Saint Louis (1214-1270), that is Louis IX, King of France, is the only King of France to have been canonized and one of the greatest figures of medieval Christendom. Brought to the throne at twelve under the regency of his mother, Blanche of Castile, he reigned for forty-four years and embodied, for centuries, the ideal of the "Most Christian King": a sovereign who governs as a penitent, renders justice in person, protects the poor against the powerful, and makes personal holiness the very heart of his royal office.[1][2]
His piety was no décor. Louis heard two Masses a day, served lepers with his own hands, fed dozens of poor people at his table every day, and wore the hairshirt beneath the purple. He bought from the Emperor of Constantinople the Crown of Thorns of Christ and built to house it the Sainte-Chapelle, one of the masterpieces of Gothic art. Twice he took the cross: the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), on which he was taken prisoner in Egypt, then the Eighth (1270), on which he died before Tunis whispering, it is said, the name of Jerusalem.[3][4]
"Dear son, I teach you first to love God with all your heart and all your power, for without that no one can be worth anything." — Saint Louis, Teachings to his son Philip[5]
This article retraces the life of Louis IX — the child-king, the husband and father, the justiciar king, the captive crusader, the dying man of Tunis — then his spirituality (prayer, charity, penance, love of the Passion, Franciscan spirit), and finally his death, his canonization of 1297 and his cult. It does not retell the history of the Crusades nor that of the Franciscan Order, which are treated in their own articles; it sheds light on what makes this king a saint — and why the Church enrolled him in her catalogue less than thirty years after his death.
How do we know Saint Louis?
Remarkably for a man of the 13th century, Louis IX is exceptionally well documented — and by witnesses who knew him, served him, heard his confession, and loved him. His reputation for holiness, immediate as it was, very early prompted the writing of Lives and the opening of a canonical inquiry; one must only, as always, distinguish direct testimony from hagiographical amplification.
Joinville, the friend as witness
The most famous source is the Life of Saint Louis by John of Joinville (c. 1224-1317), seneschal of Champagne, the king's companion on the Seventh Crusade.[6] Completed in 1309, nearly forty years after Louis's death, and dedicated to the future Louis X, it is the narrative of a layman who loved his king: familiar, concrete, full of lived anecdotes, sometimes critical. Joinville did not follow Louis to Tunis; he even refused the Eighth Crusade. But for all that he shared — the captivity in Egypt, the conversations, the angers and tendernesses of the king — his testimony is of unequalled freshness.
The biographers of the trial
Around the canonization gravitate clerical sources, more edifying in tone:
- Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Dominican, the king's confessor for twenty years, wrote about 1272-1273 a Vita at the request of Pope Gregory X: witness to Louis's interior life and death.[7]
- William of Chartres, chaplain, completed this account with his own memories.[8]
- William of Saint-Pathus, confessor of Queen Margaret, composed at the beginning of the 14th century a Life of Monseigneur Saint Loys in French, drawn directly from the depositions of the canonization inquiry — that is, from testimony given under oath.[9]
- William of Nangis, monk of Saint-Denis, inserted Louis into the great official chronicle of the kingdom.[10]
The historian's distance
On these foundations an immense literature has been built, down to our own day. The reference biography remains that of Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Gallimard, 1996), which poses the decisive question: "Did Saint Louis exist?" — that is: can the real man be recovered from beneath the statue of the holy king?[11] His answer is yes: the sources, cross-checked, reveal a strong, coherent personality, whose holiness was not a posthumous construction but a fact already blazing in the king's lifetime.
| Source | Author | Nature | Date | Closeness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Life of Saint Louis | John of Joinville | Memoirs of a lay friend | 1309 | Direct witness (crusade) |
| Vita Ludovici | Geoffrey of Beaulieu | Life by the confessor | c. 1272-1273 | Direct witness (confession) |
| De vita et miraculis | William of Chartres | Chaplain's memories | c. 1275 | Direct witness |
| Life of Monseigneur Saint Loys | William of Saint-Pathus | From the inquiry | c. 1302-1303 | Depositions under oath |
| Gesta Ludovici | William of Nangis | Chronicle of Saint-Denis | late 13th c. | Official, posthumous |
A child-king under Blanche of Castile (1214-1234)
Birth at Poissy (1214)
Louis was born on 25 April 1214 at Poissy, a royal residence near Paris — a place to which he remained so attached that he would sometimes sign "Louis of Poissy", after the place of his baptism, which he judged more honourable than that of his coronation.[12][13] He was the son of Louis VIII the Lion and Blanche of Castile, granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and a princess of iron piety. The Capetian house was then at its apogee: Louis's grandfather, Philip Augustus, had just considerably enlarged the royal domain.
The death of Louis VIII and the coronation at Reims (1226)
The reign of Louis VIII was brief. Returning from a campaign against the Albigensians of the South, the king died of dysentery at Montpensier, on 8 November 1226. Louis was only twelve years old. To cut short any challenge from the great barons, he was crowned without delay: on 29 November 1226, the first Sunday of Advent, the child was anointed and crowned in Reims Cathedral.[14][15] A child on the throne of a kingdom the feudal lords dreamed of taking back in hand: humanly speaking, everything was fragile.
