Prise d'Orange

Black-and-white image of a manuscript

Folio 41 of manuscript français 774, Bibliothèque nationale de France, containing the opening lines of Prise d'Orange

Prise d'Orange (literally "Taking of Orange";Template:Efn also translated "The Capture of Orange"Template:Sfn and "The Conquest of Orange"Template:Sfn) is a mid-12th century chanson de geste written in Old French. Its fictional story follows the hero Guillaume as he captures the walled city of Orange from Saracens and marries Orable, its queen. Other characters include Arragon, the king of Orange, and Tibaut, Orable's erstwhile husband and Arragon's father. The anonymously written poem, part of a larger cycle about Guillaume called La Geste de Garin de Monglane, consists of 1,888 decasyllable verses in laisses. It combines motifs of courtly love with an epic story of military conquest. The narrative is humorous and parodies the tropes of epic poetry.

The surviving text of Prise was probably based on an earlier version, composed at the beginning of the 12th century, which emphasized war over love and contained a section called Siège d'Orange about Tibaut's military campaign to recapture Orange from Guillaume. Nine manuscript versions of Prise survive. Its plot is attested in other sources including a 15th-century prose compilation of stories about Guillaume. The first modern edition was published in 1854; several reconstructions followed in the 20th century. A portion of Siège d'Orange was discovered in 2021.

Background

The chansons de geste are a group of around 120 poems composed in Old French in the 12th and 13th centuries about nobles affiliated with the Carolingian dynasty.Template:Sfn Chanson indicates that the poems were usually sung.Template:Sfn Geste is from gesta, a Latin word for "deed".Template:Sfn

Prise is part of a cycle of 24 chansons about a fictional hero named William of Orange (Guillaume) and his relations.Template:Sfn The 24 poems are a "complete epic biography" of Guillaume,Template:Sfn from youth to old age.Template:Sfn Sometimes simply termed the "cycle of Guillaume",Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn this group of chansons is also called La Geste de Garin de Monglane, after a designation adopted by Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in the prologue to Girart de Vienne.Template:Sfn Garin de Monglane is Guillaume's great-grandfather and the founder of the epic family of which Guillaume is the central character.Template:Sfn

Charles A. Knudson and T. V. F. Brogan call this cycle the "most cohesive" group of chansons.Template:Sfn Six poems are about Guillaume personally;Template:Sfn Lynette R. Muir places Prise fourth in that group.Template:Sfn Joan M. Ferrante groups Prise with Charroi de Nîmes, Chanson de Guillaume, and Aliscans as accounts early in Guillaume's life, dominated by his campaigns against Saracens.Template:Sfn Prise comes after Charroi in the narrative time of the cycleTemplate:Sfn and invokes Charroi in its opening lines.Template:Sfn

In the cycle, Guillaume, an epic hero guided by divine inspiration, defends Christendom against Muslim leaders of al-Andalus.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn His chief characteristics include good humour, devotion to Louis the Pious, and strength.Template:Sfn Prise and other poems in the cycle dramatize feudal concepts such as the fealty of a vassal to his lord, highlight military campaigns,Template:Sfn and often show "pagan women" who love "Christian men".Template:Sfn

Guillaume's main historical counterpart is probably William of Gellone, who was the duke of Toulouse from 790, became a monk at Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert Abbey (sometimes simply called Gellone) in 806, and died around 812.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The name "Guillaume" was extremely common in the Middle Ages; Joseph Bédier identified sixteen other candidates for the historical Guillaume.Template:Sfn

Prise is "ostensibly" set in the reign of Louis the Pious.Template:Sfn The narrative is not based on history: although Orange was occupied by the Moors of al-Andalus in the early 8th century, William of Gellone never conquered Orange.Template:Sfn Tibaut is fictional.Template:Sfn Léon Gautier, Alfred Jeanroy, and Raymond Weeks, who calls it "stupid and impossible",Template:Sfn argue that Prise is entirely unrealistic.Template:Sfn Jeanroy, in his critique, notes that major narrative elements are implausibly repeated;Template:Sfn Weeks likewise points out "not a small number of inconsistencies and repetitions", concluding that "so full is this poem of wearisome commonplaces, so deficient in epic power, that no one has yet been found to claim for it the slightest merit."Template:Sfn

Plot

Painting of a knight looking at a skull and Bible

San Guillermo de Aquitania (1671), portrait of William of Gellone by Antonio de Pereda

