French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

What does it mean to do “global French,” and how is that project related to recent initiatives in “world” and comparative literature? In the preface to the English translation of The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova writes, “our literary unconscious is largely national. Our instruments of analysis and evaluation are national. Indeed the study of literature almost everywhere in the world is organized along national lines.” What she sets out to do, therefore, is to “restore a point of view that has been obscured for the most part by the ‘nationalization’ of literatures and literary histories, to rediscover a lost transnational dimension of literature that for two hundred years has been reduced to the political and linguistic boundaries of nations.”¹ Her answer, however, is to define a “world republic of letters” that begins with early modernity and whose primary category of analysis remains the nation:

International literary space was formed in the sixteenth century at the very moment when literature began to figure as a source of contention in Europe, and it has not ceased to enlarge and extend itself since. Literary authority and recognition—and, as a result, national rivalries—came into existence with the formation and development of the first European states. Previously confined to regional areas that were sealed off from each other, literature now emerged as a common battleground. Renaissance Italy, fortified by its Latin heritage, was the first recognized literary power. Next came France, with the rise of the Pléiade in the mid-sixteenth century, which in challenging both the hegemony of Latin and the advance of Italian produced a first tentative sketch of transnational literary space. Then Spain and England, followed by the rest of the countries of Europe, gradually entered into competition on the strength of their own literary “assets” and traditions. (11, emphases added)

Reading as a medievalist, I cannot help but be struck by the profound binarism structuring this literary-historical vision: the sixteenth century set over and against its unnamed (medieval) other, the “internationalism” of early modernity counterposed to a tightly compartmentalized regionalism, the ascendancy of the French vernacular challenging the hegemony of the Latin-Italian heritage. Then again, there is the passage’s unexamined Eurocentrism: international literary space takes shape once literature becomes “a source of contention in Europe” (emphasis added); in this developmental model of literary history, Italy sets the pace, soon to be overtaken by France, with Spain, England, “and the rest of . . . Europe” gradually making their appearance.

This essay takes up the linked questions of the “world republic of letters” and the notion of a “littérature-monde en français,”² arguing that a historically situated approach to medieval French literature both complicates our understanding of the role of the Middle Ages in the literary history of France and French in the literary history of Europe while opening up the question of “European” literature itself. My title, “Worlding Medieval French,” grows out of my work in world literature and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz—a collaborative effort in which “worlding” signifies a “critical stance,” an “interruption and critique of a range of field imaginaries.” Analyzing literature and cultural production in a global context, worlding seeks “not merely [to] increase representation of previously ignored or underrepresented cultures, but rather [to] present both dominant and emerging cultures as dynamically related within specific historic and economic contexts.”³ In the spirit of “refus[ing ] to allow our object of knowledge to be naturalized in advance,”⁴ this essay begins with a look at what it might mean to “world” our understanding of French in the high Middle Ages. From there, it takes up three topics generated by worlding French literature: twelfth-century romance and the poetics and politics of translatio; literary traces of French political involvement in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean; and the premodern world system underlying Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde (Description of the World). This last text, better known today as Marco Polo’s Travels, may seem a surprising choice. Usually assumed to have been written not in French but in Italian, it is often taken (despite its extensive representations of the commercial centers of Central Asia as well as of the riches of China and the wonders of India) as exemplifying the narrowness and incredulity of the medieval European experience. Yet, as we will see, the Devisement exemplifies many of the questions involved in the “worlding” of medieval letters. “Written in French, but not by a Frenchman” near the turn of the fourteenth century, a text in which the foreign “sometimes turns out to be curiously familiar,” it radically challenges our understanding of the place of the world in Old French letters and the place of Old French letters in the world.⁵

For the Middle Ages, posing the question of a “littérature monde en français” demands an initial act of reterritorialization, defamiliarizing our idées reçues by situating medieval “Europe” in an expanded frame of reference. Told from the typical point of view (reflected in the structure of textbooks in medieval history), the history of the Middle Ages is the history of northwestern Europe—the area that eventually gives rise to the nation-states of France, England, and Germany, with the Low Countries and northern Italy playing important secondary roles. In this optic, the high and late Middle Ages, ca. 1050–1450, are synonymous with such phenomena as the Investiture Controversy, the Norman conquest of England, the Crusades, the Magna Carta, and demographic expansion and urban revival (in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries) followed (in the fourteenth) by decline: the Little Ice Age, the Great Schism, the Black Death, and the Hundred Years’ War, concluding in 1453 (the same year as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople), bringing us to the threshold of early modernity. Key figures in this history might include Henry II, Thomas Becket, Abelard and Héloïse, Saint Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Louis IX, Dante, and Petrarch, the first “modern” man.⁶ Turning to cultural currents, we can cite the transition from Romanesque to Gothic and from epic to romance, twelfth-century humanism and the “discovery of the individual,” thirteenth-century scholasticism, Dante and (again) Petrarch; in the world of French literature, the Chanson de Roland, the Lais of Marie de France and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes; troubadour lyric, the fabliaux, and the “bourgeois” literature of thirteenth-century Arras; allegory (differently instantiated in the two parts of the Roman de la Rose), the great Arthurian prose cycles, and concluding with Guillaume de Machaut and Christine de Pizan, authors who—finally!—emerge from the haze of history as something like real historical figures.

