In 1396, a Franco-Burgundian crusading army was crushed by the Ottoman forces of Bayezid I at Nicopolis, one of the most shocking defeats of the later Middle Ages. Within a year, Philippe de Mézières, an influential crusade propagandist of his age, responded with the Epistre lamentable et consolatoire.

For Mézières, Nicopolis was not merely a military catastrophe, but a moral and spiritual crisis afflicting all Latin Christendom. His epistle not only offers advice on avenging the defeat and recovering what had been lost but also sets out a programme for moral and military reform and finally makes an appeal for his lifelong project -- the Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ, a new, disciplined military order which would remedy the shared illness of Christendom.

This volume presents the first English translation of this key text, with an introduction and full annotations. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the crusades, late medieval France and Burgundy, and early Ottoman history.

Zeynep Kocabıyıkoğlu Çeçen received her PhD in Medieval History from Bilkent University, Ankara, in 2012. She has been a Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway, University of London, since 2023. Her research focuses on the representations of late medieval knighthood and the crusades in medieval literature, and on the memory of crusades in Turkey from the late nineteenth century onwards. Her most recent publications include Haçlıların Hezimeti Niğbolu Muharebesi: Fransız Kaynaklarından Türkler’e Bakış (“The Crusaders’ Defeat at the Battle of Nicopolis: The Turks through the French Sources,” 2024), an annotated volume of translated medieval French texts with accompanying analysis.