Almoravides at Thebes: Islam and European Identity in the Roman de Thebes

Historiography, including literary history, has two temporal modes: the diachronic and the synchronic. The first is the privileged mode for representing cultural difference: the difference between the present and the past, of course, but also between Europe and Islam. As medievalists like Kathleen Biddick and Kathleen Davis have emphasized, these two categories of difference are conflated in the characterization of Islam as "medieval." ¹ The second has also been important for theorizing the representation of difference, but it has proved harder to define. Edward W. Said notes that "synchronic essentialism" is a key representational strategy of orientalism: it portrays Islam in a homogeneous time, in which past and present are not differentiated. ² A synchronic perspective excludes Islam from the narratives of historical progress that define the West. But synchrony has also been proposed as the antidote to such narratives and to the construction of Western identity against a "primitive" or "belated" cultural other. So Homi K. Bhabha argues that a "'synchronous and spatial' representation of cultural difference . . . must be reworked as a framework for cultural otherness." ³ Cutting across linear narratives, a synchronic perspective refuses to read cultural difference through exclusionary narratives of progress.

This essay explores the temporal representation of cultural difference by examining its medieval genealogy in romances written at a crucial moment in the formation of European ideas of cultural identity. In the mid-twelfth century a trio of verse narratives about the classical past were composed at the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine: the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman de Troie, and the Roman d'Enéas. ⁴ These romans antiques inaugurate the genre of romance itself. They do so, at least in part, to define European identity in terms of classical civilization, a myth of cultural inheritance that persists into the early modern period. ⁵ The subject of the last two narratives, the story of Troy, was an especially important model for cultural history and identity in the Western Middle Ages. Vergil's Aeneid, recounting the founding of Rome after the fall of Troy, provided European dynasties with inspiration and authority for their own myths of origin: as Aeneas founded Rome, so Francus founded France and Brutus Britain. In linking European communities to the classical past, medieval Troy myths define cultural identity in diachronic terms through genealogical narrative and the twin tropes of translatio imperii et studii, the transmission of political authority and of knowledge from the antique world to the West. The two early romans antiques about Troy help construct this paradigm for an Anglo-Norman court eager to establish its place among the powerful European dynasties that claimed a Trojan origin. ⁶ The Roman de Troie and the Roman d'Enéas are each linked in several manuscripts with Wace's Roman de Brut, a vernacular redaction of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, the most influential account of Britain's founding by Aeneas's grandson Brutus. ⁷ Together they chart a teleological narrative of political foundation and cultural identity, from Troy to Rome to Britain. ⁸

As its exclusion from these manuscripts might suggest, the Roman de Thèbes presents a more complicated understanding of cultural identity than the Troy romances do. On the one hand, it anticipates them in linking European culture with the classical past, especially in identifying medieval chivalry with ancient heroism: the poem compares Greek warriors to Roland, Turpin, and Godfrey of Boulogne. But the siege of Thebes does not readily lend itself to myths of translatio or political origin: it is a story of self-consuming violence that does not issue in a new state. Statius's Flavian epic, the Thebaid, on which the romance is based, counters the Vergilian narrative of imperial foundation with the story of a war that deprives both sides of political legitimacy—indeed, of ordinary humanity. The Thebaid tells...