This essay considers the expression that Charles d’Orléans’s trans-national, trans-linguistic identity achieves in his poetry. It owes much to work by Jonathan Hsy and Ardis Butterfield, who highlight connections between Charles’s writing and the geo-political situation produced by the Hundred Years War. I add to their accounts an appreciation of Charles’s deliberate use of his biography in his verse in order to curry favour across audiences in England and on the Continent. I observe this process in operation at Blois, in France, where Charles wrote comic poetry among a coterie, and in England, where the poet was imprisoned for twenty-five years. I advance a new model for the transmission history of the poetry written by the duke during his incarceration, arguing that Charles prepared two corpora of his work for circulation, one politicized, the other (including the English poetry) not. Finally, my focus on the politically and socially instrumental potential of Charles’s writing provides a fresh context in which to view his use of the unusual word ‘Europe’ in English ballade 35. I close with a consideration of Charles’s sensitivity both to the valences of the word and to the discourse of English isolationism into which he draws it in this text.