Introduction
LIFE OF THE AUTHOR
After delivering a manuscript containing, among his other works, The Taking of Alexandria (La Prise d'Alixandre) of Guillaume de Machaut to Count Louis de Male of Flanders (see Earp 1995, 57), Eustache Deschamps dedicated a poem to his literary master in which he affirms:
All your works are with great honor
Received by all in many a far-off place,
And there no one, to my knowledge,
Speaks anything of them but praise.
Guillaume, the great lords hold you very dear
And take pleasure in what you write.
(Text quoted in Hœpffner 1908–21,1: iv)
Elsewhere Deschamps observes that Machaut “nourished” him and “paid him many kindnesses,” so perhaps we should consider his opinion of the older poet's reputation somewhat inflated by gratitude and personal admiration. Yet Deschamps is hardly the only contemporary writer to offer a favorable opinion of Machaut's artistic accomplishments and their reception among the nobility. Martin le Franc terms him a “grand rhetorician,” while King Rene d'Anjou praises him as a “renowned poet,” according Machaut a place in his Ospital d'amour (Love's Mansion) alongside Alain Chartier, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in this pantheon of vernacular authors.
Along with his evident influence on many poets of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the patronage he enjoyed from noble families during his long career, such remarks indicate that Guillaume de Machaut was one of the most famous and esteemed poets of fourteenth-century France (see Earp 1995, the essential starting point for all work on Machaut).
Machaut's reputation rested on his production of an immense and varied corpus of works, many of which were composed for, and in honor of, the several grand nobles with whose courts he was at various times associated. As a musician, he set more than forty balades, thirty virelays, twenty rondeaux, lais and motets and composed a polyphonic setting of the Mass. The virtuosity and innovations of these compositions made him one of the most important figures of late medieval music (of the two editions of Machaut's music, Ludwig 1926–9/1954 is the more accurate and Schrade 1956 the more readable). And Machaut was largely responsible for the continuing fashion for lyric poetry set to music which lasted right through the fifteenth century (see Chichmaref 1909 and Wilkins 1972).
Following in the tradition of thirteenth-century love vision poetry, especially the Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose), Machaut composed ten long narrative and didactic poems. Eight of these are dits amoureux (love poems), while the two others take up philosophical/religious or historical themes. Machaut also wrote four shorter narrative poems, and these are all concerned with love (see the Selected Bibliography for details about editions). The last of his major dits, however, abandoned literary models to chronicle contemporary events that had captured the imagination of Christian Europe. Along with Froissart's Chroniques and long Arthurian romance Meliador, among works by others, the Prise d'Alixandre launched a literary movement during the closing years of the century that can appropriately be termed the “chival-ric revival.” This amazingly detailed and accurate verse biography of Pierre I, king of Cyprus, celebrates knightly honor and valor. Its centerpiece is a detailed account, based on eyewitness testimony, of Pierre's improbable capture of Alexandria, the richest and most populous city known to the west. The twin virtues of knightly courage and religious fervor were quickly losing prominence in a time of profound social change. Yet late fourteenth century writers like Froissart and Machaut, and the noble patrons that supported them, were eager to celebrate the aristocratic code steeped in the Christian zeal of the High Middle Ages.
Machaut's poems, including the Prise d'Alixandre, evidently pleased the high-born audiences for whom they were originally written. The number of rich surviving manuscripts, some beautifully illuminated, testifies eloquently to this popularity (see Earp 1995, 73–128 for descriptions of all sources, including details of original owners where known).
Unlike earlier medieval poets, Machaut was very much concerned with establishing a “poetic identity” for himself first, by often making a fictional alter ego into a main character and, second, by ensuring that his works were collected and attractively presented in omnibus manuscript, some possibly executed under his personal supervision (see Brownlee 1984). One result is that his dits exerted a considerable influence on other contemporary writers and some of the generation to follow, especially Deschamps, Jean Froissart, Christine de Pizan, and Geoffrey Chaucer, whose poetry shows a close and reverent reading of narrative works by the French master. The Prise helped continue and expand the popularity of chivalric verse chronicle and biography into the next century.
Machaut was not born into a noble or bourgeois family (Earp 1995, 4–5) even though he was to become a servant of the noble and famous. Thus little is known about his life beyond what is preserved in various ecclesiastical documents and the poet's own works, which contain a fair number of biographical indications. From documents that detail his appointment to different benefices, it can be inferred that Machaut was born at the beginning of the fourteenth century and probably in Champagne. Since the same documents fail to accord him any of the titles that would indicate noble birth, it can also be safely assumed he was not wellborn. This is consistent with the self-portrait that emerges from the poetry, in which Machaut often makes his diegetic alter ego a humble or even cowardly clerk who moves uncertainly among his betters, the butt of mild class humor. The following passage from his Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse (Story of the Fountain of Love) is especially revealing:
And though I might be a clerk
Who is ignorant, incapable, and inept,
Yet I've been, by my two faiths,
In such a place [i.e. a battle] several times
With the good King of Bohemia,
And may God keep his soul among His company,
And despite myself I was brave
Since there was no place, no path,
No byway where I knew to flee
And thus I had to be courageous.
(lines 139–148 in Palmer 1993, 96–7)
A similar passage occurs in the Jugement dou roy de Navarre (Judgment of the King of Navarre). Here a poet named Guillaume de Machaut encounters a beautiful and distinguished lady while hunting rabbits (she is, it turns out, Lady Good Fortune). Starting to dismount, Guillaume is dissuaded from such an unmannerly act of obeisance by the lady herself. Returning her greeting, the poet confides to his readers that he has learned well how to honor those of higher station than himself:
Then I went on ahead, and when I saw
Her noble person replete
With honor, grace, and learning,
As a sign of great reverence
I made to get off my horse;
But at once she started to forbid it,
Saying quite politely:
“Oh no, Guillaume, this won't do.
You must not dismount;
Speak to me from your horse.”
And when I heard this, I obliged
And gave her as fine a greeting
As I could and knew how to,
In the manner I should,
Just as I had learned to honor people of such rank.
(lines 739–754 in Palmer 1988, 33–5)
Various documents refer to Machaut as “master.” This suggests that after an early education, quite probably in the cathedral school at Reims, Machaut pursued theological studies at a university, probably Paris, finishing with the degree of magister atrium (master of arts) (Earp 1995, 7–8). Machaut, however, did not go on to take holy orders, or so it can be assumed since he is nowhere referred to as a priest and only served in offices, like the canonicate, open to those outside the priesthood. Most university students left after taking the master's degree to begin a career in secular or religious administration.
Machaut followed this path, one that permitted lowborn clerics, who like himself had the right education and social graces, to advance in society. Through circumstances no longer known, Machaut became associated, while in his early twenties, with one of the most colorful nobles of the era, Jean of Luxembourg, the king of Bohemia. It may be that Machaut came to Jean's notice during one of the latter's sojourns in northern France, perhaps his visit to Reims for the coronation of Charles IV in 1322 (Earp 1995, 12). To the modern historian, Jean appears an extravagant and perhaps unstable figure. To his contemporaries, however, the king's fabled prodigality, the restlessness with which he sought to expand and consolidate the lands under his rule, and his reputed social finesse made him the very type of ideal ruler. In the Confort d'ami (Comfort for a Friend) and elsewhere, including the Prise (see lines 771–792 of the present edition), Machaut speaks of Jean with the highest respect and reverence. In the Confort, Machaut details his experiences as Jean's secretary and chaplain. These include a sojourn at the castle of Burglitz (1323), a series of military expeditions through Poland, Russia, and Lithuania (1329), Jean's invasion of northern Italy (1330–1331), and his involvement in Austrian affairs (1331) (Earp 1995, 12–14 itemizes these references and provides further information). Ecclesiastical documents suggest that Machaut remained in Jean's service until the king's heroic death: he was led blind into the battle to fight at Crécy in 1346 and was cut down by English knights along with his devoted entourage.
So willing to provide information about his early association with Jean, Machaut offers few indications about any experiences with the king after 1331. This may mean two things. During the last fifteen years or so of his life, Jean's fortunes notably declined. Machaut does not mention the king's second marriage to the French princess Beatrice of Bourbon (1334); the loss of an eye (1337) and the king's desperate, often revengeful attempts to restore it; finally his complete loss of sight in 1339 and stubborn refusal to withdraw from a restless and active public life. Nor does Machaut recount military activities in the east, especially Jean's continuing difficulty in Bohemia (which culminated in the somewhat scandalous pillage of the synagogues in Prague) and renewed hostilities in Austria, his victories there marred once again by questionable looting of a holy place. Machaut's silence may be a polite way of dealing with Jean's private sorrow and public troubles. After a long and effusive homage to Jean in the Confort, Machaut declares that he will not give more details about his doings “on the other side of the Rhine” but that no one faults him (see lines 3083–6 in Palmer 1992, 160–1). Or his reticence may simply mean that he was no longer a member of Jean's entourage and so could not testify directly about what happened. In any case, we can infer from his productivity as poet and musician that Machaut was spending increasing time in Reims, where Jean had arranged for his appointment as canon (an office he assumed in 1337). This relative inactivity afforded him the opportunity for a literary career.
During his association with Jean, Guillaume established a reputation as a writer with musical and, especially, poetical works. Evidence of various kinds suggests that three of his longer dits were certainly composed and circulated prior to 1342: Le Dit dou vergier (The Story of the Orchard); Le Jugement dou roy de Bebaingne (The Judgment of the King of Bohemia); and Le Remede de Fortune (Fortune's Remedy). It was their success that enabled Machaut to acquire other noble patrons after Jean's death.
Following Crécy, Guillaume must have found himself in a secure but unpromising position. His ecclesiastical offices offered him a living, but hardly in the style and magnificence to which as secretary and chaplain of a grand noble he must have become comfortably accustomed. Manuscript illuminations suggest that his residence in Reims was richly furnished for that of a canon. But a noted poet was for noble households a quite desirable acquisition; Machaut did not spend much time during the remainder of his long and productive life without appropriate benefactors. As Claude Gauvard has said, “the true client was less the poet than the prince” (1982, 26; see Poirion 1965, 196 for a similar view). Perhaps surprisingly, Machaut did not enter the service of Jean's heir and son, Charles, newly crowned emperor of Germany. Toward the end of his career, however, Machaut did praise him effusively in the Prise (see lines 979–1058 of the present edition), and this indicates that their relations must have been cordial at the least.
And also in the Prise (lines 977–8 of the present edition) he mentions that he performed great service for Charles' sister Bonne (Gutha), who was married not long after Crécy to Jean, son of Philippe VI, a man soon to become the next Valois king of France. It is likely, therefore, that he was associated (if only informally) with the provincial court of Jean and Bonne in Normandy. There are indications that the Remede de Fortune, the summative dit of Machaut's middle age, was composed in her honor and with her as the lightly disguised central character. Bonne, once again lightly disguised, may well be the model for the character Bonneiirte (Lady Good Fortune) in the Jugement Navarre. All of Guillaume's other patrons play such roles in the narrative dits, with the possible exception of Charles, duke of Normandy (later Charles V). In the Voir Dit (The True Poem) Machaut avers that Charles is “my sovereign lord” (line 3424 in Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer 1998), but it is not clear that the Voir Dit was written in the early 1360s for him. The Prise also constitutes something of an exception in this regard. The poem is written in honor of Pierre I, with whose name the poet's is joined in an anagrammatic puzzle that is Machaut's trademark. But Pierre had been killed some time before the writing of the poem; in fact, the king's untimely death may well have prompted Machaut to memorialize him in such fashion. Thus the poem could hardly have been destined for Pierre, but may have been written for one or several of the Northern French nobles named therein who served with distinction in Pierre's wars against the infidel.
