SOURCE: “Villehardouin: History in Black and White” in Seven French Chroniclers: Witnesses to History, Syracuse University Press, 1974, pp. 25-39, 127-29.

In the following essay, Archambault summarizes the content of Villehardouin's Conquest of Constantinople and reviews the debate concerning Villehardouin's motivation and sincerity. Archambault suggests that the work should be examined not as a historical document but as a work of literature “dictated by a certain vision of reality.”

Villehardouin lived most of his life during the latter half of the twelfth century, but his Conquest of Constantinople, dictated in French from his castle in Thrace, belongs to the early thirteenth.¹ Born before 1150 at Valenciennes, about twenty miles from Troyes, Villehardouin came from one of the best-known aristocratic families of Champagne. The title of “Maréchal,” which he bore from 1185 onwards, made him the grey eminence of Count Thibaud III of Champagne. When the count, along with several other...