Abstract
The historiographical image of Anne of Cyprus (1418–1462), Duchess of Savoy, and her husband, Duke Louis of Savoy (1413–1465), is overwhelmingly negative. The couple undoubtedly encountered serious political difficulties during their reign, but the ‘black legend’ circulating about Anne and Louis since the seventeenth century appears far from justified. It originated with the so-called Chronica Latina Sabaudiae, a text completed shortly after 1487 and probably written by Étienne Morel (c. 1440–1499), a high-ranking cleric who was a supporter of the estranged son of Anne and Louis, Philippe of Savoy (1438–1497). Morel's narrative, its historical and literary context, and its reception in early-modern and modern historiography are examined against the background of contemporaneous Sabaudian and European politics. Morel's polemics seem inspired by the Commentarii genre of historiography cultivated by fifteenth-century humanists such as Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Both the genesis and the reception of Morel's text demonstrate the shifting but unshakeable alliance of historiography and dynastic politics, exemplifying historiography's role in the fabric of power.
Writing history has always been integral to the fabric of power. Much more than mere gatherers of data, historians determine which events are deemed worthy of being reported and decide how such events are being narrated; they thereby exert great influence over who plays the parts of heroes and villains in collective memory. The historian's social position within the dynamics of remembering has thus ensured a close relationship between history and politics in all periods, with late medieval, early modern, and modern times no exception. Indeed, the vibrant field of chronicle studies in recent decades has enabled us to appreciate much more fully than ever before the multiple entanglements between chroniclers as political agents, chronicle texts, and chronicle writing as forms of political discourse, and the material aspects of the highly diverse types of sources in which chronicles have come down to us. Such subtle influences range from the choice of linguistic register (for example, Latin or the vernacular) to the literary format selected (for example, prose or verse) and the type of manuscripts or prints in which chronicles were committed to posterity (again, ranging from opulently illuminated de luxe codices to the most unassuming workaday manuscript copies, even unfinished drafts). Despite such staggering differences among the countless examples of late medieval, early modern, and modern chronicle writing, the chronicle as a genre emerges as a highly charged, politically motivated document par excellence. A chronicle was designed to reflect the chronicler's agenda as well as that of their patron, and to mould readers’ perceptions for as long a time as possible. The respective present and future, therefore, are both shaped through the chronicler's programmatic (re-)articulation and (re-)presentation of the past – a far cry from the seemingly neutral perspective that was traditionally seen as the chronicler's authorial position. 1
Similarly, gender relations at late medieval and early-modern European courts, and the ways in which they influenced medieval and early modern historiographies, remained poorly understood for a long time. While female rulers’ and courtiers’ physical presence and social roles within courtly life were universally acknowledged, the number of studies dedicated specifically to the role of women as proactive subjects in politics and courtly life has, until recently, remained disproportionately small compared to works placing male subjects at the centre of attention. Fortunately, this is no longer the case: following the first systematic explorations of female roles in late medieval and early-modern courtly life around the turn of the millennium, 2 a growing number of studies have explored the proactive agency of women at court. These include studies of female patronage, 3 the complex politics of queenship, 4 the way women handled the misogynist discourses embedded in late medieval spirituality, 5 and techniques used to besmirch female (and male) political antagonists during their lifetimes and beyond. 6
The highly gendered representations in historiography of Anne of Lusignan (1418–1462), Duchess of Savoy from 1440 to 1462, and her husband, Duke Louis of Savoy (1413–1465), co-ruler of Savoy 1434 to 1440 and Duke of Savoy from 1440 to 1465, offer a particularly striking example of these dynamics. The couple's current image as highly problematic rulers was profoundly influenced by a single text, the late-fifteenth-century Chronica Latina Sabaudiae (henceforth: CLS). 7 Its impact has proven astonishingly difficult to dislodge to this very day. The CLS and its reception history, therefore, not only provide a cautionary tale of the way in which historians sometimes allow themselves to read sources insufficiently critically, but also allow us to study the specific entanglements of historiography, politics, and gender as they unfolded in the orbit of the late-fifteenth-century court of Savoy, not only against the background of European historiography and politics at large, but also through early modern and modern scholarship all the way to the early twenty-first century.
Women at Court and the Historiographical Imagination
Women holding visible positions of power in courtly life traditionally faced peculiar odds in historiography. On one hand, as monarchs or regents, their chances of inclusion in the historical record as proactive forces were greatly enhanced. On the other hand, their very prominence seems to have sparked an impulse towards polarization among historians who, until quite recently, tended to see female protagonists exclusively either as heroines or villains. In the popular eye, such shining examples of female rulership as Eleanor of Castile, Margaret of Austria, or Maria Theresa find their mirror images in consistently vilified figures such as Isabella of France, Catherine de’ Medici, or Marie Antoinette. In early modern studies, this phenomenon of glorification was conceptualized as a variant of Ernst H. Kantorowicz's theory of the ‘king's two bodies’. 8 The same principle could also be applied to construct perceived villainesses. The ‘queen's body’ provided a readily available screen for articulating criticisms of the ruler or his regime, by seeking the root of the perceived evil not in the person of the ruler himself, but in an individual extremely close to him – when more direct, unveiled anti-royal statements might have prompted accusations of lèse-majesté or open rebellion. By using the rhetorical strategy of blaming the ruler's wife, mother, or mistress, critics could protect themselves – up to a point at least – from prosecution. They could also, even in the process of expressing criticism, affirm their loyalty to the patrilineal core of the dynasty as well as to the God-given order of society, which, on the one hand, had put the ruling house in charge and, on the other, regulated the relationships between women and men. 9 It should be readily stated that these contemporaneous polemics are, of course, bona fide historical sources. In the absence of critical readings of these documents, however, such deliberately partisan narratives continued – and not seldom continue – to perpetuate distortions that arose out of the political cross-currents of their own times. They were never meant to be dispassionate assessments – but why they were so readily taken on board by later scholars remains to be discussed.