Machaut's association with Bonne was short-lived since she died on September n, 1349, presumably of the plague then sweeping across northern France.
The opening of the Jugement Navarre tells us much of Machaut's activities at the time (See Palmer 1988, 14–23). Resident at home (presumably in Reims), and apparently performing his office of canon, Machaut recounts his melancholic reactions to the outbreak of the disease, foretold by astrological and political signs. Having made a good confession, the poet closes himself up inside his house and stops going to town (a move that may well have saved his life). He describes the various events that attended the attack of the disease: the persecution of the Jews, the appearance of wandering troops of flagellants, the mass burials of victims, the depopulation of the countryside, and desperate economic hardship. The disease at an end, Guillaume finds himself reentering a festive city, tired of burying its dead. The remainder of this work is fictional, a love debate that continues, in a complicated fashion, the one begun a number of years earlier in the Jugement Behaingne.
Significantly, the patron who figures in the second judgment poem is Charles, the nineteen-year-old newly crowned king of Navarre (the official coronation took place in Pamplona on June 27, 1350). Charles was the eldest son of Jeanne, queen of Navarre, who had inherited the kingdom from her parents, and Philippe, count of Evreux. Chroniclers at the time and modern historians usually refer to Charles as the king of Navarre (the customary epithet “the Bad” was given him by a Spanish writer in the century following his death). Yet this interesting and complex person, whose career became so connected to the important political developments of the age, was thoroughly French in culture and interests. He may more profitably be considered, as count of Evreux and the investee of other important properties, especially in the north of France, one of the great feudal vassals of the kingdom rather than a foreign potentate. Much the same, in fact, may be said of Pierre I of Cyprus, who was connected by blood and political ties to the great families of France. In fact, both young men were shrewd, dashing, charismatic, and attractive to young ladies, qualities that impressed the clerkly poet who was to compose works in their honor.
It seems probable that Machaut came to enjoy Charles' patronage through his brother Jean. Jean de Machaut followed Guillaume as secretary to Jean of Bohemia, but after the king's death passed into the service of Yolande of Flanders, brother-in-law to Charles of Navarre (see Earp 1995, 28–30). The brothers were close, and Jean must have become well acquainted with Charles, who would have been eager to meet his man's well-known brother. Patron and, to a much lesser extent, poet became embroiled in the turbulent political events of the late 1350s. Machaut's Con fort d'ami was written for Charles while he was imprisoned by Jean II for plotting the king of France's overthrow. While the poem offers Charles religious and philosophical consolation for his ill fortune, it is also a public affirmation of the king of Navarre's importance, as well as of the noted poet's support for him. The work was certainly intended to reach readers other than Charles himself; the poem's second half, moreover, contains advice on effective kingship and testifies that Machaut was expecting Charles to assume a position of leadership in a time of ongoing civil unrest and insecurity. One further document, recording the gift of a horse from Charles to Guillaume, may indicate that Machaut continued his relationship with Charles even after the latter lost his chance to challenge seriously for the French crown. Significantly, Machaut decided to include the Confort, despite its provocative, even dangerous political themes, in the omnibus manuscripts whose copying and compilation he directed during the last two decades of his life.
After Confort Machaut never mentions Charles of Navarre again in any of his narrative poems. Guillaume's career during this period demonstrates that the contractual relationship of patron and prince was flexible. Still attached to the king of Navarre, Machaut also became associated with a nobleman who, at least politically, would have been Charles' mortal enemy. This was Jean, duke of Berry, Navarre's brother-in-law and cousin and the third son of Jean II of France, born November 30, 1340, and therefore about forty years Machaut's junior and a very young man indeed when Machaut became associated with him at the end of the r3 50s. His other brothers became important figures in late fourteenth-century politics: Charles V, who reigned over France from 1364–13 80; Louis, duke of Anjou; and Philippe, duke of Burgundy. Jean was satisfied to let his brothers occupy the center stage of public life. He became embroiled in political struggle and conflict only as a mature person and quite likely with no little reluctance.
Machaut also suffered during this extended period of foreign war and civil unrest. The poet spent the winter of 13 59–60 in a Reims besieged by the English and was even required, despite his age, to do some military service. In the spring of 1360, the French were required by the treaty of Bretigny to supply hostages in return for the release of the imprisoned King Jean, whose huge ransom his subjects were having difficulty raising. One of these was the king's youngest son, Jean of Berry. Apparently in the duke's service, though he had not yet severed ties with Charles, who was now the quite openly bitter enemy of the Valois, Machaut wrote a poem of consolation for Jean, just as he had done for the king of Navarre. In fact, the two works share many elements in common, although they manifest substantial differences as well. Most important, the Fonteinne amoureuse (The Fountain of Love) offers a traditional love fiction instead of the political admonitions and instructive exempla drawn from the Bible that figure so prominently in the work composed a few years earlier for Charles of Navarre. In this poem, the poet/narrator seeks out the young nobleman who, he has learned, appreciates his work and often asks about him; after becoming acquainted, the pair become fast friends and share a dream vision that soothes the sorrow of the nobleman apprehensive about separating from his beloved. The work enjoyed an immense popularity and exerted a profound influence on two young poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Froissart. In Jean of Berry, Machaut acquired the patronage and favor of the age's most avid aesthete, an aristocrat with catholic desires for the beautiful and exotic who never hesitated to spend all of his vast resources in satisfying them. Machaut's association with the duke was perhaps much the same as the poet had enjoyed with Charles of Navarre; he served neither man as he had served the king of Bohemia, in whose household he was a constant and intimate presence.
Instead, the poet apparently remained resident for the most part in Reims, which was not part of the territory administered by Jean. Reims was one of the most important cities of the kingdom, and the poet must have participated in a number of important public events, including the coronation of Charles V on May 19, 1364. Among Charles' entourage was Pierre of Lusignan and Cyprus, who was then visiting the courts of Europe in hopes of raising money and enlisting volunteers for a great crusade against the Saracens. This is the expedition Machaut later reports with considerable detail in the Prise (lines 839–1621 of the present edition). Pierre was engaging in one tournament after another throughout Europe when Jean, appointed leader of the crusade, suddenly died. After attending the coronation of his son, Pierre then assumed secular leadership of the crusade. This famous knight, perhaps the most accomplished j ouster of the age, must have reminded Machaut of his beloved Jean of Bohemia, a man whose chivalric achievements the poet, significantly enough, recalls in the Prise.
Pierre's stay in Reims was brief, but he did spend about a month immediately thereafter in Paris. It seems very likely that king and poet did, in fact, become somewhat closely acquainted since Machaut's Dit de la Marguerite (The Tale of the Daisy) apparently celebrates the romance between the charming young man and a French lady of that name. It is not impossible that Machaut accompanied Pierre on his travels through the lands of Eastern Europe with which the poet had become well acquainted during his several expeditions there as a young man accompanying king Jean of Bohemia. Interestingly, the Prise's account of Pierre's movements during this latter part of his European sojourn are much more detailed than the more general description of the king's tour through France, the Low Countries, and England (more predictably, Froissart gives a fuller account of these earlier travels). Perhaps poet and patron became better acquainted on this long road. In any event, a striking illumination accompanies the Marguerite in MS BN 1584, the most authoritative of the Machaut omnibus manuscripts which was likely prepared under the poet's personal supervision. The illumination shows a handsome man, with a crown of gold atop his head, kneeling before a beautiful woman. This image can hardly represent anyone but Pierre, as textual and other further evidence confirms (Earp 1995; Wimsatt 1970; Fourrier 1979). Though the matter is far from settled, the scholarly consensus is that this poem (and another on closely related themes) is indeed occasional and was meant to please Pierre of Cyprus, who plays therein (if by proxy) the role of the ardent lover.
There may have been yet another point of contact between the king and the poet, who was, it is important to remember, perhaps the age's most famous musical composer. As Dzelzainis (1985) points out, when Pierre arrived at the papal court in Avignon, he found himself in a center of artistic and, particularly, musical activity. It is likely that at this time he engaged a number of musicians from Northern France; their names appear in a supplication he sent on their behalf to Pope Urban V in 1363. Machaut may have himself been engaged to compose some pieces in Pierre's honor. His musicians were certainly an accomplished group; Charles V presented them with eighty golden francs as a reward for their services during Pierre's stay in Paris in 1364 (see Iorga 1896 for further discussion). As in the case of architecture, there is strong evidence of a close link between musical practice in Cyprus and the development of the discipline in France. The most important witness to this link is a Franco-Cypriot repertory now housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale (see Hoppin 1957 for a full discussion of the repertory and the history to which it perhaps bears witness).
This poet-musician/patron relationship perhaps explains, at least in part, why Machaut decided to write the young man's biography. The work was undoubtedly intended, in part, as an homage of a different kind, for the forty or so French nobles (many from northern France) who fought with Pierre and are mentioned in the Prise by name; these noblemen and their families might well have been the poem's first reading public. Interestingly, however, the historical record hints that Machaut may have been responding to a more personal motive, not just admiration for the accomplishments of Pierre and his French supporters, many of whom Machaut must have known directly. The French culture that flourished during the fourteenth century in Cyprus had particularly strong connections to Machaut's native Champagne. Many of those who had followed Gui de Lusignan in settling the island, beginning at the end of the twelfth century, had come from this region of northern France. A modern historian observes of Cypriot culture that the period from 1250–13 50 has “as its principal characteristic a strong influence from Champagne, the result, it seems, of the presence of Alice of Champagne, wife of Hugues I and also of the numerous families from Champagne established in Cyprus…. The monuments of this period are the most beautiful and most pure, worthy of their French models. The most remarkable is the cathedral of Famagusta which … recalls the cathedral at Reims” (Longnon 1929, 184–5). (See Boase and Megaw 1977 for further detailed discussion of the Franco-Cypriot connections in ecclesiastical and military architecture.)
Among those Cypriot families of French origin, it is quite possible that Machaut's own was represented. Leontios Makhairas, a Greek chronicler of the island's history during the reign of Pierre and his successors, records that among the island's notables were Thomas Machaut, who is mentioned as a knight resident in the island in 1375, and Bartholomew Machaut, who served as sheriff in 1376 (Dawkins 1932, 563, 570–1). Both Thomas and Bartholomew Machaut appear as well in a catalog of Cypriot knights for the year 1375 in the chronicle of Strambaldi (Mas Latrie 1891, II: 238). Bartholomew is also mentioned in the chronicle of Amadi (Mas Latrie 1891,I: 483). Whether these Frenchmen were simply countrymen of the famous poet or indeed members of his family we will likely never know since the surname de Machaut is ambiguous in this regard. It is evident, however, that Cypriot society at the time was connected to the poet's birthplace (a small town), as well as, more generally, to his native Champagne.
