Saint Louis of Toulouse (1274-1297)

Key dates

Charles II of Anjou and Mary of Hungary

Louis was born into a large family: his father Charles II of Anjou, known as the Lame, King of Naples and Count of Provence, and his mother Mary of Hungary had thirteen children — eight boys and five girls.^[20] This Capetian House of Anjou-Sicily, descended from Charles I of Anjou, the younger brother of Saint Louis IX of France, then ruled the Kingdom of Naples after losing Sicily in the Sicilian Vespers of 1282. Louis was thus, through his grandfather, the great-nephew of the King of France canonized on 11 August 1297 at Orvieto — only eight days before his own death, on 19 August 1297.^[21][22]

His father owed his crown to a merciless war: in 1284, when still Prince of Salerno, Charles II was defeated and captured in a naval battle off Naples by the Aragonese admiral Roger of Lauria.^[23] He remained a prisoner in Spain when his own father Charles I died in 1285, and it was only after three years of negotiations that his release was obtained — at the price, precisely, of handing over three of his sons as hostages.^[24]

This background of royal captivity, dynastic rivalry between Anjou and Aragon, and diplomatic bargaining forms the backdrop of Louis's entire childhood. The family was also deeply devout: Charles II had rediscovered in 1279 the relics attributed to St Mary Magdalene and founded for them the royal basilica and convent of Saint-Maximin, entrusted to the Dominicans — a detail that shows the religious roots of this Provençal-Neapolitan dynasty.^[25]

The captivity at Moncada and Ciurana

In 1288, at fourteen, Louis was handed over with his brothers Robert and Raymond Berenger as hostages to the King of Aragon, as security for the treaty freeing their father. His mother accompanied him to the frontier; the testimonies of the canonization trial recount that Robert, the younger, wept bitterly at the moment of parting, while Raymond Berenger joined his brothers a few weeks later.^[26] The three princes were first held in the fortress of Moncada, near Barcelona, then in that of Ciurana, in the diocese of Tarragona — harsh conditions, marked by the presence of jailers and by the very real fear, in these adolescents, for their own lives.^[27][28]

Franciscan masters, and the shadow of Peter John Olivi

The religious and intellectual education of the three princes was entrusted to Friars Minor. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, these were Ponzius Carbonelli, Peter of Falgar and the theologian Richard of Middleton — one of the most renowned Franciscan masters of the University of Paris.^[29] The canonization trial, for its part, names the confessor Francis Brun and the master Peter Scarrier, who would accompany Louis until his death, as well as his Norman lay tutor William of Maynier Reynard; these witnesses may have succeeded the first masters as the captivity wore on, or be their Frenchified forms.^[30] Whatever the exact names, the convergence of the sources is clear: it was indeed Franciscan spirituality, with its insistence on poverty and humility, that shaped the young prince during these decisive years.^[31][32]

One name particularly holds the historians' attention: that of Peter John Olivi, the great Franciscan theologian of the movement known as the "Spirituals", a partisan of rigorous observance of evangelical poverty. Olivi corresponded with the three captive princes and addressed to them, on 18 May 1295, a long spiritual letter.^[33] This closeness does not make Louis a disciple of Olivi's own theology — some of whose theses, notably on eschatology and on the strict use of poverty (usus pauper), would be debated and partly censured after his death, though the Church never personally condemned Olivi himself as a heretic in his lifetime.^[34] It does show, however, the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, pervaded by the debate over Franciscan poverty, in which the young prince's vocation matured — the same debate that Saint Bonaventure, as Minister General of the Order, had faced a generation earlier, between Spirituals and Conventuals.^[35]

On 18 May 1295, Olivi addressed to the three captive princes a long letter, published by Ehrle in the Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte (vol. III, pp. 534-540).^[36]

The vow made in sickness

The conditions of detention gravely affected the young prince's health. According to the canonization trial, Louis contracted in captivity a grave pulmonary illness — probably pneumonia — to the point that his life hung, the witnesses say, on the prayers he addressed each day to the Virgin Mary.^[37] It was in this trial that he made the vow, should he survive, to become a Friar Minor and to consecrate his life to God in the service of the poorest. He then received the tonsure, in captivity, with the agreement of Pope Celestine V — whose very brief pontificate (July-December 1294) coincides with this episode.^[38] The same pope went so far as to name Louis, still captive, administrator of the archdiocese of Lyon on 7 October 1294 — a nomination that remained without effect and that Boniface VIII, Celestine V's successor, never had executed.^[39]

Release and return to Naples

After seven years of captivity, in 1295, the hostages were freed under a diplomatic settlement sealed by crossed marriages between the Houses of Anjou and Aragon: Robert was to marry Yolande of Aragon, and Prince James of Aragon married Blanche of Anjou, Louis's sister.^[40] Louis was then twenty-one. The news awaiting him at Naples was heavy with consequence: his elder brother, Charles Martel, titular King of Hungary, had died a few months earlier, in 1295, leaving Louis in direct line as heir to the throne of Naples.^[41][42]

