The Deprecation of the Greeks: a Very Old Story.

Leaving aside the woes and bewitchments of Gerusalemme’s heroines for a little while, I would like to return to the war between Franks and Saracens and to the hostile stance  of Torquato Tasso towards the Greeks, one of the great powers of the times, although they were called Romans back then – but this did not confuse Tasso and his contemporaries, as it did not confuse the chroniclers of the Crusades. In view of recent developments in the European world of politics and finance, and particularly in the Eurozone, it is interesting to see Tasso’s depiction of the Greeks in his epic.

Tasso used William of Tyre as his main historical source; William of Tyre, in his turn, born over a hundred years after the First Crusade, based his account on previous chronicles, among which  Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Ierosolimitanorum: the great heroes in that narrative are Bohemond and his nephew – none other than our old acquaintance, Tancred. The Gesta were hostile towards the Greek emperor Alexius I Comnenus, who did not trust Bohemond and was not particularly keen to allow the rather unruly bands of crusaders to devastate his lands. For Tasso, Alexius is of course ‘the treacherous emperor of the Greeks … with his wonted cunning’ (I.69) (Albert of Aachen’s chronicle, on the other hand, paints a much more favourable picture of the emperor, who had the difficult role of balancing his moral obligation to the Christian armies with consideration of his own people…)

In Canto One, Tasso describes the various armies participating in the Crusade. This is how he presents the Greeks:

Two hundred ride behind them, Grecian – born,

each armed so lightly that it seems he lacks

all steel, with scimitars athwart their sashes worn,

and bows and quivers rattling on their backs.

Their wiry steeds, well fed on little corn,

are tireless in long treks and swift attacks.

Quick to maraud and quick to quit the fight,

roving and scattered, they wage war by flight. (I.50)

Tasso’s description seems to refer rather to Ottoman Turks (e.g. ‘scimitars athwart their sashes worn’) or Arabs (their wiry steeds, well fed on little corn’) rather than to offer historical representations of Byzantine Greeks. (And this conflation has its own significance, too). Tasso writes over a hundred years after the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, and barely ten years after the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571, in which the Ottoman Fleet was defeated by a Holy League of the Catholic states of the Mediterranean. (Bonus info: Miguel de Cervantes fought in that battle and was wounded, too!)

Tatinos rules that band, the only Greek

who joined the Latin armies. Oh, the shame!

the crime! These wars – were they too far to seek,

right at your doorstep, Greece? And yet you came

to lounge, a lazy spectator and weak,

who waits to see the outcome of the game?

If you are now a slave, your slavery

is (don’t complain!) justice, not infamy. (I.51)

In Greek mythology, the Nine Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mmenosyne (=Memory), protected the Arts and Sciences. In this 1745 illustration of Jerusalem Delivered by Giambattista Piazzetta, you can see the Muses on Mt Helicon, their residence, while two winged figures are carrying a cameo with Torquato Tasso’s portrait.
Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.

The scornful tone and the belief that the Greeks brought their slavery upon themselves due to their deceit, weakness, and indolence seem to have initiated a narrative tradition of hostile and deprecatory assessment which is strangely echoed in similar remarks in Western Europe today on the ‘lazy’ and ‘untrustworthy’ Greeks. What Tasso cannot mention – since it wouldn’t fit in the time-frame of Gerusalemme Liberata, having happened about a hundred years after the First Crusade – is that those brave and honest Frankish crusaders led the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople; that first Fall of the City in 1204 weakened the already faltering Byzantine Empire considerably, and eased off the work of the Ottomans in 1453. Yet, according to Tasso and the mainstream narrative in the centuries to follow, it was the Greeks who were treacherous:

The faith of Greeks – who knows not how it fares?

One treason shows all treason they can do –

no, thousands show it, since a thousand snares

that faithless, greedy folk has laid for you. (II.72)

On the one hand, the narrative fictional tradition of the ‘Fallatia Graecorum’; on the other, the historical fact of the Fourth Crusade which shows treachery to be firmly in the Frankish court. But fiction seems to be winning over fact, every time. A rather melancholy thought, this.