Machaut hints in the Prise that he is unsure whether he would live to complete it, but against all odds he did. Such doubts apparently lie behind his decision to include early in the work what was intended to be the closing anagram containing the names of poet and dead patron who is its subject (see lines 229–258 of the present edition for the first occurrence of the anagram, which also closes the work in lines 8884–7). In any event, the Prise became the crowning achievement, especially for the times, of an incredibly lengthy and productive artistic career.
The records of the canonical chapter reveal that Guillaume de Machaut died in April 1377, and was interred alongside his brother Jean, who had died some five years before. In the second of two balades composed to honor his dead friend, mentor, and perhaps uncle, Eustache Deschamps observes:
O flower of the very flowers of melody,
So sweet master of such great talent,
O Guillaume, the earthly god of harmony,
After your works, who will be thought the best
Of all composers? Surely, I don't know who.
Your name will be a precious relic,
For in France and Artois the death
Of Machaut the noble poet will be deeply mourned.
(De Queux de St. Hilaire and Gaston, I: 243–6)
Even more fitting, perhaps, was the indirect tribute paid to him by poets, both lyric and narrative, as well as by musical composers who continued to be deeply influenced by his work well into the next century.
ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT
Long neglected as the work of an inferior author who could do little more than imitate the monuments of an earlier age, the narrative poetry of Guillaume de Machaut has been reevaluated in recent years. As scholars have come to appreciate the complex tradition in which he worked, Machaut has appeared increasingly to be its master (see Earp 1995, 195–203, for the best overview of work on the poetry and 277–89 for a similar overview of work on the music). The fourteenth-century dit permitted enormous variety in subject matter and treatment, not just the stale recycling of motifs derived from the tradition of the Romance of the Rose: themes (love, adventure, the battle between the sexes), characters (the unsatisfied lover, the remote lady he adores), and also narrative patterns (the unsmooth path of romance leading to a triumphal accommodation presided over by an appropriate divinity such as Venus).
To be sure, the dits of Machaut and contemporaries such as Des-champs, Christine, and Froissart most often depend on fictional cadres derived from the vast tradition of conventional love narrative. This tradition provided the formative literary background of poets and patrons alike. Yet fourteenth-century practice was flexible enough to accommodate materials more properly thought of as autobiographical, historical, or moralistic than literary in the strict sense (see Cerquiglini 1988 for a full account). In fact, the more accomplished works within this late medieval genre stage an engaging interplay between what we might, somewhat roughly, term realistic and fictional elements. Machaut's Juge-ment Navarre, for example, begins with autobiographical reminiscences and a chronicle-like description of the plague's outbreak in 1349, only to abandon the tribulations of the real for transparently fictional personification allegory. Much of the poem's precious charm derives from the fiction's sudden and humorous intrusion into the grim world of historical mischance, one result of which is a hopelessly blurred distinction between these two ways of representing human experience. Is the challenge to Machaut's poetic authority mounted within the fiction of that poem “true,” an element of fact as solid as the epidemic and the author's miraculous survival? Or is it simply a literary convenience, the pretext that allows the poet to recycle the evidently popular elements of an earlier work and transform in very untraditional fashion his fictional alter ego into the main character? The poem neither encourages nor allows the reader to choose between these quite distinct alternatives.
Similarly, Machaut opens his otherwise archly realistic account of King Pierre's career as an “athlete of Christ” with a pseudo-mythological version of the hero's birth. Pierre comes into this world when the gods, after an appropriate harangue by Mars, decide that a new man is needed to carry on the burden of prosecuting the holy war against the enemies of God. Abandoning the games “meant for those inclined to romance,” they act in concert to create him. The story's opening is consciously self-reflexive as well, for Machaut, like the gods he here invokes, is also abandoning the subject of romance for a more serious theme. Endowed with extraordinary virtue and nourished by divine nurses and guardians, Pierre is destined to attempt the recovery for Christendom of the sacred places that are the heritage of Godfrey of Bouillon (to whom he was, incidentally, distantly related). In this way, the birth of Cyprus's most famous monarch is connected to one of the themes most prominent in crusading propaganda of the period: the obligation to restore Godfrey's inheritance to its rightful possessor, for Pierre was upon reaching maturity to inherit the title of king of Jerusalem as the latest in the line of the famous crusader.
Godfrey, of course, is himself a chivalric inheritor since he is the latest of the “nine worthies,” the principal heroes from classical and Christian tradition, who are briefly and appropriately cataloged by Mars. This motif is a topos, or literary commonplace, in heroic narrative of the period and is not of ancient origin. Put into the mouth of the god who is to become Pierre's divine father, it is handled with some finesse and originality by Machaut (see the note to lines 44–66 for references to further discussion of this literary tradition). The mythological birth topos is not a Machaut invention either, but has a source that could scarcely be more different. The heroes of ancient epic (Hercules, Achilles, Aeneas, among others) are often the products of unions that are divine in some sense. Machaut's account, however, is closely modeled not on epic narrative, but on a similar episode from Alanus de Insulis's scholarly yet occasionally humorous Latin treatise, Anticlaudianus. This twelfth-century Neo-platonic allegory uses personifications to dramatize the various stages of human development that result in the birth of a “new man.” Machaut likely expected that the more learned among his readers would recognize and appreciate his surprising appropriation of Alanus, for he was one of the age's most popular and most frequently quoted philosophical authors (see Bossuat 1955 for Latin text and details). Machaut made particular use of verses 1–269 of Book I, but the fabrication of the “new man” is the poem's main theme throughout. Such readers would also have appreciated, perhaps, that Venus/Aphrodite was associated in antiquity with the island of Cyprus; that Venus was also the mother of Aeneas, Western Europe's most noted hero (and likewise the recipient of a divinely ordained inheritance to be won by arduous and bloody war in a promised foreign land); and that Venus, who makes an appearance in the Voir Dit to oversee the poet's love affair, now is called upon, like the poet himself, to play instead an epical, historical role. No doubt, the opening of the Prise is a literary tour de force that resonates on a number of levels: political, literary, genealogical, mythographic, and intertextual. Additionally, this bravura account of Pierre's birth anticipates or perhaps is in some sense a source of one of the century's most intriguing mixtures of startling, often outlandish fiction with dynastic history (including accounts of crusading against the infidel). The Roman de Mélusine (The Story of Melusine) of Jean d'Arras (composed about 1393) offers a sweeping account of the rise and growing ascendance of Pierre's family, the house of Lusignan (for further discussion see the various essays collected in Maddox and Sturm-Maddox 1996).
Machaut certainly enjoys his play with this confection of borrowed elements, whose centerpiece, making use of astrological metaphor, involves Nature's effecting a “conjunction” between Mars and Venus. In this way, Pierre can have as his parental inheritance the strengths (but also presumably the weaknesses) of the divinities of love and war. His mythological origins hint that Pierre will be warlike and fond of ladies, but, perhaps, also ferociously single-minded and subject to destructive lust. As Machaut well knew, Pierre indeed earned the admiration of contemporaries because of his unremitting aggression against those he saw as the enemies of God. His charm and good looks made him a favorite with women (so testifies Machaut's Marguerite poetry), including a wife for whom he felt a strongly sensual attachment, though this did not prevent him from taking a number of mistresses, a fault about which his admiring biographer remains silent. But Pierre also suffered the consequence of these twin passions for love and war. He died young, murdered by his peers because they had been sorely tried and impoverished by his adventurism and arrogance, even as they resented his extramarital exploits and disrespectful treatment of Cypriot women. The favored child of Venus eventually endured the ultimate insult to his “divine” inheritance, the penis hacked off his corpse by one of his most trusted lieutenants, Jacques de Nores. Brought to conspire against the man he had served faithfully for many years by the king's increasingly outrageous and aggressive behavior, Nores is reported to have said “With this thing you killed your own people” (“per queste ti ha morto la tua gente” from the Chronique d'Amadi, Mas Latrie 1891, 426). The comment of Nores offers an ironic perspective on both aspects of Pierre's aggressive desire, even as it points to his consequent failings as a monarch.
The ultimate tragedy of Pierre's life, however, is only hinted at in the poem's opening section. Machaut's tone here is more slyly ironic than serious. So that his readers will not miss the pseudo-autobiographical humor, the narrator comments in line 108 that “I don't know if you think this a fable.” In other words, the poet injects here, as he does in the Jugement Navarre, a tantalizing ambiguity about what we would now call the “truth value” of his composition. Are we to see more in his allegory than authorial charm and wit? We cannot be sure. Thus, even the Prise is not free from the precious literariness, the sophisticated connectedness with other texts, and the slippery referencing of the “real world” that are such common and distinguishing features of Machaut's love vision narrative (see further the discussion in Leech-Wilkinson and Palmer 1998, lxxix–lxxxii, of Machaut's borrowing from the popular Ovide moralisé [Ovid Moralized] in the Voir Dit).
Machaut's work in the dit reflects the genre's vitality and diversity. His twelve long and short dits amoureux probe the conventions and assumptions of a literary tradition that in Machaut's time had dominated French culture for two centuries. And, though they each contain brief passages that recall this tradition, both the Confort and the Prise strike out in quite different directions. With its intention to console and advise a troubled young ruler, the Confort is much more indebted to the scholarly tradition of regimen principum or “education of rulers,” whose most famous example was penned by St. Thomas Aquinas (as it happens, for one of Pierre's illustrious predecessors). The Prise, in turn, connects to two related vernacular genres of the period: the knightly chronicle, its popularity extended by Froissart when he breathed new life into the work of Jean Le Bel; and the aristocratic biography such as Chandos Herald's La Vie du Prince Noir, which extols the military triumphs of one of the period's most noted warrior nobles, England's Black Prince (see Pope and Lodge 1910 for text and details; Prince Noir was written about 1385). It is perhaps best to regard the aristocratic biography as simply a more specialized type of chronicle, especially since it is often difficult or pointless in practice to distinguish among the three main genres of history writing in the period—chronicles, annals, and histories (see Guénée 1973 for further discussion on this point). In what follows, I shall be assuming that Machaut intended to write a verse chronicle like the numerous others then extant, some of which he undoubtedly knew. The Prise is essentially, then, an extended verse narrative extolling the martial exploits and pursuit of honor of a notable aristocratic warrior and those among his entourage (I find the view of Lanoue 1985, that Machaut intended to write an epic in the tradition of Virgil, Lucan, and Statius, interesting, but not persuasive).
Just a few years after completing his most elaborate dit amoureus, the Voir Dit or “True Poem,” Machaut suddenly abandoned this type of composition, with its complex mix of verse narrative, lyric poems, and prose letters. Perhaps he concluded that he could hardly improve on the work that modern critics consider his masterpiece. Even so, this does not explain why he then devoted considerable time and energy to researching and writing something entirely different from everything he had previously attempted. This radical shift at the end of a long and distinguished career raises a question difficult to answer definitively. Why did the most notable practitioner of poetry in the tradition of the Romance of the Rose abandon the subject matter and themes he had cultivated with success for as long as perhaps four decades? As I have noted earlier, Machaut may well have had personal reasons to take up this subject, not only his relationship with Pierre, but, perhaps, family connections in Cyprus and a numerous body of potentially noble patrons eager to have their exploits recounted by the age's most notable poet. However, it is difficult to believe that so consummate an artist as Machaut would have taken his career in a new and unexpected direction without more specifically literary considerations. His poems often contain valuable autobiographical indications and sometimes offer explanations (though these themselves can be “fictionalized”) of what has brought them into being. Unfortunately, the Prise d'Alixandre furnishes no such explanation, though it does at several points record the poet's deep admiration for Pierre's accomplishments (see, for example, lines 8840–8869 of the present edition).