Blanche of Castile, regent and mother
What saved the crown was the mother. Blanche of Castile assumed the regency with exceptional political energy and intelligence.[16] She broke the coalitions of revolted barons, stood up to the King of England, and negotiated in 1229 the Treaty of Paris which prepared the attachment of Languedoc. Louis owed her his throne; above all, he owed her his faith. It was she who raised him in the fear of God and engraved on his heart a saying that all his biographers would report:
"She made me understand that, if I lay dying, she would rather see me die than see me commit a single mortal sin." — Words of Blanche of Castile reported by Saint Louis, in Joinville[17]
Louis would quote this sentence all his life. It explains everything else: a king for whom the loss of the soul is the only true disaster, more to be feared than defeat, sickness or death.
The weight of a mother
The attachment was so strong that Joinville sometimes sees a shadow in it: Blanche, jealous, kept the young Queen Margaret away from her son, to the point that husband and wife had to meet in secret on the staircases.[18] Louis's holiness did not erase the human tensions of a family of flesh. But between mother and son there reigned to the end a rare spiritual communion: when Blanche died, in November 1252, while Louis was in the Holy Land, he conceived a deep grief at it.
The king, the husband and the father (1234-1248)
Marriage to Margaret of Provence (1234)
On 27 May 1234, at Sens, Louis married Margaret of Provence, daughter of Count Raymond Berenger IV.[19] The marriage, political at first, became a true union: Margaret would share the king's trials as far as Egypt, where, pregnant and besieged in Damietta during her husband's captivity, she would show heroic courage. From this marriage eleven children were born; the eldest surviving son, Philip, would succeed his father as Philip III the Bold.[20]
The Sainte-Chapelle and the relics of the Passion
The most dazzling act of his devotion was the acquisition of the relics of the Passion. In 1238-1239, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin II of Courtenay, desperate for money, pawned and then sold the Crown of Thorns of Christ. Louis acquired it for an immense sum — some 135,000 livres.[21][22] When the relic arrived in France, the king, instead of receiving it in majesty, stripped himself of his insignia: on 19 August 1239, barefoot and in a simple tunic, he himself carried the Crown through Paris as far as Notre-Dame.
"The king, having laid aside his royal ornaments, barefoot and clothed in a simple tunic, carried the holy Crown on his shoulders, with his brother." — Walter Cornut, Archbishop of Sens, witness of the translation of 1239[23]
Officially, the sum paid by Louis was not the price of a sale. The Crown had been pawned to a rich Venetian merchant, and it was this creditor whom the king compensated. Since trade in relics remained canonically forbidden, the operation had taken the form of an exchange: the Holy Crown against the extinction of the debt. In February 1239, the matter was concluded and the relic left Venice.[24]
To house this treasure — soon completed by a fragment of the True Cross and other relics — Louis had the Sainte-Chapelle built within a few years, consecrated on 26 April 1248.[25] Its walls of glass, an immense shrine of light at the heart of the royal palace, bespeak a theology: the kingship of France would be the guardian of the Passion of Christ. It was also a political and spiritual gesture inscribing Paris, alongside Notre-Dame, as a new Jerusalem.
The justiciar king: the oak of Vincennes
Of all Louis's traits, none has marked French memory more than his justice. Joinville left its unforgettable image: the king rendering the law himself, without intermediary, to the humblest of his subjects.
"Many a time it happened that in summer he would go and sit in the wood of Vincennes, after his Mass, lean his back against an oak and have us sit around him. And all those who had business would come and speak to him, with no usher or other to hinder them." — John of Joinville, Life of Saint Louis[26]
This scene is not a mere pretty legend: it condenses a programme of government. For Louis, the king is not the owner of justice; he is its servant before God, answerable for the poor who are oppressed in his name.
The enquêteurs and the great ordinance of 1254
This concern was translated into institutions. As early as 1247, before leaving on crusade, Louis launched a great inquiry: royal enquêteurs — often mendicant friars — travelled the kingdom gathering complaints against the abuses of bailiffs and provosts, and making restitution.[27] On his return, he codified these principles in the great reforming ordinance of 1254: royal officers forbidden to accept gifts, to render unjust judgments, to tolerate blasphemy, gambling, prostitution.[28] He organized the curia regis into a regular court of justice — the future Parlement — and sought to abolish private war and trial by combat, those plagues of feudal society.
Protector of the poor and of learning
The reign saw charitable and learned foundations flourish. Louis created the Quinze-Vingts hospital for three hundred blind people, the house of the Filles-Dieu for repentant prostitutes, hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon, Compiègne; he supported the abbey of Royaumont, and favoured the rise of the University of Paris — whose famous college of the Sorbonne was founded by his chaplain Robert de Sorbon.[29] Around his court shone the most brilliant intellectual century of the Middle Ages: Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure were then teaching in Paris. A famous anecdote shows Thomas dining at the king's table, absorbed in his thoughts, then suddenly striking the table: "That settles it against the Manicheans!" — and Louis, far from taking offence, at once sent for a secretary to note down the theologian's argument.[30]
The shadow side: the Jews and blasphemy
An honest portrait of Louis cannot pass over in silence his harshest measures: those that struck the Jews and blasphemers. To omit them would be to lie by omission; to condemn them without understanding them would be another form of lying.
