Antoine de la Sale (also la Salle, de Lasalle; 1385/861460/61) 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. Biography 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. He travelled from Norcia to the Monti Sibillini and the neighboring Pilate's Lake (the final resting place of Pontius Pilate, according to local legend). The story of his adventures on this trip and of the local legends and Sibyl's grotto form a chapter of La Salade, which also has a map of the ascent from Montemonaco. In 1426 La Sale probably returned with Louis III of Anjou, who was also comte de Provence, to Provence, where he was acting as viguier of Arles in 1429. In 1434 René of Anjou, Louis's successor, made La Sale tutor to his son, John II, Duke of Lorraine (also known as the Duke of Calabria), to whom he dedicated, between the years 1438 and 1447, his La Salade, a textbook of the studies necessary for a prince. The title is of course a play on his own name, but