Europe – Prussia (now roughly in Poland and Germany); when they arrive in Thorun, the headquarters of the Teutonic Order which coordinates and governs such expeditions, they are joined by a huge contingent of knights from all over the Empire, including the king of Bohemia himself3. They go into battle, however, not against the pagan Lithuanians, but against an overwhelming army of “Saracens” hailing from the East and from North Africa, led by the Grand Turk of Persia, the Emperor of Constantinople, and the Sultan of Babylon. Just before battle is engaged, Saintré has himself knighted on the field by the king of Bohemia – and then performs extraordinary deeds of valour, which include his killing, in person, the Grand Turk. The Christians conquer, resoundingly and bloodily, and Saintré returns to a hero’s welcome in Paris.

Now, not all of this is mere absurdity. The fourteenth century – which is when the real Jehan de Saintré is attested in a scatter of documents (La Sale has him die in 1368)4 – was indeed the period when the Teutonic Order flourished in Prussia, and when an expedition against the pagan Lithuanians was a recognised way of spending the summer in a meritoriously Christian, if by all accounts miserably uncomfortable, crusade. The Christian participants in La Sale’s account – although their numbers far outweigh any real expedition setting off for northern Europe – do have some basis in authenticity: there are, roughly, 160 French knights, a little squadron of English ones, and that huge list of 200 or so knights from all over the Empire: the Low Countries, Germany, Poland … each of which lists must almost certainly have been copied from an existing roll of arms5. We should not either be too distracted by the fact that La Sale calls the enemy “Saracens”: he is not alone in using this as the

of Jerusalem10. Jerusalem was, of course, long gone as the capital of the crusader kingdom of which it had been the centre; René himself never took part in a crusade (his focus remained the rather more accessible kingdoms of Naples and Sicily)11; unlike the duke of Burgundy, he seems not to have reacted with any urgency to the fall of Constantinople, possibly because his wife Isabelle de Lorraine died also in 145312. But that said, he paid lip-service at least throughout his life to notions of the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and indeed of crusade – for instance with the conceit of his tournament at Nancy in 1445 being a mock battle with a geant sarrazin13; the notional kingship was one which he seems, rather ineffectually, to have cherished – as did his son and Antoine’s former pupil, Jean de Calabre, to whom Saintré is dedicated. By the time that Saintré was composed, however, and as from 1448, La Sale was in the service of a quite different patron, Louis de Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, an adept of the house of Burgundy, who was later to be connétable de France – and whose crusading ambitions were of a rather more enterprising and immediate order than were those of the Anjou dynasty14.

Although, of course, in reaction to the news of the fall of Constantinople and only seven or so months later, in very early 1454, Philippe de Bourgogne, planning for the leadership of a pan-European crusading initiative, organised one of the more spectacular responses: the so-called Banquet du Faisan at which the members of his court, and visitors from elsewhere in Europe, were invited in the course of a sumptuous banquet to make vows of splendid (and implausible) deeds against the Turks. At Philippe’s own table was … Louis de Luxembourg, La Sale’s patron, whose vow, to be among the first to engage with the Infidels, seems to have been the very first made in the series15:

Je veue aux dames et au faisant que, ainchois que soit six sepmainnes, je porteray une emprinse à intencion de faire armes à pié et à cheval, et laquelle je porteray an et jour en la plus grant partie du temps; et ne laisseray, pour chose nul qui m’aviegne, se le Roy ne le me commande, où quelque armée soufisant se face à aler sur les infidelles, par le Roy en sa personne, ou par son commandement, ou autrement pour y aler, en laquelle armée, se c’est le bon plaisir du Roy, afin de faire service à crestienté, je yray de très bon cœur et metteray painne, ou plaisir de Dieu, de estre des premiers qui assambleront aveuc les infidelles.

It is, incidentally, notable that Saintré stages its own rather muted, throwaway ceremony of vows (though with no crusading intent) when the hero, Jehan himself, is made to swear on a dressed peacock the accomplishment of a perfectly secular emprise16: writing in 1454 to 1455 under the patronage of Louis de Luxembourg, La Sale cannot have been unaware of the topicality of such an exercise17…

La Sale, then, moved in circles, and depended on patronage, in which crusading discussions were rampant, and in which he might well expect an account, however fictional, of a brilliantly successful crusade to be welcomed by either of his patrons, and by the dedicatee of the romance. But what I want to argue here is something rather more specific: that the crusade section18 of his Saintré is an early example of what is today usually called counterfactual fiction19. Briefly, counterfactual fiction (or history) makes use of historical personæ and historical circumstances, while drastically and dramatically altering their stories. Novels of the counterfactual sort embark on a dialectical game in which modes of reference are carefully, subtly, deployed to signify historical reality – but the “history” that they refashion changes or reverses actions taken or outcomes produced at some major, important historical turning-point, and then explores the consequences: Robert Harris’s Fatherland, for instance, published in 1992 and set in 1964, imagines that Hitler has won the Second World War and is still in power in Europe; Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) that the isolationist Charles Lindbergh has defeated Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1940. In essence, counterfactual novels coordinate fiction, as here, around a handful of familiar historical facts – and I stress, here, the word “familiar”: counterfactual fiction depends for its effect, crucially, on the audience’s knowledge of the actual historical record, and of the more uncontroversial facts which underlie the fiction: a reader must be conscious of the extratextual historical reality against which he or she is to measure the fiction20, and therefore recognise the

