Maybe I am the only person who has read every page of Vladimir Agrigoroaei’s 741-page book. If so, that is a mistake. It is very rewarding. It gives a full, if often speculative, account of what it was like to live in mainland Greece in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – the period after the sack of Constantinople by Frankish crusaders in 1204 and its recovery in 1261 by the Byzantine emperor Michael viii coming from Nicaea. It manages to reveal just how muddled was a time when people of differing Christian doctrines and differing languages tried haphazardly to live together. But it also has some problems for the reader – it is far too long, though it is well-illustrated and supplemented with a vast bibliography.

This exceptional period in Greece when Byzantine Greeks and Crusader Latins attempted to co-exist has recently become a subject for more detailed coverage and assessment. A sound and much more traditional historical account is offered in the works of Nickiphoros I. Tsougarakis, The Latin religious orders in medieval Greece (2012; based on his 2008 Leeds PhD dissertation) and Nickiphoros I. Tsougarakis and Peter Lock (eds), A companion to Latin Greece (2015). A lively but more biased pro-Greek account is to be found in Anthony Kaldellis, The new Roman Empire: a history of Byzantium (2024), especially chapter xxxi, ‘A new France: colonial occupation’. There is also a developing dedicated website to this period of history at <http://frankika@efa.gr>. It is frankly a new period of interest to researchers, but also a challenging one for readers – what exactly is one trying to learn from this moment in European history, with its religious and artistic peculiarities?

This volume is divided into seven sections, which are eccentrically, but perhaps correctly, denoted ‘tales’. Each one covers both literary and visual materials and consists of case studies, and each is arranged in chronological order. They cover religion and art from the point of view of individuals and their experiences. The first tale sets out the rationale of the book and the personal processes of the research strategy. It reveals that the author started his exploration into this world with his PhD thesis on the translation into French from the Greek of the text of Barlaam and Josaphat which is to be found in the margins of a thirteenth-century manuscript in the Athonite monastery of Iviron, no. 463. This opened up for him the world of Frankokratia. One immediate interest of this book therefore is that it explores the presence primarily of the French in Greece, and it is not concerned with the situation of how Venetians interacted with Greeks on the island of Crete and elsewhere. Its materials are Greek texts, some in demotic, French texts and also the many churches with wallpaintings that the author visited in his frequent travels from his own base at Poitiers. His insights are with mistranslations and also with the visual arts, where his methodology makes a distinction between form and meaning as a way of understanding French perceptions of Byzantine paintings. A key example of his visual approach is his treatment of the decoration of St Sophia at Trebizond (p. 235), where he disputes the interpretation of ‘Byzantinologists’ – in this case Agrigoroaei argues that the sculptural friezes on the façade of the church with scenes from the book of Genesis are not oddly chosen images ‘with a variety of meanings (or lack of them)’ as Eastmond puts it, but should be seen as consistent with Western thinking and Western performance art of the time. The frieze is therefore derived from current Western ideas and adapted to a Byzantine environment. Agrigoroaei argues similarly when explaining the meanings of several wallpaintings in churches in the Peloponnese which have at first sight Byzantine forms.

The second tale illustrates the career of the intellectual Byzantine bishop of Athens, Michael Choniates, after his exile to the nearby island of Kea and replacement by a Latin bishop. His letters document his plight, his complaints and also his personal reading of Classical texts in the early years of the thirteenth century. This section is a very eloquent portrayal of the nature of the consequences for an individual of the transition into Frankish Greece. For Choniates and other clerics, there was intense hatred of the Latins and the pope and endless disputes and misunderstandings about the differences of faith between the Churches. Agrigoroaei sets out the linguistic and theological problems in detail, including discussion of the filioque issue and the difficulties of understanding Greek and Latin versions of the creed. He notes that it was monks rather than the bishop who were obsessed with the theological issues.

The third tale looks at Western scholars who learned Greek and came to Greece, notably the Dominican William of Morbeka in the second half of the thirteenth century. One part looks at French manuscripts and possible Greek sources, and another important part looks at a set of sculpted spandrel panels now in the Byzantine Museum in Athens. It is well argued that they actually came from a ciborium in the converted Parthenon cathedral. The fourth tale focuses on a woman, Anna Comnena Doucaina, daughter of the despot of Epirus, who in 1258 at Patras became the third wife of the prince of Achaea and became Agnes of Villehardouin. Agrigoroaei speculates on how the marriage feasting might appear to the young Anna, listening to minstrels and their songs, translated for her into Greek. She was in a totally different spiritual world from that of her Orthodox childhood. She lived until her death in 1286 (her tombstone survives) in a mixed world of Greek and French languages and attitudes and would see new wallpaintings with French meanings and Byzantine forms.

The fifth tale looks at French Franciscans in the fourteenth century, and their relations with Orthodox monks. The background text here is the French Chronicles of the Morea and all its linguistic problems. The sixth tale centres around the Greek princess who married Manuel Cantacuzenos, despot of Morea, in 1355 and moved to Mystras. She demonstrates all the problems of being Orthodox Greek in the Peloponnese and elsewhere. The seventh tale recalls the experiences of a late fourteenth-century western pilgrim Nicholas – the text was published in M. Piccirillo (ed.), Io Notaio Nicola de Martoni: il Pellegrinaggio ai luoghi santi da Carolina a Gerusalemme, 1394 –1395 (Gorle 2003). Nicholas inadvertently documents the muddled accounts then given of the sites he visited, including the Parthenon at Athens. But the moral here is that the misinformation given by local guides in the fourteenth century is no worse than that given by some guides today. However much distorted was the world as presented to individuals in the period of Latin Greece and minutely exposed in this book, one major question remains: have social media made our ‘truths’ about the world we live in any more accurate today than those of the Middle Ages?