In the longue durée of world history, by contrast, the medieval West remained peripheral to the tradition of the great world empires that had long dominated the eastern Mediterranean, Syrio-Mesopotamia, and Iran.⁷ In Eurocentrism, political theorist Samir Amin recasts the medieval West as a peripheral form of a “regional tributary system” centered in the Eastern Mediterranean; historian Richard Bulliet, for his part, has coined the provocational term “Islamo-Christian civilization” to denote “a prolonged and fateful intertwining of sibling societies enjoying sovereignty in neighboring geographical regions and following parallel historical trajectories,” with Latin Christianity and Islam as “two versions of a common socioreligious system.”⁸

In this perspective, to focus on the European Middle Ages is to tell the story from the margins—a shift in perspective with considerable consequences for the way we frame medieval history in general and the literary history of Old French in particular. With this realization, sites such as Iberia (both Muslim and Christian); the four Italian maritime republics of Amalfi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa; the Crusader States and the Byzantine Empire; and island kingdoms such as Sicily or Cyprus, all typically consigned to the margins of “medieval Europe,” suddenly become privileged points of access to a Mediterranean political and cultural sphere with deep roots in western Asia. Key events in the history of this reterritorialized Europe might include the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and its loss in 1187; the Latin conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and the Greek reconquest of 1261; the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 (precipitating what one historian has called a “Two Hundred Years’ War” between papal and imperial factions); and the fall of Crusader Acre in 1291.⁹ Key figures include Roger II of Sicily, Saladin, Frederick II, Charles of Anjou, and literary and cultural figures such as Ibn Hazm, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Maimonides, Boccaccio, and Ibn Khaldun. These two different histories were by no means mutually exclusive: Saint Francis, who in 1219 visited the Egyptian Sultan al-Kamil (Saladin’s nephew) in an unsuccessful attempt to convert him to Christianity, or Saint Louis, the pious king who spent six years (1248–54) in the eastern Mediterranean and died in 1270 on an abortive crusade to Tunis, are but two examples of the interface between the “medieval Europe” of the textbooks and that of the reterritorialized Mediterranean.

In setting out to explore the long history of the “sense of a globe that is interconnected, of cultural difference within and beyond the nation,”¹⁰ one could scarcely find a better point of departure than the Francophone Middle Ages. For one thing, when vernacular French literature first appeared in the early twelfth century, nothing resembling the modern French nation existed: the French king controlled little more than the Ile-de-France, the language spoken south of the Loire was Occitan, and the most powerful French-speaking ruler was the Norman king of England. Our earliest texts—among them the Chanson de Roland and the hagiographic Voyage of Saint Brendan—were composed not in the dialect of Paris but in Anglo-Norman (see chapter 11). Cultivated outside the borders of the nation-state that will later lend its name to both the language and the literature, Old French is extraterritorial avant la lettre. And this remains true for much of the twelfth century, in texts ranging from the Romances of Antiquity and the Lais of Marie de France to the Tristans of Béroul and Thomas of Britain. From this precocious beginning, vernacular French quickly spread, with translations of Arthurian romance appearing in German “in principalities along the lower Rhine, located in a small region around present-day Limbourg and Maastricht”—a region that “bridges, then as now, the French and German spheres politically, culturally, and linguistically” as early as the 1170s,¹¹ and epic material in Old Norse in the thirteenth century. If one were to speak of a république européenne des lettres in the twelfth century, its center would be, if not yet in Paris, then squarely within the French-speaking world.