The struggle against usury came first. The ordinance of Melun (December 1230), issued in the name of the young king, forbade Jews to lend at interest; that of 1234 remitted to Christian debtors a third of their debts, restored even to those who had already paid it; the great ordinance of 1254 (articles 32 and 33) summoned Jews to cease "usuries, sorceries and characters" and forbade barons as well as royal agents to help them recover their debts.[31] Then came the trial of the Talmud: denounced by the convert Nicholas Donin as insulting to Christ and the Virgin, condemned by Gregory IX in 1239, the book was seized on 3 March 1240; in March 1240, a public disputation opposed, before Blanche of Castile and the whole court, the clerics — including the bishop of Paris — to four rabbis, including the famous Yehiel of Paris. The Talmud was declared infamous: twenty-four cartloads of manuscripts were burned in 1242 on the Place de Grève, after two days of shuttling back and forth; Innocent IV congratulated the king on 9 May 1244, and a second burning followed the same year. In 1254, the Jews were banished from the kingdom and their property confiscated, before being recalled a few years later; in 1268, it was foreign usurers — Lombards, Florentines, Cahorsins — who were expelled; in 1269, finally, the king imposed the rouelle, the sewn badge prescribed by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), barred Jews from public offices and from the street on the anniversaries of the Passion, and compelled them to listen to the preachings of the converted Dominican Pablo Christiani.[32]
Blasphemy was punished by the same ordinance of 1254 with corporal penalties which, in the practice of the reign, went as far as mutilation of the tongue and lips.[33]
What should the Catholic make of this? Three things, without attenuating anything. First, the canonization of 1297 canonized none of these edicts: after twenty-five years of inquiry, it recognized the charity and justice of the king — the bull Gloria laus enrolled him in the catalogue as a confessor of the faith, not as a legislator. Second, the context: in a Christendom where unity of faith founds the common order, Louis believed himself accountable before God for the salvation of his subjects, Jews included — whom he wanted to convert, not to exterminate: in 1247, he refused to finance his crusade with money confiscated from usurers, and in 1257-1258 he appointed a commission to repair excesses committed in his name; usury, moreover, was prosecuted among Christians as among foreigners. Finally, the distinction: this thirteenth-century religious anti-Judaism — the word "anti-Judaism" is Le Goff's own, severe though he is on this chapter — is not modern racial antisemitism, which the Church condemned (Nostra Aetate, § 4, 1965). A saint remains a man of his century; what makes him a saint is having loved God and the poor more than his crown — and that alone is what the Church sealed in 1297.[34]
The Seventh Crusade (1248-1254)
The vow of 1244
At the end of 1244, gravely ill at Pontoise, Louis came close to death. Recovered, he took the cross in thanksgiving, against the advice of his entourage and his mother.[35] The fall of Jerusalem, retaken by the Khwarezmian Turks that same year, added urgency to piety. After four years of meticulous preparation — he had the port of Aigues-Mortes built for the embarkation — the king departed on 25 August 1248.
Damietta and Mansoura (1249-1250)
The strategy aimed at Egypt, the heart of Muslim power. In June 1249, the crusaders took Damietta almost without a fight. But the advance toward Cairo bogged down in the Nile delta. On 8 February 1250, at Mansoura, the vanguard commanded by the king's brother, Robert of Artois, charged recklessly and was massacred.[36] The army, decimated by fighting, hunger and typhus, had to retreat.
Capture and ransom (1250)
On 6 April 1250, sick and exhausted, Louis was taken prisoner with what remained of his army.[37] His dignity in captivity struck even his jailers: he refused to swear blasphemous oaths, recited the office, and negotiated the liberation of his men before his own. Deliverance was bought at a high price: the restitution of Damietta and a considerable ransom, of the order of 400,000 livres tournois.[38] Meanwhile Queen Margaret, delivered of a child in the besieged town, prevented the garrison from fleeing by her composure.
Four years in the Holy Land (1250-1254)
Freed, Louis did not return home. Instead of regaining France, he remained four years in the Holy Land (1250-1254), ransoming Christian captives, fortifying Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa and Sidon, seeking alliances as far as the Mongols.[39] It was only on learning of his mother's death, at the end of 1252, that he resolved to return, in 1254. The crusade was a military failure; but in the eyes of contemporaries, the greatness of soul of the vanquished and captive king had paradoxically ennobled him.
The spirituality of Saint Louis
A king of prayer
Louis's holiness cannot be separated from his kingship: he sanctified the very office of king. Geoffrey of Beaulieu, his confessor, describes a man of monastic regularity: two Masses each day, the office recited at the fixed hours, long nocturnal prayers, retreats with the Cistercians and the mendicant friars.[40][41] He confessed frequently and accepted, though king, to receive the discipline (penitential scourging) from his confessor's hand.
