Pierre Dubois (c. 1255 – after 1321), a French publicist in the reign of Philip the Fair, was the author of a series of political pamphlets embodying original and daring views.
The most important of his works, his treatise on the recovery of the Holy Land, De recuperatione terrae sanctae, was written in 1306, and dedicated in its extant form to Edward I, though it is certainly addressed to Philip.
Dubois outlines the conditions necessary to a successful crusade—the establishment and enforcement of a state of peace among the Christian nations of the West by a council of the church; the reform of the monastic, and especially of the military, orders; the reduction of their revenues; the instruction of a number of young men and women in oriental languages and the natural sciences with a view to the government of Eastern peoples; and the establishment of Charles of Valois as emperor of the East.
The king of France was in fact, when once the pope was deprived of the temporal power, to become the suzerain of the Western nations, thus ending its rivalry with the Habsburd dynasty, and in a later and separate memoir Dubois proposed that he should cause himself to be made emperor by Pope Clement V. His zeal for the crusade was probably subordinate to the desire to secure the wealth of the monastic orders for the royal treasury, and to transfer the ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the crown.
He is generally credited with Quaedam proposita papae a rege super facto Templariorum, a draft epistle supposed to be addressed to Clement by Philip.