Villehardouin, GEOFFROI DE, marshal of Champagne, the first, and far from the least, of French historians, was born about 1160 at Villehardouin in Aube, took a distinguished part in the so-called Fourth Crusade—the complicated and entirely secular operations in alliance with Venice that established the Latin empire of Constantinople—became marshal of 'Romanie,' seigneur of Messinople in Thrace in 1207, and was dead before 1213. His famous Conquête de Constantinople relates with order and clearness the course of events from the preaching of the crusade in 1198 down to the death of his patron, the Marquis de Montferrat, in 1207. It is probable, as Gaston Paris says, that he did not write himself, and that we should take in its proper sense—which is not always the case in Old French—the word dicter which he uses several times in speaking of the composition of his book. The style is vigorous, direct, often singularly strong and graphic without effort or even consciousness; yet preserving from the preceding age something of the epic tone, it recalls the Chanson de Roland just as Herodotus recalls Homer. Sincere history as it is, it is of far greater value as literature than history, for it throws the strongest light upon the thoughts and feelings of the crusaders, especially the leaders. Strange to say, it is supplemented here by another prose narrative of a sharer in the crusade, Robert de Clari, whose book is much less admirable in style, but reveals the inner life of the crusaders of lower rank.
Editions are by Du Cange (1657), Dom Briar (1823), and especially N. de Wailly (1872; 3d ed. 1882). See Sainte-Beuve's Causeries du Lundi, vol. ix.