Arthurian Stories and the Latin East: Traces and Re-Enactments

This contribution is likely to disappoint the reader for at least two reasons. The first is that the materials presented here are interim findings of research that is still in progress. My initial aim was to offer a geochronological sketch by collecting Arthurian names, stories, texts, manuscripts and people, and more generally to reflect on the structure and content of narrative traditions, with reference to four main contexts: the Crusader states, the Latin Empire of Constantinople, the Principality of Morea, the Aegean Sea islands and Cyprus. Unfortunately, data I was able to collect are heterogeneous, scattered across time and space, and not plentiful. In earnest, I tend to exclude the possibility of speaking of Eastern Mediterranean Arthuriana in the terms in which Hugo Buchthal and Jaroslav Folda felt about the notion of ‘Crusader art’ (a notion that is now debated, too). The second reason is that the object of this research is itself but a fragment of the broader panorama of the dissemination of French and Western literary culture in the Mediterranean (see, for instance Fabris, Göschl, and Schneider 2023). The theme has attracted increasing attention as the Mediterranean provides an ideal setting to test the ideas of decentered history and global in the local, as well as of the sea as an agent of mediation and connectivity (Abulafia 2011 and subsequent works). Historians have pointed out the need to go beyond the history of Mediterranean as the history of lands and cultures converging in it, considering Mediterranean history as opposed to histories in the Mediterranean (Horden and Purcell 2000 and 2020, and the debate they originated). However, it is doubtful whether and how the meager evidence of Arthurian stories circulating in the Latin East can contribute to the former and not simply be included in the latter. Hence the title keeps the relation loose: Arthurian stories and the Latin East. What is the point, then? Incomplete data, unsatisfactory evidence and fragmented cultural landscape need to somehow be dealt with eventually. The dedicatee of the present volume masterfully did that in his work on francophone Arthurian attestations in Ireland and Germany (respectively Busby 2017a, 2019 and 2021; for an overview 2017b), which provide formidable models. And even when the picture appears fragmentary and haphazard, the Matter of Britain and the Mediterranean – each of the two being a stage of the world and a world in itself – can act as powerful synchronisers and grant colours and life to it.