Faithful to the vow made in captivity, Louis did not give up his plan of religious life. He received the subdiaconate from the hands of Pope Boniface VIII. His parents, without being hostile to his vocation, hoped to see him rise to high office in the Church rather than live as a humble Franciscan in the service of the poor; they even obtained for him a special pontifical dispensation to pursue his studies, with a view to an ecclesiastical post of responsibility worthy of his rank.^[43]

Passing the crown to his brother Robert

A year after his release, in 1296, Louis formally renounced his succession rights over the Kingdom of Naples, which passed to his younger brother Robert — the future Robert of Anjou, known as the Wise.^[44][45] The Angevin court then commissioned several works intended to give visual legitimacy to this unusual transmission of the crown, among them the famous polyptych painted by Simone Martini, showing Louis crowned by angels while himself crowning his brother Robert — a striking image of a prince who bestows an earthly kingship after choosing the kingship of Heaven.^[46][47]

The following table sums up the contrasting destinies of the three princes handed over as hostages, and of their elder brother:

His parents' thwarted dream

Louis's choice was no mere discreet withdrawal: it was a public act that deprived the Kingdom of Naples of its natural heir. The canonization trial lets us glimpse, without dramatizing it, the silent disagreement of Charles II and Mary of Hungary, who would have preferred for their son a high honorary ecclesiastical charge rather than the effective poverty of the Friars Minor.^[48] This kind of tension between legitimate family ambition and the radical call to evangelical poverty is not peculiar to Louis: it runs through all of Franciscan history, from Francis of Assisi himself, who publicly renounced the inheritance of his father, the cloth merchant Pietro di Bernardone, down to the great controversies over the use of poverty that stirred the Order at the turn of the fourteenth century.^[49]

Ordinations and vows

The year 1296 concentrates most of the decisive stages of Louis's religious life. He was ordained deacon and then priest at Naples — the priesthood, according to one source, on 19 May 1296, with a dispensation for canonical age since he was then only twenty-two.^[50][51] It was at the end of that same year that he pronounced his Franciscan vows: he received the habit of the Friars Minor in Rome on 24 December 1296 and immediately made his solemn profession.^[52]

Named Bishop of Toulouse by Boniface VIII

Barely a few days later, on 29 or 30 December 1296, Pope Boniface VIII himself consecrated Louis Bishop of Toulouse, in St Peter's Basilica in Rome.^[53] The nomination, approved by Louis's parents, affected him deeply: he who had dreamed of the anonymous poverty of a simple Friar Minor found himself charged, at twenty-two, with governing a vast diocese in the south of France, only just reorganized after the Albigensian Crusade.^[54] He obtained from the pope a condition close to his heart: to be able to live his Franciscan life fully by wearing the habit, even beneath his episcopal vestments.^[55]

The habit beneath the cope

At the beginning of 1297, Louis appeared in public for the first time wearing the simple Franciscan habit of coarse cloth beneath his episcopal mantle, on 5 February.^[56] The image, reported by many witnesses of the trial, would become one of the saint's most constant iconographic traits: a young bishop whose cope, adorned with the Angevin fleurs-de-lis, lets the grey or brown habit of the poor of Francis of Assisi show through.^[57]

If the throne was his by birth, it is not the throne he chose: it is the habit, kept beneath the cope.^[58]

The journey to Toulouse: a mule, six mules of books and a hundred poor clothed

The journey that brought Louis from Rome to Toulouse, with a detour imposed via Paris to meet the King of France, his cousin, already illustrates the style of his short episcopate.^[59] As a good Franciscan, he exchanged his horse for a mule and travelled in the humblest manner. The retinue was nonetheless considerable: many religious companions accompanied him, including no fewer than six mules laden with his personal library — a sign of a demanding intellectual formation that Louis never disowned, even in poverty.^[60]

All along this journey, the poor marked his path. The witnesses of the trial report that he had at least a hundred poor people clothed on the way, while recommending that the gifts be made discreetly, so as not to humiliate those who received them.^[61] When it was proposed to have his Paris studies validated to obtain the title of doctor, he refused, unwilling, according to the testimony reported, "to grow rich with titles that are but vain glory".^[62]

Serving twenty-five poor at his table

Once in office, Louis set himself to reduce the costs of his episcopal household to the strictest minimum.^[63] According to an old hagiographical notice, he himself served twenty-five poor people at his table each day, personally seeing to it that their wine was not cut with too much water — the concrete concern of a charity exercised not from above, but in direct service.^[64] The American Franciscan notice specifies that he reserved up to three quarters of the revenues of his bishopric for the poor and the upkeep of churches.^[65] To this period belongs the most famous anecdote attached to his name: coming away from a visit to a poor sick woman, his attendants noticed that his clothing was covered with vermin; Louis, far from showing disgust, is said to have answered with a smile:

"These are the pearls of the poor." — Words attributed to Saint Louis of Toulouse by the hagiographical tradition^[66][67]

An itinerant bishop

His episcopate, however brief, was not confined to Toulouse itself. Within the first weeks, duty called him back to Spain, where he was to rejoin at Lérida his sister Blanche, now Queen of Aragon through her marriage to James II.^[68] The canonization trial remains discreet about the more properly diplomatic missions that his father or the pope may have entrusted to him — the holiness of the dossier having no call to retain politics — but the testimonies suggest a brilliant young man, able to deal with civil and religious authorities, and seen by some as destined for a role as ambassador of peace in Europe.^[69]

