The Marriage Negotiations
(NLC, 50-72; CA, II, 626-38)
Heather Urbanski

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Once the newly Christian merchants return home and spread the good word of their new faith, the Saracen sultan decides to propose marriage to Constance.  This section of the story outlines the negotiations that occur between the sultan and our heroine’s father, Tiberius, regarding the marriage.  In Trevet’s version, which runs approximately 280 words and is summarized below, considerable value is exchanged for this young maid’s hand:

Once Constance’s father has consented to the marriage, on condition that the sultan convert to Christianity, the Saracen leader sends his trusted emir and other powerful representatives to Rome, along with twelve hostages (sons of the greatest families of his land) as surety for Constance’s safety. In addition, the emir carries with him letters declaring peace between the Christians and the Saracens, granting free trade throughout the holy land, surrendering control over Jerusalem to the Christians, and agreeing that all idols of the heathen religion could be destroyed by Christian bishops in their process of converting the people of the region.  The sultan also woos the pope, clergy, and nobles of Tiberius’s court with treasures and gifts in the hopes of completing the marriage contract for Constance.  Once all the arrangements are made between the Romans and the sultan, Constance is sent from her home to the heathen land and the people of the city mourn and lament her departure.  Accompanying the new bride on her voyage are cardinals, bishops, clergy, knights, and even a Roman senator.  Some of the many Christians are going on pilgrimage to the holy sites while others will take control of Jerusalem.

Gower makes significant alterations to the narration of these negotiations.  His alterations consist primarily of deletions in a section that now contains just 84 words:

The sultan agrees to convert to Christianity as a condition of his marriage to Constance.  Once this agreement is recorded, the negotiations are complete and the sultan sends twelve Saracen princes to Rome as hostages.  This gesture pleases Tiberie, so he and the pope send Constance to Barbarie accompanied by two cardinals and many lords to act as witnesses that the sultan keeps his word and actually converts to Christianity.

While both texts address the negotiations surrounding Constance’s marriage to the sultan, Gower significantly condenses the section, leaving only one-third of the text.  The elements Gower deletes from Trevet’s material are particularly telling in their overall effect of reducing the worth of Constance to her God from the Christian point of view, to her father (and his court) from an economic standpoint, and to her people from a socio-political perspective.

Perhaps the most obvious omission in Gower’s version of Constance’s story is the near-complete erasure of Constance’s value from a Christian perspective, thus denying her the chance to bring glory to her God through her faith.  In Trevet, this lone, pious, thirteen year-old girl accomplished what centuries of later war and violence in the form of the Crusades would not: the recovery of Jerusalem for the Christian God.  Constance achieved this victory, incidentally, merely by preaching to some heathen merchants whom she happened to encounter in Rome, forging a “bone et entiere pees entre touz Cristiens et touz Sarrasins” [“good and entire peace between all Christians and Saracens”] (NLC, 55) out of her piety and love for Christ, not through violent conquest nor at the expense of thousands of lives.  As an added bonus, the sultan agreed to allow the Christian bishops to “enseigner les gentz de sa terre la droite foi . . . et de eglises faire et les temples de maunetz destrure” [“instruct the people of his land in the true faith . . . to build churches, and to destroy the temples of idols”] (NLC, 61-62).  Thus, not only did the Christians gain physical and political control over the holy city because of a young girl’s piety, but they also destroyed the heathen religion in that part of the world, achieving a greater dominance of the “true faith” and the greater glory of God.  While Constance’s story took place in the sixth century, approximately 500 years before Pope Urban II declared the First Crusade in 1095, the objective of the three centuries of war that followed are too similar to the Christian gains from Constance’s marriage to be a coincidence.  For Trevet, writing in the early fourteenth century, and his readers, the Crusades would have been recent religious-political history, and a belief in the righteousness of the Christian reclamation of the Holy Land was still prominent enough to play a significant role in his tale of Constance.

None of this historical and religious context to the negotiations, however, is present in Gower’s version.  The only condition of the marriage contract from the source material that remains in the Confessio Amantis is the sultan’s conversion to Christianity; all the other rewards the church reaps from allowing Constance to be married to the sultan are dropped.  Those deleted gains are arguably far greater for the religion as a whole than the conversion of a single heathen leader, thus reflecting the distinctly more secular purpose to Gower’s tale.  Rather than paint Constance as a holy warrior or instrument of God’s will who advances the cause of her faith through her marriage, as Trevet did, Gower actually seems fairly uninterested in the negotiations related to that marriage.  His radically condensed treatment presents the negotiations as if they are a necessary but unexciting plot element to be dealt with before Constance can be put in a situation where she could demonstrate the intended lesson against Envy, a purpose which I will discuss in more detail below.