At this early stage, Old French was also the best developed and most prestigious of the European vernaculars in the medieval Mediterranean. In one account, Saint Francis of Assisi, composer of one of the earliest verses in vernacular Italian (the celebrated “Canticle of the Creatures,” ca. 1225) owed his nickname to his fondness for verses in French, “the language of his intimate outpourings.”¹² Its currency as the prestige vernacular of Latin Europe peaked in the second half of the thirteenth century, when it became the language of choice for non-French speakers such as Brunetto Latini, Martin da Canal, and (in an example to which we will return) Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa.¹³ Farther to the east, Old French was the language of La Fleur des histories de la terre d’Orient, composed by the Armenian prince Hetoum (or Hayton) and presented to Pope Clement IV in 1307, and La Geste des Chiprois, a tripartite vernacular history of Cyprus compiled by the anonymous “Templar of Tyre.” Whether motivated by the beauty of the language, their wish to reach an “international” readership, or their desire to cultivate the political favor of a specifically French audience, these writers attest to the wide diffusion of Old French as a Mediterranean vernacular.

In the early thirteenth century, the poet Jean Bodel famously divided the works of his day into three “matières,” corresponding to three stages in the rapid emergence of vernacular French literature in the previous century. Of these, the “matter of France” refers to the epic material surrounding the legendary history of Charlemagne and the “matter of Brittany” to the Celtic and Arthurian tales reworked by authors such as Chrétien de Troyes, Béroul, and Marie de France. The remaining corpus, the “matter of Rome,” refers to the Romances of Antiquity: works such as the Roman de Troie, the Roman de Thèbes, and the Roman d’Alexandre, which “translated” classical legends from Latin into vernacular French, freely tailoring their tone and themes to the new courtly and chivalric tastes of their noble audiences. Exemplary here is the Roman d’Enéas, which, in retelling Virgil’s tale of Aeneas’s passage from the fall of Troy to the founding of Rome, narrativizes the topos of translatio imperii, the historical “translation” of empire. A few years later, in the prologue to his “Byzantine” romance, Cligés (ca. 1177–80), the Arthurian romance writer Chrétien de Troyes would pair the trope of translatio imperii with that of translatio studii; a vision of the historical migration of both political and intellectual hegemony, these twinned topoi anticipate the emplotment of “Western civilization” as a linear transmission from Greece to Rome to the West:

But if the prologue makes France the center of the political and cultural world, the body of the romance slyly undercuts this brazenly hegemonic claim in the scattered and apparently gratuitous mentions of Mediterranean sites such as Toledo and Tudela, Caesaria and Candia, Antioch and Almería. In the second half of the twelfth century, Toledo was a major center for the translation of, among other things, Greek philosophical and scientific literature out of Arabic into Latin. In the very decade Chrétien was likely composing Cligés, the English scholar Daniel of Morley, on an intellectual pilgrimage to Paris, was quickly disappointed with the quality of the scholarship; so he continued on to Toledo, drawn by that city’s reputation in the doctrina Arabum, later returning to England and expressing his full satisfaction and excitement over what he had found there.¹⁴ For anyone truly interested in translatio studii, in other words, the lines of transmission of ancient Greek learning ran not through Rome and Paris but Toledo and Tudela. Thus, to the knowing audience, the text’s casual but repeated Mediterranean references subtly contest the triumphal vision of the march of civilization articulated in Chrétien’s prologue.

This momentary reminder of the medieval Mediterranean in turn brings to mind a number of poems falling outside the modern canon of medieval French literature that remain unaccounted for in Jean Bodel’s tripartite scheme. Traversing Mediterranean sites, real and phantasmatic, tracing routes rather than roots in ways reminiscent of Hellenistic romance, these texts together constitute what we might think of as a matière méditerranéenne. Thus Floire et Blancheflor (ca. 1150, or contemporary with the earliest Romances of Antiquity) tells the story of two adolescent lovers—one a Spanish Saracen prince, the other a Christian slave. Reared together, they are not only inseparable but also nearly identical, their resemblance a charming narrative evocation of the “fateful intertwining of sibling societies” characterizing Richard Bulliet’s “Islamo-Christian civilization.”¹⁵ Distressed at his son’s obsession with Blancheflor, Floire’s father sells her to some passing “merchants of Babylon” (that is, medieval Cairo). In exchange, he receives a wondrous goblet engraved with scenes from the Trojan War, but narrated in reverse chronological order; beginning with the siege of Troy and ending with the judgment of Paris, it conjures the literary-historical world of the romans d’antiquité but spools it backwards, as if to question its historical inevitability. This evocation of the thematics of translatio is confirmed by the travels of the goblet itself: brought by Aeneas from Troy to Lombardy and passed down to Julius Caesar (materializing the first stage of the westward migration of translatio), it then inexplicably falls into the hands of the Babylonian merchants, who reroute it from Latin Europe to “pagan” Spain. In the remainder of the tale, Floire disguises himself as a merchant, rescues Blancheflor from the harem of the “sultan of Babylon,” and marries her. Upon his father’s death, the two return to Spain, where he converts to Christianity for love of his new bride. In Floire et Blancheflor, the Mediterranean is no longer the space of translatio but a mercantile Mediterranean of commerce, conversion, and Christian-Saracen contact.

