ABSTRACT
In the course of the late twelĞh and early thirteenth centuries, large swathes of territory belonging to the Byzantine Empire fell to western invaders. This process of conquest and occupation was accompanied by the development in the regions in question of a tradition of historical writing different to anything that had preceded it. A key position within the new tradition came to be occupied by the Chronicle of Morea. Comprising a detailed account of the formation and government by the Villehardouin dynasty of the Principality of Morea, a crusader state of considerable longevity that had the Peloponnese as its heartland, the Chronicle was initially composed in the early decades of the fourteenth century, but then revised and updated on a number of occasions. This work is known in versions both in prose and in verse, and is extant today in a total of four vernacular languages: Greek, French, Spanish and Italian.