ways in which the alternate history they are reading invites, insistently, hypothetical thinking. The “game”, as it were, is designed for an informed audience aware that it is being asked – temporarily – to overlay an explicit framework of historical fact with a new and intriguing hypothesis; if that hypothesis is to have resonance, then the “doubleness” of the fiction (its underpinning in and recasting of historical fact) asks the reader to recall what he or she knows, from other sources, about the history. The writer of counterfactual fiction therefore must ensure that he or she creates an imaginative space capable of incorporating real social and political histories21, and must take pains not altogether to defy plausibility – but within those constraints, he or she can satisfyingly explore the epistemological and cultural repercussions of what is actually an experiment with history.

Now, La Sale’s Saintré is as a whole, quite explicitly, what we would now call an historical novel22: a fourteenth-century Jean is historically attested, though in no great detail, as having for instance fought at Poitiers in 1356. We know very little about him – as Szkilnik says, La Sale appears to have chosen for hero someone deliberately obscure, a bit-part-player on the historical stage23. Might La Sale have garnered, somewhere, more details on his life story? Might the historical Saintré have taken part in a Prussian crusade? These questions are unanswerable – and in any case do not affect my argument here, which will propose that the “extratextual historical reality”, against which the author builds

his counterfactual crusade, is an amalgamation of the Northern Crusades with a counterfactual rewriting of the disastrous crusade of Nicopolis.

What links these enterprises, as far as La Sale is concerned, is one of the two major models that La Sale seems to have used for his own Jehan de Saintré: the figure of Jean le Meingre, known as Boucicaut24. Boucicaut figures quite large and explicitly, in person in the romance, as Saintré’s friend and ally: they become brothers in arms, undertake joint emprises25. Now, Boucicaut took part no fewer than three times in what were known as the summer campaigns, sommer-reysen, which for a century, from 1283 to 1406, were conducted almost annually in Northern Europe, Prussia26. Most of these campaigns, although they were brutally destructive, were on a relatively small scale: volunteers from the courts and cities of Europe would make their way north to the distinctly inhospitable Prussian war-theatre, would be welcomed and deployed under the auspices of the Teutonic Order, would fight somewhat inconclusive skirmishes, and then return to France or elsewhere before the onset of the ferocious northern winter, congratulating themselves, no doubt, on having fought valiantly for God and Christendom. Some expeditions, of course, were rather more sizeable: Knudson points to one such, in the summer of 1348, which involved contingents from Germany, France and England and which was unusually successful27, and Boucicaut himself took part in a more major sortie, in 1391, which, it was said, very implausibly, involved 200,000 Christian combatants, but the results of which were typically inconclusive28.

But if we are to look for a more telling precedent for a huge expedition against the Sarrazins, then we should certainly look to what is usually

called the Nicopolis crusade, of 1396, in which Boucicaut was also a prominent participant29. The energy that drove it came largely, and in this context significantly, from ducal Burgundy. The French and Burgundian contingent of the army, in this instance, was much the best equipped, but like Saintré’s crusade, the force also included large groups of crusaders from the Empire. It was designed to counter Ottoman advances in the Balkans, but came to a catastrophic end when the crusading army fought and lost a pitched battle with the Sultan Bayezid I just outside Nicopolis [Nikopol] in Bulgaria (on the Danube, on the border between today’s Bulgaria and Romania)30: catastrophic in the number of dead and captured, but also catastrophic in the extent to which its immediate effect was to lead to a marked decline in crusading fervour in the west: it was, indeed, the last major international expedition to be mounted by the traditional crusading powers, and as such, its collapse had the broadest repercussions on the entire movement: repercussions that were felt most particularly in the Burgundian circles within which La Sale was now moving. Philippe de Mézières, for instance (c. 1327-1405), was particularly active, and is particularly informative: his Consolation de la desconfiture de Hongrie, addressing the Nicopolis disaster, was dedicated to Philippe le Hardi, Duke of Burgundy in 1396, and at roughly the same date he also prepared a brief for a Chevalerie de l’Ordre de la Passion, which was designed to explain “comment se pourroyent mieulx ne plus legierement conquester et recouvrer les royaumes et empires que l’Amourah et Baxeta son fils ont conquesté en la crestienté” – although it would have demanded so huge an investment in men and money that it was never of any practical use31.