Another historiographic trope that will be of relevance for what follows tends to link remarkable women with great male rulers who are their husbands, nephews, or sons: Louis IX of France and his wife Eleanor of Castile; Emperor Charles V and his aunt Margaret of Austria; Emperor Joseph II and his mother, Empress Maria Theresa. Each of them is important in their own right, and they function as mutually reinforcing role models for the type of familial relationship that they embody. Idealized by historians as paradigms of familial relationships, such arrangements in reality often arose from practical needs, for example the prolonged absence of a husband due to military engagements abroad, or the geographical dispersal of the territories of a ruling house. 10 In such political constellations, female co-rulership provided an effective way of organizing governance. Nevertheless, a woman in power was never entirely immune from critics claiming that women taking a proactive role in government constituted, by necessity, an infringement of the natural order. By default, it suggested to them a potentially worrying shift in the balance of power between the sexes. It comes as no surprise, then, that the villainesses, just like the heroines, have their male sidekicks: Isabella of France and Edward II of England; Charles VI of France and Isabeau of Bavaria; Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. In all these couples, the husbands are cast as weaklings, to whom such traits as an ambivalent sexuality, illness, even insanity, and a general lack of discipline or stamina are ascribed. It is not uncommon to read in such cases that the perceived weakness of the male counterparts is caused, or at least exacerbated, by the corresponding women's virago-like personality. As Sarah Maza aptly pointed out, such negative stereotypes are typically activated in times of crisis. 11 Nor is this rhetorical trope a phenomenon of the pre-modern past: such images are still readily employed by the contemporary yellow press. Think, for example, of the (semi-)popular images of Edward VIII of England and Wallis Simpson. 12
Sometimes the typecasting is reinforced by the perceived foreignness of the female protagonist. Given dynastic marriage practices, it was the rule that wives were ‘imported’ from elsewhere. It should be noted, therefore, that Eleanor of Castile was as much a ‘foreigner’ to the Kingdom of France as, say, Isabeau of Bavaria. But historians clearly assign different values to the same historical circumstance depending on outcome: if things are perceived as having gone well, differences in cultural background are minimized or rendered invisible; conversely, a dash of xenophobia provides extra spice to the narrative of the virago wife or mother. 13
After this brief overview of the development and rhetoric of historiography in Europe since late medieval times, let us now turn to our main subject. Following a short introduction to the history of Savoy in the fifteenth century, we shall examine how the abovementioned mechanisms played out in the discursive strategies deployed by the CLS. Reading the CLS in the context of the author's likely relation to the court, and his wider intellectual milieu, will account for some of the deliberately corrosive rhetoric that characterizes the chronicle; revisiting the readers of the CLS in their own political contexts will do the same for the views they took away from their readings. Having reconstituted the historical framework in which the CLS was conceived and read, it will be possible to re-examine the CLS in a way that does better justice to both its political intentions and its protagonists’ objective failures and accomplishments.
Introducing Anne and Louis
Today's historiographical image of fifteenth-century Savoy is dominated by the exceptional career of Amadeus VIII (1383–1451, r. 1391–1440). 14 Having come to power in 1391 while still a child, he secured the ducal title for Savoy in 1416. Almost twenty years later, in 1434, Amadeus took the unusual step of taking up residence in a quasi-monastic setting at Ripaille while putting his son and designated successor Louis in charge of day-to-day business. However, Amadeus kept a firm hand on the reins concerning all strategic aspects of Sabaudian politics. 15 Elected Pope by the Council of Basel in late 1439, Amadeus officially resigned as duke on 6 January 1440 and reigned as (anti-)Pope Felix V in Basel, while Louis ruled in his own right as Duke of Savoy henceforth. From 1442, Felix's obedience was reduced to the Sabaudian lands, with most of Christendom adhering to Felix's rival, Pope Eugenius IV. At this stage, Felix left Basel and returned to Savoy. His permanent presence in the duchy and his subsequent assumption of the prince-bishop's see of Geneva in 1444 revived the uneasy power-sharing arrangement between father/(anti-)Pope and son/duke that had already existed from 1434 onwards. In 1449, Amadeus VIII/Felix V resigned the papacy and accepted the dignity of cardinal of the Holy Roman Church while retaining his episcopal see at Geneva. He died in 1451 in the odour of sanctity. 16
