Geoffroi de Charny

Geoffroi de Charny was born around 1306 into a noble family of Burgundy, in eastern France. His father, Jean de Charny, held the modest lordship of Charny near Montbard, and Geoffroi was a younger son with little expectation of inheriting land or wealth ^[1]. The exact date of his birth was never recorded, which was typical for a boy who was not the heir to a great estate. Historians work backward from the dates of his early military service to place his birth in the first decade of the fourteenth century ^[2].

As a younger son, Charny had to make his own way, and the profession open to a well-born Burgundian youth of his time was arms. The France of his childhood was ruled by the last Capetian kings, and the long conflict with England that would define his adult life had not yet begun. He would have received the standard training of his class: horsemanship, weapons practice, and instruction in the customs of noble conduct that he later set down in writing ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Geoffroi de Charny before his rise finds a figure typical of the minor nobility: land-poor, ambitious, and dependent on service to greater lords. His early career attached him to the entourage of powerful patrons, and his first documented campaigns came in the 1330s, when he was already approaching thirty ^[2].

Charny's documented military career opened in Gascony in 1337, the first year of the war later named the Hundred Years War, when he served under Raoul, Count of Eu and Constable of France ^[2]. Over the following years he fought in several theatres of the widening Anglo-French conflict. He was present at the siege of Tournai in 1340 and campaigned in Brittany, where in 1342 he was captured by English forces at the battle of Morlaix and taken to England as a prisoner ^[1].

Captivity was a routine hazard of fourteenth-century warfare, and Charny was ransomed and back in service within a short time. In 1345 he joined the crusading expedition of Humbert II, Dauphin of Viennois, against the Turks at Smyrna in the eastern Mediterranean, one of the few genuine crusading ventures of his generation ^[3]. Service against non-Christian enemies carried special prestige in the chivalric culture of the day, and Charny later wrote that deeds of arms on crusade ranked among the most honorable a knight could perform ^[3].

By the late 1340s his reputation had grown enough to bring royal attention. King Philip VI entrusted him with commands in the north, and in December 1349 Charny led an attempt to retake Calais, which the English had captured after a long siege in 1347. He arranged to bribe an Italian mercenary commander inside the town, but the plan was betrayed to King Edward III of England, who crossed the Channel in secret and ambushed the French force. Charny was wounded, captured a second time, and held in England until a large ransom, paid in part by the French king, secured his release around 1351 ^[4].

The catalogue of Geoffroi de Charny achievements rests on three foundations: his writing, his royal offices, and his standing among fellow knights. The most durable is his authorship. Charny wrote three works on knighthood, of which the longest, the Livre de chevalerie or Book of Chivalry, survives as a central source for understanding how a practicing warrior of the fourteenth century actually thought about his calling ^[1]. Written in French prose around 1350, the book ranks deeds of arms on an ascending scale, from local tournaments up to war in distant lands, and insists that worth is earned through hardship rather than inherited ^[1].

He also composed a shorter verse treatise and a remarkable list of more than a hundred questions on the laws and customs of war, tournaments, and jousts, known as the Demandes. The questions were apparently prepared for debate within the Company of the Star, the chivalric order founded by King John II of France in 1352 ^[5]. Charny was a founding member of that order, which the king created as a French answer to Edward III's Order of the Garter, and modern scholars believe the Book of Chivalry itself may have been intended for the instruction of its members ^[5].

His second great distinction was the office of bearer of the Oriflamme, the crimson banner of the abbey of Saint-Denis that French kings carried only in moments of the greatest peril. The charge was granted to Charny in 1355, and the standard could be entrusted only to a knight of proven and unblemished reputation ^[2]. Contemporary writers, including the chronicler Jean Froissart, described him as among the most worthy and skilled knights of his era, and the biographer of the marshal Boucicaut later remembered him as one of the exemplary men of arms of the century ^[6].