From Fact to Fiction

Historical fiction is generally based on historical facts, and the author will certainly have delved into sources, usually chronicles, history books, or studies about the time and the events of her or his temporal setting. I’ve mentioned before that Torquato Tasso’s source on the First Crusade was William of Tyre. This is an episode in Book One of William’s chronicle:

There was a certain infidel living in the city [Jerusalem], a treacherous and wicked man, who persecuted our people with insatiable hatred. This man was determined to devise some scheme that would bring about their destruction. One day, he stealthily threw the carcass of a dog into the temple court, a place which the custodian – and indeed the whole city as well – were most careful to keep scrupulously clean. Worshippers who came to the temple to pray the next morning found the mouldering body of the unclean animal. Almost frantic, they at once roused the whole city with their cries. The populace quickly ran to the temple, and all agreed that without question the Christians were responsible for the act. Need more be said? Death was decreed for all Christians, since it was judged that by death alone could they atone for such an act of sacrilege. The faithful, in full assurance of their innocence, prepared to suffer death for Christ’s sake. As their executioners, with swords unscathed, were about to carry out their orders, however, a young man, filled with the spirit, came forward and offered himself as the sacrifice. (William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, transl. and annotated by Emily Atwater Babcock and A.C. Krey, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943, vol. 1, p. 68)

William Hunter owned an Italian translation of William of Tyre’s chronicle. Interestingly, the translator Giuseppe Horologgi dedicates his translation to the then Duke of Lorraine, descendant of Godfrey. These pages contain the episode which inspired Canto Two in Tasso’s epic. Sp Coll Hunterian l.6.17, Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.

There follows an exchange between the unnamed young man and the Christian community: he explains that it is better for a man to die than a whole people, and the Christians promise to offer his family the honour of “carrying the olive which signifies our Lord Jesus Christ” in solemn procession of Palm Sunday. William of Tyre concludes this episode thus:

“The young man then gave himself up to the chief men of Jerusalem and declared that he was the criminal. In this way he established the innocence of the other Christians, for, when the judges heard his story, they absolved the rest and put him to the sword. Thus he laid down his life for the brethren and, with pious resignation, met death, that most blessed sleep, confident that he had acquired grace in the sight of the Lord. (ibid., p.69)

This narrative is clearly the basis of the story in Canto Two. It is equally obvious that Torquato Tasso, inspired by this historical episode, took many liberties with it. He embellishes the truth, as he declared he would do in his introduction. He elaborates on causality and agents: the sacrilege is devised, planned and perpetrated by evil sorcerer Ismen (the ‘certain infidel’, ‘treacherous and wicked man’ of William of Tyre’s historical narrative) and wicked king Aladdin (another fictional creation) in order to exterminate the Christians of Jerusalem. He changes the object of sacrilege from a foul, rotting dog-carcass to an elevated, holy statue of the Virgin, thus providing another connection with classical epic[2]. He changes the martyr figure from a young man to the much more pathetic and attractive one of a young, beautiful virgin – but he keeps the young man character as a lover, inserting the element of romance into a typical narrative motif of Christian sacrifice. He changes the execution plan from a beheading to a burning (perhaps because his sixteenth century audience would be more familiar with it?) And he provides a happy ending to the episode, with the intervention of the fictional character of Clorinda, thus introducing one of the main characters of his epic into the story.

A historical fiction writer of today moves along those lines, more or less, in dealing with facts and transforming them into fiction. Nothing is lost, everything is put to good use for the narrative purposes, and history is transformed into something much more intriguing and satisfying.

 

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[1] William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, Volume One, translated and annotated by Emily Atwater Babcock and A.C. Krey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 68-9.

[2] The statue of a holy figure is a motif borrowed from classical epic: in the siege of Troy, Odysseus and Diomedes enter the city by stealth to recover the powerful wooden statue of Pallas Athene, which would guarantee protection to its owners. See Torquato Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme Liberata), translated by Max Wickert, with an Introduction and Notes by Mark Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 407.