A member of the lesser nobility of Champagne, Joinville first attended the court of Louis IX at Saumur (1241), probably as a squire. The young Joinville took the crusader's cross at the same time as the King (1244) and set out with him (August 1248) on his expedition to Egypt, from where the crusaders planned to attack Syria. Captured with the entire army, Louis and Joinville were ransomed, and Joinville became friends with Louis during the King's subsequent stay at Acre. They returned to France in 1254. While in Syria, Joinville wrote the first draft of a minor work, his Credo, a rather naive statement of belief that was probably revised later. Made seneschal of Champagne on his return, he became an expert in court procedures and seems to have divided his time between the royal court and his fief of Joinville. He refused to accompany the King on his fatal crusade to Tunis (1270), having previously told him that it was folly. Joinville lived to testify for the canonization of the King (1282) and to see it enacted (1298); he controlled his domain until his death at 93.

Preliminary drafts of Joinville's major work, the Histoire de Saint-Louis (The History of St. Louis, or The Life of St. Louis), may have been begun as early as the 1270s, but the final form was commissioned by Jeanne of Champagne and Navarre, wife of King Philip IV the Fair. It was not completed at the time of her death (1305) and so was presented in 1309 to her son Louis X. The Histoire is a personal account, which, in the course of setting forth the exploits of his idol, King Louis IX, reveals Joinville himself as a deeply moving man: simple, honest, straightforward, affectionate. He makes no attempt to conceal his occasional cowardice, his lack of piety, his tactlessness, or his garrulity. Although the short narratives of Louis's early life and of his later reign, death, and canonization are valuable because of the author's proximity to them, the heart of the book lies in its lengthy central section, the account of the Crusade. Besides telling the financial hardships, the dangers of sea voyages, and the ravages of disease, he vividly describes the confusion and lack of discipline in the crusading army. A blunt adviser, Joinville paints his king's sublime unworldliness against his own frank humanity. In addition, the book describes Muslim customs.

The original manuscript of the work disappeared from all records shortly after its composition. The Histoire was first printed and modernized from an inferior manuscript in 1547.