Jean II Le Meingre, known as Boucicaut, was marshal of France and a participant in numerous crusade expeditions.
He was the son of Jean I Le Meingre (d. 1368), marshal of France, and Fleurie of Linieres.
Jean II was educated at the French court with the young King Charles VI. He became a knight at the battle of West-Rozebeke, which was fought against the Flemings in 1382, and went twice to Prussia to campaign with the Teutonic Order against the pagan Lithuanians in 1384-1385. At the beginning of 1388, he went to the court of Murad I, the Ottoman sultan, offering to fight for him. As the sultan was not undertaking any campaigns, Boucicaut went on to Hungary, Venice, and the Holy Land (1389). He stayed for four months in Cairo to share the imprisonment of Philip of Eu, a cousin of the French king, who had been arrested at Damascus. In 1390 Charles VI forbade him to go with the duke of Bourbon on the Mahdia Crusade, and so Boucicaut made a third journey to Prussia in 1390-1391. On his return, the king appointed him marshal of France.
When Philippe de Mezieres founded his Order of the Passion, Boucicaut was one of the first members. In 1395 Charles VI agreed to send an army to assist King Sigismund of Hungary against the Ottoman Turks, which was to include Boucicaut and his own retinue. This venture became known as the Crusade of Nikopolis from the site of its defeat by the Turks on 25 September 1396. Boucicaut was taken prisoner, but was saved from death by Count John of Nevers and was ransomed the following year.
In 1399 Charles VI sent an expeditionary corps headed by Boucicaut to Constantinople, which was under siege by the Turks. The marshal persuaded Emperor Manuel II Palaio-logos to go to the West in person to seek military assistance. Manuel undertook a lengthy diplomatic tour of Western Christendom, and finally left Paris in order to return home on 21 November 1402, when he learned of the defeat of Sultan Bayezid I at Ankara by the Mongol ruler of central Asia, Timur Lenk. By this time Boucicaut was serving as governor of Genoa for Charles VI, where he met the emperor again at the beginning of 1403. He accompanied Manuel as far as the Morea (Peloponnese) and then went on to Rhodes. From there he took his fleet to Syria, where he attacked and sacked Botron, Beirut, Sidon, and Laodikeia in Syria. However, while returning to Genoa, he met a Venetian fleet at Modon and was defeated. He drafted a new project for an attack against Alexandria in 1407, but was expelled from Genoa two years later.
Boucicaut fought against the English at the battle of Agin-court in 1415, where he drew up the French battle plan. He was taken prisoner, and remained a captive until his death. Boucicaut embodied all the knightly values of his time, but, as a commander and political leader, he failed to understand that these values were outdated, and often showed impetuosity and lack of judgment in his conduct. Boucicaut’s career was described in an anonymous French prose work, the Livre des Fais du bon messire Jehan le Meingre.
-Jacques Paviot
Bibliography
Atiya, Aziz S., The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1938).
Barker, John W., Manuel IIPalaeologus (1391-1425): A Study in Late Byzantine Statesmanship (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1969).
Delaville Le Roulx, Joseph, La France en Orient au XlVe siecle. Expeditions du marechal Boucicaut, 2 vols. (Paris: Ernest Thorin, 1886).
Lalande, Denis, Jean II Le Meingre, dit Boucicaut
(1366-1421): Etude d’une biographie heroique (Geneve: Droz, 1988).
Le Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan Le Maingre, dit
Bouciquaut, mareschal de France etgouverneur de Gennes, ed. Denis Lalande (Geneve: Droz, 1985).
Ruiz Domenec, J. E., Boucicaut, gobernador de Genova: Biografia de un caballero errante (Genova: Civico Istituto Colombiano, 1989).
Setton, Kenneth M., The Papacy and the Levant (1204-1571), vol. 1: The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976).
Ment of population by Western settlers after 1204. The town was the seat of a Latin bishop, a suffragan of the archbishop of Athens.
The overlordship of the marquisate passed from the rulers of Thessalonica to the princes of Achaia either in the early days of the Frankish conquest or in the 1240s. About that time (possibly in 1248), according to Marino Sanudo Torsello, William II of Achaia sent an army of 11,000 men to relieve Boudonitza from an attack by the Epirote Greeks under Michael II Doukas. The marquis of Boudonitza was numbered among the twelve peers of Achaia, and it was only during the Catalan occupation of Athens that the marquisate was reckoned a dependency of Athens. The marquis survived the battle of Halmyros, and his castle successfully resisted a Catalan attack in 1311. However, it was only by coming to terms with the Catalans that the marquisate survived intact. The Pallavicini family held it until 1335, when the marquisate was ceded to the Venetian family of Zorzi in order to enhance the protection of Venetian Negroponte against the Catalans. The Zorzi were displaced when the town and castle fell to the Turks in 1414.
-Peter Lock
See also: Achaia; Athens, Lordship and Duchy of
Bibliography
Miller, William, Essays on the Latin Orient (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921).
World History
