Philippe de Mézières's Anglo-French Crusading Order and BnF f. fr. 2456

Michael Hanly

doi:10.1163/23526963-90000450

Philippe de Mezieres is a central figure in the political and intellectual history of the fourteenth-century Mediterranean world. His zeal for holy war against militant Islam shaped everything in a long professional career. He was Chancellor of Cyprus from 1358 to 1369, playing an essential role in crusade-related diplomacy with the greatest secular and ecclesiastical leaders of his time. Upon returning to his native France in the early 1370s, he established himself as an indispensable royal counselor in Paris and became the most powerful advocate of the 1396 truce between England and France that facilitated a multinational Christian expedition against the Turks in eastern Europe. Philippe's prolific writings, along with his passionate campaigning for a crusade led by his international religious-military society, the Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ, earned him friends and followers from east to wese and even suggest his participation in a late-fourteenth-century network of European literary exchange (Hanly). This cluster's emphasis on international cultural and political diffusion across borders makes him a natural choice. In this essay, I will focus on the testimony gleaned from a particular manuscript -Paris, BnF £ fro 2456. This codex contains a devotional text on the Lamb of God and was likely executed in a Parisian workshop between 1390 and 1395. The examination of its textual and iconographical details -which include the coat of arms of one of the leading officials in Philippe de Mezieres's Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ, namely the Burgundian nobleman Jean de Blaisy -suggests a number of fascinating connections between this book and the sphere of his transnational crusading society.

Philippe de Mézières's Anglo-French Crusading Order and BnF f. fr. 2456

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