Villehardouin, Geoffroi de

(ca. 1150–before 1218)

   Geoffroi composed, in prose, one of the two French eyewitness accounts of the conquest of Constantinople by the Christian crusaders in 1204, La Conquête de Constantinople, famous for its detailed and precise descriptions. He was the son of a noble Champenois family and served the count of Champagne, Thibaut III, as marshal (beginning in 1185) and gained a reputation for his mediating skills. Thibaut, who was one of the organizers of the Fourth Crusade, heavily relied on Geoffroi for the diplomatic preparations. He sent him, along with CONON DE BÉTHUNE, to Venice in 1201, to negotiate the sea voyage on Venetian ships. In return for his diplomatic and, more important, his military services, Geoffroi was appointed marshal of Romania in 1205. In the same year Geoffroi led an expedition against the Bulgarians, and he was involved in securing the retreat to safety after the defeat of the crusaders in the Battle of Adrianople the same year. In 1208 he was appointed the commander of the royal guard in Constantinople. The historical records last mention him in 1212, and in 1218, his son arranged a memorial for him.

   Geoffroi wrote his chronicle of the Fourth Crusade after the actual events and insists that he is telling nothing but the truth, though this has been questioned in modern times.He begins with the preaching of the Crusade by Foulques de Neuilly during the tournament of Ecry on November 28, 1199, and closes during the year 1207, with the death of Boniface of Montferrat. Geoffroi’s intention seems to have been the defense of the Crusade against the criticism that only the two Christian cities of Zara and Constantinople had been attacked and conquered, whereas the crusaders never made it to Jerusalem. He justifies this by the lack of support from European knighthood to pay the Venetians for the passage, which forced the crusaders to take Zara to extort the money, and by the fact that many knights later deserted the army. Moreover Geoffroi identifies the greed and sinfulness of the Cistercians—who condemned the attack against Christian cities— and of the crusaders as responsible for the failure of the Fourth Crusade, whereas he tends to whitewash the noble leaders, especially Thibaut (who died in 1201), and later Boniface de Montferrat, who conquered Constantinople. Geoffroi’s chronicle circulated in a number of manuscript copies, six of which are still extant, and in two early printed editions, which are lost today. Two fragments of the Conquête are also extant, as is a copy in the popular 13th-century Chronique de Baudouin d’Avesnes. It was translated into Latin in 1573, then into Italian, English, German, and Bulgarian.

   Bibliography

   ■ Beer, Jeanette M. A. Villehardouin: Epic Historian. Geneva: Droz, 1968.

   ■ Geoffroi de Villehardouin, La conquête de Constantinople, edited by Edmond Faral. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1937.

   ■ Lock, Peter. The Franks in the Aegean, 1204–1500. London: Longman, 1995.

   ■ Marzials, Frank, trans. Memoirs of the Crusades. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

   ■ Noble, Peter. “Villehardouin, Robert de Clari and Henri de Valenciennes: Their Different Approaches to the Fourth Crusade,” in The Medieval Chronicle, edited by Erik Kooper. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, 1999, 202–211.

   ■ Shaw, Margaret R. B., ed. and trans. Chronicles of the Crusades. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1983.

   Albrecht Classen