undertaking, against a very warlike enemy, an expedition of great importance as light-heartedly as if it were a question of going to kill a handful of heathen peasants in Prussia or in Lithuania.
In the fifteenth century each king still felt virtually bound to set out and recapture Jerusalem. When Henry V of England, dying at Paris in 1422, in the midst of his career of conquest, was listening to the reading of the seven penitential psalms, he interrupted the officiating priest at the words Benigne fac, domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion, ut aedificentur muri Jerusalem, and declared that he had intended to go and conquer Jerusalem, after having re-established peace in France, “if it had pleased God, his Creator, to let him live to old age.” After that he orders the priest to go on reading, and dies.
In the case of Philip the Good, the design of a crusade seems to have been a mixture of chivalrous caprice and political advertising; he wished to pose, by this pious and useful project, as the protector of Christendom, to the detriment of the king of France. The expedition to Turkey was, as it were, a trump-card that he did not live to play.
The chivalrous fiction was also at the back of a peculiar form of political advertisement, to which Duke Philip was much attached—to wit, the duel between two princes, always being announced, but never carried out. The idea of having political differences decided by a single combat between the two princes concerned, was a logical consequence of the conception still prevailing, as if political disputes were nothing but a “quarrel” in the juristic sense of the word. A Burgundian partisan, for instance, serves the “quarrel” of his lord. What more natural means to settle such a case can be imagined than the duel of two princes, the two parties to the “quarrel”? The solution was satisfactory to both the primitive sense of right and the chivalrous imagination. In reading the summary of the carefully arranged preparations for these princely duels, we ask ourselves, if they were not a conscious feint, either to impose upon one’s enemy, or to appease the grievances of one’s own subjects. Are we not rather to regard them as an inextricable mixture of humbug and of a chimerical, but, after all, sincere, craving to conform to the life heroic, by posing
