The Feast of the Pheasant, which took place at Lille on the evening of 17 February 1454, was the occasion for Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy to announce his vow to fight for the defense of the Christian faith against the Ottoman Turks, who had taken Constantinople (mod. Istanbul, Turkey) in 1453.
Philip wished to gain the support of his court amid much publicity and lavishness. The origin of the feast was a meeting of the chapter of the Order of the Golden Fleece at Mons in 1451, at which Philip took a religious vow to go on crusade, without specifying a precise goal. At the feast held in Lille, the proceedings were largely secular. The banquet was interspersed with dramatic interludes (Fr. entremets). The three most important of these depicted the Holy Church reciting her lamentation, the Vows of the Pheasant (modeled on the fourteenth-century romance Les Voeux du Paon by Jacques du Longuyon), and a mystery play of the Grace of God. The feast ended with dancing. Over the following weeks, vows for a crusade against the Turks were recorded in Arras for Artois, in Bruges for Flanders, and in Mons for Hainaut.
-Jacques Paviot
See also: Burgundy
Bibliography
Le Banquet du Faisan, ed. Marie-Therese Caron and Denis Clauzel (Arras: Artois Presses Universite, 1997).
Lafortune-Martel, Agathe, Fete noble en Bourgogne au
XVe siecle: Le banquet du Faisan (1454): Aspectspolitiques, sociaux et culturels (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1984).
Paviot, Jacques, Les ducs de Bourgogne, la croisade et l’Orient (fin XlVe siecle-XVe siecle) (Paris: Presses de l’Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003).
World History
