he possessed no fief of his own, hence on the muster lists that record his participations in the early campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War he is repeatedly described as based at the Toucy family fief of Pierre-Perthuis. In 1342, Charny led a cavalry charge at the Battle of Morlaix in Brittany which foundered due to a cleverly disguised trap laid by the English. Taken captive, Charny was transported to Goodrich Castle in England as the prisoner of Richard Talbot, 2nd Baron Talbot, who according to an English letters patent of October 1343 allowed him to return to France “to find the money for his ransom". Having earlier performed some valuable services for Dauphin Humbert II de Viennois, for which he had been promised revenues from the Dauphiné town of Saint-Marcellin, Charny urgently sought full payment of these, only to be baulked at every turn because of Humbert’s chronic bankruptcy. During the summer of 1344 he rode far to the south of France to confront Humbert face-to-face, but Humbert merely issued further irredeemable money orders, following which, instead of returning home, Charny seems to have boarded a sailing ship bound for the east, a voyage that he very graphically describes in his Book of Geoffroi de Charny poem. Crusade The next that Charny is heard of is as a crusader, taking part in the capture of the harbour fortress of Smyrna on 28 October 1344, a papally-sponsored assault by fast galleys which took the defending Turks by surprise. He was one of a very select band of knights led by Edouard de Beaujeu whom Avignon Pope Clement VI, on learning of their efforts from his on-the-spot legate Patriarch Henri d’Asti, specially commended for their bravery. Although there is a common supposition that Charny accompanied the ineffectual crusade to Smyrna led by Dauphin Humbert during the years 1345-7, this supposition derives from a misreading of a passage in the Militia Passionis Jhesu Christi of Philippe de Mézières. In actuality Mézières specifically listed Charny as having been with Beaujeu and other ‘brave knights’ on what is now known to have been the earlier, militarily successful Smyrna crusade of 1344. Furthermore there is reliable contemporary documentation that Charny was already back in France when Humbert’s slow-moving crusade reached Smyrna in the spring of 1346. Later career Following Charny’s return to France, he joined a siege of the town of Aiguillon in the country’s