Imperios and Margarona is a romance in Greek based principally on an Old French source and translated into rhymed verse in Venice in the middle of the sixteenth century. The editor and translator Kostas Yiavis identifies three reasons for the timeliness and significance of his new critical edition with extensive interpretive essays and a more formal commentary: first, "the romance is such a pleasure to read" (17); second, it provides the opportunity to "reconsider" previous views of translated Byzantine texts as "little more than mechanical reproductions of their original sources" (17); and, third, it "mak[es] the case that Greek literature, too, participated fully in the whirlwind of interaction that was the norm in the sixteenth century and which exceeded linguistic divides" (18-19). With this volume, then, Yiavis' aims at more than just offering an editio princeps of a literary text; he also aims to make an argument, through the text, about aesthetics, cross-cultural contact, and the development of literary history. He succeeds admirably in both goals.
In a fast-paced 1,046 lines, the poem itself tells the story of Imperios, heir of the king of Provence, and Margarona, the princess of Naples, and the trials and tribulations they must endure before their eventual marriage and accession to the throne. In writing in Greek of events that take place in the courtly world of Provence, it might be classed among those works which, according to the Victorian literary critic and aesthete Walter Pater in his masterpiece The Renaissance (1873), represent those "rare and happy conditions, in pointed architecture, in the doctrines of romantic love, in the poetry of Provence" under which "the rude strength of the middle ages turns to sweetness; and the taste for sweetness generated there becomes the seed of the classical revival in it, prompting it constantly to seek after the springs of perfect sweetness in the Hellenic world." [1]
Its plot is a mixture of elements also prevalent in other romances: Imperios is the unexpected child of an otherwise barren and heirless marriage; as a result--and despite his precocious skills in war--his parents refuse to let him fight (see Digenis Akritis and The Tale of Achilles). Imperios goes abroad incognito to prove himself (see LeChevalier de la charette), and there meets Margarona; he wins her in a joust, but her father refuses, thinking he is a commoner. The two escape but are separated when he is captured and sold into slavery (see Rhodanthe and Dosikles); Imperios rises from a slave to the sultan of Egypt's chief advisor (see the story of Joseph in Genesis); he escapes and comes back, only to find that Margarona no longer recognizes him after his struggles (see Hysmine and Hysminias). Ultimately, the two reconcile and live happily ever after as king and queen (see romances too numerous to list). The pleasure of reading the romance then is not only for the story it tells, but also for its dialogic relationship with other romances with which it shares plot motifs, character types, and thematic interests.
Yiavis' paratextual material also increases the pleasure of reading the text. In the chapter "Versification and Rhyme," for instance, Yiavis offers a succinct masterclass in the poetics of the work, describing the decapentasyllabic lines, its hemistichs and caesurae, the placement of stresses to vary iambs with dactyls, the insertion of instances of rhyming quatrains as opposed to couplets, and the other various ways in which the "rhymester" (as he calls the anonymous author-translator) displays his artful construction of lines. Each kind of poetic manipulation is demonstrated with examples from the text, and thus the reader comes to a significantly greater appreciation of the rhymester's creative imagination and skillful execution.
On the other side is Yiavis' detailed commentary, which details where the work differs from its unrhymed Greek source (275), where its lexical choices allude to the lost world of oral poetry in which such works originated (278), the use of emergent spellings in the transition from medieval to modern Greek (281), shared lines and motifs among Imperios and other works within the tradition of the medieval Greek romance (357), and historically and culturally contextual notes (282-285, the fascinating mini-essay on the value, shape, weight, and history of the ducat, complete with illustrations).
In this same vein, there is much pleasure to be had in the thirty or so pages of plates at the end containing pages from editions stretching from handwritten manuscripts to incunabula to printed versions in the mid-eighteenth-century. From these, the reader can begin to experience a taste of what it was like to read such books in their original context. Chapters 3 ("The Manuscripts of the Unrhymed Version") and 4 ("The Printed Tradition") provide rich context for these plates and the poem's textual history, but beyond the often dry work of philology are some moments of enlivening insight. In addition, for instance, to simple descriptions of the woodcut illuminations (eg "Fol. A4r, 73.5x114mm. Substantially worn at the bottom right-hand corner. A crowned king with beard and a younger man," 182-183), Yiavis offers interpretive insights, showing how they were intended to illustrate other printed editions of the Iliad and the Orlando Innamorato were repurposed for the new context of Imperios (183-185). This study of the materiality of the various iterations of the poem add another welcome level of insight.
