On May 13, 1249, the royal flotilla of some 120 large transport ships embarked with the French army for Egypt. Initially prevented in his mission by a violent storm, the king once more set sail with one-quarter of his forces on May 30, arriving off Damietta on June 4. Bravely brushing aside his advisers’ caution that they await the remaining reinforcements before besieging the city, the ships captured the rich port after only a day-long siege. The name of Herve’s vessel, The Penitence of God, also fit neatly into the larger event, for St. Louis conducted his leadership of the Christian vanguard conspicuously dressed as a pious penitent bearing the iconic Oriflamme, the great battle standard of the medieval French kings.

In 1956, the chartiste Robert-Henri Bautier uncovered an elaborate scheme undertaken to mass-produce “crusade charters” by two associates, the businessman Eugène-Henri Courtois and the copyist and genealogist Paul Letellier. Their efforts were inspired by Louis-Philippe’s unprecedented effort to celebrate the ancient French aristocracy by erecting, in a suite of large rooms in the north wing of the Palace of Versailles, a monument to all those who gave military assistance to the French crown during its prosecution of the medieval crusades. The so-called Hall of the Crusades opened to great fanfare in 1843. It contained 120 monumental wall paintings of the events, including three directly related to those described in the Hopkins manuscript: Georges Rouget’s Disembarkment of Saint Louis in Egypt, Henry Delaborde’s Siege of Damietta by John of Brienne, and Oscar Gué’s Saint Louis Receives the Patriarch of Jerusalem at Damietta.

Those who could produce documentary evidence of the direct involvement of their families’ medieval ancestors in support of the Crusades were eligible to have their ancestral family coats of arms emblazoned on the walls and columns of the room. A burning desire to renovate the fortunes of the French aristocracy after so many had been reduced to ruin and even execution by “Madame Guillotine” during the French Revolution drew many to scour muniment boxes and family papers in châteaux and archives across France.

For those who were found wanting, Courtois and Letellier were happy to oblige, producing hundreds of fake medieval charters on scraps of genuine medieval parchment, and often in quite convincing medieval scribal hands. The Hopkins De Nolis Charter is written on a tiny horizontal strip of medieval vellum sewn to a smaller vertical strip ostensibly intended to bear an official wax seal. It also appears that it might well have served its purpose, for the painted armorials and names of at least three of the four knights named in the Hopkins manuscript—Jean de Québriac, Raoul de La Moussaye, and Geoffroy de Boisbilly—appear side by side on the wall of the third hall representing the period 1240–48.

Even after their “fire sale” of fake medieval documents, some 350 remained unsold and were subsequently acquired by the National Archives (Collection Courtois, Les Fonds d’archives privées 109 AT12). For his part, Courtois went bankrupt and was imprisoned, though Letellier appears to have continued manufacturing fakes, also going on to train the infamous “autograph” letter forger Vrain-Lucas, who peddled Letellier’s false genealogical materials on commission to private buyers. Their criminal enterprise was also aided through the connivance of two unscrupulous archivists-paleographers, Eugène de Stadler and Alexandre Teulet, whose role it was to authenticate or translate Letellier’s forged documents.

This sordid story does not quite end there, however. The Hopkins “De Nolis” manuscript was acquired in the auction of the now-defunct company Astrophil. Led by the French antiquarian collector and bookseller Gérard Lhéritier, Astrophil essentially amounted to an elaborate Ponzi scheme between 2002 and 2014 in which the high-flying Lhéritier bought some 136,000 rare books, autographs, and manuscripts, which he then appraised at extravagant prices, dividing up their supposed value into shares that seemed to have promised that Astrophil would buy back investors’ shares for at least 40 percent more than their original investment. These he sold to around 18,000 investors, many of them elderly and not wealthy, reaching a capitalization of nearly $1 billion.

The company was closed by French authorities and has been sold in a series of auction sales, the first of which yielded some $4.2 million. It was this first sale that was the source of the Hopkins acquisition in which the university acquired the artifact for a tiny fraction of Astrophil’s earlier aspirational valuation of the document as an “authentic” Crusader manuscript. The manuscript is now preserved in the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection alongside the official document from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, which was granted only after considerable efforts had been taken to prove that the manuscript was indeed a forgery and thus eligible—unlike many other seminal documents of French military history—for an export license to the United States.

—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens