departs in search of his beloved:
“Heo tok for a wel fair þing”; King Horn, 6r–13r; and Assumpcion de Nostre Dame, 13v–14,
ending as a fragment with “A sonde me cam while er from heuene.” The quire is imperfect in the
sense that it comes from a much larger MS. The earliest English manuscript of Floris and
Blauncheflur is Cotton Vitellius D. 3 (before 1300) which contains 210 lines in their entirety and
fragments of 240 lines more which run from ff. 6–8 verso. The romance “begins with a few frag-
ments telling how the merchants sell Blancheflour to the “Admiral” of Babylon; and how Floryres
comes home and finds her gone, and sets out in search of her” (Ward, 1, 716). Cotton MS Vitellius
D. 3, a volume of 26 folios, is one of the many volumes that was badly charred in a fire at the
bindery during the last century. The greatest number of lines (1083) appears in MS Egerton 2862
which dates to ca. 1400. It is described in Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British
Museum, 238–40. The manuscript comprises 148 folios. The text of Floris and Blauncheflur that
occurs on ff. 98–111 is imperfect at the beginning, owing to loss of leaves. It begins “Ne thurst
men neuer in londe/After feirer children fonde” (f. 98) and ends, “Home he went with royal array/
And was crownyd within a short day” (f. 111), as quoted in Catalogue of Additions, 239. The
manuscript is misbound at the point where Floris begins so that the preceding poem, Sir Degarre,
survives only in a truncated form of 161 lines. Lillian Herlands Hornstein, in her section on
Miscellaneous Romances in the 1967 revision of Wells Manual writes, “The beginning of the story
is lost in all the English manuscripts” and proceeds with her summary of Floris and Blauncheflur,
citing only what is in the English versions. Sometimes, almost offhandedly, the French romance is
turned to for what is missing in the English, as in Edmund Reiss’s essay on the Middle English
romance, “It may, finally, be significant that Blancheflour’s mother, who raises the two children,
was a Christian. As is related in the French – the beginning of the story is lacking in all the English
manuscripts – she was captured while on a pilgrimage” (“Symbolic Detail in Medieval Narrative:
Floris and Blauncheflour,” 349). Piero Boitani, on the other hand, like Hornstein, limits his dis-
cussion of the romance to what is found in the Middle English version alone, starting his summary
of the romance from the same point as Hornstein, “. . . it concerns two youngsters, the son of a
Saracen King and the daughter of a Christian lady prisoner, who grow up together and fall in love.
To avoid a union between the two, the King sends Floris away and sells Blauncheflour to some
oriental merchants . . .” (Boitani, 52).
85
Saracen king and queen to oppose, incest, if it were involved, would appear to
add yet another obstacle. About this, the English text is silent, and none of the
literary critics and scholars who have considered the romance raise incest as
an issue. To my knowledge, no one has considered the identity of
Blauncheflur’s father as a problem, even though there is the innkeeper’s tanta-
lizing observation made about Floris (who is by the middle of the romance
making inquiries about the whereabouts of Blauncheflur, sold into slavery by
his parents): “Þu art hire ilich of alle þinge,/ Boþ of semblaunt and of
murninge,/ Of fairnesse and of muchelhede,/ Bute, þu ert a man and he4 a
maide” (lines 445–48). His willingness to help is made to seem to come from
a desire to aid a brother in search of his sister. Long ago (in 1911), Oliver
Johnston noted the matter of the resemblance of the young lovers in a dis-
cussion of the twelfth-century Old French Floire and Blaunceflor, but appears
to be taking pains to find other explanations: “. . . Floire and Blancheflor are
not only born at the same time and place and live in the same home, but they
also resemble each other:
Car en un biau jor furent ne
Et en une nuit engendre (I, 21–22)
El vous resamble en moie foi:
Bien poez estre d’un eage;
Si vous ressamble du viage. (I, 1084–86)
This resemblance motif is doubtless a folk tradition growing out of the resem-
blance between the names of the hero and the heroine. Their names being
similar it was easy for the popular mind to imagine a corresponding resem-
blance in age, personal appearance, and other matters pertaining to their lives”
(Johnston, “The Origin of the Legend of Floire and Blanchefleur,” 130–31).
The possibility of their being half brother and sister is completely ignored. In
a recent article on the sexuality of the boy heroes of two medieval French
romances, Floire et Blancheflor and Floris et Lyriope, Jane Gilbert does raise
the incest question. Early in her essay she remarks on how Floris and
Blancheflor “grow up inseparable and also . . . strangely physically similar”
(Gilbert, 41). Further on, she points to the episode, in the section of the Old
French romance where Floire is travelling from place to place in search of
Blancheflor who has been sold to merchants by Floire’s parents, wherein
Licoris, the wife of one of his hosts, notices Floire’s resemblance to
Blancheflor (at lines 1541–48). Gilbert comments, “Licoris ‘sees’ a brother
and sister: this relationship, in her eyes, best explains the combination of
physical resemblance and close affection which links the child Floire to the
maiden Blancheflor” (Gilbert, 46). Gilbert herself, however, while specifi-
4 “He” is the pronoun for both the third person feminine and masculine singular in Hausknecht’s
edition of this Southeast Midlands romance. Throughout this essay, references to the Middle
English romance refer to the Hausknecht edition.
86
cally asserting that “the attachment of twin ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ seems inces-
tuous” goes on finally to turn away from incest, concluding that “This
disruption . . . occurs only at the edge of consciousness: it could not be said to
be in the text, rather it occurs within the perceptions and memory of the audi-
ence. It exists, at most, only tangentially and marginally” (Gilbert, 49–50).
Though discounted, incest is at least spoken of.
To be sure, early on in the Old French text known as the “version
aristocratique” the poet makes clear that Floire’s father is a pagan king and
Blancheflor’s a Christian count or earl:
Flores ses amis que vous di,
uns rois paiiens l’engenui,
et Blanceflor que tant ama
uns cuens crestiiens l’engenra.5 (13–16)
A fairly literal translation would be: “Floire was engendered by a pagan king,
as I have already said, and Blancheflor, whom he [Floire] loved so much, was
engendered by a Christian count.” Nothing could be more straightforward; the
Old French effectively removes any possibility of literal sibling incest. With
three markers for the masculine gender (the -s ending in the article, the noun,
and the adjective) a clearer indicator for Blancheflor’s father than “uns cuens
crestiien” could not be constructed. Cuens is used just as it is in the thir-
teenth-century work, Chanson de Florence de Rome, where mention is made
of “Li quens Joffrois de Pise et Gautier d’Ipolie” (line 2349, “The counts
Geoffrey of Pisa and Gautier of Ipolie” [La Chanson De Florence de Rome,
Florence De Rome, 2. 97]).
Even so, especially to a native English speaker in bilingual four-
teenth-century England, listening to a read text, the word cuens might seem to
refer to the mother rather than the father as the word cuens in the Old French
text could be understood as “queen” rather than “count.” In the nominative
masculine case, Old French conte, comte (count or earl) is rendered cuens,
quans, both words deriving from the Latin word for “companion:” comes
(accusative, comitem [Dictionnaire de l’ançien français ]). In view of the inti-
mate connections which grew between Old French and Middle English after
the Norman Conquest of 1066, it is of particular interest to observe the resem-
blances of form and sound as well as differences (opposites, really) of
meaning that occur between the Old French word used to refer to
Blancheflor’s Christian father: cuens, and the Middle English word for
“woman” or “lowborn woman”: quene (also earlier, cwene, later, quene), on
5 Parenthetical references to the version aristocratique of the Old French poem are cited from Le
Conte de Floire Et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc LeClanche which is based on his dissertation (Lille,
1980). In The Romance of Floire and Blanchefleur, Merton J. Hubert translates into English poeti-
cally, “A paynim king engendered/Her father Floire, as I have said; While Blanchefleur, she whom
Floire adored,/Was fathered by a Christian lord” (16–18). Double-checking verifies Hubert’s
translation, “Her father Floire.” Later quotations from the version populaire refer to the text
included in Floire et Blanceflor: Poèmes Du XIIIe Siècle, ed. M. Edélstand Du Méril.
87
the one hand, and the Middle English for “queen”: quen(e), on the other.
These derive from Old English cwene and cw«n respectively. Blancheflor’s
mother, a duchess, when wife to the Christian Duke of Orleans, and a slave,
after being captured by the Moslem King of Spain, is both highborn and
lowly. The form of Middle English quene which derives from the Old English
weak feminine cwene is particularly intriguing as its etymology links the
Germanic and Mediterranean worlds. According to the Oxford English Dic-
tionary the word quene used to mean “woman,” sometimes in disparagement,
has a reconstructed Old Teutonic form, *kwenan, the stem of which appears in
Greek gunŠ, meaning “woman.” All of which is to say that when the Old
French poet means to clearly indicate that Blancheflor, whom Floire loved,
was engendered by a Christian count, “Uns cuens crestiiens,” hovering in the
linguistic background are ambiguities suggesting the captive Christian noble
woman who was taken into slavery and later gave birth to Blancheflor.
Blancheflor’s mother (as well as her father) is invoked by the line that names
her parentage.
Obviously one clear reason why the four English manuscripts “silence” the
issue of incest is that we have lost the leaves that contain the beginning of
the romance in the four different manuscripts which contain it. Even when
the condition of the Cotton manuscript is chalked up to the vagaries of
historical misfortune because it was badly charred in a fire at the end of the
nineteenth century, we are still left with the very odd fact that in each of
three other different manuscripts containing the romance (whether it
appears in the middle of the manuscript, as in the Auchinleck, or at the
beginning, as in the Cambridge, or two thirds of the way through, as in the
Egerton) there is always a gathering missing, or a quire which is imperfect,
or leaves that have been misbound just where we would expect to find the
beginning of the Middle English romance. While it is possible that if the
missing gathering were found; the quire, perfect; the leaves bound correctly,
we would discover that they had all been copied from a common source in
which the beginning was lost or otherwise missing, it is more likely that the
Middle English romance would be found to have been even less successful
than the Old French version in ruling out the possibility of literal incest by
specifying the identity of Blauncheflur’s father at the beginning of the text
lost to us.
It seems entirely reasonable for a reader of the romance to wonder if
Blauncheflur’s mother might have suffered rape, a common enough fate of
captive women during times of war, and if the text leaves the subject
unspoken. The possibility of rape by the enemy being the fate of captive
queens has gone unexpressed in literature before. For instance, the fate of an
enslaved Andromache is poignantly imagined by Hector in Book 6 of
Homer’s Iliad, but as the Trojan hero says farewell to his wife, among the
humiliations he pictures in his mind’s eye, rape is not one of the articulated
sufferings at the moment of parting:
88
“. . . I am not so much distressed by the thought of what the Trojans will

suffer, or Hecabe herself, or King Priam, or all my gallant brothers whom the
enemy will fling down in the dust, as by the thought of you, dragged off in
tears by some Achaean man-at-arms to slavery. I see you there in Argos,
toiling, for some other woman at the loom, or carrying water from an alien
well, a helpless drudge with no will of her own. ‘There goes the wife of
Hector,’ they will say when they see your tears.”
(The Iliad, trans. Rieu, 6. 129)
Homer leaves the most painful and the most powerful imagined thought
unspoken. (Aeschylus, on the other hand, makes clear in Agamemnon, that
Hector’s sister, the princess, Cassandra, became Agamemnon’s slave and
plaything).
Likewise in Marlowe’s sixteenth-century play, Tamburlaine, which
contains the spectacle of Bajazeth, the captured Emperor of the Turks, caged
on stage with his wife, Zabina, the captive Emperor laments the actual – not
imagined – fate of his Queen but does not directly mention rape:
“You see my wife, my Queene, and Emperesse,
Brought up and propped by the hand of fame,
Queen of fifteene contributory Queens,
Now throwen to roomes of blacke abjection,
Smear’d with blots of basest drudgery,
And villainess [slave] to shame, disdain, and misery.”
(Tamburlaine, Part 1, 5. 1. 264–69)
Both husband and wife run against the walls of their cage and brain them-
selves rather than endure slavery at the hands of the enemy. David Brion
Davis comments, “in the Mediterranean world, as in Asia and Africa, human
bondage was accepted throughout an entire society. Even when defined as
chattels and cruelly treated, slaves were looked upon as a normal class within
the body politic” (Davis, 45).
The sexual abuse of slaves is taken for granted by a notable figure in
ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Oedipus – not one to leave sexual secrets
hidden. He poses a telling question in the well known conversation near the
end of Oedipus the King that occurs between the old herdsman who years
before had carried the infant Oedipus to die on Cithaeron’s slopes and is reluc-
tant to speak; the “helpful” messenger, who is eager to explain that he himself
took the infant Oedipus from the hands of the old herdsman to raise as his
foster child, and is eager to speak; and the questioning King who is deter-
mined to discover if he did, indeed, kill his father and marry his mother and is
forcing the ugly matter to a head. Right after Oedipus gets the herdsman to
admit that the child he gave away long ago to the messenger was a child of
Laius, Oedipus asks, “A slave? Or born in wedlock?” (Oedipus the King, l.
1169). Oedipus simply assumes that some of Laius’s children are illegitimate,
born of slave women, and, therefore, slaves themselves, though born of a
royal king. About the progeny of master and female slaves during the Middle
89
Ages, Davis observes, “the offspring of master and female slave . . . were
lodged in astonishing numbers in the foundling hospitals. . .” (Davis, 55–56).
During the centuries-long struggle of Christians and Moslems, both sides
enslaved prisoners of the opposing religion. Christians had particular cause to
be concerned for women taken prisoner and turned into slaves; Islamic law
permitted them to become concubines (Daniel, Islam, 163). As early as the
ninth century, the question of sexual violence against women is addressed in a
pontifical ruling which specifically states that women who are raped do not
have to do penance for fornication: “Si quis per vim violaverit mulierem aut in
hoste aut in quocumque locum et illa noluit consentire non cogatur ea
penitere, quia fornicavit” (“If anyone has violated a woman forcibly either in
warfare or in any other place, and she has refused consent, let it not be
required that she do penance because she has fornicated”).6 In her recent book
on rape in medieval English literature, Corinne Saunders uses Floris and
Blancheflur to make the point that “The outsider, and particularly the pagan,
distanced from the mores of the chivalric world is . . . associated with overt
sexual attack” (Saunders, 206). She has in mind, however, not the fate of
Blancheflur’s mother, who is a Christian slave, but that of her daughter, sold
by the Saracen King of Spain to merchants who sell her, in turn, to the Emir of
Babylon, who places her in his harem – all because she is beloved by Floris,
the king’s Moslem son.
It is noteworthy that when Boccaccio retells the popular romance about
Floris and Blauncheflur in 1338 as an ambitious five-book prose narrative, the
Filocolo, he invents a bit of dialogue for the future mother of “Biancifiore” in
which she pleads with the Arab captors who have just slaughtered her
husband (and other fellow pilgrims) that they respect the chastity of the
captive women:
“E poi che Iddio e voi mi negate la morte, quella cosa che io più disidero, io
m’apparecchio di venire in quelle parti ove piacer vi fia; ma caramente
raccomando in prima me e le mie compagne e ‘l nostro onore nelle vostre
braccia, pregandovi, per la gentile anima che guida i vostri membri, che
come di care sorelle il serviate e non consentiate che di quello che le misere
anime de’ nostri mariti, rinchiuse ne’ mortali corpi, si contentarono, sciolte
da essi si possano ramaricare.” (Filocolo, 110)
[“And since God and you both refuse me death, the thing I most desire, I
shall prepare myself to go where ever it may please you. But first I sincerely
commend myself and my companions and our honor into your hands, and
beg you by the gentle spirit that guides your limbs, that you preserve our
honor like that of your dear sisters, and do not let it happen that what the poor
souls of our husbands could be confident of while they were in their mortal
6 MS Cod. Vat. 1349, Capitula Judiciorum VIII, Synodus Romana XXIII, 225–26. Cited by
Saunders, 102.
90
bodies they should now have to grieve for when they are released from their
bodies.” (Il Filocolo, trans. Cheney, 37)]
In Boccaccio’s late medieval version, Biancifiore’s mother, given the name

Giulia Topazia, had been barren for six years and the pilgrimage had been
undertaken by her and her husband, Lelio, in gratitude to the saint who
appeared to him in a vision assuring him that his wife would conceive their
child. In this narrative the mother dies immediately after giving birth to
Biancifiore in captivity. Boccaccio, however, scarcely comments on the
resemblance of the young lovers in his version of the old romance. Once, im-
mediately after their birth, King Felix is said to look at them for a long time
and notice their beauty and their resemblance to one another (Book 1, sec. 44)
and also, much later in this lengthy work, when Florio’s love quest is well
underway, a woman named Sisife is described as trying to remember where
she had seen him before (Book 4, sec. 76). After long consideration she is said
to remember Biancifiore, whom she realized he much resembled. That’s all
and barely noticeable in the long, novel-like version of the medieval Italian
author. On the other hand, Boccaccio is emphatic about the father of
Biancifiore. When King Felix disapproves of Florio’s choice of beloved on
the grounds of class difference a long argument breaks out between father and
son. At one point Florio states flatly: “quegli che ingiustamente il suo padre
valoroso, resistente con picciola schiera alla vostra moltitudine di gente,
uccideste, il quale forse no fu di minor qualità che voi siate” (Filocolo, 142;
“You are the one who wrongly killed her heroic father as he fought your
multitude with his tiny band. Perhaps he was of no lesser rank than you”
[Il Filocolo, trans. Cheney, 60]). Nonetheless, shortly before the son makes
this defense of Biancifiore’s station, the father had made a remark which may
suggest that there is something more at stake in his objections: “ma non
consideri tu di cui tu ti sei innamorato, e per cui tu così faticosa passione
sostieni? e ciò è d’una serva nata nelle nostre case. . . . Io non ti potrei mai
tanto sopra questo dire quanto io disidero” (Filocolo, 141; “but don’t you
realize whom you have fallen in love with, and for whom you are experi-
encing so troublesome a passion? Namely a maidservant born in our house-
hold. . . . I could never tell you all that I want to in this matter” [Il Filocolo,
trans. Cheney, 59]). The king’s last remark could imply that there is some-
thing that he must leave unsaid about his objections to the romance, not
merely that he is overflowing with unexpressed ideas about unequal alliances.
It is not known what version of the romance Boccaccio worked from, but the
tale of the unfortunate young lovers, well known in both the northern and
southern parts of the Italian peninsula, was even part of an oral tradition
(Cheney, “Introduction,” xi). Boccaccio may also have been acquainted with
the Old French and Middle English versions.
Returning to the matter of the problematical love that springs up between
young Floris and Blauncheflur, it may be significant that John Stevens is
troubled by the sexual overtones of the French romance. He writes “of the
91
precocious sexuality” which makes the attraction between the two young
people in the French romance “distasteful” and cites the following passage:
Ensamle lisent et aprendent
a la joie d’amor entendent.
Quant il repairent de l’école
li iens baise l’autre et acole. (239–42)
[Together they read and learn and give their attention to the joy of
love. When they come out of school, they kiss and cuddle one
another. (Stevens, 45)]
This would be much more distasteful if he thought the two children were half
brother and half sister. He says nothing, however, about incestuous overtones
and, as for the English version, aligns himself with those who find it idyllic:
“we see that the English author has managed to retain the innocent charm of
their attachment” (Stevens, 45). In some ways, it does not matter whether or
not we are told who the biological father is in the English romance, for even if
the possibility of literal incest is eliminated, the story still has significant
incestuous overtones. If we removed the possibility that the Saracen king
might have fathered Blauncheflur, the incest taboo in Floris’s attraction to
Blauncheflur would, nonetheless, seem an issue in the romantic relationship
for a medieval audience as Floris and Blauncheflur have been raised as
brother and sister by the same woman – the Christian slave who is
Blauncheflur’s mother. The first four lines of the English romance as it has
come down to us are:
Ne thurst men never in londe

After feirer children fonde
Þe cristen woman fedde hem þoo,
Ful wel she lovyd hem boþ twoo.
Floris and Blauncheflur are described as if spiritual brother and sister, and for
the Middle Ages that would be enough to make the romantic relationship
incestuous. From the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 up until the fourteenth
century, the rules against incest applied not only to relationships of blood but
also to relationships of affinity as well as of spirituality (Donavin, 9). That
meant, for example, that one could not marry an aunt’s former husband, for he
would be considered an uncle by affinity; nor could one marry the son of a
godmother. He would be considered a spiritual brother. Two children raised
by the same woman – the biological mother of one and the Christian slave of
the parents of the other – are made to seem like spiritual siblings by the liter-
ary text. (Technically, however, the fact that Floris, a Moslem, is not baptized,
means that in a true sense, according to Canon Law, he could not be
Blancheflur’s “spiritual” brother.)
The best known romance which suppresses the subject of incest is, of
course, Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale, the analogues of which begin with
92
Custance on foreign shores, having fled the sexual advances of an incestuous

father. Chaucer, however, makes the reason for Custance’s travel to distant
shores an arranged marriage with a Sultan who has heard of Custance’s
beauty, at once legitimizing the desire for Custance and removing it to the
Islamic East. The Man of Law, it will be recalled, tells his sanitized version of
the Custance story in the Canterbury Tales after an Introduction that catalogs
Chaucer’s career of writing stories “Of olde tyme” (Introd. to the Man of
Law’s Tale, 50) and specifically compliments his discretion in avoiding the
subject of incest:
But certeinly no word ne writeth he
Of thilke wikke ensample of Canacee,
That loved hir owene brother synfully –
Of swiche cursed stories I sey fy! –
Or ellis of Tyro Apollonius,
How that the cursed kyng Antiochus
Birafte his doghter of hir maydenhede,
That is so horrible a tale to rede,
Whan he hir threw upon the pavement.
(Intro to the Man of Law’s Tale, 77–85)
If there is an irony in the Man of Law’s telling a tale based on analogues

containing incest, that irony is compounded by the fact that, later in the
Canterbury Tales, the pilgrim Squire tells a tale about a heroine named
Canacee who, it appears from his summary of his narrative intentions, is the
object of the incestuous desires of a brother: “And after wo I speke of
Cambalo,/That fought in lystes with the bretheren two/For Canacee er he
myghte hire wynne.” (Squire’s Tale, 667–69).7 The incest taboo does, in fact,
appear in numerous medieval English romances where incest either occurs or
is miraculously averted. Among these are Sir Generides, Huon of Burdeux,
Sir Degare, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and
Apollonius of Tyre, which Gower includes in his Confessio Amantis in Book
VIII. At the center of Apollonius of Tyre is the incest riddle which is made a
suitor test for anyone aspiring to marry the daughter of the king of Antioch.
The riddle embodies the distortions created in society by incest; as told by
Gower, the enigmatic question is,
“With felonie I am upbore,
I ete and have it noght forbore
Mi modres fleissh, whos housbounde
Mi fader forto seche I fonde,
7 Two stimulating discussions of incest in connection with Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale are John Fyler’s
“Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire’s Tale,” and Elizabeth Scala’s “Canacee and the Chaucer
Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables.” Cf. Elizabeth Archibald’s observation that “Sibling
incest seems to have been regarded as considerably less heinous than parent-child incest; it is
usually a sub-plot rather than a central theme . . .” (Incest and the Medieval Imagination, 192).
93
Which is the Sone ek of my wif.

Hierof I am inquisitif;
And who that can mi tale save,
Al quyt he shal my doghter have;
Of his ansuere and if he faile,
He shal be ded withoute faile.” (Confessio Amantis, VIII, 405–14)
The speaker of the riddle is the incestuous father who wants to keep the
daughter for himself and to destroy all suitors. To answer the riddle incor-
rectly is to die.
While the English text of Floris and Blauncheflur is silent about the
circumstances regarding Blauncheflur’s birth, the modern Greek and
sixteenth-century Spanish romances as well as the Old French poetic texts and
the fourteenth-century Italian Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore are not. M.
Edélstand Du Méril, an editor of the thirteenth-century French Floire et
Blanceflor, observes that in the Greek version the motivation for making a
pilgrimage at the start of the tale was to secure the pregnancy of Blancheflur’s
mother; he refers to “le pèlerinage que son père et sa mère entreprennent pour
obtenir du Ciel un enfant” (Introduction, Floire et Blanceflor, lxxiv). A
similar purpose underlies the pilgrimage taken in the Spanish Flores y
Blancaflor which both Lumby, in his introduction to the Middle English
edition8 and George Ellis in a headnote to his retelling of the tale indicate “is
noticed” as having been published in 1512 in Alcalá (Ellis, 453). Lumby and
Ellis both provide full summaries of the Spanish romance. The closest I have
been able to come to this “noticed” original Spanish romance is a photostat
made in 1923 of an early printed text owned by the British Library (ca. 1520).9
As this text is in prose, it is not the 1512 Spanish romance referred to, as that
was said to be metrical. In her recent book on the continental versions of the
romance, Patricia Grieve flatly states, “One piece of the puzzle of Spanish
printed texts is still missing: the 1512 Alcalá edition” (Grieve, 21). Both Ellis
and Lumby, who refers to it as “the poem” (Introduction, Floriz and
Blauncheflur, p. ix), had access to this lost text in the mid-1800s. The early
sixteenth-century Spanish prose text which I read mostly accords with the
Lumby-Ellis summaries. In the beginning of the Spanish romance, La historia
de los enamorados flores y blancaflor, the nephew of a western emperor,
Prince Perse, marries Topase, a daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, and a niece of
the Duke of Milan. Unhappy at being childless, they try to produce the preg-
nancy of Topase by praying to saints and employing holy relics, but all to no
avail. Finally they take the advice of a pious Spaniard and seek the assistance
of St. James of Compostella whose intercession is said never to have met with
a refusal. Prince Perse made a vow that if the object of his prayer could be
8 King Horn with Fragments of Floriz and Blauncheflur and of the Assumption of Our Lady, ed.
J. Rawson Lumby, ix. This volume was later re-edited by George McKnight for EETS in 1901.
9 La historia de los enamorados flores y blancaflor (ca. 1520), Modern Language Association of
America, Collection of Photographic Facsimiles, no. 3 (New York, 1923).
94
accomplished he would undertake a pilgrimage to the saint’s shrine. The

following night an angel appears in a dream to promise that the couple’s
wishes would be gratified but also to foretell future calamities. Nothing
further is said about Topase’s pregnancy until she is taken in slavery to Spain.
According to the Ellis summary, after the Spanish Moslem king ambushes
the pilgrims, the body of Topase’s husband is described as falling dead atop
that of his wife who becomes covered with his blood. The detail is absent
from the 1520 prose version account which I read. It merely indicates that
after determining that the husband and wife were Christians, the Saracens kill
the husband “cruelly” but spare the wife as a “gift” to their Moslem king
because “men naturally respond to the appealing qualities of women”:
Fueron interrogados per un capitan si eran christiano o no. Y micer Persio y
Topacia por no negar la fe de riposto dixeron que sí que ellos eran
christianos, pero que no eran de aquella tierra que eran de Roma vassallos
del emperador, pero yuan en romeria a Santiago. E luego el capitan muy
cruelmente mando matar a micer Persio sin ninguna piedad y como las
calidades delas mugeres naturalmente son aplaȢigles y amigables alos
hombres viendo que Topacia era tan gentil y tan noble criatura con
consentimiento de su compania delibero de no la matarimas por hazer un
presente al rey Felice su señor. (Fol. vii [italics mine])
r
Only after Topase is made a gift to Felice by his guards does the king make a
gift of Topase to his wife. Thus, it is only after the abduction is part of the past
and a certain amount of time has elapsed, wherein the queen and captive
Christian woman become mistress and maid and even develop a kind of
friendship, that mention is ever made of Topase’s pregnancy and then by a
possibly puzzled wife of Felice:
Un día entre los otros estando las dos burlando y jugando, conoscio
la reyna que Topacia era preñada, y dixo le, “Hermana mia parece
me que estas preñada también como yo.” (fol. viiiv)
[One day while the two were joking and playing among the others, the
queen realized that Topacia was pregnant and said to her, “My dear
sister, it appears to me that you are pregnant also as I am.” (my trans-
lation)]
Shortly thereafter the queen gives birth to Flores and, on the same day, Topase
has Blancaflor. The only suggestion given in the Spanish prose version that
Topase might be pregnant before the ambush is that she is described as finding
the pilgrimage, made during hot weather, arduous because she was very deli-
cate: “muy delicada” (fol. viv). However, since the text reads “era muy
delicada” – the past of “ser” (to be) signifying a permanent condition – the
delicacy of the duchess must refer to her general fragility rather than preg-
nancy (always temporary!). This Spanish version which does not mention
explicitly who Blancaflor’s father was, as the French does, might be closer to
a version of the romance in which literal sibling incest was an issue. I would
95
suggest that literal incest was eliminated from later stories such as the Old
French and Middle English versions. However, while the Old French may try
to eliminate incest (“uns cuens crestiiens”) and the Middle English rules it out
willy-nilly by virtue of missing the relevant opening section concerning
Blauncheflur’s birth, they do not succeed in eliminating the incestuous over-
tones of the relationship. The Old French and Middle English versions,
viewed this way, appear to attempt to eradicate, however unsuccessfully, the
incest theme of an original story much as does the Man of Law’s Tale. Even
with literal incest removed, a kind of incest is still suggested.
Focusing attention on a hitherto neglected Spanish chronicle containing the
love story, Patricia Grieve argues that it “represents a more primitive version
than does the aristocratic French” (Grieve, 19). She has called this version the
Crónica de Flores y Blancaflor. Two of her strongest arguments for this
position are: (1) that the chronicle version fits into a category of historiog-
raphy that occupied itself with accounts of the fall of Spain to the Saracens in
711, and (2) that it appears in a relatively early manuscript – late fourteenth or
early fifteenth century (Grieve 22, 27). What interested me, after locating and
reading the obscure Gomez Perez edition of the chronicle version which
Grieve brings to light, was to discover that the circumstances of Blancheflor’s
birth are dealt with less ambiguously in the chronicle than in the
sixteenth-century Spanish romance. In the chronicle version, the duchess is
explicitly said to be pregnant by her husband, the count. When he dies before
they can keep their promise to make a pilgrimage, she makes the journey with
her father, the duke (as in the Old French “version aristocratique”):
. . . en aquel tiempo que el rey Fines entro sobre mar por yr correr tierra de
cristianos, asi como lo ha contado la estoria, acaescio asy que en tierra de
Francia, que un conde e su muger, que era fija de un duque, prometieran de
venir en romeria a Santiago de Galizia. Entretanto ovo de morir el conde e
ella finco preñada del, asy que ono de rogar al duque, su padre, que la levare
a Santiago por conplir el voto que avia prometido.
(Chronicle of “Flores y Blancaflor,” f. 5 vb [p. 36])
[. . . in that time when King Fines went to sea to travel to the land of the
Christians, as the story told, it happened that at the same time in France a
count and his wife, who was a duke’s daughter, promised to make a
pilgrimage to Santiago de Galizia. Meanwhile the count died and his wife
was left pregnant by him, so that it fell to the duke, her father, to accompany
her to Santiago to fulfill the vow she had promised. (my translation)]
In this prose chronicle version her name is Berta and the battle with King
Fines leads to her father’s death, not that of her husband (who is the relative
killed in the Spanish romance). Because she tells the Spanish king that she is a
nobleman’s daughter, he makes a gift of her to his wife: no intermediate
soldiers who pass her along to their leader (“E quando esto oyo el rey Finis,
plogole mucho porque era fijadalgo, ca le rogara su muger la reyna por tal
cativa,” p. 36; “And when Fines heard this, he was moved, because she was a
96
nobleman’s daughter and his wife the queen pleaded on behalf of the captive”
[my translation]).
M. Paulin Paris thought the sixteenth-century Spanish romance text was
originally of much greater antiquity and supposed that the earliest French
version was drawn from the Spanish original.10 Laura Hibbard judged the
question of the relative ages and relationships of the French and Spanish
versions to be complex and unsettled (Hibbard, 189). Patricia Grieve’s recent
contention that the chronicle version of the Spanish romance is more primitive
than the French “version aristocratique” seems to add weight to Paris’s
position. I suspect, however, that there is a yet undiscovered Spanish text even
older than the chronicle version on which the sixteenth-century Spanish
romance is based – one which, like the romance, does not state who
Blancheflur’s father was and in which sibling incest occurs.
There are two French versions of the romance composed in the late twelfth
century: the “version aristocratique,” spoken of earlier in this chapter, and the
“version populaire.”11 While in both versions Blauncheflur’s mother is
captured from a group of pilgrims bound for St. James of Compostella, in
neither romance is the motivation for her pilgrimage said to be the desire for
pregnancy. In the “version aristocratique,” the woman completes the
pilgrimage not with her husband but with her father, after the death of her
husband, who has left her pregnant (“Por son mari qui mors estoit/ De qui
remese encainte estoit,” lines 97–98). In the “version populaire,” the woman
makes the journey with her husband to whom she is newly wedded and is
identified as someone who as yet has no children but is already pregnant:
D’Olenois tint la duschiez
Novelment fu mariez;
Moillier avoit a son talant,
Mais n’avoit encor nul enfant:
Mais la duschoise estoit encanite
(version pop. [begins on p. 125], lines 53–56)
In the anonymous medieval Italian Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, it is made

immediately clear in stanzas two and three that Biancifiore’s mother gets
pregnant by her husband as an answer to a prayer:
Un cavalier di Roma anticamente
prese per moglie una gentil pulzella,
e era molto richissimo e posente
d’oro e d’argento e di molte castella;
ma non poteva aver figluol niente
da quella rosa fresca e tenerella:
10 He published the French text in Le Romancers François.

11 The “version populaire” is printed by Du Méril on pages 125ff. of his edition of Floire et
Blancheflor.
97
a santo Iacopo promese andare,

se la moglie potese in gravidare.
Dentro in Roma sì fe la promisione;
stando nel palazzo de la milizia:
la donna ingravidò quella stagione,
e tutta gente n’ avea gran letizia:
poi preson la scarsella e lo bordone
per andare a l’apostol di Galizia:
e ‘l nome del baron ni conteragio,
se m’ascoltate, ch’andava in viagio.12
[A knight from Rome who married late in life
took as a wife a gentle young girl
and was very rich and had
gold and silver and many castles;
but he could not have any children
from that fresh and tender rose:
to saint James he promised to go
if his wife could become pregnant.
Within Rome itself the promise was made;
while they were standing in the palace of the militia:
the lady became pregnant that very summer,
and all the people were joyful:
then they took the moneybag and the pilgrim’s staff
to go to the patron saint of Galizia:
and the name of the baron I will not tell,
if you listen to me, who went on the pilgrimage. (my translation)]
After Topatia is captured by Saracens while on the pilgrimage to Galicia,

there is no plea to respect the chastity of a captive woman as in Boccaccio’s
Filocolo. The movement from the battlefield where the husband is killed to
the wife’s being made a gift to the Saracen’s wife is swift and terse – accom-
plished in just four short stanzas. Moreover, there is no scene as in
Boccaccio’s romance in which the Saracen holds the newborns, Fiorio and
Biancifiore, and notices their resemblance.13
Besides the absence of clarification about the identity of Blauncheflur’s
father in the English manuscripts, there is also the omission of any account of
how Blauncheflur’s mother came to be a slave in Floris’s household.
According to the Spanish, French, and Italian versions, Galicia was in a state
12 Il Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, 2. 65–67. The translations into English of this romance are
mine.
13 There is, however, in the Cantare a brief scene in which a female innkeeper remarks on their
resemblance shortly after the grown-up Fiorio arrives at the inn in the second half of the Cantare
where he is searching for Biancifiore: “la sera giunse in una albergheria,/e inmantenente che s’ è
dismontato,/dice la dona de l’albergatore;/ ’miser, voi somigliate a Biancifiore” (Crescini, ed.,
170; “the next night in an inn/ and as soon as he had gotten off his horse,/ the wife of the innkeeper
said/ sir, you look just like Biancifiore”).
98
of disturbance and had been so for some time under Mohammedan power;
attempting to take revenge on Galician attempts to end infidel control, Felix,
the Saracen king and father of Floris, attacked the pilgrims and murdered the
husband of Topase and took her captive.14 When the English tale opens, all
these events are absent. At the start of the romance the reader simply reads
about the captive Christian woman caring for both the Saracen queen’s son,
Floris, and her own daughter, Blauncheflur, born into slavery.
The Double
I would suggest that the incestuous overtones of the Middle English romance
are legitimized by their being transformed into a quest for the beloved who
may be understood as a literary double. Speaking of the double in his 1919
essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud observes, “the ‘double’ was originally an insur-
ance against the destruction of the ego” and cites Otto Rank’s idea that the
double was “ ‘an energetic denial of the power of death’ ” (Freud, “The
Uncanny,” 235). Freud goes on to expand Rank’s thought by commenting,
“probably the ‘immortal soul’ was the first double of the body” which would
make of doubling for Freud “a preservation against extinction” (Freud, “The
Uncanny,” 235). The intensity of the bond Floris feels for Blauncheflur is not
unlike that expressed by the speaker of Shelley’s Epipsychidion for the “soul
out of my soul” who he wishes were his actual twin sister:
Would we two had been twins of the same mother!
Or, that the name my heart lent to another
Could be a sister’s bond for her and thee,
Blending two beams of one eternity!
Yet were one lawful and the other true,
These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due,
How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!
I am not thine: I am a part of thee. (Shelley, 275)
This same passionate sense of oneness in twoness, a sense of virtual identity,

is what Floris tries to convey to his parents when he awakens from fainting
after being told that his beloved Blauncheflur is dead:
“Ȣif þat deþ were ideld ariȢt,
We sholde be ded boþe in ore niȢt;
For in one day ibore we were.
Mid riȢte wee scholden deie ifer.
Deþ,” he sede, “ful of envie,
And ful of alle tricherie,
14 The name for Blauncheflur’s mother given in the Spanish text is strikingly close to that given her
by Boccaccio in the Filocolo (Giulia Topazia) and by the Cantare (Topatia). She is nameless in the
Middle English version.
99
Þu me hast my lef binome:

To bitraie þat folk hit is þi wone.
He wolde libbe and þu noldest,
And fain wolde i die and þu noldest.
Whider me wolde þat þu were,
Neltu no wiȢt come þere,
Oþer me wolde þat þu ne come,
Þer þu wilt come ilome.
...
...
After deþ clepe no more i nille,
Ac mi selve aslen ich wille.” (283–306)
Such passages as these serve to indicate that the beloved is one of the forms
the double in literature may take.15 Simply viewed, the use of the double in lit-
erature is a way of presenting the inner life of a character (and, perhaps,
unconsciously that of the author). As suggested by the late Romantic passage
by Shelley, the incest theme may attach itself to that of the double. That
linkage is found in such obvious nineteenth-century examples as Poe’s Ligeia,
where the narrator is married to the mysterious woman of unknown origin
with whom he lives in a relationship of wife/sister, and Bronte’s Wuthering
Heights where Cathy and Heathcliff – like Ligeia, of mysterious origin – live
under one roof as loosely adopted brother and sister who share an intense
sense of kinship (the immemorial line being Cathy’s “I am Heathcliff!”). Lit-
erary criticism of the Freudian persuasion has shown the themes of doubling
and incest to be explicit in some works of modern literature and the linked
themes have recently been explored in the medieval Welsh Mabinogi.16
The affinity between Floris and Blauncheflur seems to have had its incep-
tion at birth; the aformentioned speech by Floris speaks of their having been
born on the same day. Most of the duality of this romance centers on charac-
ters, though it is reflected as well in certain narrative details and in symmetry
of structure. Floris’s need to be near Blauncheflur reveals itself early. When,
at age seven, Floris is told by his father that it is time to begin his education, he
refuses to learn without his companion:
“Ne shal not Blancheflour lerne wiþ me?
Ne can y noȢt to scole goon
Wiþout Blancheflour,” he saide þan,
“Ne can y in no scole syng ne rede
Wiþout Blancheflour,” he seide. (18–22)
15 Instances in modern literature of the double as the beloved are examined in chapter 7 (pp. 130–60)
of C. F. Keppler’s The Literature of the Second Self. Among more Freudian studies of the double
in literature are such works as John T. Irwin’s Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge and
Robert Rogers’s A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature. Such works draw heavily on
Freud’s “The Uncanny” and his “On Narcissism: An Introduction.”
16 See Irwin and Rogers for an application of Freud to modern literature, and for medieval see
Andrew Welsh, “Doubling and Incest in the Mabinogi,” 344–62.
100
Apparently regarding this as a minor show of will, the king permits

Blauncheflur to learn with Floris: “She shal lerne for þy love.” (24). Within a
short space of time, however, parental opposition to the relationship of the
two hardens. Their opposition is never actually explained in terms of religious
or class difference; it simply is. The king comes to see his son’s love as
dangerous:
Þe king understod þe grete amoure
Bytwene his son and Blanchefloure,
And þouȢt, when þey were of age,
Þat her love wolde noȢt swage,
Nor he myȢt noȢt her love wiþdrawe,
When Florys shuld wyfe after þe lawe.
Þe king to the queene seide þoo
And tolde hur of his woo,
Of his þouȢt and of his care,
How it wolde of Floryes fare. (35–44)
So troubled is the king that he threatens to have Blauncheflur killed – twice.

