During the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, the court of Valois Burgundy displayed expert skills in political communication. Many expedients were used (ceremonies, processions, the public reading of letters, the prince’s pilgrimage, sermons) in order to inform, seduce and convince a multicultural people who lived in a fragmented territory with no real capital. This paper, however, is not a simple catalog of communication procedures employed in the principality. Instead it prioritizes a time-bound perception of the issue (past, present and future projection) in an attempt to understand the subtleties and the limits of this vast enterprise of symbolic communication whose overarching goal was to assert the legitimacy of the princely power. By evoking a real or fictitious ancestry, staging with refinement the body of the prince and promoting emotional communions, this political communication showed itself particularly subtle, yet on the whole not very effective due to the ultimate inability to shape a State. The absence of a common project shared by princes and subjects can most probably explain the failure of this brilliant deployment of the Burgundian media. Indeed, the latter proved more effective in forging the myth of the Burgundian State than in anchoring it in a time-bound reality.