From the late twelfth century, some lesser-known French romances evince a fascination with Sicilian kingship that emphasizes its strangeness. In Floriant et Florete, an anonymous knight at King Arthur’s court is revealed to be Floriant, protégé of Morgan le Fay and son of the ousted king of “Sicily, Calabria, and Puglia.” With King Arthur’s assistance, his campaign to recover his kingdom and free his captive mother is punctuated by his secret romance with the emperor of Constantinople’s daughter Florete. In a jumble of epic and Arthurian motifs, the two eventually rule over both Sicily and Constantinople, before finally disappearing in a happily-ever-after ending to Morgan’s enchanted castle. In Guillaume de Palerne, the titular hero—son of the king of Puglia and his queen, the Greek emperor’s daughter—is kidnapped by a werewolf, later revealed to be the son of the king of Spain, enchanted by an evil stepmother. These and similar works demand our recognition of the power the medieval Mediterranean exerted on the Old French imaginary.

The age of scholasticism and Saint Louis, the thirteenth century also brought the expansion of French interest in Mediterranean affairs—a phenomenon with consequences for the literary history of Old French. The long reign (1226–70) of the saint-king Louis IX was punctuated by his extended sojourn in Egypt and Acre in the Seventh Crusade (1248–54) and the disastrous campaign to Tunis that claimed his life. Among the traces this historical moment left in Old French letters is La vie de Saint Louis, a secular prose hagiography composed by the king’s loyal companion Jean de Joinville. More familiar to historians than to specialists in literature, this text continues to resonate in the modern world—as in Aimé Césaire’s pointed comment that the thirteenth-century knight “who fought Islam but respected it, had a better chance of knowing it than do our contemporaries (even if they have a smattering of ethnographic literature), who despise it.”¹⁶

The reign of Louis and his successors also saw the intensification of Capetian interest in the Iberian Peninsula, signaled by the royal marriages of his son Philip III to Isabel, daughter of James I “the Conqueror” of Aragon, and of his sister Blanche to Fernando de la Cerda, heir of Alfonso X of Castile. This latter marriage resulted, among other things, in Philip’s unsuccessful 1276 campaign to secure the Castilian throne for his nephews. In the world of letters, Adenet le Roi (author of such chansons de geste as Berte aus grans piés, Beuvon de Commarchis, and Les enfances Ogier) claimed to have received from Blanche, back at the French court after her Castilian husband’s early death, and from her sister-in-law, the queen of France, the material for his romance Cleomadés—a fantastic tale featuring the son of a Spanish king and a wondrous flying horse, thought to bear a resemblance to one of the stories of the Arabian Nights.¹⁷ A Castilian connection also accounts for the Latin Liber de Kalila et Dimna, translated from the mid-thirteenth century Spanish version made at the court of Alfonso X at the behest of the French queen, Jeanne de Navarre, in the early fourteenth century; a frame-tale collection with a long transmission history from Sanskrit through Persian and Arabic into Castilian, it represented “an interesting attempt to juxtapose, if not to assimilate, two sources of wisdom from two cultures, the Oriental and the classical.”¹⁸

Equally influential in French literary history was the long Mediterranean career of Louis’s youngest brother, Charles of Anjou. From his 1246 marriage to Countess Beatrice of Provence, Charles took an active and increasingly aggressive interest in Mediterranean affairs. In his sirventes (political poem) “Ges, per malvastat qu’er veya,” the Toulousain troubadour Guilhem Montanhagol registered his dissent at Provence’s “disloyalty” in accepting Charles as its lord, exhorting the king of Aragon and other great princes to resist this incursion on the part of “the French” (Frances).¹⁹ In 1265, the French Pope Clement IV, attempting to dislodge the Hohenstaufens from southern Italy, named Charles king of Sicily. As Charles prepared to make good his claim, the trouvère Rutebeuf—the versatile poet known for his hagiographic, satirical, and polemical verse—composed two poems, the “chanson” and the “dit de Pouille” (Apulia), promoting his campaign to secure the Sicilian kingdom; Charles defeated and killed the rival claimant, Manfred, the illegitimate son Emperor Frederick II, at the Battle of Benevento the following year.

