This chapter takes stock of the many consequences and conflicting legacies of the French invasion of Algiers. It analyses the effects of this climactic event in the fight against Mediterranean piracy. The invasion’s immediate consequences allow us to reflect upon the security goals French actors and their allies had attached to the expedition – and uncovers the long-term impact of those goals. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the two decades following 1830. These were the years in which French expansion commenced and soon posed international problems in Algeria’s environs. Lastly, I discuss how earlier European security efforts against piracy featured at the Congress of Paris that ended the Crimean War (1853–1856), particularly in the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law of 1856, which abolished privateering as a legitimate wartime practice. That text finalised the steady delegitimation of North African corsairing and the violent engagement with the Barbary Regencies. It served as a memorial, a recorded legacy of all the preceding negotiation, repression and destruction. It both marks a new era of international law and denotes, in the light of piracy repression, an ending to the old traditions of Mediterranean corsairing.

This book focuses on the way in which ideas and discourses of security have shaped the conduct of international relations in the past. Its main concerns include how historical actors conceived of security as an idea, used it in their writings and discussions, pondered its implementation and turned conceptions into practice. Security efforts shaped international relations at a crucial moment in history, during the first half of the nineteenth century, when international systems and global divisions of power dramatically changed. International involvement with Mediterranean piracy reflected all of these changes. Yet, in order to better grasp the impact of security considerations, one must look at the means by which contemporaries made sense of, were swayed by and, also, turned against the concept. Security must be historicised.

[1] [fol. 91r] [A]l nome sia de Dio e de la Virge Maria e de tuti li soy sancti de Dio. Diròve del naysemento de Tristano, come verrà e[n] esto mondo, chome fenite, e grande trevvalli aversa de la soa aventura.

[2] Or disse lo conto que lo Re Meliadus andando a chaçiare com altri chavalieri de la soa corte, andoron con luy ala chaçia. E cominçiano la [ca]ccia bella e grande, may niuno non v’era que saupesse de chaçia quanto lo Re Meliadus. E ello persequendo uno servo molto bello ||| delonguo se da li soy baroni. E andò in <per> uno grando desserto siqué non si guarda là ond’ello va. E laysò li chavalieri soi e <li chavalieri soi> andò en tal manera da l’ora de vespore i[n]fine al’ora de prima.

E alora lo Re Meliadus perviene a una fontana. Estando per una pocha d’ora, viene una damayssella e disse: ‘Re Meliadus, si tu fosse coysì francho chavaliere e sì prode come altry ti tiennono, io ti mostrería più alt<r>e aventure que may chavaliere trovasse’.

Alora disse lo Re Meliadus, ‘Damaysella, si voy aventura me most[r]ate, e io venrò com vui là unque voy volete’.

[fol. 91v] E alora la damaysella cavalchò inanti, e lo Re Meliadus apresso, cavalcando for de l’estrada per uno stritto sentieri. E tanto cavalcano que pervenneno ala torre di la damaysella e qui ne smontono amboro. E la damaysella presse lo Re Meliadus per la mano e menelo ende la sala del palayso, e quine si dessarmò lo Re. E poyché fo dessarmato, la damaysella lo presse per la mano e menò lo ende la camera, la quale era encantata. Quando lo Re Meliadus fo dentro, non si recorde de la Redina Eliabella nì de so realme nì de li suo baroni, si none de la damaysella que vede denançi da sé. |||

Quando le donne de Leones sepeno che lo Re Meliadus era perduto ende la foresta, montono a cavallo e vannolo cercando per tuto lo desserto e non lo trovanno en nulla parte. E venendo la notte, tuti li baroni se ne tornano. Alora la Redina Eliabella, vedendo que non si trovava, ela medesma disse ch’ella vollie andare a ce[r]chare.

The Arthurian hero Tristan enjoyed great popularity in medieval Italy as attested by various translations from the French prose Roman de Tristan. Two of these adaptations are preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. The better known Tristano Riccardiano, MS 2543, has been edited, re-edited and translated. However, the fourteenth-century MS 1729 has suffered almost complete critical neglect, perhaps due to its complex amalgam of regional dialects and its idiosyncratic script.

Shorter than its sister, this other Riccardian Tristan demonstrates important links among extant Tristans in Italy. Most of the material (Tristan's birth, early adventures and love affair with Yseut) follows that of MS 2543, with certain noteworthy variants. The famous three-day tournament conserved in the Tristano Panciatichiano and that constitutes the bulk of the Tristano Corsiniano does not appear, probably due to a faulty model. From a different model, MS 1729 contains the final episodes (Tristan's fatal wounding, the lovers’ deaths, lamen¬tation at Arthur's court) that do not appear in MS 2543.

This volume includes the previously unedited original text accompanied by a facing-page English translation, bibliography and index.

This volume presents the first complete transcription of a unique redaction of the prose Tristan found in a fourteenth-century miscellany that was copied in a single hand. Like the more famous Tristano Riccardiano edited by E. G. Parodi in 1896, this manuscript is preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. Its modern shelf mark is Ricc. MS 1729. Its former shelf mark N.IV.40 was assigned by Giovanni Lami, the librarian who was responsible for cataloguing the Riccardian collection in the early eighteenth century. An additional uniden-tified number – ‘63’ – is written in red pencil on the first original front guard leaf. The manuscript contains no notes of possession, dates or marginalia, but on the first of the two original guard leaves, there is an accurate table of contents written in a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century Tuscan mercantesca. On a front guard leaf that was attached to the codex much later, the contents of the manuscript are printed in a clear book hand. The copyist's name ‘Johannes’ appears in a rubricated colophon at the end of the Fior di virtù section (fol. 63r).2 His is the text hand for the entire manuscript.

According to library records,3 on 10 January 1972 the manuscript was restored, disinfected and rebound in white parchment over stiff cardboard to resemble the original Riccardian books; however, there is no title or lettering on the spine or on the new cover. A small, printed paper label with the words ‘Biblioteca Riccardiana’ and the machine-stamped shelf mark ‘1729’ is glued onto the base of the spine. Another such label appears on the inside front cover, at the top left corner. A late fifteenth-century (?) page was added at the front only, to cover the original two flyleaves. At the time of its modern rebinding, three pages of paper were inserted as additional flyleaves at the front, thus: iii (modern restoration) + i (c. 1500?) + ii (original). At the end are two original pages, left blank, which serve as end papers, followed by another three modern restoration ones, thus: ii + iii. None of the front flyleaves are numbered; the two blank original folios at the end are numbered 189 and 190 in the same mercantesca hand as the index on one front guard leaf.