Geoffroy de Thoisy

Geoffroy de Thoisy, chevalier seigneur de Mimeure, was a Burgundian naval commander and Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece involved in Philip the Good’s Crusade endeavors in the 1440s.

He commanded a Burgundian flotilla organized by Philip III the Good, Duke of Burgundy (r. 1419-1467) in May 1441 at the request from the Knights Hospitaller to help defend Rhodes against the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt. The duke went in person to Sluis to see off his flotilla. Throughout 1442, de Thoisy’s force was based at Rhodes, harassing the Muslim shipping and coastline. Having refitted at Villefranche, it was again in action off the North African coast and Rhodes in 1444. When a second Mamluk fleet assailed the island, the Burgundians helped the Hospitallers lift the siege of the town of Rhodes which lasted for forty days.

Next, in response to the Byzantine appeal for help against the Ottoman advance, Philip instructed de Thoisy to lead his squadron to reinforce a squadron of four galleys built or hired at Nice and Venice, commanded by Waleran de Wavrin, to join Pope Eugene IVs planned Crusade. De Wavrin's four galleys sailed in July 1444 but failed to stop Murad II's Anatolian army from crossing the Bosporus. De Thoisy joined de Wavrin's squadron at Constantinople where the latter had gone to spend the winter. In the meantime, the crusading army led by Wladyslaw III of Poland (Ulaszlo I as king of Hungary) and Janos Hunyadi had been severely defeated by the united Anatolian and Rumelian armies of Murad II, on 10 November 1444, on the plane before Varna, on the coast of the Black Sea. In the spring of 1445, de Wavrin sailed to the Danube to join the Hungarians in the continuing Crusade of Varna while de Thoisy took his ships along the south coast of the Black Sea.

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