With his accession, Charles took the Mediterranean as the stage for his political ambitions and economic interests. Provençal merchants prospered, transshipping cotton from Sicily through Marseille to North African ports like Bougie, Ceuta, Oran, Tunis, and Ténès on one hand and north to the trade fairs of Champagne on the other; after he purchased the title “king of Jerusalem,” they extended their business to the crusader port of Acre.²⁰ Moving his capital from Palermo to Naples, Charles turned toward the eastern Mediterranean, setting his sights on Frankish Morea and on Constantinople itself. It has been suggested that Martin da Canale’s Estoire de Venise—a patriotic history of Venice composed in French, with heavy emphasis on Venice’s role in the Crusaders’ 1204 conquest of Constantinople—was intended to convince Charles to launch a new crusade against the Byzantine capital, which had been retaken by the Greek Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologos in 1261.

Family allegiance and a common commitment to papal over imperial politics made for close French-Angevin cooperation in the third quarter of the thirteenth century. It was Charles, eager to assert Sicily’s historical dominance over the North African coast, who was responsible for directing the Eighth Crusade of 1270 against Tunis rather than Egypt. Coming south through the Sicilian kingdom were nobles such as Robert II of Artois (Charles’s nephew) and Gui de Dampierre, count of Flanders, who brought in their train poets like Adenet le Roi (whom we met above as the author of Cleomadés) and the Arrageois poet Adam de la Halle, author of songs and secular dramas such as Le jeu de la feuillé. (In Naples, Adenet is thought to have picked up a French translation of Frederick II’s treatise on falconry along with the material for several poems.) Though Louis IX and other members of the royal family fell ill and died, Charles emerged from the venture with agreements with the sultan of Tunis, securing commercial privileges and reinstating the tribute commanded by his Sicilian predecessors.

In 1282, Charles lost control of Sicily in the revolt known to history as the Sicilian Vespers. Rule over the island of Sicily passed to the Aragonese king, Peter III (husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance); effects of the ensuing War of the Sicilian Vespers were felt as far away as France, the Low Countries, the Balkan peninsula, North Africa, the German Empire, and England, reshaping European and Mediterranean politics well into the following century. (In the Vie de Saint Louis, Joinville continues to refer to Louis’s brother as “conte d’Anjou, qui puis fu roy de Cezile,”²¹ with no mention of the Vespers.) In 1282 and again following Charles’s death in 1285, his nephew Robert of Artois came south to stabilize Angevin control over the southern Italian mainland. It was on one of these occasions that Adam de la Halle wrote “Le Roi de Sicile,” a 378-line poem praising (perhaps eulogizing) Charles of Anjou, as well as Le jeu de Robin et de Marion, known to have been composed at the court of Naples. Though now little more than a footnote in conventional histories of the era, Charles’s life and career serve as a node around which to collect a future literary history of the Francophone Mediterranean.

The text today known as Marco Polo’s Travels was composed in Genoa in 1298, the result of a jailhouse collaboration between two prisoners: Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant recently returned from two decades in the service of the great Qubilai (Kublai) Khan, and Rustichello of Pisa, author of a baggy Old French Arthurian romance known as Méliadus. Despite their own “national” origins, the two coauthors composed their work not in Italian (at this point still only a fledgling vernacular) but in French or Franco-Italian—that literary koiné or common language associated with a flourishing body of late medieval chansons de geste. Familiar to us as “one of a select few medieval texts to have enjoyed a continuous readership since the Middle Ages,”²² in early manuscript traditions the Travels was known under various titles, including “the Description of the World” (Le devisement du monde), as in BNF fr. 5631 (ms. A1); “the Book of the Great Khan” (Le livre du Grand Caam), as in British Library Royal 19 D 1 (ms. B1); and “the Book of Marvels” (Le livre des merveilles), as in the deluxe illuminated manuscript, BNF fr. 2810 (A2). These variant titles capture a generic and cultural polysemy productive of new strategies for worlding our approach to medieval French literature: expanding our use of “congeners”—those contemporary works constituting a text’s “linguistic and narrative force-field” that cast light on its situated historical meanings “by virtue of their deeper similarities, independently of any putative influence”²³—in new and imaginative directions.

