Lord Geoffrey’s Fancy

by Alfred Duggan

First published 1962

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3.0(9)

A landless knight enters the service of Geoffrey de Briel, one of the leading Frankish lords of thirteenth-century Greece. In the feudal states created after the Fourth Crusade, tournaments, private wars and obligations of homage bind western knights to a landscape whose Greek population and rival rulers resist simple conquest.

Geoffrey’s reputation as an ideal knight is tested by political rebellion and by his pursuit of a forbidden love. Told by a subordinate who admires but does not romanticise him, the novel follows the gap between chivalric language and the bargains, evasions and violence required to preserve a lordship in Frankish Morea.