MEZIÈRES DE PHILIPPE

MEZIÈRES de PHILIPPE. - Born about 1326 in the castle of the same name; died 29 May 1405. Entirely absorbed by the fervour of the Crusade, which he conceived as a chivalric enterprise after the fashion of the knights of the Round Table, and himself dubbed a knight, he made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and later became chancellor to Pietro di Lusignano, king of Cyprus. When the latter was assassinated in 1369, he hoped that Carlo V, king of France, would undertake the Crusade; when he too died in 1380, he turned to his son Carlo VI.
In 1384 he planned the establishment of the Order of the Passion of Christ for expeditions to the East: a curious mixture of practical sense and chimerical ideas. In his Sogno del vecchio pellegrino, published in 1388, he outlined a plan for a Crusade that was to be carried out first of all by means of universal peace among Christian princes, and then by action against the Muslims in Spain, Egypt, Syria, and the rest of the East. But this was the acute period of the Great Schism, which intensified discords instead of allaying them. After the disaster of Nicopoli on the Danube, on 25 Sept. 1396, suffered especially by the French knights, Filippo addressed to Carlo VI his Lettera lamentevole e consolatrice. With him disappeared the most convinced theorist of the Crusade.