Oral Tradition, 1/3 (1986): 504-47 The Oral Background of Byzantine Popular Poetry

The popular poetry of Byzantium fi rst appears in the form of consistent surviving texts of some size in the middle of the twelfth century, at the courts of the emperors John Komnenos (1118-1143) and Manuel Komnenos (1143-1180).1 Little or no such poetry seems to survive from the thirteenth century, when Byzantine energies were occupied in the reconquest of Constantinople and other parts of the empire from the forces of the Fourth Crusade. The next preserved examples seem to date from early in the fourteenth century, and the popular poetic tradition then continues through to the end of Byzantium in 1453 and beyond. Insofar as evidence permits us to speak about the places in which this material was composed and written down, it seems that the western-ruled states surviving from the Crusades on Greek lands were at least as fertile ground for its production as the area ruled by Byzantium, under the last dynasty of the Palaiologoi. The total volume is not large, but it covers a number of genres. We shall discuss in the conclusion of this paper the diffi cult question of the continuity of this tradition in Greece under Turkish rule. These texts may be regarded for most purposes as the fi rst preserved material of any length in Modern Greek, a language which bears much the same relationship to ancient and medieval Greek as does Italian to ancient and medieval Latin. The linguistic pressures of Byzantium are not dissimilar from the early history of many Western European language groups: the steady development of spoken Greek is hidden from us by the conservatism of writing, which made efforts to keep up the illusion that Greek had not “declined ” from its great past-the classical Greek of the fi fth and fourth centuries B.C. and the “Koine” Greek of the New Testament and the Septuagint version of the Ol