ridiculous in a man of his age, and on the eccentricity of his general conduct and conversation, so marked as to suggest “a kind of mania or lesion of the imagination.” In his version of Boetius (1665), Villegas showed that he had profited by his experience, for he made no attempt to translate the last book (in which the problem of free will is discussed), and reprinted the Latin text without comment. He died at Nájera on the 3rd of September 1669. His tragedy El Hipólito, imitated from Euripides, and a series of critical dissertations entitled Variae Philologiae, finished in 1650, are unpublished, and “a book of satires,” found among his papers by the inquisitors, was confiscated.
VILLEHARDOUIN, GEOFFROY DE (c. 1160–c. 1213), the first vernacular historian of France, and perhaps of modern Europe, who possesses literary merit, is rather supposed than known to have been born at the château from which he took his name, near Troyes, in Champagne, about the year 1160. Not merely his literary and historical importance, but almost all that is known about him, comes from his chronicle of the fourth crusade, or Conquête de Constantinople. Nothing is positively known of his ancestry, for the supposition (originating with Du Cange) that a certain William, marshal of Champagne between 1163 and 1179, was his father appears to be erroneous. Villehardouin himself, however, undoubtedly held this dignity, and certain minute and perhaps not very trustworthy indications, chiefly of an heraldic character, have led his most recent biographers to lay it down that he was not born earlier than 1150 or later than 1164. He introduces himself to us with a certain abruptness, merely specifying his own name as one of a list of knights of Champagne who with their count, Thibault, took the cross at a tournament held at Escry-sur-Aisne in Advent 1199, the crusade in contemplation having been started by the preaching of Fulk de Neuilly, who was commissioned thereto by Pope Innocent III. The next year six deputies, two appointed by each of the three allied counts of Flanders, Champagne and Blois, were dispatched to Venice to negotiate for ships. Of these deputies Villehardouin was one and Quesnes de Béthune, the poet, another. They concluded a bargain with the seigniory for transport and provisions at a fixed price. Villehardouin had hardly returned when Thibault fell sick and died, but this did not prevent, though it somewhat delayed, the enterprise of the crusaders. The management of that enterprise, however, was a difficult one, and cost Villehardouin another embassy into Italy to prevent if possible some of his fellow-pilgrims from breaking the treaty with the Venetians by embarking at other ports and employing other convoy. He was only in part successful, and there was great difficulty in raising the charter-money among those who had actually assembled (in 1202) at Venice, the sum collected falling far short of the stipulated amount. It is necessary to remember this when the somewhat erratic and irregular character of the operations which followed is judged. The defence that the crusaders were bound to pay their passage-money to the Holy Land, in one form or other, to the Venetians, is perhaps a weak one in any case for the attack on two Christian cities, Zara and Constantinople; it becomes weaker still when it is found that the expedition never went or attempted to go to the Holy Land at all. But the desire to discharge obligations incurred is no doubt respectable in itself, and Villehardouin, as one of the actual negotiators of the bargain, must have felt it with peculiar strength.
The crusaders set sail at last, and Zara, which the Venetians coveted, was taken without much trouble. The question then arose whither the host should go next. Villehardouin does not tell us of any direct part taken by himself in the debates on the question of interfering or not in the disputed succession to the empire of the East—debates in which the chief ecclesiastics present strongly protested against the diversion of the enterprise from its proper goal. It is quite clear, however, that the marshal of Champagne, who was one of the leaders and inner counsellors of the expedition throughout, sympathized with the majority, and it is fair to point cut that the temptation of chivalrous adventure was probably as great as that of gain. He narrates spiritedly enough the dissensions and discussions in the winter camp of Zara and at Corfu, but is evidently much more at ease when the voyage was again resumed, and, after a fair passage round Greece, the crusaders at last saw before them the great city of Constantinople which they had it in mind to attack. When the assault was decided upon, Villehardouin himself was in the fifth “battle,” the leader of which was Mathieu de Montmorency. But, though his account of the siege is full of personal touches, and contains one reference to the number of witnesses whose testimony he took for a certain wonderful fact, he does not tell us anything of his own prowess. After the flight of the usurper Alexius, and when the blind Isaac, whose claims the crusaders were defending, had been taken by the Greeks from prison and placed on the throne, Villehardouin, with Montmorency and two Venetians, formed the embassy sent to arrange terms. He was again similarly distinguished when it became necessary to remonstrate with Alexius, the blind man’s son and virtual successor, on the non-keeping of the terms. Indeed Villehardouin’s talents as a diplomatist seem to have been held in very high esteem, for later, when the Latin empire had become a fact, he was charged with the delicate business of mediating between the emperor Baldwin and Boniface, marquis of Montferrat, in which task he had at least partial success. He was also appointed marshal of “Romanie”—a term very vaguely used, but apparently signifying the mainland of the Balkan Peninsula, while his nephew and namesake, afterwards prince of Achaia, took a great part in the Latin conquest of Peloponnesus. Villehardouin himself before long received an important command against the Bulgarians. He was left to maintain the siege of Adrianople when Baldwin advanced to attack the relieving force, and with Dandolo had much to do in saving the defeated crusaders from utter destruction, and conducting the retreat, in which he commanded the rearguard, and brought his troops in safety to the sea of Rodosto, and thence to the capital. As he occupied the post of honour in this disaster, so he had that (the command of the vanguard) in the expedition which the regent Henry made shortly afterwards to revenge his brother Baldwin’s defeat and capture. And, when Henry had succeeded to the crown on the announcement of Baldwin’s death, it was Villehardouin who fetched home his bride Agnes of Montferrat, and shortly afterwards commanded under him in a naval battle with the ships of Theodore Lascaris at the fortress of Cibotus. In the settlement of the Latin empire after the truce with Lascaris, Villehardouin received the fief of Messinople (supposed to be Mosynopolis, a little inland from the modern Gulf of Lagos, and not far from the ancient Abdera) from Boniface of Montferrat, with the record of whose death the chronicle abruptly closes.
In the foregoing account only those particulars which bear directly on Villehardouin himself have been detailed; but the chronicle is as far as possible from being an autobiography, and the displays of the writer’s personality, numerous as they are, are quite involuntary, and consist merely in his way of handling the subject, not in the references (as brief as his functions as chronicler will admit) to his own proceedings. The chronicle of Villehardouin is justly held to be the very best presentation we possess of the spirit of chivalry—not the designedly exalted and poetized chivalry of the romances, not the self-conscious and deliberate chivalry of the 14th century, but the unsophisticated mode of thinking and acting which brought about the crusades, stimulated the vast iterary development of the 12th and 13th centuries, and sent knights-errant, principally though not wholly of French blood, to establish principalities and kingdoms throughout Europe and the nearer East. On the whole, no doubt, it is the more masculine and practical side of this enthusiastic state of mind which Villehardouin shows. No woman makes any but the briefest appearance in his pages, though in reference to this it must of course be remembered that he was certainly a man past middle life when the events occurred, and perhaps a man approaching old age when he set them down. Despite the strong and graphic touches here and there, exhibiting the impression which the beauty of sea and land, the splendour of Constantinople, the magnitude of the effete but still imposing Greek power, made on him, there is not only an entire absence of dilation on such subjects as a modern would have dilated on (that was to be expected), but an absence likewise of the elaborate and painful description of detail in which contemporary