It probably would have been difficult for almost any ruler and his wife to establish a secure identity and solid power base with such a towering father figure as Amadeus/Felix hovering in the vicinity. Louis of Savoy (1413–1465), Amadeus VIII's second surviving son, first gained prominence in February 1434 when he married Anne of Lusignan, daughter of the king of Cyprus. This marriage brought Savoy one step closer to a royal crown. A lesser spirit than Amadeus VIII might, at that stage, have considered his life's work done, and perhaps felt confirmed in his decision to withdraw from the public side of politics by the exceptional success of the young couple in producing offspring: Anne underwent no less than eighteen pregnancies, and thirteen of her and Louis's children reached adulthood. 17 For some of them, promising marriage alliances were concluded early on. The couple's first-born and Louis's eventual successor, Amadeus IX (1435–1472, r. 1465–1472), was betrothed to the daughter of King Charles VII of France, Yolande of Valois (1434–1478), in 1436. For their second son, Louis the younger (1436–1482), another royal crown was brought within reach by a marriage contract with Annabella of Scotland, concluded in 1444. 18 Anne and Louis's third son, Philippe (1438–1497), may have been considered for marriage to Charlotte of Cyprus (1444–1487); 19 while this plan came to nought, he eventually came to rule over the Bresse region of Savoy and reigned as duke of Savoy in his own right from 1496 to 1497. We shall hear more about him later. 20 Of the five younger brothers, three held high ecclesiastic offices of strategic importance to the Sabaudian state: Pierre (1440–1458) was archbishop of Tarentaise; Jean-Louis (1447–1482) and François (1454–1490) were prince-bishops of Geneva 1458–1482 and 1484–1490. 21 Janus (1440–1491), count of Faucigny and, from 1460, of Genevois, and Jacques (1450–1486), count of Romont, were given parts of the Sabaudian lands to administer in appanage. 22
That not all was well in Savoy became painfully evident in 1446, with the eruption of the first of two violent episodes directed against the ducal couple. 23 Members of the indigenous nobility were concerned about continued access to important court offices and to the ruler; it did not help that Anne brought a larger-than-expected retinue with her from Cyprus in 1434, and put some of them in positions of power within the Sabaudian establishment. 24 All this contributed to the formation of two opposing factions, one associated (primarily) with the ducal couple, the other with the local nobility. Amadeus VIII (as Pope Felix V) managed to smooth over the conflict, but only temporarily.
In 1451, Amadeus died, freeing Louis and Anne from what in many ways must have seemed an uneasy arrangement between generations. Settling an old score, Louis immediately exiled the ringleaders of the 1446 cabal. Louis also wed his daughter Charlotte (1443–1483) to the Dauphin Louis, the future Louis XI, against the explicit wishes of Charles VII of France, and quite possibly also of Amadeus VIII. The banished Sabaudian nobles turned to Charles VII for protection; the king forced their reinstatement, thereby diminishing Louis's standing at home. In 1453, Louis and Anne purchased the Shroud of Turin, a relic that was to acquire iconic significance for the Sabaudian dynasty; from today's perspective, this transaction undoubtedly was the couple's most important long-term achievement on behalf of Savoy. 25 The late 1450s saw the intended marriage with Annabella of Scotland called off (in 1458), followed by the younger Louis's marriage to Duchess Anne's niece Charlotte and his brief tenure as king of Cyprus from 1459 to 1461, which ended in defeat and exile. This calamitous turn of events may have been a catalyst for a second uprising by the nobility against Louis and Anne in summer 1462. The revolt this time was led by none other than Anne and Louis's third son, Philippe. The rebels murdered Anne's maître d’hôtel, Gaspard de Varax, in front of the ducal couple's eyes and executed their chancellor, the Piedmontese nobleman Valperga, after a show trial. He was drowned in Lake Geneva, the customary method of execution for the crimes he allegedly committed. Louis and Anne, in a state of shock, fled to Geneva where Anne of Lusignan died on 11 November 1462. 26 Following a forced reconciliation, Duke Louis travelled to the court of France, by then ruled by his son-in-law, Louis XI, to seek help. Louis XI invited Philippe of Savoy to France and imprisoned him for two years (1464–1466) in the castle of Loches on the Loire. Meanwhile, Duke Louis died in Lyon in January 1465. He was buried next to his wife in the Franciscan convent of Rive in Geneva, which they had both richly endowed. 27
Savoy After Anne and Louis
As this brief account shows, the tenure of the ducal couple was far from smooth. But if the outcomes of Anne's and Louis's reign were less enduring than Amadeus VIII's legacy, worse was to come, with the instability of the dynastic succession during the four decades that followed. 28 Louis's successor, Duke Amadeus IX, ruled for only seven years, from 1465 to 1472. 29 The ducal crown then passed to his son, the seven-year-old Philibert (1465–1482). Meanwhile, Philippe of Savoy, having been released by Louis XI and assigned the territory of Bresse by his nephew, Amadeus IX, began to expand and consolidate his power as the senior of the ducal uncles after the demise of Anne and Louis. When Philibert himself died at the age of seventeen (1482), his younger brother Charles (b. 1468), barely of age himself, became duke. The tide seemed to have turned temporarily when a conflict with France over the marquisate of Saluzzo was resolved favourably for Savoy by Charles, and Charles's young wife, Bianca of Montferrat, bore a son and heir, Charles II, in 1488. However, Charles I fell seriously ill that same year and died in 1490, leaving his infant son to become Duke Charles II under the regency of his mother. The boy died in 1496, aged seven years. The ducal crown now went to the next relative in the male line, Philippe of Savoy, who, by then, was the last surviving child of Louis and Anne. As the most senior and most politically experienced member of the family, and thanks to his clever manoeuvring, Philippe had, from 1490 onward, become the true centre of power at court. 30 As Duke Philip II, he ruled only briefly (1496–1497). He passed the ducal crown to his son Philibert II (1480–1504), and though Philibert II's reign, too, was short (r. 1497–1504), 31 his accession enabled Philibert's younger half-brother, Charles (1486–1553) to succeed him. He went on to rule Savoy as Duke Charles III for almost fifty years (1504–1553). Philippe of Savoy's progeny thus brought renewed stability to the duchy, until the invasion by French forces in 1536 forced Duke Charles into exile.