One episode of Charny's life reaches far beyond military history. At some point before his death he came into possession of a long linen cloth bearing the faint image of a crucified man, and he founded a collegiate church at Lirey, a small village near Troyes in Champagne, where the cloth was displayed as the burial shroud of Christ ^[7]. The foundation of the church was approved in the 1350s, and exhibitions of the relic at Lirey drew pilgrims within a generation.

How Charny acquired the cloth is unknown. He never explained its origin in any surviving document, and the silence has fed centuries of argument. In 1389 the bishop of Troyes, Pierre d'Arcis, wrote to the pope claiming that an earlier investigation had found the image to be the work of a painter, while defenders of the relic rejected the charge ^[7]. The cloth passed from Charny's descendants to the House of Savoy in the fifteenth century and eventually to Turin, where it remains, known worldwide as the Shroud of Turin ^[8].

Radiocarbon testing carried out in 1988 dated the linen to between 1260 and 1390, a range that matches Charny's lifetime, though debate about the cloth's nature continues ^[8]. Whatever the object's origin, the documented history of the Shroud of Turin begins with the knight of Lirey, and any full Geoffroi de Charny biography must reckon with this strange afterlife of his name.

Charny married twice. His first wife, Jeanne de Toucy, died without surviving children. Around 1340 he married Jeanne de Vergy, a widow from a prominent Burgundian family, and the couple had a son, also named Geoffroi, who inherited the Lirey church and its relic ^[7]. It was Jeanne de Vergy who, after her husband's death, oversaw the first public exhibitions of the shroud at Lirey ^[7].

His writings give an unusually direct view of his private convictions. The Book of Chivalry is saturated with religious feeling: Charny urges knights to hear mass, to credit God rather than themselves for victory, and to accept the bodily suffering of campaign life as a form of devotion ^[1]. He also shows flashes of dry humor, complaining about knights who fuss over soft beds and fine wines, and he writes with evident feeling about the fear a man must master before battle ^[1].

Royal service brought material reward at last. King John II granted him lands, pensions, and standing at court, lifting the younger son of a minor Burgundian house into the inner circle of the French monarchy ^[2]. Among the plain Geoffroi de Charny facts, this ascent through merit rather than inheritance is the one his own book presents as the proper pattern of a knightly life.

The 1350s brought France to crisis. English armies under Edward, the Black Prince, raided deep into French territory, and in September 1356 King John II brought the prince to battle near Poitiers. Charny rode with the royal division and carried the Oriflamme, the signal that the kingdom itself was at stake ^[2].

The battle of 19 September 1356 was a catastrophe for France. The English archers and dismounted men-at-arms broke the French assaults, King John was taken prisoner, and much of the nobility was killed or captured. Charny died in the final melee, fighting close to the king, still holding the banner. Froissart recorded that he was struck down with the Oriflamme in his hands ^[6]. Contemporaries on both sides treated his death as the model of a knightly end, the author of the Book of Chivalry dying in exactly the manner his own writing praised.

He was first buried near the battlefield. In 1370 King Charles V, honoring his father's standard-bearer, had Charny's remains moved to the church of the Celestines in Paris, a burial place reserved for those the crown wished to remember ^[2].

Charny's reputation among his contemporaries was extraordinary and it has proved durable. The Book of Chivalry became a key text for historians of medieval knighthood after Richard Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy published a full critical edition and English translation in 1996, and it is now widely read in universities as a rare statement of chivalric ideals written by a knight who practiced them rather than a clerk who observed them ^[1]. His insistence that honor is earned through effort, summarized in his repeated phrase that he who does more is worth more, remains the most quoted line of the book ^[1].

The Lirey cloth gives him a second, stranger legacy. Because the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record in his possession, Charny's name features in every serious study of the relic, and researchers still comb the archives of Champagne and Burgundy for clues about how a mid-level French knight obtained it ^[8]. No document has yet answered the question.

For military historians he stands with the great captains of the early Hundred Years War, remembered less for victories, since he fought in several defeats, than for conduct. The fourteenth century produced abler generals, but few figures who so completely embodied what their society claimed to admire. That is why the question who was Geoffroi de Charny still has a clear answer: the knight his own age chose as its measure of knighthood ^[6].