Chrétien de Troyes

Chrétien de Troyes was a French poet who wrote at the courts of Champagne and Flanders in the later twelfth century. Little is known of his life beyond what his own prologues say: he served Countess Marie of Champagne, daughter of Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and later Count Philip of Flanders.

He is the earliest known author of Arthurian verse romances in French, and the poems that fixed the matter of Britain for later writers: Erec and Enide, Cligés, Yvain (The Knight with the Lion), Lancelot (The Knight of the Cart), and the unfinished Perceval. He also wrote courtly lyrics and, by his own account, translations from Ovid.