Ghosts of Admiral Roger: Piracy and Political Fantasy in Tirant lo Blanc

Montserrat Piera has described the fifteenth-century Catalan epic novel Tirant lo Blanc, authored by Joannot Martorell (1410-1465) and Martí Joan de Galba (d. 1490) as “a fictional narrative” that “undoes history.” In depicting the eponymous hero, Martorell drew heavily upon the quartet of historical narratives that celebrated the triumphs of medieval Catalonian expansion—the Llibre del Feyts of Jaume I (1213-1276); and Crònica authored by Bernat Desclot; Ramon Muntaner (1265-1336); and Pere III of Catalonia/IV of Aragon (1319-1387). In this paper, I will explore the role that representations of piracy—both as the sanctioned maritime aggression of a royally-appointed admiral, and as more free-wheeling maritime theft—played in constructing the fantasy of a re-written history that particularly configures the narrative of Tirant lo Blanc’s adventures in the Levant. While scholarship has studied the way in which Muntaner’s depiction of the Admiral Roger de Lauria and the almogávar captain Roger de Flor provided the inspiration for Tirant lo Blanc’s adventures, I will suggest that Martorell and Galba’s narrative also drew substantively upon the tactics of maritime belligerence as Muntaner, a former corsair, described them. These representations of maritime command allowed the authors to juxtapose the protagonist’s fictional victories with the reality, fresh in the minds of both authors, of Constantinople’s recent fall to the Ottoman Turks (1453). Presenting Tirant lo Blanc as a “Ghost of Admiral Roger," enabled the authors to posit their chivalric hero as an alternative to the real-life Genoese and Venetian commanders who had failed to save the Byzantine capital from conquest—and thus to situate Tirant lo Blanc as centerpiece in the fantasy of a Catalan past that could substitute for the shrinking opportunities of an uncertain future.