A smaller deletion, in terms of the volume of text, relates to Constance’s value from an economic perspective.  Trevet’s discussion of the marriage negotiations included, almost thrown in among the religious conditions, a commitment promising the Christians free travel and trade throughout all the Saracen lands.  Later in the section, Trevet’s sultan also sent to Tiberius, the pope, and every Roman senator “riches dons et tresours” [“rich gifts and treasures”] (NLC, 64-65).  Thus, all the powerful members of the empire, both secular and religious, benefited economically, directly and indirectly, from the sultan’s desire to marry Constance.  Gower, however, makes no mention of the sultan’s “gifts” of treasure to anyone who might be a party to the negotiations, nor of any trade alliance promised to Rome as part of the marriage contract.  This omission of treasure is the first of what appears to be a pattern in Gower’s revisions, which seem to reflect a general lack of interest in Constance’s money.  As I mentioned previously, the only element of the marriage contract that Gower includes is the sultan’s conversion.  No narration of the negotiation process occurs at all in the Confessio Amantis, which further de-emphasizes both the value exchanged via the contract and the negotiations themselves in Gower’s version.

The third element of Constance’s value that differs significantly between Trevet’s tale and Gower’s adaptation is tied to her society, both from an emotional perspective and from a political one.  Trevet described Constance’s departure as being met with “a grant deol et lermes et crie et noyse et plente de tote la cité de Rome” [“great grief, tears, outcry, noise and lament from the whole city of Rome”] (NLC, 67-68).  This great sorrow is not present at all in Gower, which indicates that his Constance is not important enough to her people for them to cry and lament at being forced to part with her.  In fact, Trevet made it clear that Constance was “maunderent” [“ordered”] (NLC, 66) to leave her home and community in order to complete the marriage contract.  Gower’s version, however, omits all such language, and simply declares that Tiberie and the pope decide who “scholden go” (CA, II, 637) with Constance “To se the Souldan be converted” (CA, II, 638).  On a more overtly political level, in Trevet’s version, the pope, clergy, and senators were all involved, along with Tiberius, in the negotiations for Constance’s marriage, directly benefiting from the rich gifts the sultan sent along (perhaps as bribes), as described above.  In this way, Trevet demonstrated the material value Constance brought to her community’s leaders.  In Gower, however, the only other official consulted by her father is the pope, and no one, not even Tiberie, reaps any monetary gains from these negotiations.

Such glaringly obvious deletions that significantly devalue Constance lead us to wonder why Gower made the changes he did to his source material.  One explanation is that Trevet’s version seemed to express a deeper distrust of the sultan on the part of Constance’s father and the other Roman officials, or, at the very least, a greater resistance to the marriage that needed to be overcome through monetary, religious, and political appeals.  In Gower, on the other hand, the only hint of mistrust between the two parties to the marriage contract—besides the unexplained twelve hostages he carries over from Trevet (see below)—seems to lie in Tiberie’s need for assurance that the sultan will actually convert to Christianity.  The diverging levels of mistrust seem to be connected to the purpose of each author in relating the tale of Constance.  In the secular hagiography Trevet was crafting, such distrust between the heathen and the Christian leaders would be of critical importance as it would provide the historical context of suspicion between the heathens and the Christians, thus underscoring the miracles that resulted from Constance’s piety overcoming issues of deep religious-political strife: the reclamation of the holy land, the defeat of the heathens, etc.  In addition, Trevet’s Of the Noble Lady Constance presents itself as a historical account based on the chronicles of old.  As such, it would need to acknowledge the long history of tensions between the Saracens and the Christians.  The excessive value that the sultan was willing to exchange for Constance allowed Trevet to do just that.  Gower, on the other hand, is not claiming to present history or hagiography and thus such “realism” is not required.  As part of the larger Confessio Amantis, with a decidedly non-Christian purpose, Gower’s version of the story of Constance can eschew such historical detail as Trevet employed in favor of focusing on those specific elements of the story that fit within the revised goals.