The final four decades of the fifteenth century, then, were turbulent times in Savoy – a circumstance to bear in mind when assessing the trenchant tone employed by the author of the CLS. To further understand the CLS within its historical context, let us now take another look at the history of late medieval and early modern historiography in Europe, and specifically in Savoy.
From Ecclesiastic to Dynastic to Public History
Originally an exclusive preserve of the Church, record-keeping and, by extension, historiography turned into a courtly cultural practice in late medieval Europe. 32 By the thirteenth century, a new sense of the importance of the past emerged among courtly communities, which manifested itself in the form of extended narratives – some of which are now considered chronicles and others literature. There is little to no distinction in late medieval texts between modern categories of ‘facts’ versus ‘fiction’. Instead, the purpose of the historiographic narrative is the glorification of a dynasty by creating a florid – and, by the standards of the time, convincing – discourse highlighting its ancient roots and associated claims to distinction. Both chronicles and chivalric romances thus aimed at reinforcing knowledge and awareness of dynastic lineage as the distinctive marker of nobility. The interpenetration of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ in late medieval awareness makes the question of the ‘truth’ of these narratives an anachronistic one – the point of either was to create a body of knowledge that was to be shared with intimates and peers only, strengthening the bonds between the parties concerned by giving them access to exclusive knowledge of the past. Far from being revealed to the general public, and circulating – if at all – in very limited copies within the innermost circles of power only, these narratives by their sheer existence functioned as markers of social prestige and exclusivity.
While still essentially serving the purposes of dynastic propaganda, historiographical texts gradually acquired a somewhat more widespread ‘public’ dimension as a result of the new possibilities opened up by the printing press during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. At the same time, influenced first by humanist textual critique, and later by a growing necessity to underpin conflicting claims to historical ‘truth’ with external evidence, a new type of historiographical writing arose that increasingly relied on textual criticism. Using charters and similar, usually legal, documents to provide the building-blocks for the creation of historical narratives, this new type of historiography boosted antiquarian knowledge as a heuristic technique, and by the early seventeenth century led to historical narratives that clearly identify their source materials. In contrast to late medieval historiographic writing, histories of the seventeenth century, therefore, were more likely to be defined by the written nature of their sources, and by their verifiable nature.
Sabaudian Historiography from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Age
Sabaudian historiography is no exception to this general trend. After early beginnings in monastic institutions, historiography as a dynastic project burst onto the scene immediately after Amadeus VIII was raised to the dignity of duke in 1416. 33 Taking his cue from his Burgundian in-laws, and by extension the French royal family, Amadeus VIII invited the Picard Jean Cabaret d’Orville, usually referred to as Jean Cabaret, to Savoy and asked him to write a chronicle of the history of the ducal family. Cabaret's text was completed in 1419 and became the baseline of court-sponsored historiography in the Sabaudian lands. 34 Reaching across four hundred years, Cabaret's Chronique de Savoye enhances the prestige of the Savoy lineage by creating a (historically incorrect) link between the family and the Ottonian Emperors. Moreover, in line with the dynastic practice of treating historiography as a tool of government, Cabaret's work was kept strictly within the inner confines of the Savoy court administration.
From the 1460s onwards, through to the early sixteenth century – coinciding with the period of greatest weakness in the fifteenth-century history of the dynasty – additional copies of Cabaret's text were produced, suggesting a perceived need to shore up the prestige of the house of Savoy by circulating Cabaret's narrative more widely. This moment of re-copying and re-writing also gave rise to two enlarged redactions of Cabaret. First, in 1464–1466, Jahan Servion expanded the Sabaudian genealogy further backwards to late Antiquity, claiming the Roman Emperor Gordian III (r. 238–244 CE) as an ancestor of the house of Savoy. 35 A few years later, around 1477, Amadeus IX's widow, Yolande of Valois, commissioned a large-scale historiographic project, based on Cabaret's work, from the ducal secretary, Perrinet Dupin. 36 Dupin's chronicle never reached completion; in its surviving form, it consists mostly of a colourful history of count Amadeus VII (1360–1391, r. 1383–1391) and focuses on the chevaleresque qualities of this prince.
In the early sixteenth century, the Lombard humanist Domenico Della Bella detto il Maccaneo (c. 1466–1530) became the first official court historiographer of Savoy. He produced a Latin chronicle of the first nine dukes of Savoy, covering the years from 1416 to his present. His assessment of Louis is entirely panegyric and, in that sense, utterly predictable: While his divine father was still alive, Louis was declared duke because of his outstanding character. … It is known that he was a very generous warrior … he was a most modest prince and most courteous in conversation … he was a lover of truth … keeping his word … above all he cultivated a sincere piety … and while he did not seem easily to fall prey to flattery, he was polite and mild beyond measure against those who had failed him.
