Tony tanner writes in Venice Desired: ‘a city's representational life is quite different from its historic, economic, demographic, cartographic, political, ceremonial, cultural life, though of course it may draw on and indirectly reflect or transcribe elements from any or all of these dimensions of the city's existence.’ In Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire, medieval France saw something of the quintessential ideal city. Attitudes to the Byzantine capital ranged from admiration and envy to a desire to imitate and compete with its many wonders. Scholars have long recognized that manifold perceptions coalesce in medieval French vernacular texts around this city. Krijnie n. Ciggaar has developed a framework of attitudes which she sees mirrored in medieval Western representations of Constantinople. The desire to imitate and assimilate elements of Byzantine culture into the West was predicated upon a prior experience of loss of the East and all that this fluid concept stood for. This desire provided the impetus upon which the political and cultural renewal of the West was founded. Yet the city also embodied an otherworldly and irreducibly different culture, celebrated as the utopian locus of a categorical and inimitable difference.

In this study I identify and analyse the strands of this debate between different attitudes to the Byzantine capital in medieval French texts. I have chosen to study ten vernacular old French and Franco-italian texts. the better known texts in my corpus include the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, Girart de Roussillon, Partonopeus de Blois, the poetry of rutebeuf, and the chronicles by Geoffroy de villehardouin and robert de Clari, both known as the Conquête de Constantinople.