At the first suggestion, the conciliatory queen advises instead that their son be
sent away to visit her sister in “þe londe of Mountargis” (66). But then Floris
pines conspicuously for Blauncheflur:
Yf eny man to him speke,
Love is on his hert steke,
Love is at his hert roote;
Þat noþing is so soote,
Galyngale ne lycorys
Is not so soote, as hur love is,
Ne nothing ne non other. (115–21)
Such extreme behaviour elicits an extreme reaction from the king. He wants
Blauncheflur decapitated: “Fro þe body þe heved shal goo” (141). The queen
prefers that she be sold to merchants, “Þer ben chapmen ryche ywys,/
Marchaudes of Babylon ful ryche,/ Þat wol hur bye blethelyche” (146–48).
The out-of-proportion nature of all the feelings expressed about this relation-
ship makes it one that goes beyond the ordinary attraction of male for female
in some effort to achieve that wholeness of being described in Aristophanes’s
fable about the two halves of the Androgynos that seek one another out to
re-form the whole that was severed by the gods. The relationship goes beyond
yet is included in the idea illustrated by the famous fable in Plato’s Sympo-
sium. The necessary unity of the two characters has been seen by Edmund
Reiss to be reflected in the numerous floral references throughout the
romance, and he argues that with “this pervasive floral detail goes an
emphasis on the colors red and white, as though if Blauncheflur is to be seen
as the white flower, Floris is to be seen as the red” (Reiss, 341). He observes
that Floris finds his way back to Blauncheflur by following the red light given
101
off by a carbuncle. He points to numerous instances of red and white

appearing together “like the lovers themselves” (Reiss, 342). Piero Boitani
comments on the “correspondences and repetitions” that occur in the structure
such as Floris’s “three times” receiving information about his lost love and
each time in “similar circumstances” and the “two crises”: the return of Floris
to discover the false tomb of Blauncheflur and the scene in Babylon where
each offers his life for the other (Boitani, 53). To this may be added
Veldhoen’s observation,
Three times Floris receives information and guidance on the road: first from
a landlady (lines 428–39), then from the men of Babylon, the ‘talk of the
town’ (lines 465–76), and finally again from a landlord, another member of
that life-sustaining and rest-providing guild (lines 527–36). Then he is three
times passed on into other hands. . . . (Veldhoen, 61)
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that when Floris sets out in
pursuit of Blauncheflur from whom he has been separated, she represents
what C. F. Keppler considers the essence of the double, “the mystery of a
contradiction, of simultaneous distinction and identity” (Keppler, 1).17 The
most obvious differences are that Floris is male, Moslem, and a prince, while
Blauncheflur is female, Christian, a slave, and, at the beginning of Floris’s
search, also a harem concubine. The darkest reading of their point of identity
is that they could be half brother and half sister, a matter mostly suppressed in
the text. The violence of Floris’s father’s threats to kill Blauncheflur rather
than allow the romance of his son to continue would seem to provide, in
Freudian terms, an unusually strong example of rivalry between father and
son that breaks out when “a boy’s earliest choice of objects for his love is
incestuous and that those objects are forbidden ones – his mother and his
sister” (Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 17). If literal incest were what is being
pictured and Blauncheflur were really a half sister, the jealous father would be
seen as reacting to what Freud described as “the earliest sexual excitations of
the youthful human beings” which ‘are invariably of an incestuous character”
( Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 124). If, on the other hand, incest is not literal
but we are dealing with incestuous overtones merely, then the father’s rage
must be seen as directed against his son’s having found a love object that
allows him to successfully deflect mother love on to “an outside object,” that
is, on to an object that does not conflict with “the barrier that exists against
incest” (Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” 16). Both father figures – Floris’s father
and the Babylonian emir – are obstacles in the lovers’ desire for reunion. The
King of Spain threatens to cut off the maiden’s head, while the emir tries to
steal her “maidenhead.” The lovers do not go back to Spain until Floris’s
threatening father is dead. Viewing the duality in yet another way, that is,
from a Jungian perspective, it is readily seen that, at a deeper level,
17 See also Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature.
102
Blauncheflur, as the female that the male, Floris, must embrace to become
whole, is the archetype known as the anima that figures forth in the visible
world of this text the inward, unseen feminine aspect of the male psyche, inte-
gration with which means health and unity. Here, then, in the realm of the
unconscious, the difference and identity of the beloved as double meet.
East and West
The quest to reclaim the lost beloved which occupies the second half of the
romance, it has been shown, has parallels among Arabic tales, first located by
Gédéon Huet, in which a young man who goes to seek his beloved finds her in
a harem (Huet, 348–59). Among those Huet cites are the tale of Ibn-al-Djouzi,
the fabric merchant conveyed into the harem in a fabric box who wins the
favorite slave of the sultan’s wife18 and that of the young moneylender, in
“The History of the Moneylender of Baghdad,” who falls in love with the
slave girl in charge of the harem’s accounts (he enters the harem disguised as
a woman after ingratiating himself with both a porter and a eunuch). To those
tales found by Huet may be added an as yet unnoticed and interesting
analogue contained in the new translation of The Arabian Nights based on the
Muhsin Mahdi edition of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript.19 It is
“The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar.”20
The would-be lover of the slave girl is different, “other,” in being a Prince as
well as Persian, while the beloved is a slave in a harem and not Persian;
indeed, it is she who asks if he is a Persian when they first meet in the shop of
a druggist. The tale contains no apparent structural symmetry nor does it hint
at incest or suggest the profoundly felt sense of identity between the Persian
prince and the slave girl that would be necessary if they were instances of the
double. The basis of the attraction is fundamental lust and the desire for
sensual pleasure. In this tale, a druggist who has many clients among the
women of the harem, where he is treated as a familiar figure, and his good
friend, Nur al-Din Ali, a prince of Persia, enter the harem of Caliph Harun
18 In the Haddawy translation of the Tales of the Arabian Nights this appears as “The Steward’s Tale:
The Young Man from Baghdad and Lady Zubaida’s Maid” (pp. 228–38). In this tale a maid buys
fabric for her lady from a young merchant with whom she falls in love. He returns her feelings. She
finds a pretext to return to the fabric shop and the young merchant then realizes that she loves him
as much as he does her. They arrange to have him smuggled into the palace harem past the eunuch
guards in a fabric box, a minor detail that may be an analogue for the basket of flowers that gets
Floris into the harem of the Emir of Babylon. The tale ends happily with the lady arranging for the
fabric merchant to marry her maid to whom she gives enough money to buy a house outside the
palace.
19 Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (New York, 1990) is based on the fourteenth-century Syrian
manuscript of Alf Layla wa-Layla.
20 “The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar and the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahar” in The Arabian Nights,
trans. Haddawy, 295–344. Quotations from this tale refer to this edition and references appear
within parentheses in the body of this chapter.
103
Al-Rashid in disguise and led by a maid21 who is the confidante of the sought
woman, the caliph’s favorite slave, Shams al-Nahar. The young woman
became smitten with the young man when she saw him one afternoon in the
druggist’s shop. As the druggist was a respected and trusted man with access
to the caliph’s palace, she boldly invites them to seek her out. This is
presented as sudden love at first sight. The man is instantly overcome: “When
Ali ibn-Bakkar saw her, he was beside himself with confusion, and his face
flushed and turned pale, and as he tried to get up and go, in deference to her,
he almost swooned” (296). The young Persian prince’s desire only increases
when he next sees her in the exotic setting of the harem, for the slave girl, a
connoisseur of sensual delight fans his passion with flirtation, music, sung
verse, and elegant food. This sudden love quickly culminates in a mutuality
that leads the narrator to exclaim, “never before have I seen a sun embrace a
moon” (303). The suffering of the young lovers begins just as suddenly when
it is announced that the caliph will arrive for his favorite slave. The young
man has a narrow escape and for the rest of the tale both he and the slave girl
suffer all the swooning, weeping, and other pains of separation familiar from
Floris and Blauncheflur. In the Arabic tale the separated lovers feed desire by
writing love letters and quoting erotic poetry. Thus, while young, in love, and
separated like Floris and Blauncheflur, they are altogether more sensually
expert. After reading a letter sent to him by the slave girl, the prince, Ali
Ibn-Bakkar, replies, assuring the slave girl,
The more I contemplated its [her letter’s] words and understood their
meaning, the more I enjoyed what I read, and the more I read and reread what
with unequaled art it expressed, the more relief I felt. (317)
The Persian prince’s letter closes with a quotation from an Arabic poem about
desire and longing. While Floris and Blancheflur are also young lovers of
different classes and backgrounds who suffer separation, weep and swoon,
and ultimately must also cope with the dangers of meeting and embracing
within the precincts of an oriental harem, their relationship is presented as
long – having begun in infancy – and untouched by sensuality until they are
reunited and make love for the first time in Babylon. Young love is dangerous
in both tales but finally things work out happily in the English tale, while in
the Arabic the slave girl and the young man both die. Ali Ibn-Bakkar wastes
away from unrequited love in a distant city, listening to a plaintiff song in
verse as does Shams al-Nahar in a parallel but separate scene in the harem.
Besides the central motif of the young man who seeks out the beloved in
the harem, this early Arabic tale offers several more incidental parallels to
Floris and Blauncheflur. There is the rich description of a room in the harem
21 The maid has her analogue in the figure of Claris in Floris and Blancheflur.
104
which not only offers a parallel to the rooms in the Tower of Maidens in
Floris and Blauncheflur but even picks up the detail of white and red roses:
When she opened the door, we found ourselves in a room covered with a silk
carpet, under a dome that rested on a hundred pillars, at the base of each of
which stood a bird or a beast dipped in gold. We sat and began to admire the
carpet, which, with its gold ground and patterns of white and red roses,
repeated the colors and patterns of the dome. In the room, resting on tables,
there were more than a hundred trays of crystal and gold, set with all kinds of
jewels. . . . The garden looked as if it had the same carpet for a floor cover.
There the water flowed from a large pond to a smaller one surrounded by
sweet basil, lilies, and narcissus in pots of inlaid gold. (298)
The description is that of a room in the harem of which the slave girl is already
an active, knowledgeable member. It has an adjoining garden. There are other
chambers occupied by other harem women; some overlook the Tigris River
(also named in Floris and Blauncheflur) rather than the garden (307). All of
this is overseen by a large retinue of eunuchs.
The Tower of Maidens in Floris and Blauncheflur is full of women in sepa-
rate chambers guarded by eunuchs, but all of these women are apparently
virgins waiting their turn to be called upon to become the Babylonian emir’s
wife of one year’s duration. Overall, the harem in the Middle English poem is
less a scene of sensual delight than a stronghold for protected property. The
tower itself is fortress-like:
And in þe burȢ amidde riȢt
Þer stant a riche tur ipiȢt.
An hundred teise hit is heie,
Who so bihalt hit fer and neie;
An hundred teise hit is wid
And imaked wiþ muchel prid,
Of lym and of marbleston:
In þe world nis swich tur non.
Þat morter is imaked so wel,
Ne mai hit breke ire ne stel. (629–38)
Within are forty-two rooms occupied by maidens of “parage” (666) – whether

indigenous or from enemies is unclear – who are guarded by eunuchs (“er ben
serjauns in þe stage,/Þat serve þe maidenes of parage,/Ac ne mot þer non ben
inne,/Þat in his breche bere þe ginne,/No er bi daie ne bi niȢt/Bute he also
capun be diȢt.” [665–670]). There is also a security guard – the porter with
whom Floris ingratiates himself – who watches the entries and exits. It is this
porter who smuggles Floris into the harem in a basket of flowers. The only
part of the harem in the English romance that compares in lushness to that of
the aforementioned description from the tale in the Arabian Nights is the
Babylonian emir’s garden with the magic well (that can test whether a
prospective “wife” is pure or not) and Tree of Love that casts a flower on the
105
chosen maid through the emir’s power of enchantment. The garden is full of
the song of birds, precious stones, wells and streams whose source is
Paradise:
Þerinne is merie foȢeles song,

Me miȢte libbe hem evre among.
And a welle þer springe þinne,
Þat is wroȢt wiþ muchel ginne.
Ihc mai seggen iwis,
Þe stremes come fram paradis.
Þe gravel is of precious stone,
And of vertu is evrech one (691–98)
In the end, impressed by the lovers’ willingness to die for one another, the
emir spares the lives of Floris and Blauncheflur, who marry and go to Spain to
rule, while he settles for marriage to Claris and presumably mends his wicked
ways. Thus, the quest for the beloved ends happily though without overt
evidence that the romance’s author has much conscious psychological insight
into the implications of the narrative action (either for the characters or for
himself). If my reading of the romance as an instance of the double in liter-
ature (perhaps an incestuous double) has validity, it would seem that Floris
and Blauncheflur has managed to win popular appeal even as it takes the
reader down long, dark, badly lit corridors. The discovery of the possibility of
incest in the relationship between the Saracen prince and the daughter of a
household slave forces the reader to consider whether an incestuous dimen-
sion in the love story makes it any less the “idyllic” tale of traditional criti-
cism. In life, as opposed to literature, the answer would be emphatically yes.
The literary maneuver, however, of the quest for the beloved of the tale, so
physically like the lover in appearance as to be his double, provides a way of
transforming incest – whether understood as literal in the text or merely as
implied overtone – into the provider of an acceptable love object. As slave and
Christian, Blauncheflur is sufficiently “other” from the Moslem prince who is
her lover to become Floris’s love object, distinct enough from his biological
mother who is royal and also Moslem to be an appropriately adult choice.
That Blauncheflur might be, as well, an illegitimate half sister is sufficiently
suppressed by the Middle English text to permit the reader to interpret phys-
ical resemblance as an abstract literary and/or psychological sign of harmo-
nious union. In terms of the conclusion in the Cambridge and Auchinleck
manuscripts of the Middle English romance, “union” also entails a conversion
of the Saracen lover to Christianity. After news reaches Floris that his father
has died in Spain, he decides to return home with his wife, Blauncheflur, but
not until he becomes a Christian (in the Auchinleck version) or, at least, has
his return made the occasion of a benediction at the end of the narrative (in the
Cambridge version). The union between Floris and Blauncheflur thus radiates
into the political, religious realm of the medieval world divided by the
Crusades into warring East and West. So powerful is this dimension of the
106
legendary romance that a little known fifteenth-century Spanish manuscript

containing a chronicle history of Spain (the Estoria de España: Primera
crónica general) incorporates a prose version of the romance of Floris and
Blauncheflur into its account of the occupation of southern Spain by Moorish
kings.22
22 Madrid. Bibilioteca Nacional, 7583 (olim T-233), Estoria de España; Primera crónica general,
207 ff. This historicized version of Flores y Blancaflor, to which Patricia Grieve has drawn new
attention, is followed by the tale of Berta, said to be the daughter of Flores and Blancaflor, named
after Blancaflor’s mother (given this name in the Spanish chronicle version). Berta becomes the
wife of Pepin and mother of Charlemagne, Christian crusader against the infidels extraordinaire.
(The manuscript’s chronicle version of Flores y Blancaflor is transcribed by Jose Gomez Perez in
“Leyendas medievales españolas del ciclo carolingio,” Annuario de Filologia (Maracaibo) 2–3
(1963–64), 35–94.) Though Elizabeth Archibald’s latest book, Incest and the Medieval Imagina-
tion, does not discuss Floris and Blancheflur, it is of interest, in connection with Berta’s becoming
the mother of Charlemagne, that Archibald points out that “incest with a sister was inserted into the
legends of two of the most famous and admired kings in medieval literature, Charlemagne and
Arthur” (199). Is Charlemagne’s incest an inheritance from an earlier generation?
107
Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East
6
I T is of primary interest that the Middle English romance, Le Bone Florence

