Between war and peace Rhetoric and uses of speech in the Histoire de l’Empereur Henri de Constantinople by Henri de Valenciennes

The many speeches found in Histoire de l’Empereur Henri de Constantinople by Henri de Valenciennes reveal a deliberate oratorical strategy that plays successively on the models of exhortation to holy war and diplomatic rhetoric. By joining together these two apparently antagonistic models, the author makes speech into the dynamis of history; he justifies the war that his side is waging, but also indicates the ways in which Christian forces might be reconciled within the empire.