Charity: Christ in the poor man and the leper
Like Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, his contemporary and co-patron of the Third Order, Louis took literally the word of the Judgment: "I was hungry and you gave me food" (Mt 25:35). Each day he fed dozens of poor people, often with his own hands, and he would kneel to wash beggars' feet.[42] Above all, he did not shrink from lepers, then objects of horror: he visited them, touched them, had them eat. Joinville reports this exchange, in which his whole scale of values can be read:
"He asked me which was better, to be a leper or to have committed a mortal sin; and I, who never lied to him, answered that I would rather have committed thirty than be a leper. […] He told me I had spoken like a scatterbrain, for no leprosy is as ugly as mortal sin." — John of Joinville, Life of Saint Louis[43]
Penance and love of the Passion
Beneath the purple, Louis wore the hairshirt, fasted rigorously, cut sought-after pleasures from his table. This austerity was not contempt for the world but love of the Cross: the king who had paid a fortune for the Crown of Thorns wanted to conform his life to the suffering Christ. The Sainte-Chapelle, the purchase of the relics, the crusade itself all belong to one same devotion to the Passion, the centre of his piety.[44]
Tertiary of Saint Francis
Louis belonged by heart to the first Franciscan generation. A friend of the Friars Minor as of the Preachers — he brought Franciscans and Dominicans into his counsels and foundations — he embraced the ideal of poverty and lowliness in his state as king.[45] Franciscan tradition counts him among its tertiaries, and the Church would give him as patron of the Franciscan Third Order, alongside Saint Elizabeth: proof that the spirituality of Assisi could bear fruit even on the throne.
The Teachings to his son
Louis's spiritual testament lies in the Teachings he dictated, dying, to his son Philip. In them can be heard, condensed, his whole doctrine of the Christian life and of government:
"Dear son, have a compassionate heart toward the poor and toward all those you believe to be suffering, and comfort them and help them according to your power." — Saint Louis, Teachings to his son Philip[46]
"Be so just that, whatever happens, you never depart from justice. And if a dispute arises between a poor man and a rich man, uphold the poor man against the rich, until you know the truth." — Saint Louis, Teachings to his son Philip[47]
The king's first commandment to his heir is not political but spiritual: to love God, to flee mortal sin, to serve the poor. All policy flows from it. (Modern criticism has shown that the version transmitted by Joinville was reworked; the core of the Teachings is nevertheless held to be authentically royal.)[48]
The Eighth Crusade and death at Tunis (1270)
The last vow
The dream of delivering the Holy Places never left Louis. In 1267, aged and sick, he took the cross again. The Eighth Crusade set sail in 1270; on the advice of his brother Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, it was diverted toward Tunis — a decision with debated motives, mixing the hope of converting the emir with Angevin interests.[49]
"Jerusalem, Jerusalem"
Landed near Carthage in July, the army was at once struck by an epidemic — dysentery or typhus — in the heat of the African summer. The king's son, John Tristan, died; then Louis himself fell. He died on 25 August 1270, laid on a bed of ashes arranged in a cross, hands joined.[50] His biographers gathered his last words, turned toward the Holy City he would never see again:
"We shall enter Jerusalem." — And, as he gave up his soul: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." — Last words of Saint Louis, reported by Geoffrey of Beaulieu[51]
The return of the relics
According to the custom reserved for the great (the mos Teutonicus), the body was boiled to separate the bones; his entrails remained at Monreale, in Sicily, while his bones were brought back to France by a long funeral procession and laid in 1271 in the basilica of Saint-Denis, necropolis of the kings.[52] All along the convoy's route, miracles were soon reported: popular veneration preceded, as often, the Church's judgment.
Canonization and cult
The trial (1272-1297)
As early as 1272, Pope Gregory X opened the inquiry with a view to canonization; Geoffrey of Beaulieu wrote his Vita for him. The instruction, conducted notably at Saint-Denis from 1282 to 1283, gathered dozens of testimonies on the king's life and miracles.[53] The process lasted twenty-five years, interspersed with vacancies of the Holy See and political crises.
The bull Gloria laus (1297)
It was finally Boniface VIII who concluded. At Orvieto, he pronounced the canonization sermon on 4 August, then ratified it on 11 August 1297 in the town's Franciscan church, by the bull Gloria laus, which enrolled Louis IX in the catalogue of saints as a confessor of the faith.[54] The gesture also had a diplomatic scope: it eased, for a time, the pope's conflict with the saint's grandson, Philip the Fair. But holiness itself had been won in the hearts of peoples long before the bull.
"Glory, praise and honour to thee, O Christ the King, the Redeemer." — Incipit of the canonization bull Gloria laus (Boniface VIII, 11 August 1297)[55]
The "Most Christian King": posterity and patronages
The cult of Saint Louis was immediate and universal. Celebrated on 25 August (the day of his death), he became the model of the Christian king for all Europe, the patron of the kingdom of France and, with Saint Elizabeth, of the Franciscan Third Order. His name is borne by countless churches, by the royal Order of Saint Louis, by the city of Saint Louis on the Mississippi, and even by the national church of the French in Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi. His great-nephew, Saint Louis of Toulouse, a Franciscan turned bishop, would prolong into the next generation this same holiness of the Capetian-Angevin house.[56]
Seven and a half centuries after his death, Louis IX remains a luminous enigma: a man of power who believed, more than anything, that to govern is to serve, and that a king's first duty is not to conquer, but not to offend God. A king who preferred, he said, leprosy to sin — and who made his earthly crown the cast shadow of a crown of thorns.
