Guillaume de Machaut

Guillaume de Machaut, a man famous for both his poetry and his musical compositions, wrote his Prise d’Alexandrie (or Capture of Alexandria) just a few years after the death of his hero, King Peter I of Cyprus (1359-69). It is a verse history of Peter’s reign, and was Machaut’s last major literary work. Peter’s ancestors had ruled the island of Cyprus since the 1190s, and in 1365 Peter gained notoriety throughout western Europe as leader of a crusading expedition which captured the Egyptian port