Reconstructing Byzantine Constantinople: Intercession and illumination at the court of Philippe le Bon

This article discusses three texts produced for Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, in the years following the fall of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. These texts deal with the West's painful experience of the postcolonial frontier between itself and Constantinople in the wake of this event. I look at the theme of intercession in two verse laments, Guillaume Dufay's 'Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae' (1454), and jean Molinet's 'Complainte de Grece' (1464). 1 compare the use of this theme with the role of illumination in a manuscript produced for the Duke in around 1458 (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, fonds francais, 9087), and containing Bertrandon de la Broquiere's Voyage d'Outremer, a prose account of a journey to the Orient. The theme of the Church (Ecclesia) as intercessor in the laments, and the representation of manuscript patronage and of the cities of Jerusalem and Constantinople in the miniatures of the Broquiere compilation, serve to bring the fallen Byzantium to the West in textual form. This reconstruction of Byzantine Constantinople may be viewed in theological terms, or it may point to the recovery of the city through the crusade projects of Philippe le Bon.