To go further
- Medieval primary sources: John of Joinville, Life of Saint Louis (completed 1309) — the great lived testimony; Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Vita et sancta conversatio Ludovici (c. 1272-1273), by the confessor; William of Chartres, De vita et miraculis; William of Saint-Pathus, Life of Monseigneur Saint Loys (from the canonization inquiry); William of Nangis, Gesta sanctae memoriae Ludovici; the Teachings to his son Philip.
- Studies: Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, Gallimard, 1996 (the reference biography); the works of André Vauchez on medieval holiness and the Crown of Thorns; Jean Richard, Saint Louis, roi d'une France féodale, soutien de la Terre sainte, Fayard, 1983.
- Reference notices: Catholic Encyclopedia, art. "St. Louis IX" (New Advent); Encyclopædia Britannica, art. "Louis IX"; historical documentation of the Sainte-Chapelle (Centre des monuments nationaux) and of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral on the relics of the Passion.
- Related articles on Ignispedia: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, co-patron of the Franciscan Third Order; Saint Francis of Assisi and the Franciscan Order; Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bonaventure, intellectual glories of his century; Saint Dominic and the Preachers; Notre-Dame de Paris and the relics of the Passion; the Crusades, whose last great hero he was; Saint Louis of Toulouse, his Franciscan great-nephew.
Notes and References
Catholic Encyclopedia, art. "St. Louis IX, King of France", New Advent (newadvent.org/cathen/09368a.htm): reference Catholic notice — son of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile, king at twelve, Blanche's regency (1226-1234), marriage to Margaret of Provence, eleven children, justice reforms (curia regis organized as a regular court, parlements), foundations (Sainte-Chapelle, Robert de Sorbon's Sorbonne, Quinze-Vingts hospital for 300 blind people in 1254, Filles-Dieu), charity (fed more than a hundred poor people each day, washed beggars' feet, served lepers), crusades of 1248 and 1270, death near Tunis on 25 August 1270, canonization by Boniface VIII in 1297. The notice gives the variant "25 April 1215" for the birth.
1 12Encyclopædia Britannica, art. "Louis IX": biographical synthesis — born 25 April 1214 at Poissy, died 25 August 1270 near Tunis; King of France from 1226 to 1270; led the Seventh Crusade (1248-1250) and died on a crusade in Tunisia; only King of France to have been canonized (1297); symbol of the ideal Christian kingship.
2 14John of Joinville (c. 1224-1317), seneschal of Champagne, Life of Saint Louis (Livre des saintes paroles et des bons faiz nostre saint roy Looÿs), completed about 1309 and dedicated to the future Louis X. Companion of the king on the Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), Joinville delivers the most vivid lay testimony on the personality, piety and justice of Louis IX. Numerous modern editions (ed. Jacques Monfrin, Classiques Garnier, 1995; Le Livre de Poche trans.).
3 6Sainte-Chapelle of Paris, historical documentation of the Centre des monuments nationaux (sainte-chapelle.fr): edifice raised by Louis IX to house the relics of the Passion (Crown of Thorns, fragment of the True Cross), consecrated 26 April 1248; masterpiece of Rayonnant Gothic. Cost of the relics estimated at about 135,000 livres, that of the chapel at about 40,000 livres.
4 25Saint Louis, Teachings to his son Philip (Enseignemens de saint Loys a Phelippe son filz), text transmitted notably at the end of Joinville's Life of Saint Louis. Opening quotation: "Chier filz, je t'enseigne premierement que tu aimes Dieu de tout ton cuer et de tout ton pooir, car sanz ce nus ne peut riens valoir." ("Dear son, I teach you first to love God with all your heart and all your power, for without that no one can be worth anything.") Modernized French translation after Joinville's text.
5 46Geoffrey of Beaulieu (Gaufridus de Belloloco), Dominican, confessor of Saint Louis for about twenty years, Vita et sancta conversatio piae memoriae Ludovici quondam regis Francorum, written about 1272-1273 at the request of Pope Gregory X with a view to canonization. Direct witness to the king's interior life and death. Ed. in the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France (RHGF), vol. XX.
7 40William of Chartres, chaplain and familiar of Saint Louis, De vita et actibus… et de miraculis: complement to Geoffrey of Beaulieu's memories, likewise written for the canonization trial. Ed. RHGF, vol. XX.
8William of Saint-Pathus, Franciscan, confessor of Queen Margaret of Provence then of Queen Joan of Navarre, Life of Monseigneur Saint Loys, composed at the beginning of the 14th century (c. 1302-1303) from the depositions of the canonization inquiry. A precious source as drawn directly from testimony under oath. Ed. H.-François Delaborde, 1899.
9William of Nangis, monk of Saint-Denis, Gesta sanctae memoriae Ludovici regis Franciae (late 13th century): official biography integrated into the chronicle of the royal abbey of Saint-Denis, necropolis and "memory" of the dynasty. Ed. RHGF, vol. XX.
10Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, Paris, Gallimard, 1996 (reissued "Bibliothèque des Histoires" then "Quarto"): reference biography by the medieval historian, posing the methodological question "Did Saint Louis exist?" — that is, whether the real man can be recovered from behind the image of the holy king built by the sources — and concluding that a coherent personality and a holiness attested in the king's own lifetime are real.
11Birth at Poissy: Louis was born on 25 April 1214 (some old notices, including the Catholic Encyclopedia, give 1215) at Poissy castle. The king liked to sign "Louis of Poissy", after the place of his baptism, which he held more honourable than the title drawn from his coronation. Cf. Joinville and Le Goff, op. cit.
13Death of Louis VIII and coronation of Louis IX: Louis VIII died of dysentery at Montpensier (Auvergne) on 8 November 1226, returning from the Albigensian crusade. Louis IX was crowned at Reims on 29 November 1226 (first Sunday of Advent), at the age of twelve, by the Bishop of Soissons (the see of Reims being then vacant). Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia and Britannica, arts. cited.
15Blanche of Castile (1188-1252), daughter of Alfonso VIII of Castile and granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Louis VIII: regent of the kingdom during Louis IX's minority (1226-1234), she broke the revolts of the great barons, stood up to England and prepared, through the Treaty of Paris of 1229, the integration of Languedoc. She exercised the regency again during the Seventh Crusade and died at the end of November 1252, while Louis was in the Holy Land. A major political figure of the 13th century.
16Words of Blanche of Castile reported by Saint Louis himself in Joinville, Life of Saint Louis: the queen told her son she would rather see him dead than guilty of a single mortal sin ("… elle amoit mieulz que je fusse mors que ce que je feïsse un pechié mortel"). A founding word of the king's moral conscience, which he quoted all his life.
17Family tensions: Joinville reports the jealousy of Blanche of Castile toward her daughter-in-law Margaret of Provence, the reigning queen being kept at a distance, to the point that Louis and Margaret had to meet discreetly. A detail attested by Joinville, qualifying the image of a shadowless royal family and recalling the saint's humanity. Cf. Le Goff, op. cit.
18Marriage to Margaret of Provence: celebrated 27 May 1234 at Sens. Margaret (c. 1221-1295), eldest daughter of Raymond Berenger IV, Count of Provence (her sisters would become queens of England, Germany and Sicily). A lasting union; the queen would accompany Louis to Egypt on the Seventh Crusade. Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia and Le Goff, op. cit.
19Eleven children of Louis IX and Margaret of Provence. The surviving heir, Philip (born 1245), succeeded his father as Philip III the Bold. The eldest son, Louis, died young (1260); John Tristan, born at Damietta during the crusade, died at Tunis in 1270. Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia, art. cited.
20Acquisition of the Crown of Thorns: the Latin Emperor of Constantinople Baldwin II of Courtenay, in great financial difficulty, had pawned the Crown to Venetian bankers. Louis IX bought it back in 1238-1239 for a sum estimated at about 135,000 livres. The relic arrived in France in 1239. Cf. Sainte-Chapelle (CMN) and Reliques de la Sainte-Chapelle (historical notices).
21Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral, file "Saint Louis and the relics of the Passion" (notredamedeparis.fr): account of the translation of 19 August 1239 — the relics, presented to the king a few days earlier at Villeneuve-l'Archevêque, arrived in procession in Paris; Louis, having laid aside his royal garments, clothed in a simple tunic and barefoot, himself carried the Crown of Thorns as far as Notre-Dame before it later joined the Sainte-Chapelle.
22Walter Cornut (Gauthier Cornut), Archbishop of Sens, eyewitness, Historia susceptionis coronae spineae (account of the reception of the Crown of Thorns, c. 1240): primary source on the translation of 1239 and the king's humility in carrying the relic barefoot. Ed. RHGF, vol. XXII.
23Jean-Christian Petitfils, Le Saint Suaire de Turin, Tallandier, 2022, pp. 109-110 (PDF pagination): "As the relic had been pawned to a rich Venetian merchant, he compensated the latter with the colossal sum of 135,000 tournois. Officially there was no question of a purchase, since trade in relics remained canonically forbidden, but of an exchange: the Holy Crown against the extinction of the debt. In February 1239, the operation was completed, and the prestigious relic left Venice." The author dates to 1238 the offer of the Crown to Louis IX by Baldwin II, who came to France "with creditors at his throat". Printed edition reference: Jean-Christian Petitfils, Le Saint Suaire de Turin. Témoin de la Passion de Jésus-Christ, Paris, Tallandier, 2022, pp. 112-113.
24John of Joinville, Life of Saint Louis: famous passage of the king rendering justice beneath an oak in the wood of Vincennes, after Mass, accessible to all his subjects without intermediary ("… et lors il aloit ou bois de Vincennes et se seoit au dos d'un chesne et nous faisoit seoir entour li, et tuit cil qui avoient afaire venoient parler a li, sanz destourbier de huissier ne d'autre"). Emblematic image of direct royal justice. Modernized translation.
26The royal enquêteurs: instituted by Louis IX from 1247, before his departure on crusade. Often mendicant friars (Franciscans, Dominicans), they travelled the kingdom gathering subjects' complaints against abuses by royal officers (bailiffs, provosts) and ordering restitutions. Their reports nourished the reign's administrative reform. Cf. Le Goff, op. cit., and notices on the "great ordinance".
