Villehardouin, Geoffroy de - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XII, p. 907

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

VILLEHARDOUIN, GEOFFROY de. — Hereditary Marshal of Champagne, born no later than 1152, he took part with his lord, Count Tibaldo III, in the Fourth Crusade and wrote its history; died in the East no earlier than 1212.

Having taken the cross (at the tournament of Ecry-sur-Aisne, 28 November 1199), he was sent to Venice to negotiate the terms for transporting overseas the army of 20,000 men, which subsequently embarked in October 1202 to occupy Zara and Constantinople (1203–1204) and to establish the Latin Empire of the East in Greece. He certainly played a significant role in this diversion and in the election of Bonifacio di Monfer-

(by courtesy of mana. A. P. Fruton)
VILLENEUVE, Jean-Marie-Rodrigue.
Portrait.

rato as leader of the enterprise, after the death of Tibaldo III; he obtained the title of Marshal of Romania and distinguished himself in the ill-fated expedition against the Bulgarians, which ended with the defeat at Adrianople (14 April 1203). He also took part in the war against Teodoro Lascaris and occupied the Morea, while nevertheless recognizing Venetian sovereignty there; he obtained from the emperor Enrico II di Fiandra the fief of Messinopoli in Thrace. Around 1207 he began to compose La conquête de Constantinople, from the preaching of Folco di Neuilly, who had prepared the Crusade, to the death of Bonifacio di Monferrato: “memoirs” intended to attest to the role played by V. himself in directing the enterprise, and at the same time to the purity of its intentions, carried out without ever losing sight of the service of God, contrary to what had been asserted by a fairly extensive and widespread body of polemical writing, traces of which remain in the chronicles of Gunther and Ernoul. With the firmness and effectiveness of a narrator, V. develops an entire theory of the “providential causes”; the substantial truthfulness and relative completeness of his work have been demonstrated by his recent scholar, Edmond Faral.

BIBL.: La conquête de Constantinople, edited and translated by E. Faral, Paris 1938–39. Studies: A. Pauphilet, Sur Robert de Clari (another chronicler of the Fourth Crusade), in Romania, 57 (1931), pp. 289–311; E. Faral, G. de V., la question de sa sincérité, in Rev. hist., 177 (1936), pp. 530–82; J. Longhorn, Rech. sur la vie de G. de V., Paris 1939; J. Frappier, Les discours dans la chronique de V., in Études romanes dédiées à M. Roques, there 1946, pp. 39–92. Enzo Bottasso