The court of Burgundy, under the self-styled “grands ducs du Ponant”, had therefore throughout the fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries toyed particularly and persistently with the idea of a major crusade32: the memory of Nicopolis remained fresh, and the dukes were very active in pursuit of western retaliation33; as Jacques Paviot and Judith Guéret-Laferté point out, it is remarkable how much of the Burgundian vernacular library deals with the Orient34. But as Yves Lacaze shows, preparations reached fever pitch following that second Christian disaster, the fall of Constantinople, in the years between 1453 and 145635: spies and informants were commissioned to report on the potential for a crusade – on the suitability, for instance, of sea-ports36; the Burgundian court encouraged, or commissioned, works intended to underline the urgency of the need, and the suffering of the city of Constantinople37;

busy embassies were sent, in general and as it turned out fruitlessly, to possible European allies, Rome, Naples, England; Guillaume Fillastre and Simon de Lalaing were recruited to drive the project and equip an army38; in 1455, Pope Calixtus III issued a papal bull proclaiming a crusade, to depart for the East in March 145639.

Philippe, in other words, instituted energetic recruitment for a crusade of rescue for Constantinople throughout 1453, 1454, and 145540 – and as a member of the household of a family so closely associated with the Burgundian court, Antoine de La Sale cannot but have been aware, however distantly, of the ferment of preparation around the ambition of a voiage de Turquie. At the very least, he must have been aware of the recruitment drive: the embassy to Henry VI, in England, was for instance entrusted to Louis’s uncle Jean de Luxembourg, comte de Ligny41. It is, of course, always dangerous to speculate on a writer’s reasons for taking his fiction in a particular direction, but the use of multiple modes of reference to signify historical reality – deliberate links to the crusading champion Boucicaut; assiduous incorporation of a wealth of detail which suggests the historical accuracy of Saintré’s fictional universe; “documentary” segments, like the painstaking lists of participants, with blazons, to which we have already referred, or the geographical descriptions, studiously transcribed42, of the pagan lands from which the Sarrazins are said to originate; the fact indeed that

Saintré is an historical figure, despite the fact that La Sale allows himself considerable latitude in presenting him – all this suggests that La Sale is studiously coordinating his fictional hero’s deeds around a handful of familiar historicities…

And this, I believe, precisely in a way that is familiar from “counterfactual” fiction43. The resonances of “crusade” in the mid-fifteenth century are such that what I called above the “doubleness” of Jehan de Saintré – history+fiction – must have been immediately perceptible44: after all, Nicopolis, and the Prussian crusades, were still within living memory, and especially so in the circles where La Sale was now employed; epistemologically, where, say, the “realities” of a Gilles de Chin or a Gillion de Trazegnies might be unverifiable, La Sale’s readers must have recognised that he is engaging with the legacy of a century or so of notoriously failed crusading ventures; quite apart from court memory, he was writing, now, in an environment where historical writing was sophisticated, and widely available. Saintré’s spectacularly successful, and highly romanticised, crusade would be read, as his own use of them makes clear, against the “chivalric biographies” where the Lalaings and the Boucicauts are celebrated certainly, but with at least a modicum of sober realism45. La Sale is, I believe, focusing a complex and dismaying historical nexus in the story of Saintré’s chivalric triumph – and enlisting the devices of imaginative fiction to counteract the actual disaster of history46. His is a revisionist, dialectical game with the extratextual historical reality with which his readers – the dedicatee Jean de Calabre, the family of his new patrons – were painfully familiar: he depicts a new horizon of possibility, a happily reassuring pseudo-historical

world open to the potential of revolutionary transformation, and a world particularly reassuring, of course, in the context of the new and urgent need for success in the threatened East. His counterfactual history, changing and reversing outcomes produced a century earlier and at a historical turning-point, is in line, suspiciously so, with Burgundian political ambitions in the few years following the fall of Constantinople: is La Sale, who had for so long put his efforts at the service of the chivalric ceremonials loved by René d’Anjou, now employing the devices of fiction, at the behest of his new patron, in response to a contemporary disaster, and to skew the past to serve a different, crusading present? Burgundian prosateurs, after all – in that genre, mise en prose, so ingrained at the ducal court – seem to have seen it as their mission to glorify a chivalry “of old”, and to have augmented and celebrated traces of “crusade” in the chansons de geste and romances which they reworked47. Is Saintré’s gloriously successful crusade not simply a further refinement, to be read by its contemporaries as an earnest of the possible? If so, politically, the counterfactual crusade would invite its readers to forget the humiliation of Nicopolis and to imagine, perhaps to engage in, the new venture promulgated at the Burgundian court by moralists, propagandists – and by the duke himself: the Count of Saint-Pol, after all, Louis de Luxembourg, was a luminary of the Burgundian crusading movement: what better way for La Sale to curry favour in a new environment, with new patrons, than to adopt a major enthusiasm of their court? Jehan de Saintré offered its readers a complex and satisfying mix: a burlesque love-story, of course – but perhaps more gratifying, the pseudo-history of an epoch when, perhaps, chivalry was especially celebrated, and when, counterfactually, a crusading army could triumph, gloriously, over the massed armies of the infidel.

Jane H. M. Taylor

Durham University