Lamentatio sanctae matris ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae ('Lament of the Holy Mother Church of Constantinople') is a motet by the Renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay.
[2] The motet probably belongs to a series of four Lamentations for the fall of Constantinople composed by Dufay and mentioned for the first time in one of his letters addressed to Piero and Giovanni de' Medici.
[3] The musical score and the texts of the French Chanson and the Latin Cantus Firmus are found in two contemporary manuscript sources: Codex 2794 (fols.
[4] It is believed to have been composed in the context of the "Feast of the Pheasant", a banquet and extravagant political show organised in Lille by Philip the Good of Burgundy on 17 February 1454.
[6] At one point in the show, according to the chronicles, an actor dressed as a woman in white satin clothes, personifying the Church of Constantinople (according to one hypothesis, played by Olivier de la Marche himself[7]) entered the hall of the banquet riding on an elephant, to recite a "complaint and lamentation in a piteous and feminine voice" ("commença sa complainte et lamentacion à voix piteuse et femmenine").