iof Rome, like other closely allied western versions of the so-called “chaste
wife tale,” is related to analogous oriental tales about heroic women who
remain steadfast in virtue against persecution and adversity. Of secondary
interest within the context of the romance’s relationship to the East is the pres-
ence of Constantinople; it is from that eastern city that Florence’s unwelcome
suitor, “Syr Garcy,” comes early in the story. Finally, it is notable in
comparing Le Bone Florence of Rome to its oriental analogues that there is a
motif shared by the eastern and western treatments of the story, namely that of
justice and the specific form of justice that would have been known to medi-
eval thinkers as piety.
Constantinople
In the first half of the romance, a war is fought by Roman “knyȢtys” on behalf
of an “emperowre” of Rome whose daughter, Florence, a Christian, refused
the marriage proposal of “Syr Garcy” of Constantinople – not for reasons of
orthodoxy because he was a heathen like the Sultan who is the suitor of Chau-
cer’s Custance, but quite simply because he was old and unattractive. Dieter
Mehl is correct in his observation that “we are not even told in so many words
whether the old Garcy is a Christian or not and there is certainly no crusading
spirit” in the tale (Mehl, 140–41). Even though war breaks out over Florence’s
refusal of Garcy, it is not one of the familiar wars of religion. This is inter-
esting since the impressions of Constantinople that Le Bone Florence’s orig-
inal audience had would have encouraged the romance’s author to turn almost
automatically to religious conflict for at least some of his material.
In a nutshell, those impressions derive from this view of history: for some
time there had been tension between the Eastern and Western Roman empires,
and the tension continued into the early Middle Ages. One cause for strain
was the power the Italians had gained over the trade in Byzantine waters by
the eleventh century. The Comnenian emperors had given Italian merchants
commercial concessions over customs-charges as well as other economic
advantages in exchange for Italian (especially Venetian) political and naval
108
help against Byzantium’s enemies. By the end of the twelfth century Italian
merchants enjoyed more commercial power than local Byzantine traders.
Another cause of growing hostility between Rome and Constantinople was
the crusades. The First Crusade preached by Pope Urban attacked Moslem
princes along the road to Jerusalem, provoking them to unite against the
Emperor of Constantinople – exactly the result Alexius Comnenus feared.
The appearance of the crusaders worked against the aims of Constantinople in
other ways as well. The emperor had been content to leave Palestine in the
hands of the Fatimid caliphs of Egypt with whom Byzantium enjoyed excel-
lent relations; the crusading armies, convinced that they were doing God’s
work, considered Constantinople’s attitude impious. Westerners, furthermore,
could not comprehend the city’s tolerance of Moslem religious practices,
tolerance which would extend to having a mosque built in Constantinople for
visiting Moslem merchants and ambassadors (Runciman, 21). Worst of all,
Bohemond the Norman, described as “the cleverest and most unscrupulous
Crusader leader,” wanted the city of Antioch to be the center of his
Mediterranean dominion in the East. Antioch was the very city “which the
emperor longed to restore to his empire” (Runciman, 18). From the point of
view of Rome, the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 restored the Greeks to
the unity of Western Christendom. In January 1205, Innocent III proclaimed
that through God’s grace the Greek church of Constantinople had come back
to the obedience of the Apostolic See “now that the Empire of Constantinople
has been transferred to the Latins” (Nicol, 173).
Le Bone Florence of Rome explains the events igniting war between Rome
and Constantinople by introducing the conventional Troy material of chron-
icle and romance and placing Florence’s story in the midst of this long
perspective. It is rather circuitous, but the logic is that Trojans founded great
cities: Andromache built Antioch, Antenor Jerusalem, Helemytes Africa, and,
most important, Aeneas founded Rome; putting Florence’s personal drama in
the framework of this political history gives heightened importance to what is
happening to her: Rome is almost destroyed in the war in the romance, and
Florence is almost destroyed by her adversities. Rome is a symbol of Florence
and Constantinople a symbol of all that threatens her. This identification of
heroine and city is reinforced by the fact that, in the fourteenth century, an
abridged version of the tale of Florence appeared in the Gesta Romanorum,
the core of which began as stories derived from Roman history.1 The narrator
of the Middle English romance suggests that he had consulted more than one
version of the tale (line 84) and states (in lines 2174–75) that “Pope Symonde”
wrote the account in “þe cronykyls of Rome,” very likely a reference to the
Gesta.2 Not surprisingly it is unclear where we are in time when war breaks
1 The Latin Gesta Romanorum has been edited by Hermann Oesterley (Berlin, 1872) and there is an
English translation by Charles Swan, rev. and ed. E. A. Baker (London, 1905).
2 All citations to the text of the Middle English romance of Le Bone Florence of Rome in this chapter
refer to my edition in the Old and Middle English Text Series (Manchester University Press,
109
out between Rome and Constantinople in the first half of Le Bone Florence of
Rome; we are somewhere between the antique and medieval worlds. Constan-
tinople was the capital of the eastern Roman empire from 330 to 1453 and of
the Ottoman empire since 1453. The timeline of Le Bone Florence of Rome is
probably before 1453. The unique manuscript in which the romance appears
(MS Cambridge Ff. 2.38) provides the endpoint, since it can be dated to
between 1475 and 1500.3
The opening Troy material is brought to a close by the introduction of the
Eastern emperor who, in the romance, threatens the city founded by Aeneas:
. . . Rome,
The chefe cyte of crystendome,
Then was there none hyt lyke.
Vnto þe tyme þat þe emperowre Syr Garcy
Werryd on hyt, and herkenyth why,
That many a oon sore can syke;
Of Costantyne þe nobull was he,
A doghtyar knyght þar not be
In batell for to stryke. (16–24)
There is a sidelight on western impressions of the east in the route that Syr
Garcy’s marriage brokers take to Rome. It is as vague as the timeline in the
poem, and the place names at first glance are not easy to identify. At times the
geography seems fanciful, which would be a commentary on the exotic char-
acter of things eastern, but rightly interpreted the place names may well be
plausible and logical, which would suggest that the itinerary is not only real-
istic but familiar – just the opposite of exotic. Garcy’s emissaries seem to be
taking ship to a seaport named Awtrement (or Autrement – certainly a French
town) and proceeding through Poland and Champagne in northern France on
to Rome. This is about the most grotesque itinerary imaginable. There is an
Autremencourt (from the German, Ostremund) in the department of Aisne in
northern France, and the Roman name for Chartres was Autricum, but neither
of these places was a seaport or anywhere near a logical route from Constanti-
nople. If we read “They passed þorow Pole and Chawmpayn” (line 148) as
indicating that the party passed through Poland and northern France, we can
only attribute the route to the poet’s caprice or ignorance. If, however, we are
willing to credit some rather plausible corruptions in spelling, we can vindi-
cate the poet’s sound geographical sense: the party took ship from Constanti-
1976). Of the Gesta Romanorum, whose edifying stories were often used by preachers in need of
exempla for sermons, the famous translator of The Thousand and One Nights, Richard Burton,
observed: “after five hundred years, the life, the manners and customs of the classical Romans
lapse into the knightly and chivalrous, the Christian and ecclesiastical developments of medieval
Europe” (From Richard Burton’s “Terminal Essay” [pp. 59–230] on the origins of the Nights in A
Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights [Benares, 1885–86], 8. 73). The same visible
jumble of classical and medieval folklore and pseudo-history found in the Gesta appears in related
and derivative medieval narratives.
3 Heffernan, “Introduction” to Le Bone Florence of Rome, 40–41.
110
nople to Awrement (Otranto), proceeded through Pole (Apulia) and

Chawmpayn (Campania) to Rome. In other words, under the leadership of
Italian-born Acwrye (who would very likely be aware that Otranto was a
hospitable port), they took the most direct route to Rome possible.
The city of Constantinople was not arbitrarily chosen by the romance’s
author. It is a natural choice shedding light on fears western Europe had of the
“Orient.”
The Chaste Wife East and West: Primacy and Influence
Before going further, it may be useful to recall the main events of the Middle
English romance:
Garcy, the old king of Constantinople, moved by tales of Florence’s beauty,
decides to sue for her hand in marriage. After consulting with his barons and
Florence, his daughter, King Otes of Rome rejects the offer made by Garcy’s
emissaries. The returning messengers are full of news about glorious Rome
and beautiful Florence. Angry at his rejection, Garcy declares war on Rome
and sets sail with an army. Battle begins despite Florence’s last-minute offer
to marry Garcy in order to save the lives of Roman knights. Mylys and
Emere, sons of the King of Hungary, come to King Otes’s assistance.
Florence and Emere fall in love and are betrothed. While Emere is engaged
in war in Constantinople, his brother, Mylys – to whose care Florence is
entrusted – tries to seize Florence for himself. So begins a series of assaults
on her virtue and fantastic rescues culminating in her arrival at a convent
where she is received by nuns. After healing all of her persecutors who come
to her with various afflictions, Florence is reunited with her husband, Emere.
There were hundreds of stories about suffering maidens in legend and medi-
eval romance, but the version to which Florence gave her name is distin-
guished from other romances about victimized women, such as Emare and
Chaucer’s Custance and Griselda, by two characteristics: first, the heroine’s
main persecutor is always a rejected brother-in-law and second, the tale ends
with her healing the illnesses of all her persecutors who go to her and confess
their crimes. The tale of Florence appears in eastern as well as in western
medieval tale collections, but it is only in the western tales that the heroine’s
husband is a man of high rank (emperor or king) and there is an episode in
which the heroine imprisons her brother-in-law after he attempts to assault her
virtue.
Shortly after a group of gifted eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Euro-
pean Orientalists and linguists, among them, the Frenchman, Antoine
Galland, and the Englishmen, John Payne, Jonathan Scott, and Richard
Burton, translated various Arabic manuscripts of the Thousand and One
Nights into their native languages for an eager European reading audience,
and more than a hundred years after Sir William Jones compiled his still
useful grammar of Sanskrit, two German medieval scholars, Adolf Mussafia
111
and A. Wallensköld – the latter, a student of the eminent French medievalist,

Gaston Paris – wrote lengthy, independent studies of this large class of medi-
eval narratives, popular in both the East and the West and numbering in the
hundreds. It came to be known as “Le conte de la femme chaste convoitée par
son beau-frère;”4 the Middle English romance, Le Bone Florence, belongs to
this group. Working separately, Mussafia and Wallensköld argued independ-
ently for the priority of the eastern versions of the tale about the innocent wife
falsely accused of adultery by her rejected brother-in-law. Not everyone
agreed; three scholars wrote counter-arguments.5 But that Mussafia and
Wallensköld stirred the scholarly waters of their day there can be no doubt and
their scholarly concerns remind us that some of the German nine-
teenth-century philologists and folklorists were among the first scholars to
raise multicultural questions about medieval texts. While in the natural
sciences, especially medicine, historians have actively explored lines of trans-
mission East to West through translations of Greek and Arabic treatises into
Latin by such pivotal translators as Constantine the African and Gerard of
Cremona (Heffernan, The Melancholy Muse, 17–18), the evidence for influ-
ence and transmission in the area of arts and letters, especially lowbrow,
popular literature, like the Arabian Nights Entertainments, is not so well
studied or understood.
The case of the medieval tale of Florence of Rome is an interesting case in
point. There are seven manuscript versions of the story of Florence – one in
English, five in French, and one in Spanish.6 The heroine of the tale of Flor-
ence gives her name to a whole group of related European stories classed as
the “Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda Legends” by Lillian H. Hornstein,
and the tale is the longest of the western narratives in Wallensköld’s classifi-
cation of “le conte de la femme chaste.”7 Wallensköld maintained that the
western versions of the tale of Florence were derived from narratives found in
4 Mussafia, “Uber eine Italienische Metrische Darstellung der Crescentia Saga,” 589–692 and
A. Wallensköld, “Le Conte de La Femme Chaste convoitée par son Beau-frère,” 1–172.
5 Grundtvig, Nielsen, and Olrik, eds. Gamle Folkeviser, 1. 195, 3. 782, 4. 730; S. Stefanovic, “Die
Crescentia-Florence Sage,” 461–557; Karl, “Florence de Rome et la Vie de Deux Saints de
Hongrie,” 163–80.
6 There are two manuscripts which present the chanson of Florence de Rome in its entirety: MS
Nouv. acquis franç. 4192 of the Bibliothèque Nationale, belonging to the end of the thirteenth or
beginning of the fourteenth century, and a late thirteenth-century manuscript owned by the d’Arcy
Hutton estate. There is also a badly mutilated fragment of the chanson, Lansdowne 362, ff. 75–7,
77 of the British Library. Besides these three manuscripts, there are four other redactions of the
story about Florence of Rome: an early fourteenth-century Dit de Flourence de Rome in quatrains
of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Notre Dame 198); MS 24384 of the fond français of the
Bibliothèque Nationale which contains a long fifteenth-century version of Florence de Rome in
alexandrines; a Spanish prose version, based on a late fourteenth-century manuscript in the
Biblioteca Escorial; and the fifteenth-century unique Middle English version, MS Cambridge Ff.
2.38. As for printed texts, apart from my edition of the Middle English Le Bone Florence of Rome,
other critical editions include Dit de Flourence de Rome, ed. Achille Jubinal; Florence de Rome:
Chanson D’Aventure du Premier Quart du 13e Siècle, ed. A. Wallensköld; “Cuento Muy Famoso
del Enperador Ottas de Roma,” ed. Amador de los Ríos.
7 Lillian H. Hornstein, “Eustace-Constance-Florence-Griselda Legends,” 1. 278.
112
three extant Oriental tale collections – the Touti-Nameh, the Thousand and
One Nights, and the Thousand and One Days – the lost antecedent of which is
an ancient Sanskrit text (Wallensköld, “Le Conte de la Femme Chaste,”
9–21). The eastern version in the Touti-Nameh, or Parrot Book, was
composed by Nakhchabi about 1306. There was an older Touti-Nameh (prob-
ably of the twelfth century) which Nakhchabi modernized which was itself a
somewhat altered translation of an ancient Sanskrit storybook now imper-
fectly represented by the Soukasaptati or the Seventy Tales of a Parrot, a work
that contains most of Nakhchabi’s tales. This fact alone is a strong argument
in favor of an Oriental source; to my knowledge the relationship of the
Touti-Nameh to the Soukasaptati has never been challenged.
Wallensköld’s comparison of the western and eastern versions of the tale
of Florence was entirely limited to a consideration of the plot which he
analyzed as containing nine principal incidents: (1) the wooing of the heroine
by her brother-in-law, (2) the heroine’s rejection of him and his accusation of
adultery, (3) her condemnation, (4) her exile, (5) refuge in a household where
she is accused of murdering the child of her protector by a rejected,
revengeful, and murderous suitor, (6) the second exile, (7) her being sold to a
ship’s captain by the debtor she releases from the gallows, (8) her escape after
a storm wrecks the ship, (9) her reputation as a healer draws all her afflicted
persecutors together. Since in all the western versions the heroine’s husband
is a king or emperor and they all include the imprisonment of the
brother-in-law in a tower, Wallensköld concluded that the western branches
developed from a common European version which contained these two alter-
ations of the ancient eastern story. He considered the various versions of the
Gesta Romanorum and the Florence subgroup, all retaining the four persecu-
tors of the ancient eastern versions, the most closely related to them and
believed them to be representatives of a literary rather than oral tradition. The
absence of two persecutors (the thief rescued from the gallows and the ship’s
captain) in the Miracle of the Virgin, Crescentia, and Hildegard subgroups
led Wallensköld to conclude that they were products of the oral transmission
of the primitive western source wherein episodes had been dropped. The Latin
Miracle of the Virgin, while omitting the debtor and ship’s captain, retains
possible evidence of the captain (the sea voyage). Wallensköld, therefore,
advanced the notion that the oral versions of the primitive western source
ended finally in a written text which was probably some version of the Latin
Miracle.8
In 1865, Adolf Mussafia also argued for the priority of the Oriental
versions of the story, and, like Wallensköld, he concentrated on the episodes
8 An English version of the Miracle of the Virgin is anthologized by Boyd,The English Miracles of
the Virgin, 64–67 and the famous French poetic version of the Latin Miracle produced by Gautier
de Coinci sometime before 1222 appears as “De l’Emperirix qui Garda Sa Chastée par Moult
Temptacions” in Nouveau Recueil de Fabliaux et Contes Inédits, 2. 1–128. The Tale of
“Crescentia” appears in Die Kaiserchronik, ed. Edward Schroder, 289–314 and that of
“Hildegard” in Deutsche Sagen, ed. Brüder Grimm, 2. 83–5.
113
of the plot. Mussafia was convinced that the eastern stories were introduced
into the West in the form found in the story of Crescentia in the Kaiserchronik
and the various redactions of the Miracle of the Virgin. Since in these versions
episodes involving the debtor and the ship’s captain are missing, he hypothe-
sized that a second importation from the East produced the longer western
versions with four persecutors. Though he agreed with the theory of eastern
origins, Wallensköld largely discredited Mussafia’s view by observing that
the western versions contain an episode absent in all the Oriental tales: “le
beau-frère, à la suite de ses premiers efforts pour seduire l’héroine est enfermé
dans un lieu solitaire” (Wallensköld, ed., Florence de Rome, 2. 107–08). It is
unlikely that two waves of influence could have triggered the same innovation
in the European versions. Wallensköld maintained that the richest form of the
story, in terms of logically combined episodes, was found among the Persian
and Arabic versions and that the longer western versions of the tale of Flor-
ence derived from them.9 Besides the reasons he advanced, there is, as I
argued in the introduction to my edition of one of the seven Florence manu-
scripts, the Middle English, Le Bone Florence of Rome, evidence of their
close relationship in the emphasis they all place on the idea of justice, a matter
to which I shall return later (Heffernan, ed., Le Bone Florence, 12–16).
A considerable stumbling block in the argument for the priority of the
Oriental versions of the tale, however, is the lateness of the extant eastern
manuscripts containing the tale of the chaste wife – the earliest dates to the
fourteenth century.10 Until earlier manuscripts containing the tale appear,
9 Three scholars argued for European origins. Svend Grundtvig regarded le conte de la femme
chaste convoitée par son beau-frère as closely related to stories which actually fall within the more
general cycle of tales about innocent persecuted women. He concluded that the Danish ballad
Ravengaard og Memering represented the oldest version of the Florence story. The Scandinavian
ballad, however, is actually related to the English Sir Aldingar (Grundtvig, Nielson, and Olrik,
Gamle Folkeviser, 1. 195; 3. 782; 4. 730). S. Stefanovic also defended the idea of Germanic
origins (S. Stefanovic, “Die Crescentia-Florence Sage,” 461–557). According to him, the episode
of the brother-in-law’s treachery has its prototype in the Old English poem, The Wife’s Complaint,
and argued that the story, having long existed as a popular legend, gave birth to the legend of
Hildegard. By a combination of the story with others in which the heroine is accused of murdering
an infant by a rejected suitor (notably the tale of the incestuous father), a new story was produced
with two persecutors. Crescentia represents the oldest version of this stage. The Miracle of the
Virgin, which in its typical form involves only two persecutors, was seen by Stefanovic as a later
development of the Crescentia story, resulting from the cult of the Virgin. As for the versions
represented by the Gesta Romanorum and the Florence subgroup, he regarded them as later ampli-
fications, influenced by the Oriental versions. If the Old English poem – the crux of Stefanovic’s
theory – contained the characteristic details of the first episode and the scene of reconciliation
which typify the conte de la femme chaste convoitée par son beau-frère, it would be easier to
accept its seniority. The last theory which supported European origins was that of Louis Karl. He
attributed the appearance of Hungary in the European divisions of the story – the Gesta, the Flor-
ence subgroup, and the Miracle – to the influence of St. Elizabeth of Hungary (d. 1231). Karl
pointed out that the basic outlines of the saint’s life were similar to the pattern of Florence’s perse-
cution, exile, saintliness, and fame as a healer (“Florence de Rome,” 163–80). None of the versions
dating before the second quarter of the thirteenth century, however, mentions Hungary.
10 The earliest extant version, the Persian Touti-Nameh (1330) of Nakhchabi derives from a portion
of an earlier Touti-Nameh which was a twelfth-century translation of a Sanskrit original. There is a
Turkish version of the primitive Touti-Nameh dating from the beginning of the fifteenth century in
114
Wallensköld’s argument for transmission East to West occurring in the

