Joinville, JEAN, SIRE DE, the biographer of St Louis of France, was born in 1224, and became sénéchal to Thibaud, Count of Champagne and king of Navarre. He took part in the unfortunate crusade of Louis IX. (1248-54), returned with him to France, and lived thereafter partly at court, partly on his estates. He declined to go on the fatal expedition to Tunis, and survived till July 11, 1317. During his stay at Acre in 1250, at the age of twenty-six, he occupied his leisure in com- posing a manual of the Christian faith—his Credo, which he retouched thirty-seven years later; and there is extant a letter he wrote to Louis X. at the age of ninety-one. During the crusade he took notes of events and wrote down his impressions. At the age of almost eighty, at the entreaty of Jeanne de Champagne, wife of Philip le Bel, he undertook his Vie de Saint Louis, which he finished after the death of his patroness, and presented in 1309 to her son (afterwards Louis X.). The concluding portion of the book bears traces of senility; nothing, on the other hand, is more clear, animated, and real than the part relating to the crusade. Thus the book is obviously a collection of pieces composed at different times. Joinville is an excellent example of the best type of 13th-century cavalier, with all his admirable qualities as well as all his limitations and defects: he is brave, pious, candid, devoted to his king while strictly maintaining against him his feudal rights, considerate for his vassals, a jealous guardian of all traditional privileges; but, on the other hand, his intelligence generally stops short at detail and cannot grasp general causes: he relates unskilful military operations without criticising or apparently even understanding them; he approves intolerance in St Louis, and falls into woeful puerilities in his narration. His style conforms closely to his character: it is veracious, flowing, naive, often singularly expressive, but it has neither the elegance of the best prose-writers of the middle ages nor the vigour and solidity of Villehardouin: it is the tone of an amiable and familiar talker, who sometimes forgets himself a little in his reminiscences, but never fails to charm. The book has the one consummate merit of sympathetically raising up clear before our eyes the breathing image of a romantic figure over whom already there hung the shadow of a tragic destiny.
Unfortunately the text has only come down to us in later MSS. in which the language has been modernised; but the methodical study of competent editors has at length restored with almost complete security both the substance and the form of the book—one of the most precious bequests of the middle ages, holding its place in time between Villehardouin and Froissart. The best edition is that of N. de Wailly (1875). See Didot, Études sur la Vie et les Travaux de Jean de Joinville (1870).