Burchard’s description of Palestinian society is an
important record of the ethno-social conditions of the
region in the last generation of the Crusader presence.
Among the Eastern Christian communities there, he
praised the Armenians for their piety and vehemently
criticized the Crusaders for their behavior, prophesy-
ing the loss of the Holy Land to Christendom “due to
their sins.”
Further Reading
Burchard of Mount Sion. Descriptio Terrae Sanctae. Ed. C.J.J.
Laurent. Leipzig: Akademie Verlag, 1864.
Grabois, Aryeh. “Christian Pilgrims in the Thirteenth Century and
the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: Burchard of Mount Sion.” In
Outremer: Studies in the History of the Crusading Kingdom
of Jerusalem Presented to Joshua Prawer. Ed. B.Z. Kedar et
al. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1982, pp. 285–296.
Aryeh Grabois
BUSNOYS, ANTOINE
(Busnois; ca. 1430–1492)
French composer in the service of the Burgundian court.
His works, of which three-voice chansons are most
numerous, typify the Franco-Burgundian style in the
third quarter of the 15th century.
Busnoys’s name indicates that he or his family came
from Busne (Pas-de-Calais), a town in northeastern
France. Nothing is known of his early life and education,
but in 1461 he was recorded as a chaplain at Saint-Gatien
in Tours, at which time he was involved in an attack on
a priest and was excommunicated. He did not remain
in disgrace for long, since he soon became a singer and
minor cleric at the royal abbey of Saint-Martin in Tours
and in April 1465 was promoted from the position of
choir clerk to subdeacon there. At Tours, he was a col-
league and perhaps a student of the famous composer
Johannes Ockeghem, master of the French royal chapel
and treasurer of the abbey of Saint-Martin. In September
1465, Busnoys sought and received the post of master of
the choirboys at Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand, Poitiers, which
he held until July 1466.
In his motet In hydraulis, which pays homage to
Ockeghem, Busnoys describes himself as “unworthy
musician of the illustrious count of Charolais,” referring
to Charles the Bold, son of Philip the Good, duke in
June 1467, Busnoys was listed as a singer in Charles’s
private service in March 1467, and he continued in that
position when Charles succeeded his father as duke in
June 1467. Busnoys was offi cially admitted to the ducal
chapel in 1471 and, with other members of the chapel,
followed Charles on most of his military campaigns,
but probably not the last, the disastrous battle at Nancy
in 1477, at which Charles was killed.
After Charles’s death, Busnoys served his daughter,
Marie de Bourgogne, and her consort, Maximilian of
Austria, whom she married in 1478. He remained a
member of the Habsburg-Burgundian chapel in the
Netherlands until it was temporarily disbanded in 1483
after Marie’s death. He is listed in court documents of
that time as a “priest-chaplain.”
Busnoys’s subsequent activities are uncertain, but
they may have included a visit to Italy, since some works
with Italian texts are attributed to him and his music was
widely disseminated there. At the time of his death in
1492, he was choirmaster at Saint-Sauveur in Bruges.
Busnoys’s reputation as a composer during his later
years and after his death was exceeded among his con-
temporaries only by that of Ockeghem. The theorist
Johannes Tinctoris dedicated his treatise on the modes
(1476) jointly to Ockeghem and Busnoys, and as late
as 1529 Pietro Aron called him “a great man and an
excellent musician.”
Busnoys was also an outstanding poet. A friend of
Jean Molinet, with whom he exchanged poems, he un-
doubtedly wrote many of the texts he set to music, in
the tradition of such earlier poet-musicians as Adam de
la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut. His works include
two Masses for four voices (L’homme armé, O crux
lignum), a Credo, a Magnifi cat, eight motets (mostly
four-voice), two hymns, and some seventy-fi ve secular
pieces, almost all French rondeaux and virelais. His
music is characterized by its triadic sonority, strong
harmonic progressions, clear structure, and extensive
use of imitation, securing for him a central position in
the evolution of musical style from Dufay to Josquin.
See also Adam de la Halle; Machaut, Guillaume de;
Ockeghem, JohannesFurther Reading
Busnoys, Antoine. Collected Works. New York: Broude Trust,- Parts 2 and 3: The Latin-Texted Works, ed. Richard
Taruskin.
Higgins, Paula M. “Antoine Busnois and Musical Culture in Late
Fifteenth-Century France and Burgundy.” Diss. Princeton
University, 1987.
——. “In hydraulis Revisited: New Light on the Career of
Antoine Busnois.” Journal of the American Musicological
Society 39 (1986): 36–86.
Perkins, Leeman L. “The L’homme armé Masses of Busnoys
and Ockeghem: A Comparison.” Journal of Musicology 3
(1984): 363–96.
Taruskin, Richard. “Antoine Busnoys and the L’homme armé
Tradition.” Journal of the American Musicological Society
39 (1986): 255–93.
Martin Picker
BYRHTFERTH (fl. 985–1011)
Priest and monk of the Abbey of Ramsey, one of the
most learned Englishmen of his time, and a studentBURCHARD OF MOUNT SION