An answer, though it is hardly definitive, may perhaps be found in the changing literary tastes of the period, especially as these were shaped and satisfied by Jean Froissart, Machaut's younger contemporary. It is perhaps not insignificant that Froissart himself experienced what Peter Dembowski calls a “midlife crisis” that led him to redesign his poetic career (see Dembowski 1983 for full details). Froissart spent his early years as a writer imitating in a skillful and often strikingly original fashion love poetry in the various genres popularized by Machaut. These include the dream allegory vision, with a strong autobiographical or subjective element; lyrics in the so-called formes fixes or traditional fixed forms such as the lai, virelay, and rondeau; and narratives with embedded lyrics and expertly retold exempla drawn from Ovid. In his Joli Buisson de Jonece (The Pretty Bush of Love, composed in 1373), however, Froissart says farewell to this type of poetry, to the way of life that it reflects and its underlying values. He would never take up this subject matter and or its themes again except in the quite different context of Meliador. In fact, his renunciation can be traced to a change of literary interest some years before he wrote the Joli Buisson. Abandoning the self-enclosed literary world of allegorical characters and refined emotions for the intriguing spectacle of contemporary chivalry, Froissart began and then gave up the composition of a work in verse, now lost, which is devoted to great heroes and martial accomplishments from the period 1325–1369. This material was later reworked into the more famous prose version originally intended for Robert de Namur. Over the next decades (Froissart was apparently still working on a redaction at the time of his death around 1404), the poet turned historian expanded and revised what would become the Chroniques, and these soon attained a great popularity that continues to the present day.
As did Machaut in composing a poetic vita of Pierre, Froissart worked less from written sources and much more from eyewitness accounts that he solicited or received directly from those involved in the events. These encounters with informants are often mentioned in the text, much as Machaut does in the case of the Prise (see lines 5937–42 of the present edition for Machaut's reference to the reporting of Jean of Reims; lines 8017–8022, 8213, 8433, and 8825 for similar references to information given the poet by Gautier of Conflans; both these Frenchmen served Pierre). Not content with treating the themes of an ideal chivalry through his account of the continuing war between the French and English, Froissart even revived the genre of Arthurian verse romance. No one had written such a romance for a century. The result was Meliador, an elaborate narrative of more than 30,000 verses that limns the complex connections between worthiness in the pursuit of arms and success in love (and Figg and Palmer 2001 for a partial translation and further discussion of these issues).
Though the direction of literary influence is usually seen as flowing from the older Machaut to the younger Froissart, it may well have been the latter's early work in verse chronicle during the end of the 1360s that prompted his erstwhile master to attempt something of the same. This hypothesis assumes that Froissart's verse chronicle and, perhaps, an early redaction of Meliador, were in circulation and became known to Machaut before he decided to write the Prise. Work on the Prise was begun most probably during the period immediately following Pierre's assassination in January 1369, and took at least two to three years to complete.
In any case, it can hardly be coincidence that the two most noted poets in northern France of this period should have both abandoned, at about the same time and after much success, working in the tradition of the Rose so that they could devote themselves to chronicling the “real” heroes of the contemporary chivalric life and, in Froissart's case, also to reviving a chivalric poetic tradition that had died out a century before. We have no record that the two poets ever met, and no direct indication from Froissart that he considered Machaut his literary model. But the poetic record clearly attests to Froissart's reverent imitation of Machaut. And it may well be, even in the absence of explicit testimony, that the Prise reflects the shift in subject matter inaugurated by Froissart, with the literary influence thus running in both directions.
The subject that Machaut chose (or which chose him) certainly epitomized the secular values Froissart was intent on celebrating; the wars between France and England that are the latter's chief subject furnished no hero of comparable stature, not even the French Bertrand du Guesclin or the English Black Prince. It is no exaggeration to say that Pierre was the most famous knight of the age, his reputation established by his spectacular career in tournaments and then by his masterminding of an improbably spectacular military conquest, the seizing of the known world's richest and most exotic city. In addition, the Cypriot king's unquestioned devotion to holy war made him even easier to idealize in an age with a taste for mystical militancy. Machaut's life of Pierre, with its strongly religious chivalric ideal, anticipates such later works as Philippe de Mézières's Songe du Vieil Pelerin (Dream of the Aged Pilgrim), which was composed for Charles VI of France in hopes of channeling the young man's energies toward regaining the Holy Land rather than contending with the English.
A crusader himself of unquestioned Christian zeal, Philippe de Mézières, in fact, may inadvertently have influenced Machaut to write a poem in praise of Pierre. If Froissart showed his fellow poet the virtues of chivalry as a theme, Philippe perhaps provided him with his subject. The inveterate crusader and religious propagandist was certainly one of the principal participants in the events Machaut therein recounted, as a modern historian (Delaville Le Roulx 1886, 123n) suggests: “Philippe de Mézières is one of the most sympathetic figures in the history of Cyprus; his devotion to its kings, his desire to save the Orient from the infidels never diminished during his long career.” But Philippe was not only a principal actor in the events Machaut was later to recount; he was also Pierre's first ardent publicist (for a full discussion of the crusader's role in Pierre's wars see Iorga 1896, on which the following brief summary is based).
Born in Amiens in 1327, Philippe studied as a young man with the canons there and, although he showed considerable intellectual talents, decided soon afterward to join the crusading expedition of Humbert II, dauphin of Vienne, which was directed against the city of Smyrna. After a battle on that campaign, Philippe was knighted. He remained in the Near East even after Humbert's return to France, making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and there conceiving the idea of founding a new military order, the Order of the Passion. This order, he thought, would solve the Christian problem of reconquering and holding the Holy Land. Eventually, he made his way to Cyprus and formed a lifelong association with young Pierre, perhaps influencing him to found his own military order, the Order of the Sword. In Cyprus, he worked closely with the papal legate, Peter de Thomas or Peter Thomas, and apparently experienced an intense spiritual awakening through his association with this saintly man, himself an ardent supporter of the crusade who eagerly anticipated the overthrow of Islamic control over the Holy Land. Ascending to the throne after the death of his father, Hugues IV, Pierre determined on a series of military campaigns, including the attack on Alexandria. In these initiatives, he was strongly supported by Peter Thomas and Mézières, who had become chancellor of Cyprus at Pierre's coronation. Brokenhearted by what he viewed as the premature abandonment of Alexandria after its seizure on October 10, 1365, Peter Thomas died not long afterward in Famagusta, on January 6, 1366.
Mézières was inspired by the legate's death to write his life, in hopes of arguing for his beatification, which was not ratified (he is venerated as a saint in his order—the Carmelites—but has never been canonized by the Roman Catholic Church). According to his own testimony, he began composition a month or two after Peter Thomas's death. He finished the work not long afterward (for the full text see Smet 1954; the Bollandist version published in the Acta Sanctorum derives from a manuscript that is lacking several essential elements, including the petition for canonization authored by Pierre I and delivered to the pope during the king's final visit to the west in 1368). Though the Vita is ostensibly a life of Peter Thomas, it is also to a large extent a panegyric to the king of Cyprus whom Philippe served faithfully. Like the legate, Pierre is, in Philippe's portrait, a man dedicated from his early years to the service of God and the restoration of the Holy Land. The following passage exemplifies Philippe's view of Pierre:
Yet Peter, king of Jerusalem and Cyprus, from his youth did eagerly desire the liberation of his paternal heritage, the kingdom of Jerusalem, as well as the liberation of the Holy City and its cleansing, proposing in his heart that if it ever might come about through God that the scepter of Cyprus should be his he would devote his own person, riches, and kingdom to the conquest of the Holy Land (Smet 1954, 102; translation mine).
After or perhaps during the writing of the Vita, Philippe set out for Europe in the hopes of renewing interest there in the prosecution of the crusade. It was there that the work was initially circulated. Based in the royal city of Reims and associating regularly with the higher nobility, Guillaume de Machaut quite probably learned of and read the Vita at that time. It might well be one of the sources eventually used by the poet in the composition of his own account of the capture of Alexandria, as certain details suggest. Consider, among a number of parallels, the account of the expedition's return to Cyprus (lines 3615–3632 of the present edition). In Machaut's version of the voyage, the fleet is threatened by a storm that divides the victorious ships. With its emphasis on divine displeasure and meteorological chastisement, the account recalls the corresponding passage in the Vita. An interesting and detailed point of contact between the two versions is Machaut's unusual use in line 3637 of the Latinism fortune in its two meanings of “fortune” and “storm.” Similarly, the narrator in the Vita says “Tantam fortunam in mari miscuit quod omnia navigia nostra divisit,” while the legate comments “Ista fortuna est Dei vindicta” (emphasis mine). Thus, the two meanings of fortuna are equally invoked in the Vita as well.
If Machaut was aware of Mézières's version of the capture of Alexandria (a good part of the Vita is devoted to this subject), then perhaps this explains, somewhat paradoxically, one of the most puzzling aspects of the Prise: the omission of any mention of Mézières, though he was for decades Pierre's chancellor and chief advisor. This omission is especially ironic since it was Philippe whose organizational efforts made possible the assembly of an army of European recruits after Pierre's attempts to enlist the nobility had met with scant success (see Smet 1954, 119–124 for details). The group of the faithful, the “fidelos quosquos” who sailed with Pierre to Rhodes, were assembled, Philippe states, “sine adiutorio alicuius principis vel communitatis Christianorum,” that is, without the assistance of any ruler or the community of Christians. Though the chancellor modestly understates his own role, historians agree that it was Mézières and Peter Thomas who recruited the small army of mercenaries at Pierre's direction and with his funds and also made the arrangements for Venetian assistance (see, for example, Delaville Le Roulx 1886, 123–4; Hodgson 1910, 466–9).
Machaut's poem offers such a detailed account of Pierre's various military expeditions that it is often invoked as a reliable source by standard histories of the period (this is the case in Edbury 1991, Iorga 1896, and Hill 1940–52, for example; Delaville Le Roulx 1886 observes of Pierre's expeditions after Alexandria that “Machaut is the chief source for all this period”). Machaut's witness to these events is especially strong in its inclusion, following the traditions of epic poetry, of long catalogs of the names of those Frenchmen involved, often down to the level of squires. Machaut's accuracy is confirmed indirectly by other sources, particularly Froissart's Chroniques, because many of the same knights were active in the European campaigns that Machaut's contemporary recounts. The Prise, it is true, displays a certain degree of chauvinism; among Pierre's multinational entourage, it is only those of French blood and language who are usually mentioned by name, though there are notable exceptions made, even for the Saracens. The narrator, in fact, testifies that he knows more details about the participants in these extraordinary events than he has space to record (see, for example, the narrator's comments in lines 4694–6 of the present edition).