Interestingly, the one element of the negotiations besides the sultan’s conversion that both Gower and Trevet mention is the conveyance of twelve Saracen hostages as a guarantee for Constance’s safety.  While Trevet was more direct in declaring the hostages to be a form of surety, thus emphasizing the mistrust between the parties, neither version returns to this plot element after the massacre of the Christians by the sultaness, nor explains in any more detail what possible role the twelve may have had in the negotiations.  The lack of closure regarding this element could be explained as authorial error if it did not appear in both Trevet’s and Gower’s versions.  The question of why these hostages are briefly mentioned and then completely forgotten is confounding, and the text does not provide many clues to help modern readers come to an acceptable conclusion.  Perhaps there is a socio-cultural custom that contemporary readers would have immediately understood but that is missing from our modern awareness—a custom that would compel, for example, the presence of such hostages any time a dangerous trip of over hundreds of miles was required to complete a marriage contract.  Unless historical research can uncover such a custom or some other reasonable explanation, the mystery of the disappearing hostages will likely remain unsolved.

Returning to the issue at hand brings me to another reason for the revisions that devalue Constance in the Confessio Amantis that is related to the first one: Gower’s stated purpose is to craft a cautionary tale warning about the dangers of Envy, specifically those resulting from Detraction, while Trevet’s was clearly to present Constance as a secular saint.  This explanation certainly accounts for Gower’s deletion of the significant religious and political benefits the Christian world attained through Constance’s marriage in Trevet’s version.  Such a theological focus would detract from Gower’s tale intended to convince a questionably Christian suppliant to Venus of the folly of Envy.  It would also be unseemly to acknowledge the marriage market and women’s value in that market during a moral lesson aimed at a man who is confessing his sins of love.  Marriage negotiations, after all, have little to do with matters of love, particularly when it comes to those conducted over such a long distance as in the tale of Constance in which the bride and groom have never even met.  To spend any more textual time than absolutely necessary on this economic and political aspect of the story would likely introduce too much real-world materialism into Gower’s moral tale.  In this way, we can read both the deletion of the treasure emphasized in the source material and the extreme condensation of the contractual elements of love as strategic choices in Gower’s project to present a “purer” vision of love, one without the vulgar economic implications and considerations that so often accompanied love in the reality of the medieval world.

A third, much more speculative, explanation for the revisions to the marriage negotiations is that Gower simply does not want to present a woman as particularly valuable.  While there is little direct evidence in the text to support this conclusion, it seems difficult not to see the effect such deletions have on the presentation of Constance from a gendered perspective as Gower transforms her from the woman of incredible worth in Trevet’s formulation to one of questionable value in the Confessio Amantis. Could these deletions simply be a reflection of Gower’s either personal or cultural devaluation of women in general?  Answering this question is not possible from an analysis of this small section of the text and would require a broader examination of the changes made to the whole story.  An initial cursory glance, however, reveals conflicting evidence as Gower, in addition to devaluing Constance, also, in contrast, presents her as a more well-rounded character, in a sense as more human than saint, when compared to Trevet’s Constance.  One could argue that this revision makes her more valuable as it treats her as a person and not as a mere instrument of God’s will on Earth, passively accepting her fate, as Trevet most frequently presented her.  Sorting out the conflicting interpretive evidence requires a sustained inquiry and presents a potentially intriguing opportunity for future Gower scholarship.

One of the smaller, less crucial details that Gower eliminates from his source material is the character of the sultan’s emissary, the emir.  This character does not exist in Gower, yet he played a key part in setting the marriage negotiations in motion for Trevet.  Also missing are the other great Saracen men sent to Rome by the sultan.  These omissions could perhaps be explained as merely an elimination of unnecessary characters, but may also be related to Gower’s purpose of transforming a historical account, which required nods to accuracy and completeness, into a moral tale in which the focus is on envy, not piety.  In addition, Gower’s version of the story does not include the army of knights sent to Barbary along with Constance, thus setting up an alteration in the next section in which the sultaness arranges for the massacre of the Christians.  Since Constance does not have an army with her, she and the clergy who accompany her are even more vulnerable to the wrath of her envious intended mother-in-law.

While Trevet’s purpose in including the details of the marriage contract was to demonstrate the miraculous value that Constance was able to bring to her God, her family, and her people because of her enormous faith, the point of the negotiations for Gower is to get Constance into the orbit of the envious sultaness, which he quickly and efficiently does with a barebones narration of the conditions “on either side acorded” (CA, II, 630) that constitute the marriage of Constance and the Saracen sultan.

Originally Posted: April 4, 2006