Guillebert de Laon, an escaped prisoner from the walled city of Orange,Template:Sfn visits Guillaume in Nîmes. He describes the beauties of the Saracen-held city, defended by 20,000 men and ruled by King Arragon, son of Tibaut. Guillebert also tells of Orable, queen of Orange and Tibaut's stunningly beautiful wife.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Guillaume is growing restless at Nîmes: there are no minstrels or women to distract him, no rivals to fight.Template:Sfn So he decides to see Orange for himself, resolving to take "la dame et la cité" (the woman and the city).Template:Sfn His nephew Bertran declines to come with him, but Guielin, another nephew, comes along.Template:Sfn Guillaume, Guielin, and Guillebert disguise themselves as Turks and travel along the Rhône and Sorgue until they reach Orange.Template:Sfn Pretending to bring news of Tibaut from Africa, they infiltrate the city and make their way to Gloriette, the tower where Orable lives.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Still in Turkish disguise, Guillaume meets Orable and charms her with stories of the great Guillaume of Nîmes. His ruse is eventually discovered. Guillaume and his henchmen kill the queen's guards and take the palace for themselves. Orable is won over to Guillaume's side and, out of pity, gives him her husband's armour.Template:Sfn

The fighting has not yet ended. Orange's Saracen defenders enter the palace through a secret entrance. They retake the palace and imprison Guillaume, Guillebert, and Guielin. Orable frees them in exchange for Guillaume's hand in marriage, which he accepts. Meanwhile, Guillebert is sent back to Nîmes to muster reinforcements.Template:Sfn

When King Arragon returns, he has Guillaume, Orable, and Guielin imprisoned again. They again escape. Nîmes's forces, led by Bertran—who has now reconsidered his participation in the expeditionTemplate:Sfn—arrive and take the city.Template:Sfn Guillaume and Orable marry. She is baptized Guibourc. They live (mostly) happily ever after, remaining in Orange while fighting off the Saracens.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Structure

Prise comprises 1,888 decasyllable verses in laisses.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Decasyllable metre is standard across the chansons de geste, including in those chronicling Guillaume's adventures,Template:Sfn and in Old French epic generally.Template:Sfn The laisse is a group of lines, of varying length, into which chansons are divided.Template:Sfn A laisse is defined by the vowel sound that ends each of its lines: all lines in a laisse have assonance with one another, such that the same vowel sound is repeated at the end of each line.Template:Sfn

The verse of Prise is repetitive and formulaic.Template:Sfn A basic element of Old French epic poetry is the hemistich, or half-line.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Prise has approximately 3,700 hemistichs in total, 39 percent of which are repeated.Template:Sfn Barbara D. Schurfranz argues that repetition, more than its division into laisses, gives Prise structural integrity.Template:Sfn In her view, repetition emphasizes the connections between distinct narrative elements, draws the reader's attention to important plot points, and reinforces Prise's comic episodes in particular.Template:Sfn

Textual history

The text of Prise dates from the mid-12th century, circa 1160–1165.Template:Sfn Nine manuscripts survive that contain Prise and other poems in the cycle dealing with Guillaume and his exploits.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Five of the nine are housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.Template:Sfn The manuscripts were likely compiled by more than one poet;Template:Sfn Prise itself is anonymous.Template:Sfn

The surviving version of Prise is based on a lost version of the same story.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The earlier version was probably composed at the beginning of the 12th century, before the surviving versions of Li coronemenz Looïs (Couronnement de Louis) and Charroi de Nîmes,Template:Sfn and was more focused on war than on romance and adventure.Template:Sfn Scholars have inferred the existence of a proto-Prise from discussion in Vita sancti Wilhelmi, a text written at Gellone which also describes a campaign against Orange;Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn and other texts including Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois (1213), Chanson de Guillaume, Template:Ill, and I nerbonesi, a work by Andrea da Barberino.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

The older, lost Prise also describes a siege of Orange by Tibaut, Arragon's father and (the now) Guibourc's husband.Template:Sfn In this episode, called Siège d'Orange,Template:Sfn Tibaut returns to recapture the city and wife that he lost to Guillaume in the portions of the narrative that survive.Template:Sfn As Template:Ill points out, it would be odd if the "prideful" Tibaut did not try to avenge Guillaume's conquest.Template:Sfn Siège was thought to be completely lost until 2021, when Tamara Atkin discovered a 47-line fragment of it, incorporated into the binding of a 1528 book, in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.Template:Sfn

