SOURCE: “Joinville: History as Chivalric Code,” in Seven French Chroniclers: Witness to History, Syracuse University Press, 1974, pp. 44–57, 129–31.

In the following essay, Archambault argues that critics have failed to recognize Joinville's criticism of King Louis in Vie de Saint Louis. The work is less about King Louis, Archambault maintains, than it is about the noble class and the nature of “preudome” as an institution in which Christian values, linked with the concept of nobility, are upheld to the best of one's ability.

Villehardouin's chronicle was composed a short time after the events narrated in order to justify a series of decisions the morality or the opportunity of which had been brought into question by some of his contemporaries. The circumstances surrounding the composition of Joinville's biography of Saint Louis are quite different. While Villehardouin was writing in a spirit of self-righteousness on a debatable subject, Joinville wrote in a...