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"Tu es pélérin en la sainte cité":Chaucer's Knight and Philippe de Mézières Stefan Vander Elst It has become widely accepted that the Knight, the first pilgrim mentioned in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, is one of only a few characters in the work that Chaucer designed as implicitly admirable. The portrait of the "verray, parfit gentil knyght" who has travelled and fought throughout Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East is thought to be almost a eulogy.1 The Knight is "the champion of the Church, the righteous and implacable enemy of the infidel, the compassionate protector of the weak and the oppressed, the defender of all Right and Justice."2 He is the perfect exponent of his calling, blameless even for his errors, for if he has any failings, these "are the failings of the ideal which informs his portrait, or those of the age which created the ideal."3 Beyond being the perfect representative of knighthood, Chaucer's first pilgrim has often been seen as embodying perfect knighthood, making the portrait a description almost of the [End Page 379] superhuman: in the words of Paule Mertens-Fonck, "Chaucer's description of the Knight, who personifies worthiness, cannot correspond to a truthful human portrait."4 Only recently have some dissenting voices questioned this notion of the Knight as an archetype of ideal chivalry. Lee Patterson has suggested that the Knight and what he stands for were already obsolete and irrelevant by the time of Chaucer's writing,5 while Terry Jones has read the Knight as a fourteenth-century privateer and mercenary.6 However, it is clear that, whether Chaucer wanted to paint an image of ideal knighthood or conversely chose to highlight its downsides, he probably found the inspiration for much of what is attributed to the Knight in his immediate surroundings. Maurice Keen, defending the late medieval crusades in which the Knight is said to have participated against Jones's scepticism, has illustrated that the crusade movement was still an important concern of the English aristocracy in Chaucer's time.7 He highlights the fact that many of those in Chaucer's environs, from John of Gaunt's son Henry of Derby to the parties in the Scrope-Grosvenor trial in which Chaucer served evidence, fought in crusade campaigns similar to those in which the Knight has fought. When creating the portrait of the Knight, Chaucer therefore had ample source material in the English aristocracy of his time. But Keen also emphasizes that the geographical and temporal scope of the crusades mentioned is so large that "those who have written footnotes to the Prologue have been able, it is true, to find an English knight who played some part in each of the campaigns and engagements that Chaucer's Knight had a hand in. They have never, though, found a knight who had a hand, as he is supposed to have had, in all of them."8 The portrait of the Knight is therefore usually understood to be a composite portrait. In finding possible sources for the Knight's portrait, we may however have limited ourselves by only looking at Chaucer's English contemporaries. In the following pages I would like to suggest another source for [End Page 380] many of the deeds and characteristics ascribed to the Knight in the General Prologue: the life and writings of the French soldier and statesman Philippe de Mézières (1327–1405). Indeed, I will argue that Chaucer may have found the inspiration for almost every line of the portrait in the deeds and writings of his French contemporary, whose philosophy of reconciliation, pacification, and crusade had strong support at the court of Richard II and appears to have influenced even those nearest to Chaucer himself. Philippe de Mézières lived a life of exceptional achievement and variety, even by the standards of the tumultuous fourteenth century.9 Not only did he serve as a mercenary, crusader, chancellor of Cyprus, diplomat, and councilor to the French throne, he also compiled a body of literary works impressive in its sheer volume, as well as in its variety and learning.10 Almost...
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