The courtly milieu of the "waning Middle Ages" gave a warm reception to the first "L'homme armé" tune. This jaunty little fifteenth-century ditty, about an armed knight riding to conquest, may have gained popularity in the 1460s, when a new Crusade against the Turk was being preached. Antoine Busnois and Robert Morton, composers to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, involved themselves with the tune, and by the end of the decade, a tradition had been spawned of composing cyclic Masses based upon the hit song; around forty "L'homme armé" Masses would be composed in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, many as showpieces of one-upmanship between composers. Among the earliest contributions to this huge complex of musical cross-references, and probably one of the earliest of the composer's masses, is the Missa l'Homme armé of Johannes Ockeghem.

The earliest composers to complete cycles of all five movements of the Mass Ordinary, unified around a voice (usually the tenor) singing "L'homme armé" as cantus firmus, include Busnois, Ockeghem, and Guillaume Dufay. (A splendid collection of six masses on the tune from this early period also survives, having apparently been a gift presented by Charles' Burgundian court to the King of Naples.) It has proven difficult for scholars to determine which of the three was written first. Busnois' patron was Charles the Bold himself, and the other two masses could have been written for his court, or for his noble Order of the Golden Fleece (1468), in imitation of Busnois. Another possible occasion hypothesized for Ockeghem's version is a French celebration in 1454 of the end of the Hundred Years' War, at which Ockeghem was present. With Ockeghem's early penchant (demonstrated in his Missa Caput) for challenging himself compositionally by adapting (and complicating) the plan of another man's piece, he could hardly have known of the complexity of Dufay's and Busnois' settings and let the opportunity to exceed them pass.

Ockeghem's treatment of his cantus firmus is remarkably lucid in some senses, though compositional advances in his style are very much in evidence. The memorable tune, with its characteristic and quite audible leaps of martial fifths and fourths, is sung in its entirety at least once in each movement; he manipulates the rhythmic content by careful placement of rests, but does not change the basic contour. He attempts no inversion of the tune (as in Busnois' Agnus Dei) or retrograde (as in Dufay's Agnus). However, he does call for transposition twice—down a fifth in the Credo, placing the cantus firmus melody below the other voices, and down an octave in the Agnus Dei, creating a sudden new richness of vocal depth for the final movement. While Josquin later chose to culminate his Missa l'Homme armé super voces musicales with climactic transposition upwards, Ockeghem—known as a splendid bass singer—naturally seeks depth. He also creates a setting which takes advantage of certain ambiguities within the system of modal music, such that intentional variations between B flat and B natural in the tenor melody create different harmonic casts for different movements. Finally, his Agnus Dei III beautifully manipulates the vocal scoring—first alternating a series of duets, then trios, and concluding with the full four-voiced texture—to culminate his entire mass.

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