Thus, it is surprising, to say the least, that the Prise contains no reference to the Frenchman who was most instrumental in helping Pierre organize, against all odds, and lead successfully against the Mamluk enemy a crusading army. It simply cannot be that Machaut, so well informed about every detail of Pierre's accomplishments, did not know of Philippe de Mézières or that he served Pierre as chancellor of the kingdom of Cyprus, perhaps the most important post in his administration. A native of nearby Amiens, Mézières was in Europe at the time of Pierre's murder and in 1373 became one of the councilors of Charles V and tutor to the future Charles VI. Like Machaut, he was appalled by Pierre's murder and inveighed against the king's brothers Jean and Jacques, who were implicated in the plotting that led up to it. After Pierre's murder and the death of Peter Thomas, in fact, Mézières became the leading and most famous exponent of holy war and the very chivalric values that the Prise takes such pains to celebrate. He was never to forget his years with Pierre of Cyprus and even penned in 1389–90 a lengthy meditation on, among other subjects, the expedition against Alexandria; the Oratio Tragica was intended to generate interest in the then projected crusade (see Smet 1954 and Iorga 1896 for further details).
Why did Machaut choose to ignore Philippe de Mézières? Because both writers were supporters and admirers of Pierre, it cannot be for political or ideological reasons. Machaut shared with the younger crusader/propagandist a firm belief in traditional chivalric values and the importance of a militant Christian defense against Islamic threat. Both were thoroughly French in outlook and culture, even sharing a clerkly interest in learning and literature (like a number of Machaut's secular dits, the Songe du Vieil Pelerin makes use of a dream framework and personification allegory). It may be, therefore, that Machaut envied Philippe's early accomplishment in writing a stirring account of Pierre's military achievements and then taking a strong role in advocating canonization of the expedition's papal legate. This advocacy was furthered by Pierre of Cyprus himself; so attests the letter from the king to the Holy See that is appended to what Smet determines is the best manuscript of the Vita. With its strong focus on Pierre to the complete exclusion of Philippe and only brief mention of Peter Thomas (see lines 3507–3538 of the present edition), the Prise offers an alternative version of these events, one in which the place of secular values and power is more prominent.
This is certainly what one might expect of a poet who, though a clerk, had spent his life serving and entertaining a succession of grand nobles. If Machaut understood Mézières as in a double sense a competitor (an author rivaling him, a crusader rivaling Pierre), then we can perhaps understand the otherwise puzzling omission of France's most famous crusader from the Prise. To have included him would have called attention to the role of Mézières as celebrant of chivalric accomplishment and noteworthy soldier of Christ. Machaut, perhaps, did not wish to take attention away either from the accomplishments of Pierre or from his own admirable efforts in publicizing them.
The Cyprus of Pierre's birth was a kingdom made prosperous by its role in the most profitable international commerce of the period, the East-West trade in luxury goods for which, after the fall of Acre, the island became an important entrepôt (the historical account that here follows is based on Edbury 1991, Hill 1940–52, Iorga 1896, and Atiya 1938). Pierre's father, Hugues IV, did his best to foster the mercantile economy of Cyprus, which meant mostly following a policy of peaceful coexistence with his Muslim neighbors and trading partners. To a large extent, Hugues's governance represented a substantial break from the past. As George Hill remarks, “Hugh's reign was distinguished from those of his predecessors and successors by the fact that his Kingdom was less seriously and directly concerned in war” (1940–52, 298). Hugues did his best to avoid Cypriot involvement in the crusading against the infidel in which, as successor to the kingdom of Jerusalem, he had a personal and dynastic stake. He did attempt to strengthen his claim through the marriage of his eldest son Gui to Mary of Bourbon, thus allying himself to the French royal house. But he only participated sporadically in military efforts against those who now occupied his heritage and even turned down the gift of the Armenian citadel Gorhigos, which would have provided a useful base for operations against them.
Pierre, in contrast, was a throwback in his political vision, preferring a policy of more or less continual war against the Turks and Saracens. As a young man, Pierre apparently underwent a mystical experience at the Church of the Holy Cross in Stavrovouni, where the voice of the resurrected Jesus directed him to regain his lost heritage and rescue the Holy Land from its Saracen occupiers. Perhaps not long afterward (the date is disputed by scholars), he founded a military fraternity, the Order of the Sword, whose explicit goal was the liberation of the Christian east. Even more noteworthy, however, was the attempt that Pierre and his younger brother Jean made to escape the apparently tyrannical rule of their father and journey to the Latin west. Contemporary chroniclers are silent about the motives of the young men, but it seems likely that they were interested in discovering if there was some support for a crusade in a Europe whose glamour also attracted them. Hugues sent two galleys after his wayward sons, who were captured and returned home (the older knight who abetted their escape was tortured and killed). Pierre and Jean were imprisoned for some time and then released. They were, however, deprived of the opportunity or the resources for further flight. These three noteworthy episodes of Pierre's youth are developed at some length in the Prise, with an appropriate emphasis on the fervor of Pierre's calling to Christian militancy and what he considered his divine election to lead a renewed expedition to regain the Holy Land.
Pierre was thirty years old when Hugues died in 1359, but had already been crowned king of Cyprus some months before because his father foresaw some opposition to this succession. Pierre's older brother Gui had not survived his father, but his son Hugues believed (as did others) than he had a better claim to the throne (for further detailed discussion see the explanatory note to lines 612–18). Upon the death of Hugues, Pierre was crowned king of Jerusalem, in an impressive ceremony in Famagusta cathedral, where the papal legate Peter Thomas anointed Pierre and his wife Eleanor of Aragon as the monarchical couple on April 5, 1359. His nephew Hugues, who had been made prince of Galilee, raised objections, finding sympathy for his cause from Pope Innocent VI and Jean of France. This trouble required Pierre to dispute envoys who, after some difficulty, were able to satisfy Hugues's supporters. Pierre was required to pay him 50,000 white besants a year to settle the case. Pierre's envoys, however, had been dispatched on other business as well: to make preliminary preparations for the crusade upon which Pierre eventually hoped to embark. Unlike all the other expeditions that had hitherto been launched against the Muslim east, this venture was initiated not by a western monarch or the papacy, but by a Christian leader from the embattled east.
Meanwhile, Pierre was pursuing an aggressive policy that would establish his credentials as a worthy leader of a Christian army. Not long after he ascended to the throne, Pierre was approached by the people of Armenian Gorhigos, who, fearful of falling under Turkish domination, asked him to assume sovereignty over their city. He welcomed the opportunity that his father had refused. This occupation led in the following year to the capture of nearby Adalia and its environs, which the Cypriots then held against strong counterattacks. With these aggressive moves, Pierre aroused the anger of the emir of Damascus; it was the latter's threatening actions that convinced the pope and others that a crusade should be launched in response.
Pierre sailed for Avignon in late 1362, which he reached at the end of March the following year after spending time negotiating with the Venetians and Genoese, the two maritime powers with which Cyprus had an often contentious but profitable relationship. By the time he appeared before the pope (now Urban V, who succeeded Innocent in October 1362), Pierre had settled all outstanding difficulties with these Italian city states, whose support for the crusade was essential. A final treaty with Genoa, however, was concluded only in early 1365, just before the departure of Pierre for the east. The first order of business at the curia was the final settlement of the prince of Galilee's claim to the throne. Jean of France, then present in the city on other business, was supporting some modification of the original agreement, but after some further negotiations it was confirmed and Hugues took an oath of allegiance to his uncle. The prince of Galilee was later to serve with distinction in the crusade (see lines 2293–2306 of the present edition). With Urban's enthusiastic support, Pierre persuaded Jean to take the cross with himself, along with a number of other notables; the cardinal Elie Talleyrand de Périgord was appointed papal legate (see Guillemain 1962 and Housley 1986 for a full discussion of papal policy and involvement).
After taking the cross, Pierre embarked upon a journey throughout the kingdoms of western and eastern Europe with the expressed intention of drumming up support for the venture, though it is probably equally as true that he enjoyed the constant tourneying, feasting, and traveling for their own sakes. This venture lasted two years, perhaps lengthened by the sudden deaths of both Jean and the cardinal in early 1364. It is after attending the coronation of Charles V at Reims that Pierre assumed leadership of the crusade and embarked upon further efforts to encourage support from the nobility and monarchs of Germany and eastern Europe. Though Machaut summarizes briefly the king's travels through France, Flanders, and England, he develops these later expeditions as a continuous narrative in considerable detail and with many precise geographical references.
Pierre returned to Venice in early 1365, discouraged and disconsolate at the lack of actual support he had received, despite many extravagant promises. Fortunately, Peter Thomas (now legate for the crusade) and Philippe de Mézières had assembled a small army and arranged for transportation from the Venetians. Pierre and his entourage embarked for Rhodes with 31 ships, where a large force (108 vessels) arrived from Cyprus. With an appropriate blessing from the legate, the fleet set out on October 4, its destination known only to Pierre and his closest advisors.
The selection of the commercial center of Alexandria as the point of attack has provoked much discussion among modern scholars. Hill 1940–52 suggests that Pierre, once established in Alexandria, could march on Cairo while his fleet blockaded Egypt; additionally, the seizure of the city would deprive the sultan of the main source of his revenue. Such a strategy would hardly have been new, having already been advanced as early as the twelfth century. Edbury 1977, in contrast, questions whether Pierre was a “crusading enthusiast” or had, instead, a “more modest and more practical aim” (91). In other words, he questions whether Pierre, despite what his propagandists Mézières and Machaut declare, really intended to reconquer his heritage in Jerusalem, surely an impractical goal given the slim support to be expected from the western rulers. Marshaling an impressive amount of evidence, he argues that the attack on Alexandria may have been instead a preemptive first strike to achieve a more limited and realizable goal. For the ultimate security of Cyprus, surrounded by hostile powers, rested on its commercial importance to the western trading states with naval strength (Genoa and Venice, but also Aragon, and Catalonia). If, as seems likely, Alexandria was by 1365 threatening to eclipse the ports of Cyprus as trading centers, then seizing it might enable the Cypriots to regain control of trade in the eastern Mediterranean. If it could not be held, then destroying the city would buy the kingdom some time. A further point, one that Edbury does not make, is that the demonstration of Cypriot power in the Alexandrian campaign might persuade the sultan to conclude a treaty favorable to the island's trading interests. Pierre could thereafter gain by the threat of force what he had been unable to achieve directly with the city's capture. Machaut's version of Pierre's strategic decision is a pleasing fiction. That the king embarked with no idea of a destination and was swayed by the testimony of Perceval of Coulonges is an epic touch in the tradition of the chanson de geste, yet another characterization of the noble king who relies, according to the canons of conventional aristocratic virtue, on his trusted counselor.
