gundy, and it had a chivalrous reason for its avowed motive: King John, that knightly muddle-head, wished to reward the courage shown by his son at Poitiers by an extraordinary liberality. The stubborn anti-French policy of the dukes of Burgundy after 1419, although dictated by the interests of their house, was justified in the eyes of contemporaries by the duty of exacting an exemplary vengeance for the murder of Montereau. Burgundian court literature exerts itself to keep up in all political matters the semblance of chivalrous inspiration. The surnames of the dukes, that of “Sans Peur” given to Jean, of “Hardi” to the first Philip, of “Qui qu’en hongne” which they did not succeed in imposing on the second Philip, usually called “the Good,” are inventions calculated to place the prince in a nimbus of chivalrous romance.
Now there was one among the political aspirations of the epoch where the chivalrous ideal was implied in the nature of the enterprise itself, namely, the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. The highest political ideal which all the kings of Europe were obliged to profess was still symbolized by Jerusalem. Here the contrast between the real interest of Christendom and the form the idea took is most striking. The Europe of 1400 was confronted by an Eastern question of supreme urgency: that of repulsing the Turks who had just taken Adrianople and wiped out the Serbian kingdom. The imminent danger ought to have concentrated all efforts on the Balkans. Yet the imperative task of European politics does not yet disengage itself from the old idea of the crusades. People only succeeded in seeing the Turkish question as a secondary part of the sacred duty in which their ancestors had failed: the conquest of Jerusalem.
The conquest of Jerusalem could not but present itself to the mind as a work of piety and of heroism—that is to say, of chivalry. In the councils on Eastern politics the heroic ideal preponderated more than in ordinary politics, and this it is which explains the very meagre success of the war against the Turks. Expeditions which, before all else, required patient preparation and minute inquiry, tended, more than once, to be romanticized, so to speak, from the very outset. The catastrophe of Nicopolis had proved the fatal folly of