37
The work of Samuel Guichenon (1606–1660) was a turning point for Sabaudian historiography. Guichenon's œuvre is an example of the new kind of antiquarian historiography that developed in early seventeenth-century France. 40 His Histoire genealogique de la Royale Maison de Savoye (1660) creates a historical narrative proceeding from information that he could actually verify in legal and archival documents. Guichenon undertook intensive source research and, in the process, was the first historian to discover the Chronica Latina Sabaudiae. 41 Guichenon's verdict on Louis's reign is positive overall: ‘We come to a reign that was not as tranquil but no less glorious than the preceding one [of Amadeus VIII]; for although there were some problems in the conduct of this prince, these were counterbalanced by other virtues or by evident advantages that he secured for the Royal House of Savoy.’ 42
Guichenon, nevertheless, is the first historian explicitly to take the view that a significant portion of Louis's problems was caused by an excess of goodness, allowing Duchess Anne to usurp political power. As we shall see, Guichenon, in doing so, directly reflects the position taken by the CLS: Louis, duke of Savoy, a prince who had many qualities that recommend him; he was extraordinarily pious, a great lover of justice, loved his people, esteemed by all neighbouring princes who never took any important initiative during his reign without his participation and without seeking out his support. He had the glory not only to have preserved, but to have augmented the inheritance of his predecessors. Affability and clemency were his best-known virtues; so was patience in his never-ending difficulties. In short, he was good to excess: for Anne of Cyprus, his wife, acquired such powers over him that she became the absolute mistress of his will and disposed of the offices and the finances of the state. This caused a contemporary historian to bemoan the ease with which the Cypriots held the principal dignities to the exclusion of the Savoyards and Piedmontese which alienated the goodwill of most of his subjects; and instead of becoming the arbiter of other princes, following the example of his ancestors, the excess of agreeability he showed a favourite brought him to such an extreme as to allow for a [rift] between him and his subjects. He is also blamed for not having kept his promises sufficiently.
43
The Chronica Latina Sabaudiae
The Chronica Latina Sabaudiae was compiled in the final years of the fifteenth century by an anonymous author. 44 It begins with a synopsis of Cabaret's chronicle, followed by a discussion of the reign of Amadeus VIII. The third section – which primarily concerns us in what follows – is dedicated to Amadeus's time as (anti-)Pope Felix V and the reign of Louis and Anne; it seems mostly based on oral histories and accounts, whereas the description of events from the 1460s onward to the end of the 1480s indicates that the author was able to take advantage of copious written records, and often was an eyewitness. Many of the events mentioned are focused on the north-western parts of the Sabaudian territories, Bresse and Bugey, as well as Lyon, giving the text the flavour of a personal rather than an official document, of almost autobiographical character. The manuscript lay dormant at the abbey of Ambronay in Bresse until it was brought to the attention of Guichenon in the mid-seventeenth century; he then used it for his Histoire genealogique. Remarkably, the CLS played no further role in Sabaudian historiography for two more centuries, until the manuscript was acquired in the 1830s from Guichenon's estate by the Regia Deputazione sopra gli studi di Storia Patria. This new institute was tasked by King Carlo Alberto of Sardinia (1798–1849, r. 1831–1849) to write a history of the house of Savoy that conformed to the new standards of the nineteenth century. The CLS manuscript was then used by Domenico Promis to prepare his edition of Monumenta Historiae Patriae, published in 1840. It is currently lost. 45
The use of Latin, and the frequent text passages referring to events concerning the Church, suggested to Promis that the likely author of the CLS was an ecclesiastic with a particular interest in Lyon, Bresse, and Bugey. 46 Recently, Clémence Critin convincingly identified this cleric as Étienne de Morel (c. 1440–1499), doctor utriusque iuris, and abbot of Ambronay from 1482 to 1499. Morel was closely involved with the Sabaudian court administration. He succeeded Jean-Louis of Savoy as abbot of Ambronay after having administered the abbey on Jean-Louis's behalf since the 1470s, served as bishop of Maurienne from 1483 until his death in 1499, and held benefices and dignities at Lyon, Mâcon, and Saint-Pierre-de-Bèze (Burgundy). In 1490, he joined the regency council of Duke Charles I, which was presided over by Philippe of Savoy, and in 1496, after Philippe's accession as duke, became a ducal counsellor. Morel's origins and career fit with the CLS author's pronounced sympathies for Philippe of Savoy: Philippe ruled Morel's native region for most of the churchman's lifetime, and was his long-term patron, as Morel's appointments from 1490 onwards suggest.
The CLS was written in the final years of the 1480s, given the date of the most recent events recorded there. Morel, a few years earlier, had become abbot of Ambronay (1482) and bishop of Maurienne (1483). Having reached such high office might have prompted him to compose a kind of personal memoir, taking stock of the events of his own lifetime. Certainly, his choice to write in Latin implies that he was addressing an educated, Latinate (hence, clerical) audience. At this point, it is important to note that the CLS – unlike the approximately contemporaneous chronicle of Perrinet Dupin – was never a part of the official, Francophone historiography of the court. It is, instead, a voice from the (relative) periphery of power, and was understood as such by Guichenon and Promis.