Whatever Pierre's motive, the city presented a formidable obstacle to the relatively small force that Pierre was able to bring against it. Alexandria had not been attacked successfully for centuries; it was protected by thick walls and well-designed defenses, though the garrison was small. In the event, however, and with no little luck, the force of crusaders managed to defeat a lightly armed party of shore defenders, force open one of the city's huge gates, and eventually kill or drive off the soldiers inside. What followed was an orgy of looting and wanton destruction that lasted for some days. A majority of those in the expeditionary force, however, determined not to mount a defense against a relief force then on its way from Cairo (Pierre had been unable to destroy the bridge over which the sultan's troops would gain access to the city; see lines 2979ff of the present edition). To the bitter disappointment of the king, the Christian army took to their ships and departed to Cyprus with a full load of booty and prisoners (for further discussion of the battle and its aftermath see the explanatory notes to lines 2185–3614 of the present edition). We should note here only that Machaut's account is quite accurate and developed with the small, authentic details that confirm his dependence on eyewitness accounts. There is nothing to equal it in the Cypriot chroniclers, who pass over quite briefly what was undoubtedly the signal event in this period of the island's history (see, for example, the version of Makhairas in Dawkins 1932, 151, 153).
The remaining three or so years of Pierre's reign were occupied with three matters: continuing negotiations over a peace treaty with the sultan; further military action against other Muslim cities and defense of the mainland outposts held by Cypriot garrisons; and the gradual deterioration of Pierre's relations with his brothers and other Cypriot nobles, the result of the king's growing arrogance, self-concern, and vindictiveness against enemies both perceived and actual. Like the Cypriot chroniclers, Machaut offers detailed accounts of all these related events, including those that hardly contribute to any glorification of Pierre's accomplishments. Pierre could never extort a treaty favorable to Cyprus from the Saracens; outstanding questions between the two powers were to be settled only after his death, during the reign of his son Pierre II. Though he was to launch a number of raids that harassed and humiliated his enemies, none achieved the success of the expedition against Alexandria, which itself had no lasting political consequences and cannot be said to have contributed substantially to a western attempt at reconquista. The cost of these expeditions, however, was high, for the fiscal burden they placed on his people, along with the resentment that was felt at his frequent absences from the island, gave rise to the political and personal difficulties that, exacerbated by Pierre's violent temper and arrogance, led, perhaps inexorably, to his murder.
It is no wonder that Pierre's story, with his great accomplishments ending in a dishonorable death, prompted Machaut (and, following him, François Villon as well as Chaucer's monk) to recount this inspiring yet sad tale with a number of references to the Boethian figure of capricious Fortune. There is a certain conventionality in Machaut's portrait of the star-crossed Pierre; as Morton Bloomfield 1975 observes about literary heroes in the later Middle Ages, “there is a Christian sadness about these later protagonists which encourages a kind of fatalism. The heroes or protagonists are victims of fortune, but a fortune modified by redemptive history” (39). The fickle goddess's deceptive bestowal of transitory goods precedes her destruction of those who trust too much to her apparent beneficence, though such characters, like Chaucer's Troilus, may be redeemed by the poet's art. As Machaut notes at the beginning of his tale (lines 123–6), he does not know if Fortune was present at the divine assembly that ordained Pierre's birth, but will make herself known by what she accomplishes for him. The Prise certainly makes clear the contradictory influences of Fortune on the life of the warrior king it celebrates. But it is hardly a meditation on this view of human purpose, nor does it transform Pierre into an exemplum to illustrate it. Machaut often draws deeply on Boethian ideas to develop his particular version of fin'amors in his other dits (especially in the Remede de Fortune, essentially an adaptation of the honored Latin author to the tradition of the dit amoureus). But his invocation of Boethius in the Prise is more perfunctory than profound.
If Boethius provides a rough philosophical framework within which Pierre's story could be understood, Machaut's way of recounting his accomplishments is more heavily influenced by a different tradition, that of the aristocratic chronicle, as I have noted briefly above. According to the detailed cultural analysis of this genre presented in Brandt 1966, the essential feature of the aristocratic chronicle is that it is a narrative in which events, “being ordered more or less chronologically were habitually reported in the most elementary relationship to each other.” Thus, such a narrative does not concern itself with causality but “aims to celebrate, not to explain, the action with which it is concerned. An explanation that may occur along the way is never the point of the narrative” (85–88). Hence, the sporadic references to Dame Fortune throughout the Prise do not constitute its central theme in the sense that they organize or give significance to the story of Pierre's accomplishments. Instead, the organizing principle of such a narrative is found in character; the aristocratic chronicle locates a line of action in the will of a focused character and then follows it to some conclusion. In the Prise, Pierre is given direction, appointed his path to the house of honor as Machaut puts it, by the divine powers who attend his birth and by the voice of Jesus that suddenly issues from the shrine of the Holy Cross. Pierre is to realize that most basic of feudal injunctions: to take possession of the lands that are his by right and protect them from those intent on seizing them.
Though it does not focus on explaining what it recounts, the aristocratic chronicle does not lack “meaning” in the sense that its tales are not infused with values. On the contrary, in these texts “man was instead always considered teleologically, in light of those values and goals he regarded as a kind of immutable definition of proper human behavior” (106). And for Machaut and Froissart, as for the men whose deeds they recounted, that system of values of feudal chivalry was directed toward “the personal honor of the aristocrat” (110).
It is such a focus that distinguishes the Prise from the strictly clerical chroniclers who also provide us with information about his reign. Makhairas, Amadi, Strambaldi, and Bustron often relate actions Pierre took that we might properly regard as political, most prominently various disputes with the Venetians and Genovese that Pierre must settle. As Brandt points out, the clerical chronicler “did not see the materials he recorded as constituting a continuum of action. Every new page of the clerical chronicle was potentially, at least, a new beginning; interest, not relevance, was the criterion determining selection” (65). Machaut passes over political events of this kind briefly, if he mentions them at all, because they do not originate in Pierre's will, nor do they concern his pursuit of personal honor.
Such values help us understand what aspects of Pierre's life are omitted and which are emphasized in the poem. There is little mention, for example, of his family, except insofar as his father and brothers enter into Pierre's attempt to carry out his divinely imposed mission; his son, the future Pierre II, appears only in the context of the pointless but bitter quarrel that erupts between Pierre and Henri de Giblet over the possession of some hunting dogs. Only seemingly minor is yet another quarrel, the one between Pierre and Florimont de Lesparre that results in this knight challenging Pierre to individual combat on the field of honor. Even though the agreed-upon confrontation never takes place because Florimont loses his nerve and agrees to papal intercession, Machaut devotes more than five hundred verses (lines 7401–7934 of the present edition) to the description of the episode, even including three letters that document the dispute (these may well be genuine; see the explanatory note to lines 749off for further discussion). Similarly, Machaut recounts in great detail the king of Cyprus's travels to Germany, Austria, and Central Europe in search of support, even though this expedition came ultimately to nothing (lines 839–1552). Perhaps even more surprising is the emphasis given to the expedition sent to prevent the Turkish reoccupation of Gorhigos (lines 4453–5642), for Pierre does not accompany the men who, after an initial setback, manage to inflict a disastrous defeat upon the invaders. Additionally, this episode includes a lengthy catalog of the French knights involved. In fact, except for the conquest of Alexandria and the king's murder, these three sections of the poem are the lengthiest and constitute a considerable percentage of the whole. In all three instances, however, the narrative is developed in order to manifest Pierre's honor, follows a line of action that begins with the king's expressed will.
In the quarrel with Lesparre, Pierre's truthfulness and virtue are challenged. This explains why the king is willing to go to great lengths, even traveling from Cyprus to France, and at great expense, solely for the purpose of clearing his name and restoring his honor. That Pierre agrees after fervent exhortation over a period of weeks to the pope's brokered offer of a public apology from Lesparre over which he will personally preside demonstrates that his pridefulness can be properly tempered by mercy and his devotion to religion (the reconciliation takes place during the Easter season). The restless journeying from one royal court to the next illustrates yet another virtue, Pierre's perseverance, even as it testifies to the high honor in which he is held by others of the most exalted rank. And the expedition to Gorhigos proceeds from Pierre's will to preserve his territory, the armed force he assembles and commands an extension of royal resolve. If absent in the flesh, Pierre is present by proxy as the monarch whose honor has been offended and must be exonerated. In this instance, Machaut may have been serving another purpose as well. Though in writing the Prise his patron was ostensibly Pierre, the fact that the king of Cyprus was dead likely meant that some other, living patrons were also in view, most probably one or more of the French knights celebrated in this episode (see Tyson 1986 for a discussion of the connection between chronicles and patrons; her conclusion is that one of the former is seldom found without one of the latter). If this is in fact the case, then it is the heroic will of these men, who accomplish a difficult mission after much suffering, that also organizes the narrative of conquest and righteous self-assertion.
Throughout the poem, Machaut keeps firmly to his intention to demonstrate how Pierre, despite whatever evident personal failings he might have had, remained faithful to his mission. The Prise thus closes with a summary of its narrative theme from which neither the king nor his admiring biographer has much diverged:
He was so valiant—here's the main point
—That it would be honorable and fitting
For him to be numbered among the nine worthies;
And he'd make the tenth of their company,
For just as we've been saying
In all we've related about him,
Nothing made him stand out as much
As did honor—so saw every man.
And Mars favored and exalted him
So that he often sought out war
In which he found a hundred to his four.
Yet victory and honor were his,
And so, lords, if I honor him,
You should not think it strange,
(lines 8850–8862)
This vision is hardly expansive enough to be called epic in the Virgilian sense; Pierre's accomplishments do not lead to the (re)founding of a state or the salvation of a people. Machaut's more limited theme, however, admirably suits the aristocratic chronicle, whose chief purpose was to record for their contemporaries and for posterity the deeds of valiant men whose unswerving conformity to a code of values, what we call chivalry, dominated their sense of purpose and human worth. We might speculate that for this reason the Prise would have been read with great interest when it was first published. For with the resumption of hostilities between the French and English in the 1370s, the poet's account of Pierre's unstoppable drive to defend his realm and regain territory that was his by right should have offered a powerful model for the great nobles who were in all likelihood his first readers. They too were charged with a duty like the one imposed by the resurrected Jesus on the king of Cyprus.
SOURCES AND INFLUENCES
The deeds of Pierre I, as he learned of them from both his informants and, perhaps, the work of Philippe de Mézières, constitute the main source materials of the Prise. Though he occasionally, at least from the viewpoint of modern historians, purveys incorrect information, his omissions (such as his silence about Pierre's adulteries) and his errors (such as his occasional incorrect dating) are usually minor, certainly no indication of any decision to deceive or distort. The one significant exception might be his account of the aftermath of Pierre's murder, especially the description of the strange mistreatment of the king's corpse prior to burial and the revolutionary political acts of the aggrieved but now triumphant nobles (see lines 8769–8832 of the present edition). If Machaut is here bending the facts to suit his glorification of Pierre, an exaggerated vilification of his murderers is at least understandable—if the poet's account is in fact exaggerated, but that remains in some scholarly doubt. Though criticized by earlier scholars, notably Mas Latrie 1877, for unjustly implicating the king's brothers in the crime, modern specialists, notably Edbury 1980, have tended rather to confirm the poet's harsh judgment. Machaut, it turns out, is for the most part a remarkably accurate and astute historian (certainly unjustified is the dismissive judgment offered in Levine 1985, 260, that the poem is full only of “discontinuous bursts of reality”). On the contrary, though admittedly partial to his subject, Machaut does show his fairness by recounting some episodes, particularly the torture of Marie de Giblet, that hardly redound to the king's glory but in fact offer some justification for his eventual assassination. The Prise is a work of history properly speaking, true enough, especially by medieval standards, to its sources; it is by no means a piece of simple-minded propaganda. In fact, the poem is in its turn an important source for any modern reconstruction of the events with which it is concerned.
