Antoine de la Sale

Antoine de la Sale (also la Salle, de Lasalle; 1385/86 – 1460/61) was a French courtier, educator and writer. He participated in a number of military campaigns in his youth and he only began writing when he had reached middle age, in the late 1430s. He lived in Italy at the time, but returned to France in the 1440s, where he acted as umpire in tournaments, and he wrote a treatise on the history of the knightly tournament in 1459. He became the tutor of the sons of Louis de Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, to whom he dedicated a moral work in 1451. His most successful work was Little John of Saintré, written in 1456, when he was reaching the age of seventy.

He was born in Provence, probably at Arles, the illegitimate son of Bernardon de la Salle, a celebrated Gascon mercenary, mentioned in Froissart's Chronicles. His mother was a peasant, Perrinette Damendel.

In 1402 Antoine entered the court of the third Angevin dynasty at Anjou, probably as a page. In 1407 he was at Messina with Louis II, Duke of Bourbon, who had gone there to enforce his claim to the kingdom of Sicily. The next years he perhaps spent in Brabant, for he was present at two tournaments given at Brussels and Ghent. In 1415 he took part in the successful expedition by John I of Portugal against the Moors in Ceuta. In 1420 he accompanied the 17-year-old Louis III of Anjou in his attempt to assert his claim as King of Naples.

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