47
As a literary utterance of a late-fifteenth-century cleric writing in Latin, the CLS can be inserted – irrespective of authorship – into a tradition of humanist historiography that is exemplified at its most brilliant by Enea Silvio Piccolomini's Commentarii. As the editors of Piccolomini's Commentarii point out: Renaissance humanists had little doubt that history-writing was a form of rhetoric; and that the historian's job was to narrate the record of political events in such a way as to inspire admiration or outrage or otherwise convince readers of a particular point of view. … The tendency to view history as yet another rhetorical arena in which a writer might promote his own or his employer's political interests … spread rapidly through the princely courts of Italy in the middle years of the fifteenth century.
48
Could Morel have been familiar with such humanist models? The answer is yes, quite possibly. His contacts with the papacy began with the pontificate of Francesco della Rovere (Sixtus IV, r. 1471–1484) and continued through the reign of his successor, Innocent VIII (r. 1484–1492). The Della Rovere family cultivated close connections with Savoy: Cristoforo della Rovere was archbishop of Tarentaise from 1472 to 1478, Cardinal Domenico della Rovere from 1479 to 1483. In 1484, and again from 1496 to 1497, Domenico della Rovere was prince-bishop of Geneva, replacing Jean-Louis of Savoy, and from 1484 to 1503 bishop of Turin. Morel himself was an apostolic protonotary, and his see of Maurienne had previously been held for 30 years (1453–1482) by Cardinal Guillaume d’Estouteville, a member of the extended French royal family, senior member of the College of Cardinals and renowned patron of the arts. D’Estouteville was considered a papabile and several times came close to being elected Pope, losing to Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1458) and to Francesco della Rovere (1471). 50 Piccolomini, in turn, was papal secretary in the early years of Amadeus VIII's papacy; and the Savoy dynasty in 1451 obtained consent from the Holy See that ecclesiastical dignities in their territories would be given only to candidates that enjoyed the favour of the house of Savoy. 51 Morel, therefore, was deeply entangled in an ecclesiastic-political network connecting Savoy with the French royal family, the Della Rovere family and, by extension, the papacy – an office already intimately connected to the house of Savoy through Amadeus VIII. Humanist influence in Savoy is often seen as negligible, but this picture might bear revising if the focus is shifted away from the court itself to the ecclesiastical networks. These stand at a certain distance from the dynasty, but at the same time form an integral component of the fabric of power, in Savoy as elsewhere. Last but not least, Morel seems to have been in regular contact with the Curia in Rome, where he died in 1499.
The Image of Anne and Louis in the CLS: the Origins of a Historiographical ‘Black Legend’
Analyzing the discourse of the CLS concerning Anne and Louis, one of the first things the reader notices are the characteristics ascribed to Louis of Savoy: physical beauty, a way with words, but also fickleness, lack of backbone, and wastefulness. These are the exact opposites of the virtues sought in rulers, according to late medieval Mirrors of Princes. 52 Moreover, the attributes assigned to Louis of Savoy are in direct contradiction to the prevailing ideas about masculinity, as constructed by medieval theories based on humoral medicine. The rhetoric used to characterize Louis, therefore, turns him into a woman, and it draws on a misogynistic discourse well established in late medieval Europe. 53
The CLS chronicler does not, at first, state explicitly what caused this feminization of Duke Louis. Instead, he introduces Louis's wife, Anne, the daughter of the king of Cyprus, recalling the festivities surrounding their marriage in 1434, which indeed qualified as one of the most spectacular celebrations of their age, as famously told by Martin Le Franc in his Champion des dames (written in the early 1440s). 54 Further on, we hear that Savoy was financially depleted at the behest of Louis's wife (‘suasione uxoris’), and that Louis liked Cypriots more than his own sons because of his love for his wife (‘Ciprianos amore uxoris magis quam proprios filios diligebat’). But Louis also sought the company of other shady individuals, presumably also mostly from outside Savoy. They end up as a particularly insidious form of ‘evil councillors’, distracting and thereby implicitly controlling Louis's mind: ‘he regularly kept the company of singers, comedians, Picard archers and jesters [and] conducted government in their midst’ (‘habebat cantores, ioculatores farsarum, sagittarios picardos, buffones in hiis gubernabatur’). Here a second, xenophobic strand enters the chronicler's discourse, alongside a socio-cultural divide. He (writing in Latin, and thereby marked as a member of the clergy) separates himself – as a moral authority – from the performers of courtly entertainment and the foreignness of Louis's wife, the Cypriot princess. 55
Finally, the problem is stated outright. All this happened ‘because Anne, duchess of Savoy … infatuated the duke her husband so much that he would have sold his entire country and given her the proceeds, if she had asked him to do so’.
56
Feminized in his union with Anne to the point of paralysis, Louis ‘could not take a single step without his wife’.
57
Anne's sinister attributes are amplified by the statement that ‘this duchess never loved her children’ (‘ista ducissa numquam dilexit liberos suos’): reminiscent of Medea, Anne is denied the most basic maternal qualities. And she remains isolated socially: according to the chronicler, Anne had ‘no friends [in Savoy] besides some servants from Cyprus over whom she lorded it with full force, rightly or wrongly’ (‘nec erant sibi amici nisi quidam ministri cipriani, quos cunctis viribus dictabat sive iure sive iniuria’).