The title “Book of Marvels” situates Marco’s work in two distinct, if related, traditions textualizing Westerners’ knowledge and experience of the exotic East. The first, with a long genealogy in classical antiquity transmitted to the Latin Middle Ages through Pliny’s Natural History, includes descriptions of the “monstrous races” and other “wonders” destined to figure prominently in the iconographic program (though not in the text) of manuscripts such as BNF fr. 2810. In this reading, its closest congener is perhaps John Mandeville’s fourteenth-century Travels, likewise composed in French (this time Anglo-Norman), whose manuscript history is, if anything, more complex than Marco Polo’s own. The second tradition is the product of that premodern moment at the heart of Janet Abu-Lughod’s seminal study, Before European Hegemony: that century, ca. 1250–1350, when the urban centers of Latin Europe formed part of a pan-Eurasian precapitalist “world system,” due in large part to the pax Mongolica enabled by the meteoric rise of the Empire of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan and his successors.²⁴ In this perspective, Marco’s text joins travel accounts such as those of the Franciscan friars John of Plano Carpini and William of Rubruck, who in the 1240s and 1250s undertook missions to the Mongol khan at the behest of the pope and the king of France, respectively, returning to report what they had learned of the history and strange customs of this wondrous and threatening people.

In western eyes, Marco’s journey (like Plano Carpini’s and Rubruck’s) seemed an exceptional adventure, his encounters with the Great Khan, the riches of China, and the wonders of India key moments in the expansion of the European geographical imaginary. But particularly in scenarios of cross-cultural contact, wonder—like beauty—frequently resides in the eye of the beholder. Thus the trebuchets (siege engines) the Polos claim to have built for the Great Khan’s army at Sianfu, which the Mongols took to be “the greatest wonder in the world,” were, as Simon Gaunt points out, “quite explicable from a Western point of view.” Conversely, then, it follows “that the merveilles of the Orient may also be perfectly explicable, natural rather than supernatural, with the correct knowledge, experience and understanding.”²⁵

Such is the case, I suggest, with Marco Polo himself. However tantalizing his books and his travels may appear to western eyes, seen from beyond the bounds of Latin Europe, both acquire a somewhat different spin, accessible through the manuscript’s variant titles. The first of these is “The Book of the Great Khan” (Le livre du Grand Caam). In this optic, Qubilai Khan himself becomes the book’s central wonder, with extensive passages devoted to his court and accomplishments. In chapter 75, for example, Marco describes the Great Khan as

le plus puissant homme de gent et de terre et de tresor qui onques fust au monde ne qui orendroit soit du temps d’Adam nostre premier pere jusques au jour d’ui. Et ce vous mousterrai je tout apertement en nostre livre . . . comment il fu li plus granz sires qui onques fust ne qui orendroit soi.²⁶

[the most powerful man—in terms of people, lands, and wealth—who has ever lived or ever will be, from the time of Adam (our first father) to this day. And in our book I will very clearly show you how he was the greatest lord ever born or who ever was.]

In medieval French literature, accustomed to marking superlatives through comparison, Alexander the Great is the king against whom all others were frequently measured; in the mid-twelfth century Roman d’Alexandre by Alexandre de Paris, Julius Caesar himself hails the titular protagonist (who has conquered the Armenians, Persians, Syrians, Indians, Africans, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Tyrians) as “tous li mieudres des princes terrïens [the greatest of all earthly princes]” (I.5.204).²⁷ Here, on the other hand, Alexander and Caesar, Arthur and Charlemagne, completely disappear in the light cast by the presence of the Great Khan, who is a world unto himself.

Moreover, this description of the khan’s absolute power and splendor serves as a kind of cultural shifter, summoning forth, I want to suggest, a different set of congeners from those with which The Travels are typically considered. Four decades earlier, another chronicler had taken the measure of Qubilai Khan’s grandfather, the great Chinggis Khan:

God Almighty, in wisdom and intelligence distinguished Chingiz-Khan from all his coevals and in alertness of mind and absoluteness of power exalted him above all the kings of the world; so that all that has been recorded touching the practice of the mighty Chosroes of old and all that has been written concerning the customs and usages of the Pharaohs and Caesars was by Chingiz-Khan invented from the page of his own mind without the toil of perusing records or the trouble of conforming with tradition. . . . And indeed, Alexander, . . . had he lived in the age of Chingiz-Khan, would have been his pupil in craft and cunning.²⁸