eleventh-century cannot be conclusive because it rests, in the end, on what is
anterior and lost. There is a need for vigorous pursuit of manuscripts of such
texts as the Tuti-Nameh, the Thousand and One Nights, and the Thousand and
One Days and for an exchange of scholarship between eastern and western
scholars. Until such discoveries are made and until critical editions and trans-
lations are available, scholarship is stuck with a problem as impossible of
solution as that of the proverbial chicken and egg.
Transmission: Where and When
While we may have gone as far as we can with arguments about origins until
earlier manuscripts lend weight to speculation about the priority of eastern
versions, there are fruitful questions that can be explored about what we have:
(1) Where and when could the transmission of the tale of the chaste wife
occur? – for whether East influenced West, or vice versa, meet they did; (2)
What does the tale mean for the East? For the West?
It is well known that the Arabs, seated in North Africa for some time, made
their way into Spain about the beginning of the eighth century. Here – if
anywhere, an early eastern tale was going to enter the West – transmission
could have occured. And, indeed, one of the extant tales of Florence is a
fifteenth-century Spanish prose version, the manuscript of which is about as
old as most of the extant eastern manuscripts containing the tale of the chaste
wife (“Cuento Muy Famoso” in Historia Crítica de la Literatura Española, 5.
391–468). A prerequisite for the transmission of tales is that the language of
origin be understood by the borrower. A passage from Du Cange indicates
that some Spaniards actively learned Arabic after the Moorish invasions.
Because the passage is so apt and also so unfamiliar, I quote it in full:
The same thing that the anonymous writer whom I praised above says about
the Latin language spoken barbarically in our Gaul before the times of
Charlemagne is by Alvarus affirmed of Spain after the invasion of the
Saracens: there, following the neglect of sacred scriptures and their
commentaries, the Christians who survived devoted themselves to
expounding the books of the Arabs and Chaldaeans and were notable for
their refined erudition and outstanding for their eloquence in Arabic, but
ignorant of the beauties of the ecclesiastical writings and the rivers of
paradise flowing from them, and, in fact, contemptuous of them. They did
not know their own law and paid no attention to their own language, Latin,
so that out of the whole society of believers in Christ there could scarcely be
found one in a thousand men who could correctly write the salutation of a
letter to his brother while at the same time there could be found a numberless
which the tale is called the “Tale of Merhuma” (In Tuti-Nameh, ed. George Rosen, 1. 89–108;
Xavier Marmier, ed. and trans., Contes Populaires de differents Pays, 165–77).
115
horde who could learnedly explain the formalities of Chaldaean words. This
certainly abundantly confirms what we said above. . . . We have, however,
from all this sufficiently demonstrated how many Arabic words were one
after the other introduced into Spain.11
Certainly within the context of troubadour poetry, many scholars are

convinced that there was interaction between Romance and Arabic cultures,
especially in northern Spain and Provence.
Sixty years ago, for example, the Spanish Arabist, Julian Ribera, pointed
out that the root of troubadour, “trobar,” is a derivative of Arabic taraba,
meaning “to sing” (Menocal, xi). And when, in 1948, Samuel Stern discov-
ered lyric poems in a Romance vernacular – Mozarabic – some scholars
thought they expressed something like courtly love (Stern, 204–30). More
recently, Michael Sells has pointed to courtly love as a feature of the poetry of
Ibn ZaydÃn (d. 1070), an Andalusian poet, born in Córdoba. A lyric which
Sells translates from the Arabic certainly contains the familiar features of that
medieval love called “courtly”: amorous longing, fear of death, sorrow,
weight loss, insomnia, sighing, changed aspect, etc.:
In desiring you, I play my destiny away,
in loving you I worship.
Wishings of passion, save me!
At my back is death’s shade.
Keep the oath that I, by God,
won’t be the one to betray.
Console a mournful lover,
sorrow thinned away,
His nights sickness, sighs,
worry, and care.
Love wasted him and he became
too thin to see.
He became, for desires, the prey.
From him, all eyes were pulled away. (Sells, 128–29)
11 Charles du Fresne Du Cange, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinatis, vol. 1, Praefatio, 32, 31.
The Latin reads: “Quod vero supra laudatus Scriptor anonymus de Galliae nostrae in Lingua Latina
barbarie ante Caroli M. tempora, idem de Hispania post Saracenorum irruptionem testatur
Alvarus: ubi neglectis et posthabitis Scripturis Sanctis earumque sacris interpretibus, quotquot
supererant Christiani, Arabum Chaldaeorumque libris evolvendis incumbebant, gentilitia
eruditione praeclari, Arabico eloquio sublimati, Ecclesiasticam pulchritudinem ignorantes, et
Ecclesiae flumina de Paradiso manantia, quasi vilissima contemnentia, legem suam nesciebant, et
linguam propriam non advertebant Latini, ita ut ex omni christi Collegio VIX inveniretur unus in
milleno hominum genere, qui salutatorias fratri posset rationaliter dirigere literas, cum
reperitentur absque numero multiplices turboe, qui erudite Chaldaicas verborum explicarent
pompas. Quod quidem abunde firmat . . . supra diximus. Sed et inde satis arguimus unde tot voces
Arabicae in Hispanam, subinde sese intulerunt.”
116
Though textual evidence of vernacular love poetry in a Romance language

tied to Arabic tradition is compelling and there is much circumstantial
evidence for the Arabic origins of courtly love, or, at least, cross-cultural in-
fluence, scholars are by no means unanimous in the belief that there is a
significant Arabic background behind the troubadours of southern France. A
typical reluctant acceptance is this tempered comment by Marshall G. S.
Hodgson, “the romantic poetic tradition of the troubadours seems to have
depended directly on the somewhat prior corresponding tradition of
Islamicate Spain; but this went back ultimately to older Hellenistic traditions,
long since partly echoed in Latin, and seems to have received its immediate
forms from local romance tendencies common to Spain and Gaul” (Hodgson,
363). Moslem Spain reached its zenith in A.D. 929 when the Arab-Syrian
dynasty of the Umayyads made its seat in Córdoba and dominated all of North
Africa, Granada, and Seville (Daniel-Rops, 2. 235).
One Thousand and One Nights
It seems to me that the One Thousand and One Nights might have contained
the lost primitive Indian version of the chaste wife story which Wallensköld
maintained had spawned all the oriental versions of the narrative from which
he traces the descent to, first, the occidental versions found in the Gesta
Romanorum and the closely related French, English, and Spanish tales of
Florence, and, latterly, to those of the Miracle of the Virgin from which derive
similarly simplified stories of Crescentia and Hildegarde. The earliest records
of the existence of the likely first stage of the One Thousand and One Nights
date to the same period as the height of Moorish power in Spain: the first
known references to the work are found in the writings of tenth-century his-
torians. J. von Hammer Purgstall drew attention to a passage from Mas’udi’s
Golden Meadows, written in A.D. 943, which deals briefly with the Arabian
Nights. He mentions stories current among old Arabs which he compares with
“the books which have reached us in translations from Persian, Indian, and
Greek, such as the book of Hezar Afsane, a title which, translated from
Persian into Arabic, means ‘the thousand tales’ ” (Goeje, 26. 883). Von
Hammer also drew attention to al-Fihrist (A.D. 987) which mentions Hazar
Afsane and sums up the plot of the frame story, so familiar from the Thousand
and One Nights:
The ancient Persians were the first to invent tales and make books of them,
and some of their tales were put in the mouths of animals. The Ashghanians,
or third dynasty of Persian kings, and after them the Sasanians, had a special
part in the development of this literature, which found Arabic translators,
and was taken up by accomplished Arabic literati, who edited and imitated
it. The earliest book of the kind was the Hezar afsane or Thousand Tales,
which had the following origin. A certain Persian king was accustomed to
kill his wives on the morning after the consummation of the marriage. But
117
once he married a clever princess called Sharazad, who spent the marriage
night in telling a story which in the morning reached a point so interesting
that the king spared her, and asked next night for a sequel. This went on for a
thousand nights. (Goeje)
If this tenth-century, lost Persian collection was the forerunner of the Arabian
Nights, and a version of the unspecified primitive Indian source, lost in the
mists of time that Wallensköld supposes, might it have contained not just the
recognizable frame of the Arabian Nights with which we are familiar, but the
chaste wife story as well of which there are three versions in the Thousand
and One Nights?
The possibility is certainly held out by the resolution of the situation in the
frame story as we have it in the Conclusion to the Arabian Nights Entertain-
ments that Richard Burton translates as follows:
“O King of the Age, these are thy children and I crave that thou release me
from the doom of death as a dole to these infants; for, an thou kill me, they
will become motherless and will find none among women to rear them as
they should be reared.” When the king heard this, he wept and straining the
boys to his bosom said, “By Allah, O Shahrazad, I pardoned thee before the
coming of these children, for that I found thee chaste, pure, ingenuous, and
pious!” (Burton, 8. 51)
It takes Shahrazad three years of daily storytelling and her having given birth
to the King’s three sons, before she succeeds in renewing his trust in women.
She represents, in the frame of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, the wise,
pious woman who stands as a foil to the frivolous, unfaithful wives of the king
and his brother. In other words, she is like the type of “the chaste wife” who,
appearing in an enframed story, fits thematically, like Shahrazad, “by
contrast” into the frame situation of Shahrayar who has lost his faith in
women. Comparison of the various extant manuscripts reveals a similar frame
story in all, but considerable variation in the stories enframed and their order
of appearance.12
It might be useful here to summarize the frame situation. The first wife of
Shahrayar was found in bed with a black slave; not only has his wife betrayed
him, but the same thing happens to his brother, King Shahzeman. Later on,
when the two kings make a voyage, they have an experience which inverts the
12 Of the editions I have been able to consult, “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” is not found in
the editions by Galland, Scott, “Breslau text,” “Calcutta text,” Haddawy but is found in vol. 3
Trebutien, “Bulacq text,” Lane (The Thousand and One Nights, 3 vols.), “Mac. text,” vol. 5 Payne,
vol. 5 Burton; “The Adventures of the Cauzee, his Wife” is not found in Galland, “Breslau text,”
Habicht, “Mac. text,” “Calcutta text,” Lane, Trebutien, “Bulacq text,” Payne, Burton, Haddawy
but is found in vol. 6 Scott; “The Tale of the Pious Woman Accused of Lewdness” is not found in
Galland, Scott, Trebutien, “Bulacq text,” Lane, Habicht, “Mac. text,” “Calcutta text,” Haddawy
but is found in vol. 1 Burton, vol. 2 Payne. The recent translation by Haddawy is based on the text
of the fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript edited by Muhsin Mahdi (Alf Layla wa Layla [Leiden,
1984]).
118
opening events of the frame: they have intercourse with a young woman
whom a powerful Jinny believes to be carefully locked up (whereas, earlier in
the frame, the wives of the two brother kings managed illicit affairs despite
the tight security of the royal palace). King Shahrayar, since his betrayal,
devotes his nights to “one night stands” with local virgins who are executed in
the morning as insurance against his ever being betrayed by a woman again.
Finally, the only virgin left is the daughter of the king’s executioner who
volunteers herself as a means of restoring the king’s faith and of protecting the
lives of the women of the realm. She accomplishes this feat by telling stories
so enthralling that they keep the king on the edge of his bed, so to speak. By
leaving her tale unfinished each night, she manages to stay alive the next night
so as to allow the king to hear the story’s continuation. This device goes on for
three years, until the king’s trust in womankind is restored.
The story type of the “femme chaste convoitée pour son beau-frère” would
certainly have thematic relevance in a collection of eastern tales so framed,
and it is tantalizing to think that if the frame story existed as early as the ninth
century, so might have the eastern versions of the chaste wife story. It may,
indeed, have been contained in a lost primitive Indian collection from which
all eastern versions of this tale derived, as Wallensköld theorized. As for
transmission, it might well have travelled into Arabic Spain as early as the
beginning of the tenth century and from there to other parts of the West.
Wallensköld’s hypothesis that the longer western versions of the tale of the
chaste wife – the various versions of the Gesta Romanorum and the Florence
subgroup, all retaining the four persecutors of the eastern versions – together
with the Miracle of the Virgin subgroup, among the shorter versions, are most
closely related to the oriental versions is, I think, correct. Besides the reasons
the German scholar advanced, there is evidence of their close relationship in
the very heavy stress they all place on the idea of justice – an emphasis not
found in the Hildegard and Crescentia subgroup. Some of what follows
repeats and considerably expands ideas first put forth in the introduction to
my edition of the Middle English romance of Le Bone Florence of Rome
(Heffernan, ed., 12–16).
Justice-Piety Motif
Not only is there the implicit justice of the concluding vindication episode in
the eastern versions, together with explicit references to the justice of Allah,
but there are also reinforcing details related to the idea of justice: (1) all of
them contain a scene in which the brother-in-law falsely charges the heroine
with adultery and brings her before a court of law; (2) the husband in the three
versions of the story contained in the Thousand and One Nights is actually, by
profession, a judge. He does not act judicially as judge or prosecutor in the
story, but, in “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife,” the husband is character-
ized as a pious man (Burton, A Plain and Literal Translation, 4. 206–09). In
119
fact, in this tale he leaves his wife in order to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
There is evidence in the placement of the tale within The Thousand and One
Nights, as we know it, that the idea of piety had civil and domestic ramifica-
tions for the East. In R. F. Burton’s translation of the Thousand and One
Nights, the tales that precede “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” are two,
both told on the 464th night: “Iskandar Zu Al-Karnayn and a Certain Tribe of
Poor Folk” and “The Righteousness of King Anushirwan.”13 In the first,
Iskandar comes to a poor town where folk own nothing and dig their graves
against the doors of their homes for, as their king tells Iskandar, “They may be
the prospective of our eye-glances; so we may look on them and ever renew
talk and thought of death, neither forget the world to come . . .” (4. 203). The
king then shows Ishkandar two skulls, one belonging to a tyrant now abiding
in fire, the other, that of a just king who Allah lodged in his garden. The king
asks Iskandar which sort he is and sends him on his way. Following this tale,
on the same night, the second, about King Anushirwan is told. Again, there is
a just king. He feigns illness and tells his people the leaches have prescribed
as cure a mud brick cast off from some ruin. When the people go out to search
for one and return, unable to find a brick as there are no ruins in the realm, the
king is content because “the affairs of the reign are best-conditioned and its
ordinance is excellent” (4. 205). After these two tales, comes the 465th night
on which the tale of “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” is recounted. But
before the tale begins, there is a lead-in which links it to the previous tale of
the Just King; Shahrazad says to the King of the frame,
“Religion dependeth on the King, the King on the troops, the troops on the
treasury, the treasury on the populousness of the country, and its prosperity
on the justice (emphasis mine) done to the lieges.” (4. 206)
She concludes by saying of subjects that “they love not a tyrant and cease not
to offer up successive prayers against him, so that the King hath no ease of his
kingdom and the vicissitudes of fortune speedily bring him to destruction.
And they tell a tale concerning ‘The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife’ ”
(4. 206). Following the telling of this tale, told on the 466th night, comes that
of “The Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child,” a tale about a woman who no
sooner gives birth to a son, after being swept ashore following a shipwreck,
than a sailor attempts to rape her and throws her baby into the sea (4. 209–12).
She gets justice from Allah, however. Immediately after she prays, Allah
sends a sea monster to devour the sailor, and her son is miraculously restored
to her by sailors who have rescued him. The tale concludes with verse begin-
ning,
13 Burton, 4. 203–05; 4. 205. References to these texts as well as to “The Jewish Kazi and His Pious
Wife” and “The Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child” will appear within parentheses in the body
of my chapter.
120
How many boons conceals the Deity, Eluding human sight in mystery:/ How
many graces come on heels of stresses, and fill the burning heart with
jubilee. (4. 212)
In the context of the hypothetical Sanskrit origin of the chaste wife tale, it is of
interest that Mia Gerhardt, who wrote the first full-length literary study of the
Thousand and One Nights, points out that, while the few pious tales contained
in the collection seem to have Jewish sources, none has been found for the tale
about the Jewish judge and his pious wife; moreover, in its appearance as the
Story of Repsima in the Thousand and One Days, she observes that “it also
occurs without any Jewish connotations.”14 This eastern version of the chaste
wife tale, however, is notable for underscoring the justice motif: Repsima is
taken before a court by her brother-in-law, Revendeh; when, later in the tale,
she is falsely charged with having murdered the child of one of her rescuers
and he decides to exile her from his home rather than having her killed,
Repsima extolls his sense of justice at great length (Petis de la Croix, 2. 221);
and finally, she is made queen of the region she floats to after a shipwreck and
it is said that “She selected viziers as upright as they were enlightened, and
she took particular care to render justice . . .” (2. 230).
The anonymous author of Le Bone Florence of Rome likewise lays partic-
ular emphasis on the idea of God’s justice, which punishes the wicked and
preserves the faithful. This is particularly evident in the miracles by means of
which God intervenes to save the heroine. In referring to his source, the poet
says at one point:
The boke seyþ God þat vs boght
Many myrakyls for hur he wroght
Many a oon and thyckfolde. (871–73)
The story reaches a climax when all four men who have injured Florence are
stricken with disease and come to the monastery where she lives to be healed.
Their public confession of their attempts to assault Florence is still another
manifestation of the justice of God, and the realistic description of their
painful symptoms (2020 ff.) stresses the contrast between reward and punish-
ment. The poem concludes with the idea that God always metes out justice
appropriately to the good and the wicked:
For y schulde men and women als
Them bethynke or þey be false
Hyt makyth so fowle an ende
Be hyt neuyr so slylye caste
Ȣyt hyt schamy þe maystyr at þe laste
In what londe þat euyr þey lende
In meene be the iiij fekyll
14 See also J. Perles, “Rabbinische Agadas in 1001 Nacht,” 123–24.
121
That harmed feyre Florence so mykyll

The trewest that men kende. (2176–84)
There are similar passages in the Spanish and French versions.

The section of the French chanson which begins with the rubric, Piété de
Florence, makes clear that Florence’s piété consists in giving each man his
due. There is a certain justice in the balance of the action in which Florence
heals only after having elicited a confession from each of her persecutors who
express remorse for their past wrongs. The connection between piety and
justice, as we shall see in a moment, is consistent with the medieval church’s
classification of piety as a part of justice.
Like the Florence subgroup, the Gesta Romanorum contains a justice
motif. In a “Moral” appended to the conclusion of tale 249 of the Latin Gesta
(“De Octaviano Qui Super Omnia Uxorem Dilexit”) an allegorical equation is
set up – the emperor = Jesus Christ = Judge:
The Emperor is our master Jesus Christ. The Empress is the soul which was
entrusted to his brother, Mankind. But alas the Flesh so strongly enticed the
soul to sin that it could not rest. What was to be done? Obviously to
incarcerate the Flesh by way of penance. But Holy Church recounts to us
reports that our emperor is to come out of the Holy Land on the day of
Judgement. . . .15
Evidence of the justice motif in the versions of the Miracle is slighter,

perhaps because the narrative is so brief. It is particularly noteworthy that in
Etienne de Bourbon’s collection of exempla the story appears under the
heading, “Pietas.” The Greek term for pietas is eusebeia and was used by the
Greek philosophers, especially Plato, and by the Greek Fathers of the Church
in the sense of respect for the gods (or God) and one’s parents (Plato, 2. 497.
615c: Clement of Rome, 1. 8 [ch. 11], 1. 13 [ch. 32]). Among the Roman
authors, Vergil and Cicero stand out for the frequency of use of the noun,
pietas, or the adjective, pius. Vergil used the noun twenty-two times in the
Aeneid where it almost invariably has the sense of the Greek eusebeia. Cicero
formulated a definition of the word which embraced the main traditions of the
term and made them comprehensive and more specific: “This is pietas: to
fulfill one’s duty and conscientious service towards our own flesh and blood
and those having the interests of our country at heart.”16 In the Middle Ages
Thomas Aquinas, drawing on Cicero, explained pietas more fully as a specific
form of the virtue of justice:
Cicero classifies piety as a part of justice. . . . What makes any virtue to be
specific is that its relationship to its objective is based on some specific
15 Translated from Gesta Romanorum, ed. Hermann Oesterly, 652.

