Sophie Gee

involved in that many battles.

So what we're seeing here is a satirical overblowing of the figure of the knight in the medieval world.

And the detail about the knight that some genius historian has exhumed since Chaucer wrote this poem is that we kind of know who Chaucer was basing this figure on, but that the knight by the time Chaucer was writing was basically a mercenary.

He was essentially a soldier for hire.

that this person would no longer have been someone who would be fighting as part of a kind of kingly retinue.

So ostensibly he stands in for the ideal type of the Christian warrior, but actually what we're seeing in this vignette is someone who's more likely to be fighting as

under pay, that that will determine the campaigns that he's fighting on.

And he's participating in the Christian crusades against Islam.

He's fought in Alexandria, he's fought in the Holy Land, and we find out that he's been fighting in

Eastern Europe and against Muslims in all of these regions.

And actually what's emerging in the period is not just a sense of intense rivalry between the Islamic world and the Christian world, but also a sense that European countries,

Christians need to gin up their sense of togetherness and solidarity by fighting these almost performative crusades against the Islamic world.

That it's as much about trying to consolidate a myth of European unity as it is about trying to defeat the power of the Islamic world.

And just to put it in context, the Alexandrian crusade, which this guy's been on, which was in 1365.

So

during Chaucer's lifetime was this total devastation of the extraordinary vibrant modern city of Alexandria.

There was a looting of Muslim and Coptic Christian tombs, a total destruction of the city.

It was actually a disaster from a trade point of view for the Christians because after these lands had been attacked by the West, Christians across the Muslim world were devastated

increasingly persecuted and trade possibilities were increasingly ended.

So what Chaucer is including in this passage for people who are really in the know, namely his own circles of politically really knowledgeable colleagues and diplomats and other