Prise d'Orange

Prise is part of a cycle of chansons about William of Gellone, referred to collectively as the Geste de Guillaume d'Orange,[1] which contains 24 poems about Guillaume and his relations.[2] The Geste is a "complete epic biography" of Guillaume,[3] from youth to old age.[4]

The historical Guillaume held military and civil offices under Charlemagne and became a monk in later life.[3] The Guillaume of the Geste, an epic hero,[5] defends Christendom against Muslim leaders of al-Andalus and is guided by divine inspiration.[3]

Prise is "ostensibly" set in the reign of Louis the Pious.[6] The narrative is not based on historical events: although Orange was occupied by the Moors of al-Andalus in the early 8th century, the historical Guillaume never reconquered the city from them.[7] Tibaut is entirely fictional; the Muslim leaders of Orange during Guillaume's life were Al-Hakam I, Abd al-Wahid ibn Mughith, Abdallah ibn Abd al-Malik, Abu Tahir, Futays ibn Sulayman, Bahlul, and Zaydun.[8]

Guillebert de Laon, an escaped prisoner from Orange, comes to Guillaume in Nîmes and describes the beauties of the Saracen-held city and its formidable defences (20,000 men), led by King Arragon, son of Tibaut. Guillebert also tells of Orable, queen of Orange and Tibaut's wife.[9] She is stunningly beautiful.[10]

Guillaume is growing restless at Nîmes: there are no minstrels or women to distract him; no rivals to fight.[11] So he decides to see Orange for himself, resolving to take "la dame et la cité" (the woman and the city).[12] He and a few associates disguise themselves as Turks and travel along the Rhône and Sorgue until they reach Orange, a walled city.[12] They successfully infiltrate it under the pretence that they have news of King Arragon from Africa.[10]

Guillaume (in Turkish disguise) meets Orable and charms her with stories of the great Guillaume of Nîmes. Guillaume's ruse is eventually discovered. He 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,[13] supplies him with her husband's armour.[10]

As it turns out, the fighting has not yet ended. The palace has a secret entrance, through which Orange's Saracen defenders enter. They take back the palace and throw Guillaume, Guielin, and Guillebert (his associates) into prison. Orable frees them in exchange for Guillaume's hand in marriage. Guillaume accepts. Meanwhile, Guillebert is sent back to Nîmes for reinforcements.[14]

Guillaume's escape is short lived. King Arragon finds out what has transpired. He has Guillaume, Orable, and Guielin imprisoned yet again. And they escape again. This time, the escape is permanent. Nîmes's forces, led by Bertran, arrive and take the city.[15] Guillaume and Orable marry. She is baptized Guibourc. They live (mostly) happily ever after, remaining in Orange while fighting off the Saracens on a regular basis.[16][17]

Prise comprises 1,888 decasyllable verses in assonanced laisses.[1][17] Scholar Joan M. Ferrante groups it with Charroi de Nîmes, Chanson de Guillaume, and Aliscans as accounts early in the narrative chronology of Guillaume's life that are dominated by his campaigns against Saracens.[18] Prise comes after Charroi de Nîmes in the narrative time of the Geste.[10]

The verse of Prise is repetitive and formulaic.[19] It contains over 3,700 hemistichs, about 1,500 of which are repeated.[20] One motif used in Prise is the planctus, which occurs when Bertran (back in Nîmes) thinks that Guielin (his brother) and Guillaume (his uncle) have been killed in Orange. A very similar planctus occurs in The Song of Roland.[21]

The surviving text of Prise dates from the mid-12th century, circa 1160–1165.[22] Nine manuscripts survive that contain Prise d'Orange and other poems in the part of the Geste de Guillaume d'Orange dealing with Guillaume himself and his exploits.[23][24] Five of the nine are housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.[25] The manuscripts were likely compiled by more than one poet;[26] Prise itself is anonymous.[27]

The version of Prise that survives is based on a lost version of the same story.[17][28] The earlier Prise was probably composed at the beginning of the 12th century, before the surviving versions of Li coronemenz Looïs and Charroi de Nîmes,[16] and was more focused on war than on romance and adventure.[29] Scholars have inferred the existence of a proto-Prise from discussion in Vita sancti Wilhelmi, an account of Guillaume written in the 1120s, and other texts including the Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois (1213), Chanson de Guillaume, Siège de Barbastre, and Nerbonesi, a work by Andrea da Barberino.[30][17]