From a literary rather than a historiographical point of view, however, the poem's relationship to its “sources,” broadly considered, requires more extensive comment. On an elementary level, the Prise constitutes an important part of the author's production, which he considered to be in some sense a “whole.” Machaut, to be sure, signals a distinct break between his other longer narrative works and the Prise by his choice of subject matter. In the poet's typical fashion, this break is also realized textually, mirrored in the work itself by the somewhat abrupt transition to the real matter of biography after the pleasing, mythographic fancies of the opening section. After more than two hundred lines, the poem in effect “begins again,” abandoning fiction for truth:
Now I will commence with my main theme,
And tell all there is to know
About the young man—may God save him
—And how he conducted his life.
(lines 259–62)
Though there is this textual suggestion of a break in the hitherto uninterrupted flow of poems drawn from the Rose tradition, Machaut establishes a structural continuity with his preceding works by continuing to write in octosyllabic couplets rather than the alexandrines used in most verse chronicles. The poetic chronicle borrows this structural feature from the chanson de geste. It is, in fact, a significant point of contact between the two literary genres, a sign of continuity in outlook and subject matter. The alexandrine or dodecasyllabic line is arguably better suited, because of its greater length and strong caesura, to the requirements of complicated historical narrative. This verse form replaced the decasyllabic line of the older chanson de geste and became standard as well in later poems within this tradition because “it offers to discourse a more expansive space” (Suard 1993, 11).
Despite this generic pressure, Machaut in the Prise uses the octosyl-labe, traditional in the Old French fictional roman since the 1170s and the standard if not exclusive verse form of his longer dits (the Jugement Bebaingne is in stanzaic quatrains, a youthful experiment not repeated; see Guthrie 1999 for further discussion). In a sense that is much emphasized by the omnibus manuscripts that contain it, Machaut's Prise, then, discovers its source, its most immediate literary context, in the authorial oeuvre that precedes, follows, and contains it. These transtextual connections are completed and formalized by the Prologue placed at the beginning of the collected works in manuscripts A and F-G. In this “foundational” text, Machaut is enjoined by Nature and Love to compose the poetry and music that are to make him famous, even as these creations, reflecting the divine order of things, are to do honor to the two deities—and to women in general. The Prise thus finds its effective cause, so to speak, in the divine commands communicated to the poet, or so the fictional account of his career in the Prologue would have his readers believe (see Palmer 1993 for text and translation of the Prologue, as well as further critical discussion).
In a wider sense, as we have already noted, the Prise belongs to a genre that extends beyond the poet's personal production: the aristocratic chronicle. Beyond a doubt, the Prise conforms to its genre in terms of subject matter (war), theme (chivalry), and basic structure (chronological narrative), but is somewhat idiosyncratic stylistically. It is especially interesting in this regard that Machaut avoids two features common in other aristocratic chronicles of the period.
On the one hand, Machaut does not succumb to the clerical tendency to place the life of Pierre I within an intellectual scheme. The opening of he Livre des Pais offers an interesting contrast with Machaut's approach. This prose biography is otherwise quite similar to the Prise and may even have been influenced by it. Its subject is Jean le Maingre, more commonly known as Boucicaut, the marshal of France and a man famed for his exploits in the wars of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (the work was completed in 1409). The author states, moreover, that he chose this subject at the instigation of several nobles who campaigned with the marshal; these men have served as his informants. Like Machaut, he offers a strong brief in favor of Boucicaut that emphasizes the knight's accomplishments in battle and his virtuous character. As his editor declares, the writer's “objective was, it seems, to record the grand accomplishments of the marshal so that they might remain in human memory and serve as examples for knights to come” (Lalande 1985, xxv). Though the Livre des Pais is devoted to the deeds of a warrior nobility, it begins with a demonstration of the writer/clerk's intellectual powers:
Two things are, by the will of God, established in the world exactly in the fashion of two pillars, to sustain the ordinances of human and divine laws that give to human beings a code for living peacefully and appropriately under the strictures of Reason, and that make human intelligence increase and grow larger in knowledge and virtue and also rescue it from ignorance—and along with this protect and sustain and augment private virtue and the public good, and without which the world would be just something confused and devoid of order of any kind…. These two pillars, without doubt, are Chivalry and Learning, which go together quite well (Lalande 1985, 6–7; translation mine).
In effect, the clerical author of the Livre des Fais argues for the indispensability of his own work. For if learning were to be destroyed, then “law should be nothing, and since man cannot live well without law, he would be reduced to living like a beast.” But society cannot dispense with chivalry either. For in any land where chivalry might die out, “the grasping covetousness of those enemies who fear nothing would reduce it to disorder.” Hence without knights like Boucicaut to protect it, civilization would cease to exist. Though these values are implicit in the Prise, such moralizing commentary is minimal there, confined mainly to sporadic references to Fortune and occasional more or less didactic comments about proper courtly behavior (such as the admonition against self-destructive truth telling in lines 8163–86). Beyond a doubt, however, Machaut shared with the anonymous author of the Livre des Fais the belief that the first estate of noble warriors needs the intellectual direction of those in the second of churchmen. Such a belief, in fact, constitutes the organizing principle of the Confort d'ami, which consists mainly of moralizing comment and exempla. The Prise and Confort share some themes in common in this regard, notably the extended praise of Jean of Bohemia as a chivalric model. In his last dit, however, Machaut avoids a clerical tone for the most part. In contrast to that of the Livre des Fais, the opening of the Prise offers an allegorical fiction of origins—an important point to which we will shortly return.
Machaut does not adopt the learned persona of the clerkly chronicler. He rejects as well that of a latter day jongleur. In an earlier age, when epic tales were more often performed than read, the wandering minstrel or jongleur felt “the need to establish a direct contact with his listeners.” And so his appeal for attention was placed “at the very beginning, where the singer addresses his public in order to boast of the story he offers them” (Suard 1993, 19). In Machaut's own time, the chansons de geste continued to enjoy a substantial popularity that is attested by the works, often extensive, of talented remanieurs such as Jean Bodel and Adenet le Roi. Cuvelier's verse chronicle of the life of Bertrand du Guesclin may have been influenced by Machaut's Prise, or so some scholars believe. However Cuvelier, unlike his ostensible model, adopts the pose of a jongluer to give his story an epic cast. The opening of his poem deliberately recalls the extempore performance of the oral poet:
Now please listen to me, knight and young man,
City dwellers, man or woman, priests, clerks, friars,
And I will sing to you the beginning and end
Of the valiant life of Bertran du Guesclin,
Constable of France, the valiant champion
Who was greatly feared as far as the watery Rhine
In France, in Auvergne, and in the Limousin.
Never since the time of king Alexander,
Or since King Arthur or King Pepin,
Or since the times of Godfrey or of Saladin,
Did such a man hold sway and give battle.
There are chronicles of him—doubt not that I think so.
Lords, now keep still and attend to me.
You who value reason and keep honor well,
Now draw close to me; I believe you will hear
A book that's long enough, just put into rhyme.
(Charrière 1859, lines 5–20; translation mine)
But if Machaut does not choose to stylize his chronicle in the manner of the chansons de geste, as does Cuvelier, he does subtly connect the Prise to the continuing tradition of vernacular epic. The twelfth century saw the development of a cycle of epic poems (in alexandrine verse form) that were devoted to the signal successes of the First Crusade and its principal hero: Godfrey of Bouillon. These works were refashioned at that century's end, gaining a new popularity, by a remanieur named Graindor of Douai, who added an account of Godfrey's youth and his mythical grandfather, the legendary swan knight (this brief discussion is based on Foulet 1989, Cook and Crist 1972, and Hatem 1932). Of more immediate relevance to Machaut perhaps is the fact that around 1350 a second remaniement of the epic cycle of the crusades was begun. Three poems are extant and a completing fourth can be deduced from a fifteenth-century prose romance, Saladin, which takes the narrative of Godfrey's heirs to its discouraging conclusion, the ultimate defeat of his line by the greatest of Saracen warriors. Interestingly, the first poem in the series, he Chevalier au Cygne et Godefroid de Bouillon ends tragically as well, as Foulet 1989 describes: “the climactic episode of the poem, the poisoning of Godfrey by patriarch Heraclitus (vv. 27512–28537) is narrated with a certain amount of dramatic skill. Tancred [Godfrey's erstwhile companion in arms] is made to appear as the accomplice, however reluctant, of the murderer, and we are told that the day will come when Godfrey's mother, countess Ida of Boulogne, will exact a terrible vengeance for the death of her son” (114).
Godfrey of Bouillon is not only the latest of the nine worthies and the representative of a militant Christendom whose ardor for conquest will be reborn in the tenth, Pierre of Lusignan, according to Machaut. He is also Pierre's ancestor, the man most justified by ties of blood to inherit what Godfrey won and what his heirs then lost. The expanding series of poems devoted to him shows the workings of the chanson de geste as a form that cannot be contained by the boundaries of the individual text. In fact, the epic tradition of medieval France is defined by transtextual clusters of poems, separate works joined by close narrative and thematic ties, the most famous of these are the cycles of Charlemagne, Guillaume d'Orange, and Doon de Mayence. And at the center of each “cycle” stands
a martial figure whose prowess in many a combat has charmed a public never weary of hearing tales about prestigious heroes who fight and slay innumerable foes. At the beginning of the fourteenth century this avid interest was crystallized in the literary and iconographic cult of the “nine worthies.” … The epic hero is not allowed to remain in splendid isolation; he may be the brightest star within his family constellation, but the deeds of his father, grandfather, brothers, sons, nephews, and grandsons are likewise memorable and so must be praised in epic song. Just as Charlemagne's father Pepin and his nephew Roland are the protagonists of various chansons de geste, so Godfrey of Bouillon's ancestors, brother, cousin, and their descendants were celebrated in epics built around their persons and deeds, real or imaginary. (Foulet 1989, 99)
Like the Godfrey cycle to which it is connected by matter and theme, Machaut's Prise opens with a brilliant account of the hero's miraculous and divine origins, an act of mythopoeia that centers on the hero's election to his special status. Like Godfrey, Machaut's Pierre fulfills the destiny bestowed upon him by a special mother. In Godfrey's case this is Ida, the child of the swan knight, who transmits to him the special blood inheritance of the original seven swan children. In Machaut's, it is Venus, the protecting spirit of Cyprus and mother also of the celebrated Aeneas. Like Godfrey, Pierre dies tragically, betrayed by those who should owe him allegiance and protect him from harm. Like those of Godfrey, Pierre's conquests pass on to lesser men. Thus in Pierre, the story of the line's originary hero is capitulated. What begins well ends badly. What is gained by blood and steel is lost by treachery. Machaut, it seems likely, thought his first readers would appreciate the connections he establishes between Pierre and the king's glorious ancestor and understand his poem, at least in part, as a continuation of the epic cycle of the Crusades.