27Great reforming ordinance of December 1254: promulgated on return from the crusade, it fixed the moral and practical principles of the government of royal officers — forbidden to accept gifts, to render unjust judgments, to pronounce fines before conviction; struggle against blasphemy, gambling, prostitution and drunkenness. It prolonged the work of the enquêteurs and marked a stage in the building of the Capetian state of justice.
28Charitable and intellectual foundations: Quinze-Vingts hospital for 300 blind people (c. 1254-1260); house of the Filles-Dieu for repentant prostitutes; hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon, Compiègne; abbeys of Royaumont and Le Lys; support for the University of Paris, where Robert de Sorbon, the king's chaplain, founded about 1257 the college of the Sorbonne. Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia, art. cited.
29Anecdote of Saint Thomas Aquinas at the king's table: reported by Saint Thomas's first biographers, the scene shows the Dominican theologian, the king's dinner guest, absorbed in meditation, suddenly striking the table and crying out "Conclusum est contra Manichaeos!" ("That settles it against the Manicheans!"); the king, far from taking offence, at once sent for a secretary so the argument would not be lost. Episode illustrating the intellectual climate of Louis IX's court, where Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure were then teaching.
30Measures against the Jews: ordinance of Melun (December 1230), issued in the name of the young king during the regency of Blanche of Castile; ordinance of 1234 (remission of a third of debts); great ordinance of December 1254, articles 32 and 33 ("usuries, sorceries and characters"); trial of the Talmud — denunciation by Nicholas Donin, letter of Gregory IX (1239), seizure of 3 March 1240, disputation of March 1240 before Blanche of Castile (the bishop of Paris facing four rabbis, including Yehiel of Paris), condemnation despite the opposition of Archbishop Walter Cornut, burning of twenty-four cartloads on the Place de Grève in 1242 (two days), congratulations of Innocent IV of 9 May 1244 then a second burning; banishment and confiscations of 1254, recall a few years later; expulsion of foreign usurers in 1268; rouelle imposed in 1269 in application of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), under the influence of the converted Dominican Pablo Christiani. Cf. Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis, Gallimard, 1996; the works of Robert Chazan on the 1240 Talmud trial; Jewish Encyclopedia, art. "France".
31 32Repression of blasphemy: the great ordinance of December 1254 prohibits blasphemy and punishes it with corporal penalties, which in the practice of the reign went as far as mutilation of the tongue and lips. Cf. Le Goff, op. cit. (moral ordinances of 1254-1256 and their application).
33The Catholic answer: the bull Gloria laus (cf. [^gloria-laus]) enrolled Louis in the catalogue as a confessor of the faith, for his charity and justice recognized by twenty-five years of inquiry — not for his edicts; the refusal of 1247 (not financing the crusade with confiscated money) and the corrective commission of 1257-1258 attest the intention to convert without despoiling; on the distinction between medieval religious anti-Judaism and modern racial antisemitism, condemned by the Church at the Second Vatican Council, declaration Nostra Aetate, § 4 (28 October 1965).
34The crusade vow (1244): gravely ill at Pontoise at the end of 1244, Louis IX vowed to take the cross if he recovered; restored, he persevered despite the reluctance of his entourage and his mother. The capture of Jerusalem by the Khwarezmians (1244) strengthened his resolve. Effective departure from Aigues-Mortes — a port he had developed for this purpose — on 25 August 1248.
35Battle of Mansoura (8-11 February 1250): on the Seventh Crusade, the Frankish vanguard led by Robert of Artois, the king's brother, recklessly charged the Mamluks despite the Templars' warnings and was annihilated in the town. The crusading army, weakened by fighting, famine and typhus, then had to fall back. Cf. historical notices on the Battle of Mansoura.
36Capture of Louis IX (6 April 1250): at the end of the retreat toward Damietta, sick with dysentery and at the end of his strength, the king was taken prisoner with the rest of his army at Fariskur. His dignity in captivity — refusal of blasphemous oaths, recitation of the office — is unanimously stressed by the sources. Cf. Joinville, op. cit.
37Ransom and restitution of Damietta: Louis IX's liberation was obtained on 6 May 1250 against the restitution of Damietta and the payment of a considerable ransom (of the order of 400,000 livres tournois, about 800,000 bezants), part of it advanced by the Order of the Temple. Queen Margaret, delivered of a child in besieged Damietta, there prevented the garrison's flight. Cf. Joinville, op. cit., and Le Goff, op. cit.
38Stay in the Holy Land (1250-1254): after his liberation, Louis IX did not return at once but remained four years in the Latin East, ransoming Christian captives and fortifying Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa and Sidon. He also attempted a diplomatic alliance with the Mongols. He resolved on return (1254) only at the news of his mother Blanche's death, the regent, at the end of 1252. Cf. Jean Richard, Saint Louis, Fayard, 1983.
39Life of prayer: according to Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Saint-Pathus, Louis IX daily heard two Masses, recited the office at the hours, prayed at length by night, confessed often and accepted the discipline (penitential scourging) from his confessor — all in secret, without ostentation. Cf. Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Vita, and Le Goff, op. cit.
