very summit of fifteenth-century musical art and artifice.
The later composers in the line, Italians who were both temporally and geographically remote from
the origins of the tradition, probably thought of it as a “purely musical” tradition, and a rather academic
one at that, involving nothing more than a test-piece to establish professional credentials. The
circumstances attending the earliest L’Homme Armé Masses—circumstances probably well known to the
composers of the “Tinctoris” generations—suggest that there was originally a lot more to it. These
circumstances point to the court of Burgundy, and in particular to a knightly order founded there, as the
site and source of this most famous of all emulatory traditions in music.
In 1453, Constantinople (now Istanbul in Turkey), the largest and most splendid city in all of Europe,
the capital of the latter-day Roman (Byzantine) Empire and the seat of Greek Christendom, fell after a
two-month siege before the gigantic cannons of the Ottoman Sultan, Muhammad II (“The Conqueror”).
Muhammad made it the capital of his empire, which it remained until 1918, and it has been a Turkish and
a Muslim city ever since its conquest. The European response to this stunning event was one of horror and
professed resolve, but little action. (Indeed, the armies of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor,
were defeated largely because no European power sent aid.) In immediate—if ultimately futile—reaction
to the calamity of Constantinople, Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy vowed to go on a Crusade against
the Turks. On 17 February 1454 he convened at Lille in northern France a great meeting of his own
knightly retinue, known as the Order of the Golden Fleece. At this meeting, known as the Banquet of the
Oath of the Pheasant, the Knights of the Order were sworn to the defense of Constantinople. Descriptions
of the proceedings by court chroniclers recount the lavish musical performances that enlivened the
banquet. At the climax, right before the oath itself was sworn, a giant led in an elephant on whose back
was a miniature castle, from which a woman dressed in mourning sang a lament for the fallen city—
perhaps one of four such Constantinopolitan laments that Guillaume Du Fay is known to have written, of
which one survives.
This gives us some idea of the manner in which ceremonial music was “consumed” by the court of
Burgundy, and the sorts of occasions that the great musicians of the day were expected to dignify. A great
deal of sacred music has been circumstantially associated with the Order of the Golden Fleece, including
many of the early L’Homme Armé Masses, which date from the period when the Order had become at
least nominally a crusading order and when Philip the Good’s famously belligerent son and eventual
successor Charles the Bold had become active in it. Charles is already known to us as the patron of
Antoine Busnoys, who had entered his service shortly before Charles’s accession to the ducal throne in
1467.
FIG. 12-7 Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, presiding over his Grand Council in 1474 (oil painting at the palace of
Versailles, France).
The song L’Homme Armé was a special favorite of Charles, who identified himself with the titular
“Man at Arms” (probably Christ himself, if the connection with Crusades was there from the beginning).^4
The song may even have been written for Charles. In any case, we know the song as a song, text and all,
thanks to the chance survival of a manuscript containing a cycle of six anonymous L’Homme Armé Masses