The Fall of Constantinople to the knights of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 would lead to the establishment of Frankish states in the former Byzantine Empire. A unique crusader state was the Villehardouin principality in the Morea--the Greek Peloponnese--where, as the Chronicles of Morea testify, a rare degree of harmony and cooperation existed between the French and the native Greek inhabitants.
This dissertation studies the Old French Chronique de Moree as a fourteenth-century work of vernacular historiography which puts romance narrative techniques at the service of the truth of the Villehardouin Morea. The first section gives the historical background of the Crusading enterprise and the relationship between Byzantium and Western Europe before describing the events of the Fourth Crusade and the subsequent establishment of the crusaders in the Peloponnese. The second section discusses in detail the corpus of the Chronicles of Morea (a total of eight manuscripts in French, Greek, Italian and Aragonese), the question of the lost original and why I believe that it was composed in Old French, the Greek $X\rho o\nu\iota\kappa\`o\nu\ \tau o\upsilon\ Mo\rho\'\varepsilon\omega\varsigma$ and the relationship between the Greeks and the French in the space of the Morea. The third section traces the associations of courtoisie in vernacular Old French writing and studies its depiction in the Chronique de Moree. The final section discusses the links between romance-type narrative and historiography before moving to a detailed analysis of the use of romance techniques in the Chronique de Moree. In the conclusion I attempt to relate the Morea as it is depicted in the Old French Chronique de Moree--and the rest of the corpus--to certain other literary works and to the history of the Morea in later centuries. The dissertation itself is followed by a Book Style Index of the Old French Chronique de Moree based on Jean Longnon's edition of the text.