Cover image: French School engraving (19th c.): Boucicaut in full armor with a hammer or mace, Le  Plutarque Français.

One of the most capable warriors of all time and a distinguished Crusader was Marshal (Marshalle) Jean II Le Maingre also known as Boucicaut (August 28, 1366 – June 21, 1421).

Text by Ilias Anagnostakis.

Possessing tremendous physical strength, the 1.80-meter-tall Boucicaut could climb tall ladders while wearing full armor, tie sacks of sand to himself and run five kilometers (!), mount a horse in full armor without stirrups, run three kilometers daily fully armored (!), and train every day for six hours with a war hammer, axe, sword, and guisarm. All twice their normal weight. He was a phenomenon even among the already well-trained French knights of his generation.

His astonishing career began at the age of just 16, when he participated in the Battle of Roosebeke against the Flemish. In 1384, he was in Prussia, fighting with the Teutonic Knights against the pagan Lithuanians. In 1388, Boucicaut joined Spanish comrades in cleansing operations against the Moors in Morocco, and in a tournament in 1392, he defeated six (!) English heavily armored knights in succession.

In 1393, he returned to the vast Russian steppes, once again battling the Lithuanians. In 1396, alongside a multitude of Burgundian and French Crusaders, he took part in the dreadful Battle of Nicopolis in Bulgaria, against 20,000 Ottoman Turks. According to eyewitness Turkish accounts, the tireless Frenchman “ran madly up the hill where the Turks were stationed, wearing thirty kilos of armor, in temperatures exceeding 35°C, and cut a path through the Turkish hordes with his hammer and short lance, amidst a cloud of arrows” (Nicolle, 1999), slaughtering anyone who approached him, decapitating and crushing skulls with a single blow. However, he was eventually captured. After being temporarily imprisoned in Didymoteicho, was taken to Bursa, where he remained in chains for a year and a half.

At the end of 1397, he was released after the ransom demanded by Bayezid was paid. Boucicaut had not said his last word, and in the summer of 1399, the tireless Marshal, leading 2,200 men (600 men-at-arms, 600 crossbowmen, and 1,000 soldiers of various specialties), arrived in Constantinople to assist the desperate Manuel II Palaiologos, to whom he offered his services almost without pay, as he “had old scores to settle with the Turks” (Nicolle, 2002).

Indeed, within just four months (July–November 1399), the small French force carried out twenty-five (!) amphibious landings at various points around the Propontis (Sea of Marmara), capturing Turkish fortresses, executing their garrisons, and burning Turkish villages and mosques. The French withdrew at Christmas, but Boucicaut had given the Empire precious breathing room.

The stormy career of the French marshal did not end there.

In 1403, he was defeated in a naval battle off Methoni by the Venetians, commanding nine Genoese ships, after fighting “furiously.” After three years of service with the Lusignans of Cyprus and operations in Syria, the tireless Frenchman would fight once more under his homeland’s banner. This time against the English at Agincourt in 1415. There he led 6,000 heavy cavalry in the third wave of the French forces. After a titanic struggle, and while “the bodies of dead Englishmen had formed a mountain around him” (La Persier, 2007), he was captured.

This unyielding warrior and idealist Crusader, a fervent anti-Turk, eventually died in an English prison. This was due to the astronomical sums the English demanded for his release were never paid by France. His remains were returned to France and buried by his loved ones in his birthplace, Tours.

On his tomb was inscribed a notable phrase. “Connetable de l’Empereur et l’Empire de Constantinople” (“Constable of the Emperor and the Empire of Constantinople”).

He was a towering figure.

He is Boucicaut.

Sources:

J. Nicolle, Nicopolis 1396: The Collapse of the Crusader States, Osprey Publishing, 1999

B. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.

J. Sumption, The Hundred Years War: Trial by Fire (Vol. 2), University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

M. Keen, Chivalry, Yale University Press, 1984.

G. Duby, The Chivalrous Society, University of California Press, 1980.

Taylor, Craig (2019). A Virtuous Knight: Defending Marshal Boucicaut (Jean II Le Meingre, 1366–1421). Woodbridge: York Medieval Press