One of the elements in the older, lost Prise is a siege of Orange by Tibaut, Arragon's father and (the now) Guibourc's husband.[17] In this section of the narrative, called the Siège d'Orange,[31] Tibaut returns to recapture the city and wife that he lost to Guillaume in the portions of the narrative that survive intact.[32] As Madeleine Tyssens points out, it would be odd if the "prideful" Tibaut did not try to avenge Guillaume's conquest.[32] The Siège was thought to be completely lost until 2021, when the scholar Tamara Atkin discovered a 47-line fragment of the missing section in the binding of a 1528 book in the Bodleian Library.[33]

Compared to earlier chansons de geste, the tone of Prise is frequently playful, comic, and parodic.[1] Claude Régnier, who reconstructed a version of Prise from manuscript sources, called it a "masterpiece of humour", noting its "discreetly parodic" use of tropes of the epic genre.[34] Prise is more concerned with romance than with recounting historical detail.[35] The poem is a blend of a romance of courtly love and an epic tale of military conquest;[6] it includes some tropes of the courtly love genre, but does not conform completely to the type.[1][16]

Scholars have not generally been fond of Prise.[13] Raymond Weeks calls it "stupid and impossible".[15] John Fox argues that Prise is worse than The Song of Roland because the latter's characters have strong and clear motivations, whereas Prise looks more like a mere "adventure story".[13] Joseph J. Duggan, dismissing Régnier's suggestion, says Prise's "unimaginative" use of epic tropes "approaches self-parody".[36]

Sharon Kinoshita argues that the connection between military conquest and the love plot is not accidental. Rather, describing Prise as a tale of "conquest-by-seduction", she suggests that the poem treats love and war as two sides of the same coin.[37] Further, Kinoshita notes, Orable—the Saracen queen—serves as an emblem of the 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".[5]

• Bédier, Joseph (1908). Les légendes épiques : recherches sur la formation des chansons de geste (in French). Paris: Honoré Champion. OCLC 1141306693.
• Duggan, Joseph J. (1973). The Song of Roland: Formulaic Style and Poetic Craft. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02201-7. OCLC 629242.
• Ferrante, Joan M. (1974). Guillaume d'Orange: Four Twelfth-Century Epics. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-231-03809-7. OCLC 858797.
• Fox, John (1974). A Literary History of France: The Middle Ages. Ernest Benn Limited. ISBN 0-06-492218-9. OCLC 2236433.
• Gautier, Léon (1868). Les épopées françaises : étude sur les origines et l'histoire de la littérature nationale (in French). 3. Paris: Victor Palmé. OCLC 1141328537.
• Hasenohr, Geneviève; Zink, Michel, eds. (1992). Dictionnaire des lettres françaises (in French). 1. Fayard. ISBN 2-253-05662-6. OCLC 489672003.
• Kinoshita, Sharon (2006). "The Politics of Courtly Love: La Prise d'Orange and the Conversion of the Saracen Queen". Medieval Boundaries. University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 46–74. doi:10.9783/9780812202489.46. ISBN 978-0-8122-3919-5.
• Moreno, Paola (2001). "Une allusion au Siège d'Orange perdu dans Foucon de Candie". In Luongo, Salvatore (ed.). Épopée romane au Moyen Âge et aux temps modernes: Actes du XIVe Congrès International de la Société Rencesvals pour l'Étude des Épopées Romanes (in French). 1. Fridericiana Editrice Universitaria. pp. 481–487. ISBN 88-8338-018-5. OCLC 49495243.
• Régnier, Claude, ed. (1977). La Prise d'Orange : chanson de geste de la fin du XIIe siècle (in French) (5th ed.). Klincksieck. ISBN 2-252-01950-6. OCLC 4047830.
• Tyssens, Madeleine (1967). "Le Siège d'Orange perdu". Boletín de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona. Reial Acadèmia de Bones Lletres de Barcelona. 31: 321–329. ISSN 0210-7481.
• Weeks, Raymond (1901). "The Primitive Prise d'Orange". PMLA. 16 (3): 361–374. doi:10.2307/456480. JSTOR 456480.