1 Teresa Shawcross, The Chronicle of Morea: Historiography in Crusader Greece (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. xvi + 401. £65 (hardback). ISBN: 978 0 19 955700 4. After Constantinople was captured and sacked by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the provinces of the Byzantine empire were conquered and parcelled out among a number of French knights and nobles, many of whom came from the Champagne region. Most of the Peloponnese, Attica and the island of Evvia ended up in the so-called Principality of Achaea or Morea under the rule of Geoffroy I de Villehardouin (1209-1228). This principality proved to be an enduring feature of the political landscape, surviving until it was finally absorbed by the Byzantines in 1430. It has left behind a visible mark on the landscape of the Peloponnese in the castles and towers that dot the landscape. It has also left a literary legacy in the historical compilation known as the Chronicle of Morea , the subject of Teresa Shawcross’s book. Written by an anonymous author during the early fourteenth century, the Chronicle was subsequently reworked and edited by others. It now survives in four language versions, Greek, Old French, Italian and Aragonese and in eight different manuscripts, scattered over the libraries of Europe from Venice to Brussels. A section at the end of the book gives selected parallel passages in all four languages with a helpful English translation of each since the versions do differ in their emphasis and interpretations of events. Eight beautiful colour plates provide examples of the script and style of the manuscripts. Together the plates and translations give a real flavour of the Chronicle and the times in which it was written. Not surprisingly, given that this book is based on a DPhil thesis, the early chapters of the book are dense and scholarly, dealing with matters such as the relationship between the various versions and manuscripts, the sources of information on which the Chronicle was compiled and the use of tenses in the four languages. It is the later chapters which form Part Three that are likely to be of most interest to a general readership for it is here that Shawcross examines what