58
Anne's nefarious regime culminates in the duke's seeking glory not through good rulership or success in battle, but through cultural display, specifically in music and archery: His glory lay in having singers, musicians in large and luxurious numbers, and bowmen from Picardy to whom he regularly gave what was his and what was not his, and he boasted about hearing daily chants, songs, and immoral frivolities that in the vernacular are called ballades … so much that he would have preferred to lose one good castle than to lose a single frivolity.
59
The Reception of the CLS: Anne and Louis in Modern Scholarship
As stated earlier, such polemics were par for the course for a late-fifteenth-century humanist writing in support of his struggling patron, and keeping in mind an audience of ‘insiders’ that would, no doubt, have relished the colourful language and gossipy nature of his discourse. The kind of writing cultivated in the CLS was, however, far removed from the officially sanctioned Sabaudian historiography of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, which we have seen exemplified in the chronicle of Perrinet Dupin (roughly contemporaneous with the CLS) and in the portrayal of Anne and Louis provided by Maccaneo. As such, the CLS is something akin to a modern opinion piece, or one of the late-eighteenth-century pamphlets produced in copious quantities against Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. It might have been meant, in due course, to influence Sabaudian politics in favour of Philippe of Savoy through a provocative historical account, and failing that would have served as a contemporaneous version of the Ciceronian ‘O tempora! O mores!’. The proactive source research undertaken by Samuel Guichenon in the spirit of the new historiography of the seventeenth century revived the CLS, allowing it to enter the official discourse of Sabaudian historiography through the back door as a bona fide source, not a pamphlet, with all the damaging consequences for the image of Anne and Louis that this entailed. However, this damage mostly occurred in a period well after Guichenon's Histoire genealogique: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Guichenon's opus, having become the quasi-official historiographic text for what by then had become the Kingdom of Sardinia, was reprinted between 1778 and 1780. Meanwhile, younger historians under the influence of the Enlightenment, such as Carlo Denina, began to re-orient Sabaudian historiography away from dynastic genealogy towards recasting the Sabaudian state as an example of modern government befitting a homogeneous proto-nation state with an Italian-peninsular identity. 60 In 1831, King Charles Albert of Savoy-Carignan, having just acceded to the throne of Sardinia, set in motion an ambitious programme of cultural modernization. A significant historiographic research project was put in place, institutionalized as the Regia Deputazione sopra gli studi di Storia Patria (1833), with Domenico Promis and Luigi Cibrario as the intellectual driving forces. The two men undertook several research trips in 1832–1834, leading to the publication of the Monumenta Historiae Patriae, which included the first publication of the CLS, rediscovered – as mentioned earlier – by Promis among Guichenon's papers. These were acquired by the Deputazione with the specific aim of collecting as many relevant sources for Sabaudian history as possible. 61
Although Promis still advocated some scepticism towards the account of the CLS, Luigi Cibrario's Origini e progresso delle instituzioni della monarchia di Savoia (Part II, Turin: Stamperia reale, 1855) already reflects the full negative impact of the CLS on the assessment of Anne and Louis's rulership, setting the stage for a mythology that persists in scholarship until the present day: ‘1451. Louis lets himself be ruled by the fantasies of the very beautiful Anne of Lusignan, his wife, whose preferences and antipathies show little reason and who enriches with the money of Savoy herself, her Lusignan relatives and her Cypriots; …’. 62 A similar tone is struck by Ercole Ricotti in his Storia della monarchia piemontese (1861). He notes a ‘decline of the monarchy from 1440’ (‘declinazione della monarchia dal 1440’), the year when Louis took power, and headlines the period of Louis and Anne as the ‘wretched reign of Duke Louis’ (‘regno sciagurato del Duca Ludovico’). 63
In the first volume of Émile Plaisance's Histoire des Savoyens, the chapter discussing the reign of Louis and Anne carries the title ‘Decadence of the Duchy of Savoy under Duke Louis, 1440–1465’ (‘Décadence du Duché de Savoie sous le Duc Louis, 1440–1465’), leaving little room for interpretation.
64
Plaisance sets the tone as follows: Feeble of character, pleasure-loving, shy of work, he [Louis] handed over power to Duchess Anne of Cyprus. … Beautiful and imperious, she [Anne] dominated her husband entirely. She was, in the words of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, ‘a woman unable to obey coupled with a man unable to give orders’. She surrounded Louis with minstrels, ballade-singers, and comedians. She distributed the posts to her favourites, above all to ‘Cypriots’, her countrymen, to the discontent of the burgesses whom these strangers oppressed mercilessly.