Machaut's treatment of this exemplary (yet flawed) heroic life may have influenced other writers, notably Chaucer and Francois Villon, to write of the king of Cyprus; we cannot be sure. What impressed these two other poets, however, was not the way in which the glorious destiny of Godfrey manifested itself in the greatest of Christ's champions from their own age (see Braddy 1935, 1947 for further discussion of the Chaucerian connection; see La Monte 1932. for Villon). To Chaucer's monk, Pierre is one of a number of tragic cases. To Villon, his faded grandeur exemplifies the inevitably destructive workings of time on even the greatest of human accomplishments, those managed by the “lords of bygone times”:
Likewise, where is that Scottish king,
Half of whose face, they say,
Was as red as an amethyst
From his forehead down to his chin?
And Cyprus's famous king,
Alas! And the good king of Spain
Whose name I do not know?
But where is the bold Charlemagne?
(lines 365–72 in Bonner 1960, 41)
It is fitting that Pierre finds his poetic final resting place not far from the greatest of medieval warrior kings, who in medieval legend also achieved a glorious victory over the enemies of God.
EDITORIAL POLICY FOR THIS TEXT AND TRANSLATION
Sources
Unlike most poets of the Middle Ages, Guillaume de Machaut was eager to present to the public his poetical and musical works as a unified oeuvre that would testify, in its breadth and variety, to his talent and accomplishment. Though his works are sometimes found individually bound with those of other authors, the most authoritative manuscripts offer more or less complete versions of the oeuvre. For some time, textual scholars evaluated these on the basis of what might be called a “growing contents” theory. Thus, the more complete manuscripts should be thought of as later and hence representing the poet's final version of his works (see Hoepffner 1908–21 and Williams 1969, 1978 for a discussion and defense of this view). In the Voir Dit, the character Guillaume de Machaut speaks of the book “in which I put all my works,” establishing that there was at least one manuscript whose contents did grow, the poet's own compilation of fair copies. In the past two decades or so, this theory has been challenged, both as a global explanation of the affiliation of the surviving manuscripts and as a criterion for establishing the “best text” to be used for editions of individual poems (see, for example, Keitel 1977 and Kibler and Wimsatt 1999). It may well be that one or more of the surviving manuscripts is “incomplete” because its contents were meant to suit the tastes of a particular patron. Obviously, dating and the establishment of relative authority must rest on a careful examination of the evidence in each case. However, this does not mean that in deciding on the base text for an edition of any individual work, including the Prise, the view that the more complete manuscripts do carry no special authority can be laid aside lightly.
The poems of Machaut are found either individually or in groups in seventy three manuscripts that have either survived or can be postulated with some certainty (see Earp 1995 for the most authoritative and detailed description of these). Nine extant manuscripts preserve Machaut's oeuvre in its most complete form (with some variation), and five of these offer versions of the Prise d'Alixandre (I follow Dzelzainis 1985 in so titling the poem rather than Prise d'Alixandrie with Mas Latrie since it is the former spelling of the city's name that is more common in the poem). The manuscripts are as follows, with the sigla assigned them by Hœpffner, one of Machaut's early editors:
| A | Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français MS 1584. |
| B | Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français MS 1585 |
| E | Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français MS 9221. |
| F-G | Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, fonds français MS 22545. |
| Vg | New York, Wildenstein Family, no number. |
Of these manuscripts, only A and G include a full version of the verse Prologue that Machaut wrote late in his career to serve as a literary explanation of why he devoted himself to the composition of verse and music (see Palmer 1993 for an edition/translation and discussion). B includes a short, perhaps preliminary, version of the Prologue. Vg lacks not only the Prologue, but some of the shorter works of Machaut's later career and the long dit that must have preceded the composition of the Prise by only a few years, the Voir Dit, Machaut's undoubted masterpiece. While, like Vg, E lacks some of the short, later dits, it does include full versions of both the Voir Dit and the Prise. Of the nine major omnibus manuscripts, only five include the Prise, which must have been composed after January 1369 (the month of Pierre's murder) and thus has to be Machaut's last major composition (as the order of contents in these five manuscripts customarily indicates). The three manuscripts that also include the Prologue, it can hardly be coincidence, also offer the best versions of the Prise.
A, E, and G are undoubtedly related to one another, but no direct affiliations can be established. Of the three, A and G may well have been copied from the same source, but these two manuscripts do not regularly agree against Vg, B, and E, as one might expect in such a case. E sometimes furnishes readings superior to those of A and G. We can hardly doubt that A, E, and G are no more than one or two removes from Machaut's own fair copy of the poem, which he might well have edited during the preparation of those omnibus manuscripts completed under his direction. In other words, “authorized” versions of the poems may have circulated in different “final” forms. For this reason, the principle of common error cannot be invoked with certainty to establish a “correct reading” in many cases of disagreement among the important manuscripts.
Choice of a base manuscript in these circumstances must be made after a careful review of evident reliability. E contains a large number of idiosyncratic errors, including its own versions of whole lines at various points (it might be that the exemplar from which it was copied had lacunae that E's scribe has done his best to fill). G is also idiosyncratic, introducing a large number of variants that can hardly be anything but deliberate modifications (though these are cataloged extensively in Dzelzainis's unpublished edition, pp. 14–24, she still chooses G as her base text).
A has consistently, if not exclusively, been preferred by Machaut's literary (if not musical) editors because it offers reliable, if hardly error-free versions of the various texts. In addition, its index bears a rubric, unique among the other manuscripts, that reads “Vesci l'ordenance que Guillaume de Machau wet qu'il ait dans son livre” or “This is the arrangement that Guillaume de Machaut wishes his book to have.” This rubric seems to indicate that Machaut was involved in the production of A. Furthermore, the miniatures in pen and ink throughout seem to be of provincial design, perhaps executed in Reims under the poet's personal supervision (see Avril 1982 for a full discussion of the relevant evidence). For these reasons, I have selected A as the base text for this edition, as I have done in the case of the other Machaut editions in the Garland Library and as did Mas Latrie for his edition of the Prise in 1877. I have not emended A's readings for minor grammatical and spelling variations (disagreements of this kind with the other manuscripts are not noted in the variants). Significant lexical and grammatical variants, however, are detailed, and the textual notes explain those instances, which are not numerous, in which I have deemed A's reading to be in need of correction. The textual notes do not address aspects of interpretation that would be obvious to a specialist reader, e.g. when se is to be interpreted as si, lor as leur, etc. The readings of G and E have been carefully collated with those of A, and I have regularly consulted with profit Dzelzainis's accurate and intelligent edition of the poem in regard to textual and lexical matters, though it is now somewhat dated because it predates the masterly and encyclopedic account in Earp 1995.
Orthography and Layout
Editors of Middle French have traditionally modernized many features of the manuscript text, most importantly separating words (or joining their constituent parts), changing letter forms to distinguish u/v and i/j, and introducing accents and punctuation. The underlying assumption seems to have been that Middle and modern French are sufficiently close that there is no good reason to inconvenience modern readers by leaving the text in its original state. But if we are seriously interested in Machaut's poetry, we should also be interested in the way it was set down. For him the two were inseparable, and if we are prepared to make the effort to understand the words he wrote, we should surely be prepared to read them.
A facsimile of an authoritative manuscript, or preferably of all the manuscripts, is thus the closest we can get to an ideal edition. Facsimiles bring with them, however, two significant disadvantages. Reading fourteenth-century hands requires experience that cannot at present be reasonably expected of most users, including many scholars. And manuscripts contain copying errors that readers today cannot improve at sight, in the way that medieval readers surely did. There is therefore a strong case for editions that use modern print; that refer to other sources when the main manuscript needs emendation or when the other sources offer significant lexical and grammatical variants; and that correct identifiable errors, especially scribal ones. The main question for an editor, then, is how much more to do than simply print the text as it stands in the main manuscript. While on academic grounds we could most easily justify following the manuscript as closely as print allows, this contemporary edition of the Prise aims to bring new readers into Machaut's world. We must therefore consider the skills of a wide readership, including experts but also students and amateurs of medieval literature.
After much deliberation and consultation, I have decided to modernize those features of the original orthography that are shaped mainly by traditions of design or constraints of space in the manuscripts. Thus, this edition does not retain the separation of the initial letter from the rest of each line. This is, no doubt, a feature of the design of formal manuscripts, but probably not of Machaut's working copy; perhaps more important, modern readers are simply not accustomed to the practice. I have expanded abbreviations (including always printing et for the ampersand in order to be consistent), and I have separated words run together. These are features related to space constraints in two-column layout, the usual page design for poetic manuscripts in this period. They are functions of manuscript copying and prove bothersome to the modern reader yet yield nothing positive. I have, in contrast, chosen to represent the decorated initials of the manuscript, using drop capitals covering roughly the same number of lines (usually 3) as in the main manuscript. These provide essential information about the division of the text into sections. Modern accents or punctuation has not been added since these could have had no part in any fourteenth-century text. The puncti sporadically present in the original have, however, been retained since they offer no impediment to easy scanning and reading and take the reader one step closer to the original. Two important concessions to the contemporary reader have been made. The modern distinctions between i and j and between u and v have been followed throughout even though this is in some sense distorting, if only mildly so since scribal practice is itself inconsistent and these letter pairs are variants. The line numbers and folio indicators (referring only to manuscript A) are, of course, editorial additions to assist the reader. It should be noted in this regard that Mas Latrie's numbering includes an error that causes him to undercount the number of verses in the poem by one. While she corrects this error, unfortunately the line numbering in Dzelzainis is otherwise idiosyncratic, with numbers being assigned arbitrarily to a likely lacuna of indeterminate length and to the lines of copy for the included prose letters. I have followed neither practice here.
The facing English translation serves two quite different purposes which, in practice, it has not always proved possible to reconcile. On the one hand, the English is a guide for those reading the original, who might glance at it for assistance with a difficult construction or unknown word. For such readers, the most useful translation is a version in which each French expression is rendered by an appropriate English equivalent. Basic syntactical and grammatical similarities between Middle French and modern English make such translation possible, though sometimes, perhaps often the result would be awkward or unidiomatic. On the other hand, the translation serves those with no or very little knowledge of Middle French, for whom the best introduction to Machaut's poem is a modern English version that reproduces not only the meaning of the orig-inal, but something of its style. Except for the opening account of Pierre's birth, which is witty and elegant, Machaut's style here suits his subject matter admirably, which is to say that it is hardly “literary” in the same sense the poetry of his other works always is. He strives throughout for clarity and precision of expression, qualities that are well served by a fairly literal translation, such as I offer here. Sometimes, however, literalness must be sacrificed for clarity and fluency. In those instances, which are fortunately fairly rare, the reader looking for detailed help with Machaut's French may be disappointed, and for this I apologize. Most lines of the translation do correspond to those in the original. To produce easily readable English, however, I have sometimes not been guided by Machaut's syntax. All translation, of course, must fail to equal its source. In the end, there is no truly adequate substitute for an encounter with the original, an opportunity that is of course here offered as well.