Reconstructing Byzantine Constantinople: intercession and illumination at the court of Philippe le Bon
Florence, Italy
This article discusses three texts produced for Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, in the years following the fall of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. These texts deal with the West's painful experience of the postcolonial frontier between itself and Constantinople in the wake of this event. I look at the theme of intercession in two verse laments, Guillaume Dufay's ‘Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae’ (1454), and Jean Molinet's ‘Complainte de Grèce’ (1464). I compare the use of this theme with the role of illumination in a manuscript produced for the Duke in around 1458 (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français, 9087), and containing Bertrandon de la Broquière's Voyage d'Outremer, a prose account of a journey to the Orient. The theme of the Church (Ecclesia) as intercessor in the laments, and the representation of manuscript patronage and of the cities of Jerusalem and Constantinople in the miniatures of the Broquière compilation, serve to bring the fallen Byzantium to the West in textual form. This reconstruction of Byzantine Constantinople may be viewed in theological terms, or it may point to the recovery of the city through the crusade projects of Philippe le Bon.
1 Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London, Vintage, 1999), pp. 253–54.
2 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London, Routledge, 1998), pp. 107–9 (p. 109).
3 Armand Grunzweig, ‘Philippe le Bon et Constantinople’, Byzantion, 24 (1954), 47–61 (pp. 50–54); Robert Schwoebel, The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk, 1453–1517 (Nieuwkoop, de Graaf, 1967), pp. 14–16; Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire: 312–1453 (University of Toronto Press, 1986), p. 243.
4 Georges Doutrepont, La Littérature française à la cour des ducs de Bourgogne (Paris, Champion, 1909), pp. 512–15. The dates given are those provided by Doutrepont.
5 The editions used are the following: Guillelmi Dufay, Opera Omnia, vi, Cantiones, ed. by Heinrich Besseler, Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae, 1 (Rome, American Institute of Musicology in Rome, 1964), pp. xxviii–xxix, 19–21; Le Voyage d'Outremer de Bertrandon de la Broquière, ed. by Charles Schefer (Paris, Leroux, 1892); Les Faictz et dictz de Jean Molinet, ed. by Noël Dupire, 3 vols (Paris, Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1936–39), i, 9–26. Page references to these editions are given after citations in the text. The title of the Dufay motet translates as follows: ‘Lament of the holy Mother Church of Constantinople.’ This translation is my own; further translations of quotations in Latin are taken from the sources cited.
6 Voyage d'Outremer, ed. by Schefer, p. vi; The Voyage d'Outremer by Bertrandon de la Broquière, trans. by Galen R. Kline (New York, Lang, 1988), p. x; Alain-Julien Surdel, ‘Oultremer: la Terre Sainte et l'Orient vus par des pèlerins du XVe siècle’, in Images et signes de l'Orient dans l'Occident médiéval (Aix-en-Provence, Centre Universitaire d'Études et de Recherches Médiévales d'Aix, 1982), pp. 323–40 (p. 333); Schwoebel, pp. 1–29; Doutrepont, pp. 247–50.
7 Jean Devaux, ‘Le Saint Voyage de Turquie: croisade et propagande à la cour de Philippe le Bon (1463–64)’, in Claude Thiry ed., ‘A l'heure encore de mon escrire’: Aspects de la littérature de Bourgogne sous Philippe le Bon et Charles le Téméraire, Les Lettres Romanes, special edition (1997), 53–70 (p. 54); Grunzweig, pp. 54–58; Schwoebel, pp. 84–91; Agathe Lafortune-Martel, Fête noble en Bourgogne au XVe siècle: le banquet du Faisan (1454): Aspects politiques, sociaux et culturels (Montreal-Paris, Bellarmin-Vrin, 1984), pp. 15–23.
8 Albert Blaise, Le Vocabulaire latin des principaux thèmes liturgiques (Turnhout, Brepols, 1966), pp. 64, 161, 219–21, 238, 240–41, 245–46.
9 Meyer Schapiro, Words and Pictures: On the Literal and the Symbolic in the Illustration of a Text, Approaches to Semiotics, 11 (The Hague, Mouton, 1973), pp. 9–16.
10 See my ‘The West Looks at Constantinople: The Idea of the City as Renewal and Utopia in Selected Medieval French and Franco-Italian Texts’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2002), pp. 1–3, 27–30, 177–78.
11 Dufay, ed. by Besseler, pp. iv–v, xxviii; Agostino Pertusi, ed., La caduta di Costantinopoli, 2 vols (Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Mondadori, 1976), ii: L'eco nel mondo, 316–17; Marie-Louise Concasty, ‘Les Informations de Jacques Tedaldi sur le siège et la prise de Constantinople’, Byzantion, 24 (1954), 95–110 (pp. 105–6); J. P. A. van der Vin, Travellers to Greece and Constantinople: Ancient Monuments and Old Traditions in Medieval Travellers' Tales, 2 vols (Istanbul, Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1980), i, 93; Otto Cartellieri, Am Hofe der Herzöge von Burgund: Kulturhistorische Bilder (Basle, Schwabe, 1926), pp. 143–63.
12 The line from Lamentations, where the two phrases are in the reverse order to that in Dufay, translates as follows: ‘Among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her.’ See The Bible: Authorized King James Version, ed. by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford University Press, 1997) [note that the Latin means ‘all her friends have spurned her’]. For the Dufay text, see also Grunzweig, p. 51.
13 On the poem's allusions to the Body of Christ, see Pertusi, Caduta, ii, 478. On the iconography of Ecclesia as a woman (both Bride and Body of Christ), often depicted holding a chalice, see Jo Spreadbury, ‘The Gender of the Church: The Female Image of Ecclesia in the Middle Ages’, in Gender and Christian Religion: Papers Read at the 1996 Summer Meeting and the 1997 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. by R. N. Swanson (Woodbridge, Boydell, 1998), pp. 93–103 (pp. 94–96, 98).
14 See Grunzweig, pp. 50–53. On parallels between Constantinople and Jerusalem in medieval thought and literature, see Pertusi, Fine di Bisanzio e fine del mondo: significato e ruolo storico delle profezie sulla caduta di Costantinopoli in Oriente e in Occidente, ed. by Enrico Morini (Rome, Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1988), pp. viii–xii; Grunzweig, pp. 50–54; ‘The West Looks at Constantinople’, pp. 17, 22–26, 39–40, 44–50, 106–8, 136–38. For the representation of Sainte-Eglise as a woman at the Feast of the Pheasant, see Lafortune-Martel, pp. 128–30.
15 Voyage d'Outremer, ed. by Schefer, pp. vi, xxxii–iii, 1–2; Concasty, pp. 105–7; Schwoebel, p. 84; Surdel, p. 333. Doutrepont suggests that Broquière may have written his account prior to 1453 (pp. 259–60), but this has been refuted by more recent criticism. See Vin, i, 93.
16 Voyage d'Outremer, ed. by Schefer, pp. lxxvi–viii; Brochard, ‘L'Advis Directif pour faire le passage d'oultremer’, in Recueil des historiens des croisades: documents arméniens, ii, ed. by Édouard Dulaurier (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1906), pp. clxxi–vi; Henri Omont, Catalogue général des manuscrits français: ancien petits fonds français, i (Paris, Leroux, 1895), p. 304; Schefer, ‘Notes sur les miniatures ornant un manuscrit de la Relation du Voyage d'Outremer de Bertrandon de la Broquière’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, n.s. 5 (1891), 289–93; Paul Durrieu, La Miniature flamande au temps de la cour de Bourgogne: 1415–1530 (Brussels and Paris, Van Oest, 1921), pp. 21–24, 55–56; ‘Bulletin codicologique’, Scriptorium, 14 (1960), n. 793, p. 401; Utopie: la quête de la société idéale en Occident, ed. by Lyman Tower Sargent and Roland Schaer (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France; Paris, Fayard, 2000), p. 60.
17 Voyage d'Outremer, ed. by Schefer, pp. v–xii; Paul Perdrizet, ‘Jean Miélot, l'un des traducteurs de Philippe le Bon’, Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 14 (1907), 472–82 (p. 476); Durrieu, pp. 21–24. On the authorship of the Directorium, see Brochard, ed. by Dulaurier, pp. cxliii–clxx; Aziz Suryal Atiya, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London, Methuen, 1938), pp. 95–113; Georges Dogaer and Marguerite Debae, La Librairie de Philippe le Bon: exposition organisée à l'occasion du 500e anniversaire de la mort du duc (Bibliothèque Albert 1er, Bruxelles, 9 septembre – 12 novembre 1967) (Brussels, [Bibliothèque royale de Belgique], 1967), p. 136; D. J. A. Ross, ‘Methods of Book-Production in a XIVth-Century French Miscellany (London, B.M., MS Royal 19.D.I)’, Scriptorium, 6 (1952), 63–75 (pp. 64–65); Vin, i, 87; ii, 366.
18 Voyage d'Outremer, ed. by Schefer, pp. lxii–lxiv; Grunzweig, p. 48.
19 Vin, ii, 547–698. On the equestrian statue of the emperor Justinian, see my doctoral thesis, ‘The West Looks at Constantinople’, pp. 13, 41–42, 107–8, 118; for the architectural and religious heritage of Constantinople, see also pp. 10–14, 44–46, 58, 105–9, 148–49, 164–65.
20 Vin, i, 93; Surdel, p. 335.
21 The information in this paragraph is derived from study of the manuscript.
22 Devaux, pp. 55–57, 60, 67, 69; Schwoebel, pp. 106–9.
24 Molinet, ed. by Dupire, i, 9; Pertusi, Caduta, ii, 319; Monique Santucci, ‘Jérusalem, Rome et Constantinople dans l'
uvre de Molinet’, in Jérusalem, Rome, Constantinople: l'image et le mythe de la ville au Moyen Age, ed. by Daniel Poirion (Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1986), pp. 137–48 (pp. 140–41).
25 Molinet, ed. by Dupire, iii, 928; Pertusi, Caduta, ii, 478; Devaux, p. 64. I have not found the phrase exurget draco in mulierem anywhere in the Vulgate. The closest equivalent is Revelation 12.17: ‘Et iratus est draco in mulierem’ (‘the dragon was wroth with the woman’, Authorized King James Version). See Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. by Bonifatius Fischer and others, 3rd edn (Stuttgart, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1984).
26 Pertusi identifies Mars with Philippe le Bon: see Caduta, ii, 322. However, Molinet makes it clear that the ‘lion’ is more powerful than either of the two gods.