The author of this passage was Juvaini, a Persian functionary in the service of Qubilai’s younger brother Hülegü, the conqueror of Baghdad (1258) and the Ilkhan of Persia; the text from which it is drawn is his massive History of the World Conqueror, composed in the late 1250s. In this passage, Alexander and Caesar still survive as standards of comparison, the better to highlight the unprecedented extent of the Great Khan’s power. Only the mention of “Chosroes”—the pre-Islamic Sasanian king Khosrow I, whose reign (531–79) was remembered as a Golden Age of Persian political and cultural power—signals the text’s Iranian origin. In other respects, the unprecedented extent of Mongol power furnished the Persian chronicler and the Venetian traveler with a common frame of reference; as Marco put it, Kublai is “le plus grant et le plus poissant [the greatest and most powerful]” of all the Mongol khans, lord over “touz les Tartars du monde [all the world’s Tartars]” in both East and West, such that all the world’s Christian and Saracen kings together “n’aroient pooir a lui ne tant ne porroient faire comme cestui Cublay le Grant Caan porroit [would have no power over him or be able to do as much as this Great Khan Qubilai]” (II.68.4–15).

At the same time, the very title “Le livre du Grand Caam” contains a productive ambiguity. On one hand, it is a book about the unprecedented power of the great Qubilai, who compels our attention as the object of wonder; on the other, it may also be construed as the book belonging to the Great Khan, who is in one sense its original destinataire. As Rustichello tells us, Marco first began noting the particularities of the sites he visited in order to satisfy Qubilai’s vast curiosity. His is “the book of the Great Khan” in the same way that al-Idrisi’s mid-twelfth-century geographical text, the Kitab Nuzhat al-mushtaq fi-khtiraq al-afaq (Book of Pleasant Journeys Into Faraway Lands) was better known as the Kitab Rujar (Book of Roger) for the Norman king, Roger II of Sicily, to whom it was dedicated. If al-Idrisi confronts us with the (for us) counterintuitive example of a North African scholar composing a work in Arabic for a Latin Christian king, Marco Polo’s Livre du Grand Caam, in which the world beyond the eastern Mediterranean is “described through the medium of a language that is [for him] foreign (yet familiar), a language that signifies in itself an openness to other and travel,”²⁹ likewise instantiates the surprising cosmopolitanism of a world empire of letters before European hegemony.

The third title, Le devisement du Monde, borne by some of the earliest manuscripts of The Travels, calls attention to the more pedestrian parts of the text least likely to attract the attention of modern commentators. In long sections devoted to the cities and roads of Persia and Central Asia, Marco documents—sometimes in numbingly repetitive form—the characteristics of locale after locale, defined in terms of variables such as language, form of government, the religion and customs of its inhabitants, and the major commodities to be found there. The liveliest entries are reserved for sites that are somehow superlative:

Et sus la rive [de la mer Osiane] a une cité, qui est appelee Cormes, laquele a port. Et vous di que les marcheans y viennent d’Ynde avec leur ne[s] chargies d’espiceries et de perrerie et de peles et de dras de soie et dorez et de dens d’olifans et d’autres pluisours marcheandises et si les vendent aus marcheans, qui puis les portent par universe monde, vendant aus autres marcheans. Elle est vile de moult grant marcheandise.³⁰

[And on the banks (of the Ocean Sea) is a port city called Hormuz. And I tell you that merchants come there from India, their ships loaded with spices, precious stones, pelts, cloth of silk and gold, elephant tusks, and many other kinds of merchandise; these they sell to [other] merchants, who then carry them throughout the whole world, selling them to other merchants. It is a city of very great mercantile activity.]

Its author, Ibn Hawqal, was a tenth-century merchant and traveler, “one of the best exponents, with his contemporary al-Mu[q]addasi, of geography based on travel and direct observation.”³¹ The book from which it is drawn bears two alternate titles: the first, Kitab Surat al-ard (Book of the Picture of the Earth), resonates suggestively with Marco Polo’s Le devisement du monde, while the latter, Kitab al-masalik wa’l-mamalik (Book of Routes and Kingdoms), was widespread enough in medieval Arabic to constitute something of a genre. According to the Arabist André Miquel, these texts were a kind of “imperial” geography that took up and augmented previous geographical traditions, bringing out the economic and cultural coherence of lands that had been assembled by political and military conquest. They combined three kinds of description—(1) physical environment (topography, waterways, seas, and climate), described not for its own sake but for its effect on mentalities, languages, and culture; (2) history (the development of political units and religious or juridical schools, famous men, monuments, and notable local events); and (3) the economic activities (production, commercial exchange, routes, weights and measures, taxes, currencies and prices), collective attitudes, and social behavior (customs, folklore, proverbs, and calendar) of its population—combining this textual knowledge with the personal observations of an author-traveler.³² Within this genre, Ibn Hawqal’s work stands out for its “vividness of description and . . . depth of feeling,” particularly in his account of commercial matters, “which form a complete break with convention.”³³

I have heard there was a certain man of Siraf who had passed forty years at sea, never leaving his ship during that time: whenever he came to a port, he sent some of his people on shore to transact his commercial affairs; and when that business was finished, he sailed on to some other place. The inhabitants of Siraf devote their whole time to commerce and merchandi[s]e. The Author of the book says, “I myself saw at this place several persons who possessed four thousand dinars; and there were some who had still more; and their clothes were like those of hired labourers.”