16 Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. The words are quoted by Aquinas from the De
Inventione Rhetorica in his discussion of “Virtues of Justice in the Human Community” (vol. 41),
trans. T. C. O’Brien, II–ii, Q. 101, Art. I.
122
moral value in the objective. Since honouring a debt towards someone else is
a function of justice generally, a specific kind of justice arises wherever
there is a specific basis for indebtedness to any person. This is the case in
regard to anyone who, in the natural course of things, is a source of our life
and its development . . . piety is the response towards those sources. . . .
(Aquinas, II–ii, Q. 101, art. III)
In short, justice requires that one give every person what is due him. This is
probably the sense in which the thirteenth-century Dominican, Etienne de
Bourbon, understood the term as he used it in his collection of exempla.
It is no accident, in the light of these findings about the justice motif, that
Chaucer selected the Man of Law as narrator of the tale of Custance. Though
Custance does not belong to the tale type of the Chaste Wife, she is one of
Florence’s literary sisters. Before telling his tale about the working of Divine
Justice, the lawyer surveys Chaucer’s extant works in the Introduction to the
Man of Law’s Tale. The survey makes clear that one of Chaucer’s appeals to
the Man of Law as a storyteller is that he is moral: the poet’s Legend of Good
Women is about ladies true in loving and Chaucer, unlike Gower, did not write
about incest. The lawyer’s Custance has not merely the physical beauty of
Florence but mature moral seriousness:
In hire is heigh beautee, withoute pride,
Yowthe, withoute grenehede or folye;
To all hire werkes vertu is hir gyde;
Humblesse hath slayn in hire al tirannye.
She is mirour of alle curteisye;
Hir herte is verray chambre of hoolynesse,
Hir hand, ministre of fredom for almesse.
(Man of Law’s Tale, 162–68)
The lawyer’s Tale of Custance, like Le Bone Florence of Rome, is about

female faithfulness and its reward.
The learned clerk’s Tale of Patient Griselda (another literary sister of Flor-
ence) demonstrates that the domestic virtue of loving faithfulness embodied
in the Griselda permutation of this tale type has public consequences. In her
husband’s absence, the obedient, long-suffering wife proves to be an excellent
ruler:
. . . when that the cas required it,
The commune profit koude she redresse.
Ther nas discord, rancour, ne hevynesse
In al that land, that she ne koude apese,
And wisely brynge hem alle in reste and ese.
(Clerk’s Tale, 430–34)
Her nature, furthermore, reaches into the commonweal in another way;

namely, through her husband. As I have argued in another place, Griselda’s
passivity contains potent, catalytic force enabling her “to transform Walter’s
123
nature on a domestic level, and this, in turn, benefits the political sphere”
(Heffernan, “Tyranny and Commune Profit,” 335–36). A central problem of
the Clerk’s Tale is “how to make Walter, the lord and tyrant, more like
Griselda, the commoner and genius of commune profit” (Heffernan, 332).
That Walter has the potential to change is made evident at the beginning of the
tale, when he is said to meet his subjects with “pitee,” a quality that Chaucer
(Canterbury Tales, I, 465–70) considered essential in a ruler. The citizens
have come to urge him to marry and thus assure smoothe succession of lord-
ship. The domestic-public linkage here recalls how the placement of “The
Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife” within The Thousand and One Nights serves
to emphasize the civil and domestic ramifications of piety. Chaucer was fully
aware of the contemporary appeal of hagiographical romances about
wronged, beleaguered heroines. Not only did the popularity of the type con-
tinue well into the sixteenth century in English romance literature, but similar
tales appear in the other vernacular romance literatures of medieval and
Renaissance Europe as well as in eastern tale collections such as The Thou-
sand and One Nights and The Thousand and One Days.
124
Conclusion
Conclusion
T HE appearance of the Orient in medieval English romance – as exotic

setting (in the Squire’s Tale), as new territory for trade and conversion (in
Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale and Gower’s Tale of Constance), as realm of
sensuality (in Chaucer’s legends of Dido and Cleopatra and possibly even in
Floris and Blauncheflur), and, indeed, as the source and conduit of tales them-
selves (in Le Bone Florence of Rome and some elements of Chaucer’s
Squire’s Tale) – suggests that contact with strangers can become a powerful
motor for change in literature. The very rise of romance as a new genre in
medieval France, placed as it is in time after the East-West encounter of the
Second Crusade, is itself the most potent example of this. The appearance of
the ancient Greek novel is another.
The Question of the Ancient Greek Novel and the Arabs
What part, if any, may have been played by the ancient Greek novel in the
development of medieval romance literature remains problematic. Did the
earlier affect the latter genre? It is striking that the ancient Greek novel also
arose after the West encountered the East. The form appeared in the Helle-
nistic Period which began with Alexander’s conquest of the Orient and ended
when the last Hellenistic state – Egypt – was swallowed by the Roman
Empire. This new type of prose literature was produced in Greek-speaking
countries of the eastern Mediterranean by writers actually not Greek, but
North African or Near Eastern – people from such places as Pergamon,
Antioch, or Alexandria (Wolff, 2; Hägg, xi). Heliodorus (A.D. 220–250),
author of the Æthiopica (An Ethiopian Tale), is a prime instance of this
orientalizing period of Greek culture. The last lines of his novel describe him
as a Phoenician from Emesa who was a priest of Helios, the chief Ethiopian
diety:
Thus endeth the Aethiopian historie of Theagenes and Cariclia, the authour
where of is Heliodorus of Emesos a citie in Phoenicia, sonne of Theodosius,
which fetched his petigree from the Sunne.1
1 An Æthiopian History Written in Greek by Heliodorus, Englished by Thomas Underdowne, Anno

1587, Book X, p. 290.
125
To my knowledge there is no evidence of Arabic translations of ancient

Greek novels such as the Æthiopica or the Daphnis and Chloe of Longus
(3rd century A.D.), not even in medieval Sicily, where one might expect to
find them since, in antiquity and the early Middle Ages, Sicily had large popu-
lations of both Arabs and Greeks. Longus’s four-book pastoral romance about
two orphaned shepherds who discover erotic longing and Heliodorus’s
ten-book picaresque adventure about the white daughter of the black king and
queen of Ethiopia do not become known in the Latin West until the early
modern period.
Modern scholarship, however, draws a distinction between ancient long
prose novels like those by Longus and Heliodorus which have “a stable liter-
ary form” and a work like the History of Apollonius of Tyre, shaped with oral
and folk elements (Swain, 6). As a Latin romance of the fifth or sixth century,
Historia Apollonii regis Tyri is believed to be a revision of a third-century
original, presumed Greek.2 Almost every manuscript of this work, familiar all
over medieval Europe, represents a separate version, not one of which is
Arabic. It was first translated into English in England in the tenth or eleventh
centuries and is retold by Gower in the fourteenth century in his Confessio
Amantis. One is tempted to speculate as to whether or not the so-called novels
of ancient Greece would have affected Europe earlier had they been translated
into Arabic and then from Arabic into Latin along with scientific works in the
translation centers of Toledo, Sicily, and Salerno. As it is, works like the
episodic Æthiopica do not become influential in Europe until the Renaissance
(Achity, 367). After being translated into Latin and English in the sixteenth
century, Heliodorus’s Aethiopica became one of the models for Sidney’s
Arcadia.3
Apart from the literature of antiquity, one wonders how even a medieval
Greek work such as the Digenes Akritas might have come to the attention of
Chaucer, if, indeed, Metlitzski is right about this epic being an analogue of
Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale. Could the poet manage the Greek or would he have
2 See Alexander Riese, ed., Historia Appollonii regis Tyri and History of Apollonius of Tyre, ed.
Kortekas. Kortekas makes a convincing argument for a Greek original being composed in Syria
some time in the late second or early third century A.D. See also the discussion of sources and
analogues by Archibald in Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations,
27–44.
3 The Renaissance translations are Heliodori, Æthiopicae Historiae Libri decem, trans. S.
Warschewiczki (Basel, 1552) and An Aethiopian Historie, trans. T. Underdowne (London, 1569
(?)). See Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 333–35. There is some doubt about
the date of the first edition of Underdowne’s translation of Heliodorus’s novel; 1569 and 1577 are
both possible. The latter coincides with the time when Sidney is thought to have begun composing
the Arcadia. According to the Stationer’s Register, Transcript I. 388, Francis Coldocke had a
license to publish in 1569, but the “Atenae Oxonienses, I. 431–32, indicates that Underdowne’s
translation was printed by Francis Coldocke in 1577. Sidney’s Arcadia took several years to
complete and its restructuring as the New Arcadia was underway when the poet died in 1586 with
only two and a half books of five completed. The 1587 edition of Underdowne appeared too late
for Sidney to have seen.
126
Conclusion
needed to have access to an English or French translation? (There was none).

Chaucer’s Middle English translation of Boethius’s sixth-century Latin work,
The Consolation of Philosophy, was probably more reliant on a medieval
French translation than it was on the original Latin text.
Greek, Arab, and European Science
There were other worlds of learning apart from the realms of imagination that
moved westward. The recognition of extensive cultural contact between the
Islamic Middle East and Christian West calls for a closer examination of the
intertextual connections between Eastern and Western literature of the Middle
Ages, particularly in those European countries where Arabs had an early pres-
ence – not just southern France and Spain but also southern Italy and Sicily. It
is clear that real historical contact with the Moslem world opened up to the
West the discovery that the Arabs possessed a sophistication and richness of
learning that surpassed anything in the Latin West. But when centers of trans-
lation grew up in such places as Toledo, Sicily, and Salerno, translators
concentrated on the useful knowledge of science, philosophy, and medicine,
not belles lettres. In all but the latter field, therefore, the Arabs are recognized
as mediators of Greek and Byzantine learning; almost nothing is known about
any possible relation that might exist between Arabian tales and classical
Greek novels. The debt of medieval Islamic civilization to ancient Greece in
philosophy and science has long been recognized. Translations of ancient
Greek texts into Arabic transmitted Hellenistic thought to Islamic philoso-
phers and scientists. These Arabic works, translated into Latin, conveyed this
body of authorities to the Christian West.
Arabic medicine, as represented by such physicians as Rhazes (865–923),
Haly Abbas (d. 994) and Avicenna (980–1037), develops out of the Byzantine
compilers in whose work the thinking of the celebrated Greek physicians,
Hippocrates and Galen, survived. By the second half of the ninth century,
nearly all Galen’s works had been translated into Arabic. “It could not be
otherwise,” as Manfred Ullmann comments, “for, since the third century,
Galen’s medicine had been completely dominant in the east of the Hellenistic
world” (Ullmann, 10). The innovations of Arabic medicine, in turn, become
part of the literature of the Christian West through translations of Arabic into
Latin in the late Middle Ages by such translators as Constantine the African
and Gerard of Cremona.
Constantine the African (A.D. 1010–1087) translated the most important
Arabic medical writings that had appeared by the eleventh century. As a
member of the Benedictine community of Monte Cassino, translating
Greco-Arabic writings from Arabic into Latin, Constantine’s work over a
period of fifteen years makes him the major transmitter of Arabic medicine to
the West. He did not, however, translate the most famous work of the most
influential Arabic physician, Avicenna’s Canon (Qanun). A magisterial work
127
of five volumes, it was translated by Gerard of Cremona into Latin in 1187 at

Toledo.4 By the mid-thirteenth century, it had assumed an important place in
western medicine. The Canon was retranslated from Arabic into Latin by
Andrea Alpago (d. 1522) in the early modern period, by which time the work
had long been prominent as a textbook of medicine in European universities.
He was among the medical authorities known to Chaucer’s physician pilgrim
who had been university-educated and, therefore, a rarity among medieval
practitioners: a Doctour of Physik,
Wel knew he the olde Esculapius,
And Deyscorides, and eek Rufus,
Olde Ypocras, Haly, and Galyen,
Serapion, Razis, and Avycen, . . .
(General Prologue, The Canterbury Tales, lines 429–32)
The medical writing on melancholy, for instance, in western literature of the

late Middle Ages and early Renaissance owes a great debt to Avicenna whose
thinking on the subject is ultimately Galenic, as can be seen from the
following representative passage:
Unnatural melancholy . . . is like something burned down to ashes. . . . But
melancholy that is overflowing is another one that is ashes of bile and its
conflagration. And it is bitter; between it and red bile that we recognize to
have been burned, there is this difference, that it is red bile into which these
ashes have been mixed. But this adds up to nothing but ashes separated by
themselves whose thin properties have been refined. Another case is that of
the ashes of phlegm and what was burned off from it. And if the phlegm was
very thin and watery its ashes will be salty, and if not will be drawn to
[acredinem] or [ponticitatem?]. Another kind is the ashes of blood and what
is burned off from it, and this is sharp, and verges on a bit of sweetness.5
Galen’s medicine had been based upon the humoral pathology of classical
Greece and Rome.
4 Avicenna, Liber Canonis De Medicinis, trans. Gerardo Carmonensi postea uero aba Andrea
Alpago and Liber Canonis De Medicinis, trans. Andreas Alpagus are owned by the New York
Academy of Medicine.
5 Avicenna, Liber Canonis, trans. Gerardo Carmonensi postea uero aba Andrea Alpago, 1. 1. 4. cap.
1. 14: “Melancholia uero non naturalis, . . . est ad modum adustionis & cineereitatis. . . . Melan-
cholia aute quae est superflues, alia est quae est cinis cholerae, & adustionis eius: & ipsa est amara
inter quam tamen & choleram rubeam qum adustam uo camus, existit differentia, quod ill est
cholera rubea, cui cinis hic fuit admistus: haec uero non est nisi cinis per se separatus, cuius subtile
fuit resolutum. Alia est quae cinis phlegmatis, & quod de eo adustum fuit: & si phlegma ualde
subtile & aquosum fuerit, eius cinis erit salsus: & sinon, trahit ad acredinem aut ponticitatem. Alia
est quae est cinis sanguinis, & haec quidum est salsa, ad paucum trahens dulcedinem.” For more on
the subject of melancholy in medicine and literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance see my
The Melancholy Muse: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Early Medicine.
128
Conclusion
Petrus Alfonsi: Science and Storytelling
One of the most important translators who transmitted Arabic science to the
Latin West was the twelfth-century teacher-writer, Petrus Alfonsi, an
emigrant from Moslem Spain who brought Arabic texts with him to Aragon,
England, and France. In 1116, Alfonsi translated and adapted a series of astro-
nomical tables from Al-Khwarizmi’s Zij Al-Sindhind from Arabic into Latin.6
This work combined Ptolemaic and Hindu elements and was the best known
work of Sindhin astronomy. Alfonsi’s translation into Latin introduced a new
concept of planetary motion to western astronomy (Tolan, 55). A convert to
Christianity from Judaism, Alfonsi’s attitude toward astrology, the predictive
aspect of astronomy, was quite different from that of Ghazzali; Alfonsi
considered astrology part of God’s grand design and defended it against its
detractors. He believed that stars were ordained by God to influence the
terrestrial world. Alfonsi had particular influence in England: his translation
of Al-Khwarizmi’s Zij al-Sindhind was reworked by Adelard of Bath, appar-
ently with Alfonsi’s help, and Walcher, Prior of Malvern, learned from
Alfonsi, who was his teacher, how to predict solar and lunar eclipses.
Alfonsi’s collection of moral fables, the Disciplina clericalis, reveals yet
another facet of Petrus Alfonsi, that of philosopher.7 Preachers in the Latin
West mined the work for exempla to be used in sermons, while writers of
imaginative literature – Boccaccio, especially – often indifferent to Alfonsi’s
didactic purpose, used the collection as a rich source of tales from which to
borrow. The Disciplina thus became yet another conduit for transmitting
stories from the East to the West.
In the Disciplina clericalis 34 stories are recounted by parents or teachers
through conversations with students who are given some opportunity to
answer back. The work is heavily laden with proverbs. A work of ethical
philosophy, its sources trace back to the wisdom literature of India, Egypt, and
the Fertile Crescent as well as to certain story cycles such as the Kalila wa
Dimna (Kalilah and Dimnah, in English), a sort of handbook for princes
which instructs through fables. Etienne de Bourbon, the thirteenth-century
Dominican friar, whose collection of exempla is mentioned in the previous
chapter, is one of those preachers, along with his friend, Jacques de Vitry, who
borrowed stories from the Disciplina for use in sermons. In Chaucer’s Canter-
bury Tales, in one of the tales the poet tells himself, the Tale of Melibee, it is
6 Petrus Alfonsi’s Tabulae Astronomicae may be read in Otto Neugebauer, ed., in The Astronomical
Tables of al-Khwarizmi, Translated with Commentaries of the Latin Version, ed. Suter. This work
contains Alfonsi’s Latin version of the Zij and English translation. It also contains an English
translation of Adelard of Bath’s version, edited by Suter.
7 Petrus Alfonsi, Disciplina Clericalis I: Lateinischer Text, eds. Hilka and Soderhjelm. This work is
translated by Joseph Ramon Jones and John Esten Keller as The Scholar’s Guide. See also
Disciplina Clericalis, ed. and trans. Hermes.
129
the aphoristic content rather than the fables of the Disciplina for which
Chaucer the pilgrim names Petrus Alfonsus. The Melibee is “a moral tale
vertuous” (line 940) in prose with which the poet obliges Harry Bailly, who
has cut off Chaucer’s preceding rhyming doggerel romance of Sir Thopas.
Now certain not to win the fictional competition of tale-telling, Chaucer
moves from romance to this work of advice on right living – his “litel tretys”
(line 956). The Tale of Melibee cites two proverbs attributed to Alfonsi:
“Piers Alfonce seith, ‘Whoso that dooth to thee oother good or harm, haste
thee not to quiten it, for in this wise thy freend wole abyde and thyn enemy
shal the lenger lyve in drede.’ ” (1053 ff.)
“And Peter Alfonce seith, ‘Make no felawshipe with thyne olde enemys, for
if thou do hem bountee, they wol perverten it into wikkednesse.’ ” (1189ff.)8
Boccaccio, on the other hand, mines the Disciplina for its stories. Alfonsi’s
Fable 14, for instance, becomes the fourth tale told on the seventh day of
storytelling in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Not only is Boccaccio indifferent to
the didactic intent of the Spaniard’s work, but he subverts the point of the tale
about the cuckolded husband locked out of his home by the adulterous wife
(whom he had imprisoned in the house). Boccaccio makes the wife the victim
instead of the husband who is characterized as both jealous and alcoholic.
8 See Disciplina Clericalis 25.15 (ex. 24) and D.C. 4.4 in Petrus Alphonsus, Disciplina clericalis,
ed. Hilka and Soderhjelm, Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae 38. 4–5 (1911) and their
Disciplina Clericalis III: Franzosische Versarbeitungen, Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae,
49.4 (1922).
130
Afterword
Afterword
S PENSER replaces Chaucer as the exemplary practitioner of the romance

genre for the sixteenth century in England. By this time European chivalry
was in decline and Protestant England felt a sense of separation from the Cath-
olic Mediterranean world, a world whose commercial dominance had become
destabilized by western overseas exploration and expansion. Though Spenser
admired his great English predecessor and borrowed from his Squire’s Tale, a
chief literary source in the Faerie Queene comes from the Mediterranean:
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516). Ariosto’s poem has three primary centers
of interest: the siege of Paris and the final defeat of the Saracen army, the
madness of Orlando, and the loves of Bradamante and Ruggiero.
Through the influence of Ariosto’s work the Orient makes an occasional
appearance in Spenser’s romance – for example, in Books Four (the Legend of
Friendship) and Five (the Legend of Justice).1 Spenser’s Aemylia, in the
episode of the Cave of Lust (Book 4, Canto 7) is modelled on the Saracen
woman, Isabella, in the robbers cave of Book 12 of Orlando Furioso. We find
in these parallel episodes the depiction of the male Saracen as sexual threat,
familiar from medieval romance. In Spenser, Aemylia is captured by the
“accursed Carle of hellish kind,/ The shame of men, and plague of woman-
kind” (Book 4, Canto 7, stanza 18) when she goes to keep a clandestine
rendezvous with her beloved squire of low degree. Aemylia’s father, a Lord,
would not agree to her choice of beloved, and so she had planned to run away
with her squire in secret. Unfortunately, she is found and intercepted by the
evil captor and carried off to the Cave of Lust where she is attended by an old
woman of whom Aemylia says:
For euer when he burnt in lustful fire,
She in my stead supplide his bestiall desire. (4. 7. 19)
By this deception, she is able to remain virginal. Ariosto’s Isabella, the

