Burgundian Crusade Propaganda in a Middle English Manuscript

This article reinterprets a sultan’s letter in Middle English and shows its connection to a list of military resources that follows that letter in their manuscript. Moreover, it discusses their relationship to analogous texts in Middle French, which are identified here for the first time. A brief review of past work on the genre of sultans’ letters and the first full edition of the list of military resources help the reader follow my argument. I give robust support to a previous scholar’s claim that the English documents originated as Burgundian crusade propaganda and show that the French documents must have had the same origin as the English ones. This article will interest crusade historians, manuscript studies scholars, and researchers into fifteenth-century culture, history, literature, and military technology.