That this passage could, I suspect, be seamlessly slipped into Marco Polo’s Travels without attracting the slightest notice bespeaks the common culture binding together the worlds of the tenth-century traveler from al-Jazira in Upper Mesopotamia and the thirteenth-century merchant of Venice. No longer, then, does it make sense to speak of a medieval literary system “confined to regional areas that were sealed off from each other.”³⁴ Rather, perhaps we might productively rethink Marco Polo’s Devisement du monde as a late Francophone Kitab al-masalik wa’l-mamalik.

What I hope to have shown by this foray into the twelfth through fourteenth centuries is that, in our present global moment, “the world” is a productive category through which to rethink our conception of medieval French literature. Expanding our field of vision outside the Hexagon reveals the expansive geographical and cultural terrain traversed by producers and consumers of texts in ancien français. From the courts of Anglo-Norman England in the northwest to the Mongol capital of Khanbalik in the east, Francophone readers and authors participated in a literary system comprising texts and text-networks from across Asia, Europe, and Africa. The long history of expansion, contact, and diffusion underlying this literary system presses us to rethink the political and cultural history both of France and of French and Francophone studies. Worlding our perspective on the French Middle Ages reveals surprising layerings of contact and continuities linking east and west, the medieval and the modern. A simple but telling example: before the advent of electricity, any researcher in Paris’s Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal consulting a manuscript by the light of a bougie (candle) would have been surrounded by traces of Europe’s Arabo-Mediterranean roots. “Arsenal,” in the sense of a naval shipyard or munitions warehouse, derives from the Arsenale, the famous shipyard of Venice first built in 1104; but that name, in turn, comes from dar as-sina’a or “house of manufacture,” from the Arabic term meaning art, craft, or skill. Meanwhile, bougie, used since the beginning of the fourteenth century to mean “candle,” attests to the importance of the port of Bougie (Bejaïa) on the North African coast as a site for the shipment of beeswax from the hinterlands to markets in Marseille and even far-away Flanders.³⁵

As specialists in many areas of premodern culture are beginning to document, the Middle Ages can no longer be adduced as the point of origins of a pristine protonational culture or identity. For one, the medieval Francophone world and the literature it produced was imbricated in complex networks of contact and exchange—some of which continue to resonate, in unexpected ways, in the age of nationalism and modernity. In the 1830s, for example, European visitors to Sidi Bou Saïd, near Tunis, began encountering a legend that the Muslim holy man after whom the town was named was in fact a figure we have met before: the thirteenth-century crusader, Saint Louis IX. According to the story, the king did not die on crusade but—attracted by the piety of a wandering marabout or simply weary of the burdens of rulership—converted to Islam, remaining in the region as a beloved and revered local figure. (In one twentieth-century variant, he “quietly left his camp, married a local girl, and disappeared into the hills.”) As Afrodesia McCannon aptly puts it, Tunisians replaced the history of “the great crusading Christian saint” who died trying to teach the Muslims “the error of their ways” with “a king converted by Tunisia.”³⁶ From Jean de Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis to Aimé Césaire to Sidi Bou Saïd, one could hardly find better proof of the fact that “symbols circulating beyond the boundaries of their places of origin are rarely simple copies. Instead, imported things are often socially and culturally reconstituted, and given compound local meanings and associations that are sometimes directly related to foreign meanings and sometimes quite distinct from them.”³⁷ The kinds of transcultural, transhistorical, and transconfessional transactions I have tried to map here are precisely those bound to remain invisible to the normalizing centripetal vision implied in a world republic of letters. Rather, the transgressive energy required to shuttle between languages and epochs, center and periphery, the global and the local, calls forth alternate ways of worlding the Francophone Middle Ages—ways we have only just begun to explore. For a worlded pedagogy “is never complete. Mastery is not the goal. But the new spatialities and temporalities”³⁸ it traces remind us that medieval French literature was, from the beginning, a “littérature-monde en français.”