fifteen-year-old Saracen girl of the cave, is also attended by an old woman.
Isabella has been snatched away from the friend of her Christian beloved,
Zerbino, by robbers while she was on her way, accompanied and ostensibly
protected by his friend, to meet Zerbino in secret. Soon after the Siege of Paris
1 This is unsurprising. As C. S. Lewis observed long ago in The Allegory of Love, “The English poet
follows the Italian as closely as Virgil followed Homer” and Spenser’s source for innumerable
episodes “stares us in the face the moment we open our Ariosto” (305). Moreover, he pointed out
the fact that “below the surface fantasy” of Orlando Furioso is “the theme of the chanson de geste,
the ‘old world’s debate’ of cross and crescent” (309).
131
and after fighting two Saracen knights (one from Algeria, the other, from the
Sudan), Orlando continues his quest to find his beloved Angelica; he follows a
light that leads him instead to Isabella, captive in the robbers’ cave.
Likewise, the Pollente episode of Book 5, Canto 2 of the Faerie Queene
has a source in Ariosto: specifically, the complicated tale of the wooing of
Isabella – whose beloved Zerbino has died – by Rodomonte, the Saracen King
of Algiers, a tale which develops through Cantos 29, 31, and 35 of Orlando
Furioso. Loyal to her dead lover, Zerbino, Isabella finds Rodomonte’s atten-
tion unwelcome and tricks him into killing her. She makes him a gift of a
magic ointment that will make him invincible and demonstrates its power by
anointing herself and offering her neck to the King’s sword. When the
Saracen king cuts her neck with his sword, Isabella is decapitated. King
Rodomonte then erects a tomb to Isabella’s memory near his castle by a river
over which there is a treacherous bridge without rails. Rodomonte fights all
knights who intrude and hangs the armor of the defeated upon Isabella’s tomb.
Orlando, Flordelis, and Brandimart all approach the perilous passage and
manage to escape alive. In the case of the latter, however, who gets stuck in
the mud, the Saracen’s Lady intercedes on behalf of the Christian knight.
Finally, in Canto 35, the King of Algiers, Rodomonte, is defeated by the
Amazonian Christian heroine, Bradamante. Spenser simplifies the episode in
his adaptation: the number of conflicts is reduced from three to one, that of Sir
Artegall; the motivation of the Saracen, Pollente, is made simple robbery –
Ouer his Bridge, albee he rich or poore,
But he him makes his passage-penny pay
Else he doth hold him backe or beat away (5. 2. 6)
and the Saracen woman who came to the aid of the endangered Christian
knight, Brandimart, in Ariosto, is transformed into Lady Munera, Pollente’s
daughter of the rich coffers with her “golden hands and siluer feete” (5. 2. 10).
The effect is to shift emphasis to the moral basis of Spenser’s allegory of
Justice. Artegall deals fiercely with the tyrannical Pollente and his corrupt
daughter, for the tyranny of oppression must be met by the force of Justice.
Pollente’s bleeding head and Munera’s hands and feet are hung up as a lesson
to tyrants.2
In terms of an oriental thread running between Spenser and Ariosto, it
should be added that the female heroine, Britomart, at the center of Book 3 of
the Faerie Queene (the Legend of Chastity), is a figure of epic proportions
who recalls not only Ariosto’s Christian heroine, Bradamante, upon whom
she is modelled, but also his Saracen heroine, Marfisa, against whom
Bradamante is set. Marfisa has great physical endurance and her magical
2 See Heberle, “Pagans and Saracens in The Faerie Queene,” who argues that “pagan and saracen
characters . . . represent not only hellish and ethical and psychological foes but also the Roman
Catholic Church” (83). He finds this especially the case in Book 5, the book of Justice.
132
Afterword
armor keeps her from feeling fear or receiving injury. She has vowed not to
remove her armor until she has defeated three kings, among them, Charle-
magne. Spenser’s Britomart is likewise strong but as a womanly embodiment
of unwavering ideal love, rational and free. Spenser continually emphasizes
her boldness and courage: she goes on her quest for her lover, Artegall, “with
stedfast courage and stout hardiment” (3. 1. 19), she moves through the House
of Busirane “with bold steps” (3. 2. 50) and with “courage proud” (3. 12. 1–2).
By the seventeenth century, the romance genre appeared to have become
obsolete despite the effort of seventeenth-century Spenserians to continue
writing chivalrous romances. Ralph Kneveth wrote A Supplement to the Faery
Queene and Samuel Shephard produced The Fairy King; however, neither
romance was ever published. Milton planned an Arthurian epic, but never
wrote it. The genre never really died but was dispersed or incorporated into
other kinds of writing taking different forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries – travel literature and drama, most especially.
Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and
Discoueries of the English Nation, made by Sea or ouerland to the Remote
and farthest distant quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of
these 1600 yeres (1589, 1598–1600) can be thought of as an early modern
substitute for the chivalrous aventure of medieval romance.3 Hakluyt’s
compilation spans a period of time from the days of King Arthur to the
Spanish Armada and contains one hundred lengthy prose narratives by many
writers who together create a magisterial record of English overseas travel.
Some of the tales of travel are to the Ottoman Orient. Hakluyt includes an
account of the voyage of the Susan of London to Constantinople, for instance,
to bring William Harborne to Turkey as the first English Ambassador
(1582–88). This narrative contains a description of Harborne’s reception at
the Turkish Court which has as much attention to detail as might be found in a
romance:
These Bassas entertained us as followeth. First, they brought us into a hall,
there to stand on one side, and our Ambassadour and gentlemen on the other
side, who sate them downe on a bench couered with carpets, the
Ambassadour in the midst. On his left hande sate our gentlemen, and on his
right hand, the Turkes, next to the doore where their master goeth in and out:
the common sort of Turkes stayed in the Courtyard, not suffered to come
neere us. When our Ambassadour had sitten halfe an houre, the Bassas (who
sate by themselues in an inner small roome) sent for him; to whom the
Ambassadour and his gentlemen went: they all kissed his hand, and
presently returned (the Ambassadour onely excepted, who stayed there, and
a Turks chaus with him) with the Ambassadour and gentlemen went in also
3 Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations appeared first in 1589, then in a three-volume edition which
appeared in 1598–1600. A good recent general anthology of early modern English traveller’s tales
is Parker’s Early Modern Tales of Orient.
133
so many of our men as there were presents to carry in, but these neither
kissed his hand, nor tarried. (Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, 2. 169)4
The narrative includes not merely observations of diplomatic ceremony and
manners but also of Moslem temples of worship, one, in particular, built out
of a former Christian church:
. . . I went to visit the church of Santa Sophia, which was the chiefe church
when it was the Christians, and now is the chiefe see and church of primacie
of this Turke present: before I entred I was willed to put off my shoes, to the
end I should not prophane their church, I being a Christian. The pillers on
bothe sides of the church are very costly and rich, their pulpets seemely and
handsome, two are common to preach in, the third reserued onely for their
Paschall. The ground is couered with mats, and the walles hanged with
tapistry. They also haue Lamps also in their churches, one, in the middle of
the church, of exceeding greatnesse; and another in another part of the
church of cleane golde, or double gilded, full as bigge as a barrel. Round
about the church there is a gallery builded upon rich and stately pillers.
(Hakluyt, 2. 169)
Both of the passages above reflect the Pre-Empire Englishman’s reaction to a
Moslem culture – older, wealthier, and very different from his own. While
there may be a hint of European superiority, the English gentleman is mindful
of his manners as he tests the waters for trading prospects. Harborne was
responsible for the delicate negotiations that eventually led to the formation of
the Turkey Company.
By 1595, the commercial exchanges between England and the Turkish
Orient had advanced considerably. The progress can be seen in Richard
Wragge’s account of what followed upon the delivery of a gift by the Queen’s
Ambassador (by that time, Edward Barton) to Sultan Murad Khan, Emperor
of Turkey:
The ambassador thus betwixt two stood at the doore being led in, either of
them taking an arme, kissed his hand, and so backward with his face to the
Turke they brought him nigh unto the dore againe, where he stood untill they
had likewise done so with all the rest of his gentlemen. Which ended, the
ambassador, according as it is the custome when any present is deliuered,
made his three demaunds, such as he thought most expedient for her
maiesties honor, and the peaceable traffique of our nation into his
dominions: whereunto he answered in one word, Nolo, which is, in Turkish,
as much as, it shal be done. . . . As to our ambassador, he granted all his
demands and gave order that his daily allowance for his house, of mony,
flesh, wood, and haie, should be augmented with halfe as much more as it
had bene before. (Hakluyt, 2. 306)
The English position in the Turkish Orient had improved considerably from
that point in the mid-1580s, when William Harborne wrote to Richard Forster,
4 The text used is in the Rare Book Room of the New York Public Library.
134
Afterword
appointed first English Consul at Tripoli in Syria, “you are wisely to proceede
considering both French and Venetian will haue an enuious eye on you:
whome, if they perceiue wise and well aduised, they will feare to offer you
any iniurie. But if they shall perceiue any insufficiencie in you, they will not
omitte any occasion to harme you” (Hakluyt, 2. 172). By Richard Wragge’s
time, the English can hold their own even with the Venetian traders.
The Principal Navigations attest to early modern England’s continued
interest in foreign places and peoples, not just the trans-Atlantic New World
but the familiar old crusading world of the Near and Middle East, especially
the commercial world of the eastern Mediterranean. The incorporation of
Constantinople into Muslim Turkey in 1453 assured that Europeans would
have to maintain an interest in the “Turkish Orient.” Hakluyt’s narratives set
fire to many imaginations – Christopher Marlowe’s among them, as can be
seen in the words of his dying Tamburlaine. Near the end of Tamburlaine,
Part 2 (1590), the Scythian conqueror asks his sons for a map and then
speaks:
Here I began to march towards Persea,

Along Armenia and the Caspian sea,
And thence into Bythynia, when I tooke
The Turke and his great Empress prisoners,
Thence marcht I into Egypt and Arabia,
And here, not far from Alexandria,
Whereas the Terrene and the Red Sea meet,
Being distant lesse than ful a hundred leagues,
I meant to cut a channell to them both,
That men might quickly sail to India.
From thence to Nubia near Borno Lake,
And so along the Ethiopian sea,
Cutting the Tropic line of Capricorne,
I conquered all, as far as Zansibar. (2 Tamburlaine, 5. 3. 126–39)
Among Marlowe’s sources for his play about the Mongolian emperor Timur
(1336–1405) was the atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1584), of Ortelius,
whose maps of Asia and Africa provided the playwright with geographic
inspiration and mellifluous place names. Marlowe was intoxicated by the
exotic charms of eastern cities like Samarkand, Baghdad, and Babylon:
“ ‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’

Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ ”
(1 Tamburlaine, 2. 5. 50–54)
His chief source was a chapter in Fortescue’s Foreste (1571), an English

translation of Pedro Mexia’s Spanish life of Timur (published in Seville in
135
1543) and later translated into Italian, French, and English. Marlowe may also
have been acquainted with the Latin account of Petrus Perondinus, Magni
Tamerlanis Scytharum Imperatoris Vita (1553).
Marlowe makes it easy for us to recognize that this Mongol conqueror
came from an eastern culture that was far more advanced than any in the
medieval West of his day. He creates a Tamburlaine full of romantic yearning:
“Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous Architecture of the world:
And measure every wandering planets course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And alwaies moving as the restless Spheares,
Wils us to weare our selves, and never rest,
Untill we reach the ripest fruit of all” (1 Tamburlaine, 2. 7. 21–7)
Tamburlaine soliloquizes about the nature of beauty like a poet: “What is

beauty, saith my sufferings then?” (1 Tamburlaine, 5. 1. 160). He does not,
however, distinguish between the beauty of Zenocrate and the blood of war,
which is to him,
As great a grace and majesty . . .

As if a chaire of gold enamiled,
Enchac’d with Diamondes, Saphyres, Rubies
And fairest pearle of welthie India. (2 Tamburlaine, 3. 2. 118–21)
Another popular play on an eastern theme of the English Renaissance stage

came from a ruder pen, that of Thomas Preston: A Lamentable Tragedie
Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth, Containing The Life of Cambises, King of
Percia. Entered for publication in the Stationers’ Register in 1569, the play
won lasting favor. Numerous other plays about Oriental potentates, especially
the Turkish, attest to English interest in the distant East but they were not as
successful (i.e., The first part of the tragicall raigne of Selimus [1594],
William Alexander’s The Tragedy of Darius [1603], Fulke Greville’s
Mustapha [1608]).
The Elizabethan stage’s most enduring representations of the exotic
oriental Other are found, of course, in Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and
Cleopatra. Othello, at the beginning of the play to which the Moor gives his
name, is a frank and honest soldier, dedicated to a code of conduct; however,
abused because of his color. The first we hear of his marriage to Desdemona is
that the two of them together make the beast with two backs: the black ram
and the white ewe. It is with this degraded and bestial image of the Moor’s
lovemaking with his wife that a hate-filled Iago attempts to incite Roderigo to
move against Othello:
Even now, very now, an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise;
136
Afterword
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,

Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
(Othello, 1. 1. 88–91)
Iago’s description is a passionate and extreme distortion of what shortly turns

out to be the general perception of the other local Venetians – among them,
Brabantio, Desdemona’s father – that is, that Desdemona’s marriage to the
“lascivious” Moor is unnatural and perplexing. The idea of the sensual nature
of the Moor is continuous with views about the excesses of the East encoun-
tered in earlier romance literature.
By the end of the play, Othello himself, so maddened by the manipulations
of Iago that he is driven to murder his wife, concludes that he must be the
embodiment of the uncivilized and disordered – a Turk – whom it was an act
of wantonness in Desdemona to marry.5 In the last scene of the play he tells
Lodovico that he threw away a pearl “richer than all his tribe” (5. 2. 348) and
asks him to write down the story of how
in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
and smote him thus. (5. 2. 362–5)
Othello thus comes to see in himself the Turk he once punished. Feeling his
own crime is greater than that of the other traducer, Othello produces a hidden
dagger and kills himself. Shakespeare’s poetry throughout Othello draws on
the complexities of the cultural encounters in the eastern Mediterranean
which extended from the Middle Ages into the playwright’s day.
Another of Shakespeare’s soldiers is met in Antony, the Roman general of
Antony and Cleopatra. As early as Act 1, scene 1, he is presented as a martial
hero fallen from grace to become, in the words of the play’s opening:
. . . the bellows and the fan,
To cool a gypsy’s lust. (1. 1. 8–9)
The play’s first half concerns itself with Antony’s effort to free himself from
captivity to Egypt’s Queen, Cleopatra, and thus move from Egypt and its
excesses to Rome and his public responsibilities there. From the outset of the
play, Shakespeare shows Egypt to contain contradictory elements – vitality,
but also corruption. On the one hand, there is the fertility of Egypt implied in
the sexual fantasies of Cleopatra’s maid, Charmian, revealed to the sooth-
sayer:
5 On Othello’s racial difference and sensuality, see Traversi, 129–33, 140–42 and Ania Loomba,
chapter 4 (“Othello and the Racial Question”).
137
Charmian. Let me be married to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them

all. Let me have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry may do homage.
Find me to marry me with Octavius Caesar, and companion me with my
mistress. . . .
...
how many boys and wenches must I have?
Soothsayer. If every of your wishes had a womb,
And [fertile] every wish, a million. (1. 2. 25–39)
But on the other, there is the frustration which accompanies extravagant

desire in Egypt. This is embodied in the impotence of the eunuch Alexas who
is not only present from the scene’s beginning but is the first person to be
spoken of in the first line:
Lord Alexas, sweet Alexas, most any thing Alexas, almost absolute Alexas,
where’s the soothsayer that you prais’d so to th’ Queen? (1. 2. 1–4)
The Antony met later in this scene may be resolved – “These strong Egyptian
fetters I must break,/Or lose myself in dotage” (1. 2. 120–21); however,
Cleopatra, as described by Enobarbus, is an irresistible magnetic work of
art:
. . . her own person
It beggar’d all description: she did lie
In her pavilion – cloth of gold, of tissue –
O’er-picturing Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. (2. 2. 197–201)
This proves to be as true for the audience as for Antony. It is no wonder that
Robert Frank, in explaining what may disappoint in Chaucer’s Cleopatra,
writes, “Shakespeare’s seductive creation glides wantonly between Chaucer’s
page and our reading of it, and, glancing at her, we can see only that Chaucer
has denied her charms and made a failure of what we know can be a triumph”
(Frank, 37). By Act 2, scene 3, despite a marriage to Caesar’s sister, Octavia,
Antony’s attraction to Cleopatra fatally seals his fate:
I will to Egypt:
And though I make this marriage for my peace,
I’ the east my pleasure lies. (2. 3. 38–40)
After Antony’s first defeat at sea, he begins to count the cost, “. . . we have
kiss’d away/Kingdoms and provinces” (3. 9. 7–8). When defeat is final by Act
4, scene 12, Antony blames the magical charms of the Eastern queen: “O this
false soul of Egypt! this grave charm” (line 25) who “Like a right gipsy, hath
at fast and loose/Beguil’d me” (lines 28–29). Antony’s talk of charms recalls
Brabantio’s speculations about the enchantments and potions that Othello
must have used to win the love of his daughter, Desdemona.
138
Afterword
A notable reappearance of the Orient in an English romance narrative is

Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia (1759).
Eastern tales had become enormously popular in Europe with the publication
of Galland’s French translation of the Arabian Nights (1704), the first
printed text of the tales to appear in the West. Johnson, though, was known
not to be fond of fiction that sprang from what he called the “wild strain of
imagination” (The Rambler, No. 4, Saturday, March 31, 1750; Johnson, 68).
The choice of oriental setting appears to be ironic. When the Prince of
Abissinia is first mentioned, he is said to have grown weary of the Happy
Valley where,
the sons and daughters of Abissinia lived only to know the soft vicissitudes
of pleasure and repose, attended by all that were skilful to delight.
(Rasselas; Johnson, 610)
Rasselas has grown restless in the realization that, as he says, “I can discover
within me no power of perception which is not glutted with its proper
pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted” (Johnson, 611). Eager to escape
the confines of the Abysinnian palace, he seeks the help of the designer of the
complex engines which irrigate the palace gardens and operate the fans that
cool its apartments. Here Johnson seems to be toying with a cliche of oriental
tales: the harem garden. Rasselas requests that the mechanical wizard create
wings for flight with which the prince might flee. Suggesting the flying ebony
horse of the Arabic analogue of Adenès le Roi’s Cléomadès but less
successful, the inventor’s design meets an Icarus-like end:
In a year the wings were finished, and, on a morning appointed, the maker
furnished for flight on a little promontory: he waved his pinions a while to
gather air, then leaped from his stand, and in an instant dropped into the lake.
His wings, which were no use in the air, sustained him in the water, and the
prince drew him to land, half dead with terrour and vexation.
(Rasselas; Johnson, 620)
The intellectual play of Rasselas was not lost on Boswell. In 1759, he

observed that “This tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery” was like
Voltaire’s great satire, Candide, and wrote in his great biography: “I have
heard Johnson say, that if they had not been published so closely one after the
other that there was no time for imitation, it would have been in vain to deny
that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other”
(Boswell, 2. 16–17).
*
Nearly four hundred years earlier, Chaucer had created his own satire on
popular romances in the Tale of Sir Thopas. Like Christopher Marlowe, who
declared that his new play about Tamburlaine moved beyond the “jyggyng
vaines of riming mother wits/And such conceits as clownage keepes in pay”
139
(1 Tamburlaine, Prologue, 1–2) – Marlowe’s assessment of the poetic talents

of some of his fellow playwrights – Chaucer was confident that his achieve-
ments in the writing of romance narratives outstripped those of his contempo-
raries. He could with impunity, therefore, give the pilgrim Chaucer a romance
so awful to tell on the way to Canterbury that even the critical acumen of the
Host would be sufficient to judge its merit: “Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a
toord!” (Sir Thopas, 929). The pilgrim Chaucer imitated the diction, rhyme,
and meter of the tail-rhyme romances of his day and specifically referred to
Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton, Lybeaus Desconus, Horn Child, and
Ypotys (Sir Thopas, 897–900).
His appeal for attention,
Yet listeth, lordes, to my tale
Murier than the nightyngale,
For now I wol yow rowne
How sir Thopas . . . (Sir Thopas, 833–36)
echoes that found in one of the romances on the popular subject of the
encounter between Islam and Christianity, Bevis of Hampton –
Lordinges, herkneth to my tale,
Is merier than the nightingale,
That y schel singe;
Of a knight ich wol yow roune . . .
(The Romance of Sir Beues of Hamtoun, 1–4)
Chaucer also parodies the figure of the huge, threatening Saracen knight, a
commonplace in Middle English romance:
Til that ther cam a greet geaunt,
His name was sire Olifaunt,
A perilous man of dede.
He seyde, “Child, by Termagaunt!
But if thou prike out of myn haunt,
Anon I sle thy steede
With mace.” (Sir Thopas, 807–13)
The poet’s comic Sir Elephant (Olifaunt) is modelled on Sir Amourant in Guy
of Warwick and Sir Thopas’s swearing on Termagaunt, a supposed god of the
Saracens, is also paralleled in Guy and in Lybeaus Desconus.6 When some of
the more threatening aspects of the East-West encounter along with the
romances that depicted them could be parodied so broadly, it was a sure sign
that the subject and its appearance in romance had entered a period of transi-
6 Guy of Warwick, stanza 98, line 1; and stanza 121, line 2; stanza 126, line 7; Lybeaus Desconus,
line 1301. On Islam and idolatry, particularly its reflection in medieval poetry, see Daniel, Islam
and the West, 338.
140
Afterword
tion. While there was a continuity of interest in oriental themes, they began to
appear more in other literary genres – i.e., travel literature, drama, and eventu-
ally the early modern novel. Interest in romance literature as it was known in
the Middle Ages and early Renaissance was in decline and transforming itself
into something else.
141
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155
Index
Acre: the fall of (in 1291), 8 Thousand and One Nights, 117–19,
Adenès Le Rois: Cléomadès, 65–66 124; transmission, 115–17
Admetus, 46 Braddy, Haldeen, 66–67, 78–80
Aiken, Pauline, 49 Byron: Don Juan, 77; Manfred 77
Alceste of Thrace, 46 Byzantine Empire, 19
Alexander II (Pope), 6
Alighieri, Dante: Divine Comedy, 54 Cantare di Fiorio e Biancifiore, 94, 97, 99n
D’Amiens, Girard, 65 Carthage, 47, 56
Annales Regni Francorum, 39 Cassodorien, Queen, 14, the legend of 14n
Anne of Bohemia, 46 Chanson d’Antioch, 13
Apollonius of Tyre. See Gower; incest; Chanson de Florence de Rome, 87
History of Apollonius of Tyre chanson de geste, 12
Arabian Nights, 65, 66, 103. See The Chanson of Roland, 10
Thousand and One Nights Charlemagne romances, 10–11
Arabic medicine, 127–28 Chaucer, Geoffrey: imprint of crusades on
Archbishop Turpin, 11 place names, 8–9,
Archibald, Elizabeth, 93n, 107n employment in civil service, 25; The
Ariosto: Orlando Furioso, 77, 131–33 Book of the Duchess, 4, 6; House of
Arsinoe, 50 Fame, 56; The Legend of Good
Atiya, Aziz, 19, 22 Women, 2, 5, 24, 43–44, 45, 48, 59;
Audita tremendi. See Gregory VIII Cleopatra in, 49–56, Dido in,
Avicenna, 5, 127 56–62; The Seintes Legende of
Cupide, 44, 45; Troilus and
Bacon, Roger, 47 Criseyde, 4, 6, 45, 46, 77; The
Balan, 11 Canterbury Tales, 4, 6; The Clerk’s
Baldwin of Flanders, 7 Tale, 123–24; The General
Baldwin of Lorraine, 7 Prologue, 19, 44; the Doctor of
Beidler, Peter, 25 Phisik, 6, 128; The Knight’s Tale,
Benedict VIII, 6 59, 76–77; The Man of Law’s Tale,
Beowulf, 63 2, 4, 24–27, 29, 30–35, 59, 123,
Beues of Hamtoun, 15, 16, 140 Syria in 3–33, 42; The Man of
Bishop Willibald, 18 Law’s Epilogue, 26, 30, 40–41;
Blanche of Castile, 8, 65 Introduction, 34, 43–44, 45; See
Boccaccio, Giovanni: Decameron 5, 2: 23, incest; Tale of Melibee, 129–30; The
29, 35–40; Filocolo, 90–91, 98, 99n; Merchant’s Tale, 26, 59; The
De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning Shipman’s Tale, 26, 29; The
Famous Women), 49, 49n, Cleopatra in, Squire’s Tale, 2, 5, 26, 59, 62,
50–54, Dido in, 57, 61 63–82; the franklin interrupts, 72;
Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy: See incest; Sir Thopas, 4, 139;
Chaucer’s translation (Boece), 76–77, tail-rhyme in, 77, 140
127 church of the Holy Sepulcher, 17
Bohemond of Taranto, 7 Clanvowe, Sir John: The Two Ways, 9
Le Bone Florence of Rome, 2, 5, 23, 68, Cleopatra, 5, 45, 47, 138; in classical
79; the chaste wife (east and west), sources, 49–50; in The Inferno, 54–55
111–15; Constantinople in, 108–11; See Chaucer, Legend of Good Women;
justice and piety, 119–23; The Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
157
Index
Comnenus, Alexius (Byzantine emperor), The Fourth Crusade, 7, 21

6 Fourth Lateran Council, 92
Comnenus, Manuel (Byzantine emperor), Frank, Robert, 138
21 Frederick II, 7–8
Constance: tale of 23–24. See Gower Freud, Sigmund, 99, 102
Constantine the African, 5, 127 Friar, Kimon, 67
Constantinople, 8, 19; conquest of 21. See Fyler, John, 61
Le Bone Florence of Rome
Constantius’s basilica (Golgotha), 17 Galen, 128
Cooper, Helen, 24, 72 Generides, 63
Council of Lyons (1245), 8 Gerard of Cremona, 5
Council of Vienne, 17 Gerhardt, Mia, 78
courtly love, 116 Gesta Romanorum, 109, 122
Crónica de Flore y Blancaflor, 96–97 Gilbert, Jane, 86
Crusade of Damietta, 21 Gittes, Katherine Slater, 79
Crusades, 6–9 Goodman, Jennifer R., 63
crusading romances, 9–16 Gower, John: Apollonius of Tyre, 93–94;
La Cuba, 38 Tale of Constance, 29, 41–43
Gradeningo, Domenico, 21
Datini, Francesco, 51 Gradenigo, Giovanni, 21
David, Alfred, 25 Gradenigo, Guidoto, 21
Decameron. See Boccaccio Gradenigo, Jacopo, 21
Delany, Sheila, 48, 52 The Gradenigo of San Giovanni
De miseria. See Innocent III Confessore, 21
De Mulieribus Claris. See Boccaccio Gregory VII (Pope), 7, 9; Audita tremendi,
Dido, 5, 44, 47; the name, 56. See 7, 9
Chaucer, Legend of Good Women; Gregory IX (Pope), 8
Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris Grieve, Patricia, 96
Digenes Akritas, 67, 126 Guglielmo I (King of Sicily), 35
Dirum amaritudinis calicem. See Nicholas Guiscard, Robert, 7
IV Guy of Warwick, 140, 140n
The double, 99; and the incest theme, 100;
in Floris and Blauncheflur, 100–3 Hakluyt, Richard: The Principal
Duby, Georges, 4 Navigations, 133–35, 133n, 134n
Haly Abbas, 5, 127
Egypt, 47 Hanseatic League, 21
Eisenberg, Daniel, 4 Hattin: disaster at (in 1187), 9
Emare, 23–24 Hazar Afsane, 117–18
Heliodorus Æthiopica, 125–26, 126n
Ferdinand of Cerda, 65 La Historia de los enamorados Flores y
Ferrante, Joan, 46n Blancaflor, 94–96. See incest
Fierebras, 10 History of Apollonius of Tyre, 126
The Fifth Crusade, 7 The History of the Moneylender of
Filocolo. See Boccaccio Baghdad, 103. See The Thousand and
The First Crusade, 6 One Nights (The Steward’s Tale)
Fisher, John, 29 Homer: The Iliad, 88–89
Flemish Hansa of London, 21 Hornstein, Lillian, 84
Floire and Blaunceflor, 86, 92, 97; Hugh of Payns, 17
incestuous overtones in, 92 Huon of Bordeaux, 63
Floris and Blauncheflur, 2, 5; the garden
in, 105–06; pilgrimage in, 17; tower of Ibn ZaydÃn, 116
maidens in, 105. See incest, the double indulgences, 18
Floris et Lyriope, 86 incest, 74–75, 83; in Apollonius of Tyre,
Florus: Epitome of Roman History, 50 93–94; in Flores y Blancaaflor, 95–96;
158
Index
in Floris and Blauncheflur, 84–88, Middle English tail-rhyme romances, 12,

91–92; in Mabinogi, 100; in Man of Chaucer satirizes, 139–41
Law’s Tale, 85, 92–93; in medieval Mills, Maldwyn, 11
English romances, 93; in The Squire’s Milton, John: Il Penseroso, 64
Tale, 93. See the double Mocenigo, Jacoba (of Murano), 21
Innocent III, 7, 109; De miseria, 35 Morgan casket, 38, Plate 2 (p. 37)
Innocent IV (Pope), 8 Mussafia, Adolf, 113–14
Islam: western perceptions of 47
Newstead, Helaine, 3
Jerome, Saint, 17 Nicholas IV (Pope): Dirum amaritudinis
The Jewish Kazi and His Pious Wife. See calicem, 8
The Thousand and One Nights Nicolas of Lynn, 35
Johnston, Oliver, 86 Normans: in southern Italy, 20
Jones, H. S. V., 64–65, 65n
The Order of St. John, 18
Kalila wa Dimna, 129 Orient, 45; the term, 2, 49
Kamil, Malik al-, 8 “oriental,” 49, 56, 57
Kazantzakis: The Odyssey, a Modern oriental frame structure, 5, 78–80
Sequel, 67 orientalism, 47–48; in Chaucer, 48, in The
Keiser, George, 24 Squire’s Tale, 63–68. See Edward Said;
Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, 84 medieval orientalism
The King of Tars, 12, 23–24 Origo, Iris, 51
The Knights of Malta, 18 Otuel, 10
The Knights Templar, 17 Otuel and Roland, 10
Kolve, V. A., 24 Ovid, 57–58, 60; Heroides, 58, 60;
Metamorphoses, 4
Legenda Aurea, 46 Ovid moralisé, 4
Lewis, C. S., 73
Leyerle, John, 73 Panchatantra, 79
Libya, 47, 56 Patterson, Lee, 2
Lipari, 35, 38 Patient Griselda: tale of, 23. See Clerk’s
Lollards, 43 Tale
Longus: Daphnis and Chloe, 126 Partonope of Blois, 63
Louis, Saint, 8 Pearsall, Derek, 40
Louis VII (of France), 9 Petrus Alfonsi: Disciplina clericalis, 129;
Lull, Raymond, 17 in Chaucer, 129–30; in Boccaccio, 130
Lybeaus Desconus, 140, 140n Pilgrimage, 17–19
Lydgate, John: The Fall of Princes, 44 Pinault, David, 78
Lynch, Kathryn, 48, 68 Pliny: Natural History, 53
Poenitentialia, 17–18
Mabinogi. See incest poetry of interlace, 5, 63; in Beowulf, 73;
Machaut: Dit de la fonteinne amoreuse as European (in The Squire’s Tale),
Mandeville, John, 5, 18; Travels, 18–19 68–81; in thirteenth-century French
marguerite, 46 prose romances, 72–73
Marlowe, Christopher: Tamburlaine, 89; Pollard, A. W., 64
the orient in, 135–36 Polo, Marco, 5; Travels, 64
Mate-Gryssoun, 13 Pratt, Robert A., 29
Mecca, 19 Prince Edward of England: crusade to the
medieval orientalism, 5, 52. See Holy Land (1271), 8
orientalism Ptolemy I, 49
Mehl, Dieter, 13 Ptolemy Auletes, 49
Méliacin, 65–66 Pynchebek, Thomas, 25
Metlitzski, Dorothee, 67, 84, 126
Michael VII (of Constantinople), 6 rape, 88–90
159
Index
Raymond of Provence, 7 Taj al-Muluk and the Princess Dunya. See

Rhazes, 5, 127 The Thousand and One Nights
Richard I (of England), 9 Tale of Constance. See Gower
Richard the Lion-Heart, 12 The Tale of the Flying Horse. See The
Richard Coeur de Lion, 12–15; Thousand and One Nights
cannibalism in, 13 Termagaunt, 140
rock of the Ascension (Gethsemane), 17 The Third Crusade, 7, 9, 12
Roman de Thèbes, 4 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 48
romance, 3; definition, 3–4; Chaucer’s use Thomas Becket, Saint, 9
of the term, 4 The Thousand and One Days, 78, 79, 124;
The Story of Repsima, 121
Said, Edward: Orientalism, 47–48 The Thousand and One Nights, 5, 79, 80;
Sala della Fontana, 35, Plate 1 (p. 36) The City of Brass, 78; The Jewish Kazi
Saladin, 7, 13 and His Pious Wife, 119–20, 124; The
San Marco: treasury of, 20 Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child,
saracenate bezants, 21 120–21; The Steward’s Tale, 103 n18;
Saunders, Corinne, 90 The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar
Schein, Sylvia, 8 and the Slave-Girl shams al-Nahar,
The Second Crusade, 3, 7; English 103–05, 103 n20; Taj al-Muluk and the
aristocrats in, 9 Princess Dunya, 66; The Tale of the
The Sege off Melayne, 11 Flying Horse, 81–82. See Le Bone
The Seventh Crusade, 8 Florence of Rome
Shakespeare, William: Antony and Trade, 19–22; in the Islamic world, 19–20;
Cleopatra, 137–38; The Merchant of Venetians in Eastern Mediterranean
Venice, 29; Othello, 136–37 trade, 20–21, 27, in Syrian trade, 27–28
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Epipsychidion, 99 Travels. See Mandeville, Marco Polo
Shoaf, R. A., 41 Trounce, A. McI., 12
The Shipwrecked Woman and Her Child. Tunisia, 38
See The Thousand and One Nights Tuve, Rosemond, 80
Sidney, Sir Philip: Arcadia, 126 Tyerman, Christopher, 8
Sigurd of Norway, 17
Sir Ferumbras, 10 Urban II (Pope), 6; sermon at Clermont, 7
Sir Orfeo, 46 Urban III (Pope), 7
The Sixth Crusade, 7–8
Sophocles: Oedipus the King, 89 Valentine and Orson, 63
Sowdone of Babylone, 10, 11 Vinaver, Eugene, 73
Spearing, A. C., 10 Vincent of Beauvais: Speculum Historiale,
Speculum Historiale. See Vincent of 49–50
Beauvais Virgil: The Aeneid, 57–59
Spenser, Edmund, 131; The Faerie
Queene, 68–69; influence of Ariosto, Wallace, David, 23
131–32; the orient in, 131–32 Wallensköld, A., 112–15
Stevens, John, 91 Wells, John Edwin, 14
The Story of Nur-al-Din ibn-Bakkar and William of Normandy, 27
the Slave-Girl Shams al-Nahari. See Wimsatt, William K., 49
The Thousand and One Nights Worringer, Wilhelm, 73
The Story of Repsima. See The Thousand Wycliffe, John, 43
and One Days
Syria. See Trade; Chaucer: Man of Law’s Zisa Castle, 35
Tale Zumthor, Paul, 3
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The Orient in Chaucer

and Medieval Romance

Dr Roger Dalrymple, St Hugh’s College, Oxford, OX2 6LE

Dr Corinne Saunders, Department of English, University of Durham,

Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation

First published 2003

ISBN 0 85991 795 9

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

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Printed in Great Britain by

1 Introduction: Romance and the Orient 1

2 Mercantilism and Faith in the Eastern Mediterranean: Chaucer’s 23

3 Two Oriental Queens from Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women: 45

4 Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale: Content and Structure 63

6 Le Bone Florence of Rome and the East 108

Plate 2 The Morgan Casket. One of the most accomplished Islamic 37

Michigan University, Kalamazoo, and the Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium

1 The views of such representative nineteenth-century scholars of romance literature as Huet,

however, discuss distinct instances of orientalism, as, for example, in

in the revised Wells Manual: “The medieval romance is a narrative about

of university-trained European doctors of medicine. It is said of Chaucer’s

Contemporaries regarded the crusades as holy wars of Christianity against the

6 See Heffernan, The Melancholy Muse, 38–94.

1367), Palatye, a city in Anatolia (associated with the Seljuk Turks),

7 See The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. V. J. Scattergood.

The story of Otinel, as the Saracen knight is called in French, concerning an

English Charlemagne Firumbras romance, is a translation of the French

Charles’s chief adviser, Bishop Turpin, is himself portrayed as an exemplary

A! Mary mylde, whare was thi myght,

Richard took leue, and leep on stede,

9 See Chanson d’Antioch, Chant v.

The Saracen presence in these popular medieval English romances reflects

bound by a bishop or priest to undertake a pilgrimage to offer his prayers at

Thus, Mandeville’s book was conceived of primarily as a guide to the Holy

T HE impact of continual and steadily increasing interaction between East

If the fact of Chaucer’s problem with debt is added to an interesting idea

Manuscript evidence also seems to invite us to think about Chaucer’s addi-

Chaucer’s source, Nicholas Trivet’s Chronicle, is called Thiberie Constantin)

castle walls of a “hethen Amirall” (1090), precisely this arena of reli-

Telle us a tale anon, as forward is.

Thise marchantz han doon fraught hir shippes newe,

Now fil it that thise marchantz stode in grace

The account of the exceptional qualities of Custance qualified as the “big

Allas, what wonder is it thogh she wepte,

Christian-Moslem tensions are further displayed in the words of the mother of

The narrator underscores language difference along with geographical shifts

were, aimlessly, another traveller by sea happens to encounter Custance’s

Even though Gower says Constance accomplishes these conversions because

their having been converted to Christianity by her). Moreover, the decision to

Chaucer drops Bishop Lucius’s name entirely.

That he ferst loke out ate porte,

C HAUCER’S portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Legend of Good

Bysechyng every lady bright of hewe,

Chaucer’s collection of exemplary pagan women is later, in the Canterbury

thirteenth-century Legenda Aurea. Had there not been so many tales of

encounter women whose claim to being considered worthy of praise is less