Of burning monks,unidentified churches and the last Cistercian foundation in the East: Our Lady of Camina in the principality of Achaia

The existence of the monastic church of Camina in Frankish Morea has long been noted by historians of Frankish Greece, but its history has never been thoroughly investigated and its location remains unknown. Moreover, some of the documents pertaining to this church have not been published while others have been published in faulty editions that have obscured their full significance. In the present study the surviving documents are edited and the church's history is reconstructed and its location identified. It is suggested that some of the original Benedictine inhabitants of Camina were the only Latin religious to have been burnt at the stake for heresy in medieval Greece. It is also argued that Camina was the last Cistercian abbey to be founded in the Latin East, and that it may be identified as the present monastery of Our Lady of Blachernae near Glarenza (Killini).     

Honour,Shame and the Fourth Crusade

This article evaluates how far chivalric notions of honour and shame had become associated with crusading by the early thirteenth century. It stems from a wider investigation into how crusading helped to forge standards for knightly behaviour and influenced the development of chivalric ideals. The Fourth Crusade serves as a focused case study, and this article examines the significance of its controversial course and conclusion as well as how two lay authors, Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari, used ideas about honour and shame in their narratives. It takes a close look at terminology, exploring a variety of expressions for concepts of honour and shame, and highlights the contexts in which they were used: whether to describe military encounters, the pressure on social bonds, or leadership roles. It argues that by the turn of the thirteenth century, crusading played a significant rather than extraneous role in developing ideas about chivalric conduct and proper social behaviour.     

The importance of Old French chronicles as historical sources of the Fourth Crusade and the early Latin Empire of Constantinople

Michael Angold has shown that the collapse of Greek resistance to the crusading army has not yet been fully explained by historians (Journal of Medieval History, 25, 3 (1999) 257–78). The chronicles of Villehardouin and Clari are an additional, important source, written by eyewitnesses. They provide first-hand evidence of the morale of the army, its sense of mission and the problems which it faced. Henri de Valenciennes provides a similar, first-hand account of the start of the reign of Henry of Hainaut as Latin Emperor. Close study of these texts helps to explain the victory of the westerners. They are even more important as historical sources than as examples of early French prose.