Philippe de Mézières and the Order of the Passion

: crusade ideology, propaganda, and strategy in the late fourteenth century

Abstract

This thesis offers an account of the role of Philippe de Mézières, a soldier, servant of kings, and prolific writer, as an important but far from fully understood figure of the fourteenth-century crusade movement. The thesis is based on analysis of all of Philippe’s surviving written works, from long treatises to brief letters, and is divided into four chapters. The first focuses on an important group of texts relating to Philippe’s hope to found a new crusading military order, the Order of the Passion. These texts have often been misunderstood in the past and this new analysis reveals that they formed part of a suite of documents for a propaganda campaign that actually did meet with some success. Chapter two examines the ideology that drove Philippe’s commitment to crusading and his attempts to influence others. It demonstrates that Philippe’s crusade ideology combined a conventional use of language with highly personal ideas about the meaning of crusade and an innovative vision of his new military order as both a driver of Christian moral rejuvenation and the vanguard of a real-world crusade. Chapters three and four reveal just how focused Philippe could be on the practical. He offered often innovative, if sometimes wildly optimistic, strategy and logistics advice to potential crusaders, and developed a unique funding and recruitment model for his proposed new military order. His efforts addressed both the traditional question of how to recover the Holy Land and, as has not been adequately recognised to date, the newer problem of confronting the growing threat of the Ottoman Empire. In so doing his career reveals the survival into the late fourteenth century of a serious belief that the Holy Land, lost for a century, might yet be recovered, whilst also representing an important precedent for the later theorists who inherited the struggle against the Ottomans.

Date of Award	4 Dec 2019
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Angus Stewart (Supervisor) & Justine Marie Firnhaber-Baker (Supervisor)