These previous elements are what might be considered the edition proper: text, manuscript descriptions and stemma, and commentary. But these are not the entirety of the volume; indeed in order to achieve his second and third goals, Yiavis has hidden a monograph inside the edition. The opening chapters of the volume, "'Imperios' in the World" and "From Courtly to Composite" are his attempts to answer the second two goals of the volume. The first of these sections is a comparative study of Imperios within the broader tradition of romance, ranging from French and Italian versions to The Arabian Nights and the Persian Haft Paykar. In this, Yiavis' volume adds to a growing scholarly consensus (to which he has contributed significantly over the past decade) that the medieval Greek romance must be read in a polyvalent way: diachronically, as an inheritor of ancient and medieval Greek literary traditions and a forerunner of early modern and modern Greek ones; and in a synchronic and comparative perspective that demonstrates the deep links of the Greek to the neighboring cultures with which it increasingly interacted in the late Byzantine period and, even more, after the fall of Constantinople, when Greek became effectively a diasporic language. Scholars have long acknowledged the debt of Greek literature (and particularly romances) to western sources in French, Italian, and other romance languages, but an increasing body of scholarship has begun to prove that Byzantium's eastern neighbors played an influential role as well. [2] In connecting Imperios not just to Pierre de Provence but also with the Arabian Nights and the Persian Haft Paykar, Yiavis uses Imperios as a vehicle to make a larger case about cultural exchange in the Mediterranean.
Given that Yiavis is so committed to placing the work in the tradition of European fiction, one aspect of the work that could have used more attention is the place of Imperios within the broader tradition of Greek diasporic literature in the period after the fall of Constantinople, the period known as the "Cretan renaissance." [3] Though produced in Venice, Yiavis notes that "the 1543-53 rhymester must have had local knowledge of the broader southern area and culture," insofar as he alludes to "a church in Candia," "two hospices in the southern Peloponnese" and "he was fluent in the Cretan dialect," even if the work "does not have a strong dialectical character" (233). Crete under Venetian occupation produced some writers and artists of enduring and international importance, such as Giorgos Chortatzis, whose Erophile (written in Crete in 1600 but produced in Venice in 1637) was the first work of secular Greek drama produced since the Classical period; Vitsentzos Kornaros' romance Erotokritos, composed around the turn of the seventeenth century; and the painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, better known internationally as El Greco, born in Venetian Crete in 1541. Though El Greco is by far the most famous, Kornaros' text might be the most interesting comparator to Imperios, since it, too, is based on the fifteenth-century Old French romance Paris and Vienne and the Ludovico Ariosto's Italian Orlando Furioso of 1516-32. All of these slightly later works draw from the same cosmopolitan and multilingual environment as Imperios. This is an especially tantalizing possibility given that the cover image for the volume is of Kornaros at work, holding his pen over an open book in one hand, resting his head pensively in the other.
It is likely that this edition will be the definitive text of the poem for the foreseeable future, but this does not mean the discussion of Imperios and Margarona is over. Rather, as is the case with all good editions, this volume will serve as the foundation of what will hopefully be a new generation of scholarship by Yiavis and others who now have access to this underrated and underappreciated poem. Such scholarly attention can continue to shed light on the literary and aesthetic merits of the poem itself as well as the broader context of Greek, European, and Mediterranean literature of which it was a part.
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Notes:
1. Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2005), 7.
2. See, for instance, Fictional Storytelling in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Carolina Cupane and Bettina Krönung (Leiden: Brill, 2016) and my own Reading the Late Byzantine Romance: A Handbook, edited by Adam J. Goldwyn and Ingela Nilsson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), to both of which Yiavis contributed chapters addressing some of the issues addressed more fully here.
3. For which, see Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete, edited by David Holton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Elsie Burke's The Greeks of Venice, 1498-1600: Immigration, Settlement, and Integration (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016); and Greeks, Books and Libraries in Renaissance Venice, edited by Rosa Maria Piccione (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), which at the time of writing is still forthcoming and will hopefully add more to this discussion.