65
Historians of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, too, bought into the legend. Marie-José dedicated the final chapter of her study on Amadeus VIII to the ‘Mediterranean policy’ of that prince. 67 While replete with many interesting and original observations, the text re-states the familiar Orientalizing and misogynist tropes, going as far as to state that ‘perhaps never in history had the errors of a woman created more friction and had more disastrous consequences’ than Anne's alleged nefarious influence on Louis. 68 Donatella Taverna's Anna di Cipro: l’eterna straniera stands out as the first and only monograph so far dedicated to Anne of Lusignan. 69 Published in a paperback series dedicated to biographies of female protagonists of history, and addressing a general public, the final chapter offers an overview of the negative readings of Anne's reign put forth by modern historians writing in Italian. Taverna concluded that the much-needed re-evaluation of Anne's life has not yet been achieved. 70 This is confirmed by the image of Anne and Louis given in the otherwise magisterial biography of Guillaume Du Fay by the musicologist Alejandro Enrique Planchart. Basing his views on Marie-José, Planchart writes: ‘… Louis, an idle man entirely in thrall to his beautiful and capricious wife, proved an ineffectual ruler, but he was apparently an avid supporter of music …’. 71
Conclusion
If the CLS emerges as a highly idiosyncratic source with clear affinities to a polemical strand of humanist historiography, it should also be clearly understood that it cannot be used to make blanket statements about Sabaudian history in the mid-fifteenth century without adducing some very serious qualifications. In the context of Sabaudian politics and culture, the CLS is singular in combining humanist aspirations with a very personal account of history, driven by a pronounced political agenda on the part of its author that favours the one competing faction at court whose interests converged most closely with his subjective outlook on the world, his personal experiences, and his political ambitions. It thus provides fascinating evidence of the reception in Savoy of humanist concepts of historiography inspired by the likes of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, and fed through the trans-European ecclesiastical network; these evidently included the deliberate use of historiography as a political instrument. All this produced a literary document sui generis. Concerning the actions of Anne and Louis, on the other hand, a lot more painstaking work will be needed to clarify the motives of the ducal couple and their entourage in the context of their own aspirations and circumstances. Reading the CLS against the evidence of the archival documents will, no doubt, show that many of the assertions of the CLS reflect actual events, but do not necessarily characterize them accurately, because everything is seen through the filter of the CLS author's politics. Comparing these readings against each other will, in turn, provide an additional, fascinating new dimension for interpreting both the CLS and the traces left by the moves of the various factions at court in the final decades of the fifteenth century.
Established late medieval discourses of misogyny and xenophobia, unsurprisingly, provided ready tools for the author of the CLS to explain conflicts of interest within a courtly setting from a theologically imbued, moralizing perspective. While never verbalized explicitly in the text of the CLS, biblical models, for example of Solomon and his foreign wives in the Book of Kings, might have provided further suggestive demonstrations of foreign queens dominating their husbands and thereby wreaking havoc on their people. In the final analysis, the author of the CLS brings Anne into the position of Eve, whose wilfulness towards Adam violates the divine order and brings an evil into the world – here to be understood as the Sabaudian lands – that has the potential to replicate itself until Judgement Day. This reading was no doubt enforced by the election of Louis's saintly father to the papacy, a subject that is treated, unsurprisingly, with consummate loyalty towards the house of Savoy by the author of the CLS. This election – contested as it may have been – evidently made Amadeus VIII a successor of Christ, and introduced an element of a beata stirps narrative into the house of Savoy that manifested itself not only in miracles at Amadeus VIII's grave in Ripaille but also at Amadeus IX's tomb in Vercelli. 72
By the seventeenth century, Amadeus VIII's venture involving the Holy See was seen in a different light. Given the disappearance of the Lusignan dynasty from the political playing field, the newly discovered criticisms articulated by the CLS of Anne and her alleged nefarious effects on Louis's rulership offered an easy way to bring into play new discursive elements that were not only justified as bona fide historical records, but also could convincingly help account for the mixed results of Louis's and Anne's reign without having to face any serious counterarguments from inside the court. The desire, indeed need, to exploit the CLS to whitewash potentially problematic aspects of Sabaudian history was even more urgent in the mid-nineteenth century in light of Savoy's ambitions of leadership surrounding the unification of Italy as a nation state. Such historiographical shifts match up closely with changes in the prevailing intellectual and political currents. They demonstrate how historiographical agendas served changing political aims.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Orientalist clichés and the newly constructed gender roles put forth by middle-class politics further facilitated the uncritical adoption of the CLS's view of Anne and Louis; indeed, it is not without irony that the caustic remarks of the CLS about Anne and Louis unwittingly fell on their most fertile soil four to five centuries after they were written. It is difficult to dispute the fact that the ducal couple's reign, from the remote perspective of modern historians, was not particularly successful, and that their chronological proximity to Amadeus VIII did little to help, in particular from the perspective of an epoch where the trope of ‘great men’ was one of the linchpins of the historiographical discourse. On the other hand, there is a strangely deterministic undertone in all this, entangling the history of Savoy with narratological tropes of the rise and fall of great houses that pervaded the literary production of that epoch as much as it did historical research. It will be all the more interesting to see how an open-ended examination of the data will fit in with the colourful, even flamboyant commentaries provided by the CLS. It is to be hoped that it will change Anne's and Louis's status as stepchildren of historiography – like that of so many other ‘tainted’ rulers of the past – to one that acknowledges both their mistakes and their merits within the complex fabric of courtly politics and power of their own times.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was carried out under the auspices of the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures’ (
), funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation grant no. 669190 at the University of Oxford. My thanks to the editors of this special issue, Pascal Firges and Regine Maritz, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments and input, and to Clémence Critin for generously making a copy of her unpublished MA thesis available to me.