Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés in the Medieval Mediterranean

This article rereads Cligés in the context of medieval Mediterranean history, particularly the way the place names evoked subvert the text’s claims for translatio studii.

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Two-thirds of the way through Chrétien de Troyes’s late twelfth-century romance Cligés, the half-Greek, half-Arthurian titular protagonist travels incognito to the Arthurian court to measure himself against the best knights in the world.¹ On the first day of a tournament at Oxford, he triumphs, wearing a set of unmarked black arms. That evening, wishing to preserve his anonymity, he conceals these arms—displaying instead a green set he will wear the following day. Thus when King Arthur dispatches messengers to learn the identity of the mysterious champion, they can find no trace of him, ‘any more than if he were in Caesaria, Toledo, or Candia’ (‘Ne plus que s’il fust a Cesaire / Ou a Tolete ou a Quandie,’ vss. 4726–27).² For the casual and even for the informed reader, this last line is likely to mean little; the place names we normally associate with Chrétien’s Arthurian romances include sites like Carduel (Yvain, vs. 7; Perceval, vs. 839), Cardigan (Erec et Enide, vs. 28), and Caerleon (Perceval, vs. 4003) in Wales, or, in the particular case of Cligés, English sites like London, Winchester, and Windsor alongside Athens and Constantinople. Translations and critical editions do little to dispel the impression of the randomness of this apparently throw-away line: the Pléiade edition of Chrétien’s Œuvres complètes glosses, ‘Césarée, ville de Palestine; Tolède en Nouvelle-Castille était l’ancienne capitale des Wisigoths; Candie (aujourd’hui Héraklion) se trouve en Crète’ (p. 1160), while the Lettres Gothiques edition identifies the first term as ‘la ville antique de Césarée’ (p. 470). These annotations typify the widespread habit of identifying sites mentioned in medieval texts with either their classical or modern equivalents. Rarely are we given any sense of what such places might have meant to a twelfth-century audience. At best, we are told (as in the Penguin translation of the Arthurian Romances) that ‘Caesarea (Palestine), Toledo (Spain) and Candia (Crete) are evoked as distant exotic sites’ (p. 510, n15). Our editors and translators, in other words, are guided by the assumption that such place names would have been as obscure to Chrétien’s contemporaries as they are to us today—an assumption all the more striking to the degree that ‘realism’ has long been seen as one of Cligés’s distinguishing features.³

Nor are these the text’s only evocations of ‘distant’ and ‘exotic’ Mediterranean sites. Earlier, when Cligés’s father, the Byzantine prince Alexandre, had first fallen in love with King Arthur’s niece, Soredamors, he had metaphorized her in his mind’s eye as a precious arrow—thinking to himself that if he could have her, he ‘would desire nothing more: not for Antioch would I trade its feathers and nock’ (‘seul les penons et la coche / Ne donroie por Antïoche,’ vss. 799–800).⁴ Further on, when Cligés’s sweetheart, the Byzantine empress Fénice, recovers her health after a drug-induced false death, the young prince is so relieved that ‘if he were duke of Almería, Morocco, or Tudela, he wouldn’t have cared the price of a cenele in comparison with his present joy’ (‘S’or fust Cligés dus d’Aumarie / Ou de Marroc ou de Tudele, / Nel prisast il une cenele / Avers la joie que il a,’ vss. 6310–13)—an allusion to, among other things, the tremendous prestige silks from the city of Almería in Muslim Spain enjoyed in the French feudal imaginary.⁵ Individually, each of these fleeting references means little; together, however, they add up to a worldview in which the great centers of the Mediterranean constitute the standard of comparison with which any hyperbolic statement must contend.

What would happen if we were to take more seriously the signifying potential of such ‘distant exotic sites...