Around 1450, Couronnement, Charroi, and Prise were adapted in a prose text called Roman de Guillaume d'Orange,Template:Sfn which survives in two manuscripts.Template:Sfn Roman and Prise differ in several respects: in Prise, Guillaume is shown meeting Orable for the first time, for instance, whereas in Roman they know each other already. Orable's conversion to Christianity is also treated differently in the two versions.Template:Sfn

Willem Jozef Andreas Jonckbloet edited Guillaume d'Orange, Chansons de geste des XIe et XIIe siècles, a collection of chansons including Prise first published in 1854.Template:Sfn Blanche Katz edited a version published in 1947,Template:Sfn using the same manuscripts as Jonckbloet.Template:Sfn Her edition reproduces several folios of the manuscript in facsimile.Template:Sfn Template:Ill edited Les Rédactions en vers de la Prise d'Orange, first published in 1966.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Régnier's Rédactions contains three separate reconstructions of Prise based on three families of manuscripts.Template:Sfn At least four editions of Rédactions were published.Template:Sfn An edition by Claude Lachet, based on a single manuscript, was published in 2010.Template:Sfn

Claude Lachet and Jean-Pierre Tusseau's translation of Régnier's manuscript reconstruction into modern French was published in 1972, with a second edition in 1974.Template:Sfn Both editions were based on Régnier's Old French reconstruction.Template:Sfn Joan M. Ferrante's English translations of Prise, Couronnement, Aliscans, and Template:Ill, the first English versions of each, were first published in 1974.Template:Sfn Lynette R. Muir's English Prise, published in a volume edited by Glanville Price and based on the Old French text in Régnier's Rédactions, followed in 1975.Template:Sfn A set of English translations of Prise and several other chansons by Michael A. H. Newth was published in 2014.Template:Sfn

Interpretation

Prise blends a chivalric romance of courtly love with an epic tale of military conquest.Template:Sfn Language traditionally used for epic adventures is repurposed to describe Guillaume's romantic exploits.Template:Sfn Sharon Kinoshita argues that the juxtaposition of military conquest and the love plot is not accidental. Rather, describing Prise as a tale of "conquest-by-seduction", she argues that it treats love and war as two sides of the same coin.Template:Sfn Lucas Wood suggests that the combination of epic and romance tends to "trivialize" epic themes such as feudalism and military might.Template:Sfn According to Minnette Grunmann-Gaudet, Prise's narrative is shaped by Guillaume's struggle between the opposing roles of lover and conquering hero.Template:Sfn

Orable (Guibourc) is cast as a faithful "helpmeet-heroine" who supports Guillaume on the battlefield and in the bedroom.Template:Sfn She is an example of the Saracen princess, a trope in medieval literature in which a woman coded as "non-Western" marries a "Christian knight".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The trope appears in at least 15 chansons de gesteTemplate:Sfn and Orable herself appears in several chansons other than Prise.Template:Sfn Kinoshita suggests that Orable represents a foreign world to be conquered and converted by Christendom: "to seduce Orable and to convert her to Christianity is to assimilate Orange to Frankish Christendom, under the tutelage of the intrepid Count Guillaume."Template:Sfn However, Charles A. Knudson notes that it is the Saracen princess, not the knight of Christendom, who generally professes her love first—and helps the knight escape from Saracen clutches.Template:Sfn In other respects, Orable is not consistent with the trope: she is older than most Saracen princesses and, unlike in other chansons, her meeting with the hero, Guillaume, is not by chance.Template:Sfn

By contrast with other chansons about his exploits, the Guillaume of Prise is generally motivated by love as opposed to fealty or religious fervour.Template:Sfn He is weak-willed and mercurial, depending on encouragement from his more purpose-driven companions.Template:Sfn Summarizing the views of several critics, Grunmann-Gaudet describes Guillaume as "a ridiculous caricature of the epic hero".Template:Sfn Guillaume's weak will is contrasted with Orable's firmness of mind: she proposes marriage to him and upbraids him for his inconstancy.Template:Sfn

Compared to earlier chansons de geste, the tone of Prise is playful, comic, and parodic.Template:Sfn According to William W. Kibler, Joseph Bédier's 1908 study Les Légendes épiques was the first to treat Prise as a comic text.Template:Sfn Logan Whalen argues that Prise is not the only funny chanson: Couronnement and Charroi, writes Whalen, also have a comic style.Template:Sfn Claude Régnier calls Prise a "masterpiece of humour", noting its "discreetly parodic" use of tropes of the epic genre.Template:Sfn Joseph J. Duggan, dismissing Régnier's suggestion, says PriseTemplate:'s "unimaginative" use of epic tropes "approaches self-parody".Template:Sfn