41Charity to the poor: the king daily fed numerous poor people, sometimes with his own hands, and washed beggars' feet; he maintained needy people at his court and multiplied alms. Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia, art. cited, and William of Saint-Pathus, Life of Monseigneur Saint Loys.
42John of Joinville, Life of Saint Louis: dialogue in which the king asks Joinville whether it is better to be a leper or to have committed a mortal sin; to the seneschal's worldly answer (he would rather have thirty mortal sins than leprosy), Louis opposes that no leprosy is as ugly as mortal sin. A capital passage on the holy king's scale of values, for whom the loss of the soul is the only absolute evil.
43Devotion to the Passion: the purchase of the relics (Crown of Thorns, True Cross), the building of the Sainte-Chapelle, the king's wearing of the hairshirt and austerities all belong to one spirituality centred on the Passion of Christ and the will to conform his life to the suffering Saviour. Cf. André Vauchez, works on the Crown of Thorns and medieval holiness.
44Saint Louis and the Franciscan Third Order: close to the Friars Minor as to the Preachers, Louis IX is traditionally counted among the tertiaries of Saint Francis and proclaimed, with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, patron of the Franciscan Third Order (Secular Franciscan Order). The Dominicans and the Trinitarians claim him too; the essential point is his real adherence to the mendicant orders' ideal of poverty and penance. Cf. Franciscan Media and the Franciscan Order article.
45Saint Louis, Teachings to his son Philip: precepts of justice — "… tien toi si droiturier que tu ne declines de la droiture et de la justise pour quelque chose qui aviengne. Et se il avient contens entre povre et riche, si soutien plus le povre que le riche jusques atant que tu saches la verité." ("… hold yourself so upright that you never turn aside from right and justice for anything that may happen. And if contention arises between poor and rich, uphold the poor rather than the rich until you know the truth.") Modernized translation after the text transmitted by Joinville.
47Textual criticism of the Teachings: scholars (notably from 19th-century works and H.-François Delaborde onward) have shown that the version of the Teachings transmitted at the end of Joinville's Life was reworked and differs from the primitive redaction. The doctrinal and spiritual core — love of God, refusal of mortal sin, justice, charity to the poor — is nevertheless held to be authentically derived from the king's teaching to his son. Cf. Le Goff, op. cit.
48Eighth Crusade (1270): Louis IX took the cross again in 1267 and embarked in 1270. On the advice of his brother Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, the expedition was diverted toward Tunis; the motives (hope of converting the Hafsid emir, Angevin interests in the Mediterranean) are debated by historians. Cf. Le Goff, op. cit., and Jean Richard, op. cit.
49Death of Saint Louis (25 August 1270): landed near Carthage in July 1270, the army was decimated by an epidemic (dysentery or typhus) in the summer heat. The king's son, John Tristan, died; Louis himself died on 25 August 1270, laid on a bed of ashes arranged in a cross. Cf. Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Vita, and Britannica, art. cited.
50Last words: Geoffrey of Beaulieu, a witness, reports that the dying king repeated the longing for Jerusalem ("Jerusalem, Jerusalem") and died commending his spirit to God ("Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit", Lk 23:46). Wording varies among biographers; all converge on a death turned toward the Holy City and the prayer of Christ on the cross.
51Treatment of the body and burial: according to the mos Teutonicus (custom reserved for the great who died in distant lands), Louis's body was boiled to separate bones from flesh; his entrails remained at Monreale (Sicily), his bones were brought back to France and laid in the basilica of Saint-Denis in 1271, necropolis of the kings. Miracles were reported along the funeral procession's route. Cf. Le Goff, op. cit.
52Canonization trial (1272-1297): opened by Gregory X as early as 1272, the examination of virtues and miracles extended over twenty-five years; an inquiry was notably conducted at Saint-Denis in 1282-1283. Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres wrote Vitae for the trial; William of Saint-Pathus would exploit the depositions. Cf. "Les enquêtes pour la canonisation de saint Louis, de Grégoire X à Boniface VIII" (Revue d'histoire de l'Église de France, 1971, on Persée).
53Canonization by Boniface VIII (11 August 1297): after twenty-five years of inquiries, Boniface VIII pronounced the canonization sermon at Orvieto on 4 August 1297, then ratified the act on 11 August in the town's Franciscan church, by the bull Gloria laus (incipit "Gloria, laus et honor tibi sit, Christe rex redemptor"), which proclaimed Louis IX a confessor of the faith. The act also had a diplomatic dimension in the pope's conflict with Philip the Fair, the saint's grandson. Cf. "Les sermons de Boniface VIII à Orvieto et la bulle Gloria laus", in the Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, vol. XXIII (on Persée).
54 55Cult and patronages: feast on 25 August; patron of the kingdom of France and, with Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, of the Franciscan Third Order; countless churches, the royal and military Order of Saint Louis (1693), the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, the city of Saint Louis (Missouri). His great-nephew Saint Louis of Toulouse (1274-1297), Franciscan and bishop, prolongs the holiness of the Capetian-Angevin house. Cf. Catholic Encyclopedia and notices on the cult of Saint Louis.
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