JOINVILLE, JEAN, SIRE DE (1224-1319), was the second great writer of history in Old French, and occupies the interval between Villehardouin and Froissart. He was the head of a noble family of the province of Champagne (see JOINVILLE, p. 133). His first appearance at the king's court was in 1241, on the occa sion of the knighting of Louis IX.'s younger brother Alphonse. Seven years afterwards he took the cross. The crusade, in which he distinguished himself equally by wisdom and prowess, taught his practical spirit several lessons. He returned with the king in 1254. He was in the intervals of residence on his own fief a con stant attendant on the court, but he declined to accompany the king on his last and fatal expedition. In 1282 he was one of the witnesses whose testimony was formally given at St. Denis in the matter of the canonization of Louis, and in 1298 he was pres ent at the exhumation of the saint's body.
It was not till even later that he began his history, the occa sion being a request from Jeanne of Navarre, the wife of Philippe le Bel. The great interval between his experiences and the period of the composition of his history is important for the due com prehension of the latter. Some years passed before the task was completed in Oct. 1309. Jeanne was by this time dead, and Joinville presented his book to her son Louis. This original ms. is now lost. Great as was his age, Joinville had not ceased to be actively loyal, and in 1315 he complied with royal sum mons to bear arms against the Flemings. He was at again in 1317, and on July 11, 1319, he died, leaving his possessions and his position as seneschal of Champagne to his second son Anselm. He was buried in the neighbouring church of St. Laurent.
which occurred in his youth. He evidently thinks that the times have not changed for the better—what with the frequency with which the devil is invoked in modern France, and the sinful expenditure common in the matter of embroidered silk coats. But this laudation of times past concentrates itself almost wholly on the person of the sainted king whom, while with feudal inde pendence he had declined to swear fealty to him, "because I was not his man," he evidently regarded with an unlimited reverence. His age, too, while garrulous to a degree, seems to have been free from the slightest taint of boasting. No one perhaps ever took less trouble to make himself out a hero than Joinville. He is constantly admitting that on such and such an occasion he was terribly afraid; he confesses without the least shame that, when one of his followers suggested defiance of the Saracens and volun tary death, he (Joinville) paid not the least attention to him; nor does he attempt to gloss in any way his refusal to accompany St. Louis on his unlucky second crusade, or his invincible con viction that it was better to be in mortal sin than to have the leprosy, or his decided preference for wine as little watered as might be, or any other weakness. Yet he was a sincerely religious man, as the curious Credo, written at Acre and forming a kind of anticipatory appendix to the history, sufficiently shows.