The relationship between the present in which the chronicle is written and the past that it records is permeated by various forms of existing memories as well as by literary devices that shape particular speech situations in which time is the real subject even if it does not appear to be so. When searching into the forms used by the text to represent time, the reference made to different times within the past that is brought to us by history and to the present to which both writer and readers belong make an interesting object of study. A close reading of such references in three fifteenth-century Portuguese chronicles helps to bring into focus the chronicler’s awareness of the variety of time distances that find actual expression in the historical discourse and to see how the idea of time was woven into the historical network.

This paper analyses the various aspects through which author and translator represent in their texts different ideological conceptions about the Oriental Latin States. Addressing himself to a homogeneous community, with which he shares the feelings and the points of view, Guillaume de Tyr interprets the historical events from a subjective perspective, connecting them to the present. Unlike him, the French translator, as well as his reader, lacks identification with this territory as a geographic reality. They find, thus, on the concept of ‘Christendom’, a point of view that enables the reinterpretation of those historical events, integrating the history of crusades into their own Christian history.

The starting point of this research is the chronicle ascribed to Oliver of Dixmude, which deals with the period 1377-1443 and which has hitherto always been characterized as a regional ‘Flemish’ chronicle. However, the study of this often cited chronicle offers us new (after Ghent) evidence that during the fifteenth century the genre of the town chronicle was also rather successful in the Southern Low Countries, contrary to what has always been supposed. There are several reasons why the chronicle by Oliver of Dixmude has never before been given the epithet of urban chronicle. One of them is that the edition by Lambin from 1835 – the only edition of the manuscript, which was lost in 1914 – does not faithfully present the original text. Apart from omitting the annual lists of the members of the town government, Lambin also left out several of the ‘Ypres’ fragments. It is only thanks to a previously unstudied copy of the text found in the Courtrai Town Library, that these ‘lost’ passages could be retrieved. Besides, this chronicle should be studied in the context of a much broader fifteenth-century local tradition of recording important urban events in the form of a narrative account. Indeed, the hardly known chronicle ascribed to Pieter van de Letuwe, which discusses the immediately following period 1443-1480, is very similar in structure. Even if the authorship of the persons mentioned above can be maintained, it should be kept in mind that there existed a kind of collective authorship, the members of which belonged to the leading urban elite.