The newly minted prince’s uncle, the marshal…

The newly minted prince’s uncle, the marshal Geoffrey of Villehardouin, probably starts writing his sober, if biased, Histoire de l'empire de Constantinople, in which he describes the “crusade” by the Franks and their Venetian allies against the Greek empire. (Villehardouin's eyewitness account, usually known as the Conquête de Constantinople [“Conquest of Constantinople”], is the first original prose history written in French by a serious writer. His achievement, though unfinished at his death a few years later, is remarkable because neither in style nor form had he had any models on which to base his work; his Latin predecessors were probably unknown to him at first hand.)