At the end of July 1297, a new journey brought Louis to Brignoles, in Provence, where his parents had just arrived — perhaps in connection with the forthcoming canonization of his great-uncle Louis IX, which Boniface VIII was to pronounce at Orvieto in the following month of August.^[70] On the way, he stopped at Tarascon for the ceremonies of St Martha, then celebrated Mass at Brignoles and preached, for the feast of St Dominic, in the chapel of the palace of the Counts of Provence.^[71]

It was then that the illness, which had long been undermining him, finally carried him off. Feeling his end near, Louis summoned a notary to bequeath his goods to the Franciscan convents and strove, to the very last, to die in the greatest material destitution — total coherence, unto death, between the ideal professed and the life lived.^[72] He died at Brignoles, on 19 August 1297, at the age of twenty-three.^[73][74] His body was carried by night on mule-back and buried the next day at the Franciscan convent of the Cordeliers in Marseille, in accordance with his own wish.^[75][76] From the very day of his burial, many miracles were reported around his tomb.^[77]

One hundred and eighty-five witnesses and twelve miracles

Louis's reputation for holiness grew rapidly after his death. In 1307, Pope Clement V entrusted the canonical inquiry, by the bull Ineffabilis providentia, read out in Marseille Cathedral in 1308 — ten years after the prince's death.^[78][79] Two bishops, those of Saintes and Lectoure, were appointed pontifical commissioners of the inquiry; the notary Bernard Salagnac drew up its authentic copy, preserved today in the Biblioteca Estense of Modena (Campori collection, no. 161).^[80] This manuscript is one of the best-preserved canonization trial dossiers of the Middle Ages: it is complete, whereas only fragments survive, by comparison, of the trials of St Clare of Assisi or St Dominic.^[81]

The trial gathered the depositions of one hundred and eighty-five witnesses, mostly Provençal, who describe a full picture of the saint's life and character. Among them: William of Cornillon, lector at the Franciscan convent of Marseille, who had known Louis since his priestly ordination and never left him until his death; William of Sabran, abbot of Saint-Victor, who accompanied him for a fortnight between Draguignan and Tarascon; Provençal lay nobles such as Bermond de Roca, Elzéar de Lamanon and Hugues Porcelet; and finally his Norman tutor William of Maynier Reynard, his confessor Francis Brun and his master Peter Scarrier.^[82] The last part of the manuscript reports twelve miracles, including several raisings of the dead as well as healings of the blind and the deaf, all attributed to the saint's intercession around his tomb.^[83]

John XXII, once close to the saint

Among the witnesses stands a name destined for a considerable future: Jacques Duèze, who had met Louis on his arrival at Toulouse and served in his entourage.^[84][85] Having become in the meantime Bishop of Fréjus, then Chancellor of Provence, then Bishop of Avignon and cardinal, Duèze was elected pope in 1316 under the name of John XXII. It was thus a former familiar of the saint who, on 7 April 1317, solemnly inscribed Louis in the catalogue of saints, by the bull Sol oriens, in Avignon Cathedral — in the presence, according to tradition, of the new saint's mother and brother.^[86][87] Louis of Toulouse remains, in the whole long history of John XXII's pontificate, the only Franciscan saint that pope ever canonized.

A historians' debate: charity to the poor, or the virtue of poverty?

The historian Jacques Paul, in his landmark study of the canonization dossier, brings out an important theological nuance in the way the witnesses understand Louis's holiness.^[88] Some stress his charity to the poor, exercised after his elevation to the episcopate — almsgiving, serving at table, clothing distributed on the way. Other witnesses, those who lived closest to him day by day, retain a more radical understanding: Louis did not merely do charity, he loved poverty itself as a value in its own right, independently of any service rendered to others.^[89] This distinction is no scholar's detail: it rejoins the great debate running through the entire thirteenth-century Franciscan world over the exact meaning of the vow of poverty — a mere means in the service of charity, or a spiritual end sought for its own sake in imitation of the stripped Christ.^[90][91]

"Go, sell what you possess": the Gospel echo

Louis's gesture is no isolated originality in the history of salvation: it takes up, almost to the letter, Christ's invitation to the rich young man of the Gospel — "Go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, [...] and come, follow me" (Mt 19:21) — with this difference, that the young man of the Gospel "went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions", whereas Louis answered in the affirmative an invitation more radical still, since it concerned not a fortune but a crown. The Catechism of the Catholic Church places precisely voluntarily embraced poverty, with chastity and obedience, among the evangelical counsels offered by Christ to those he calls to follow him more closely (CCC 915).^[92] St Paul, describing the mystery of Christ's abasement, offers the ultimate model of this renunciation:

"Who, though he was in the form of God, [...] emptied himself, taking the form of a servant." — Epistle to the Philippians 2:6-7

It is therefore not a flight from princely responsibilities that Catholic tradition recognizes in Louis's gesture, but a positive imitation of Christ who, though he was rich, became poor, in St Paul's phrase to the Corinthians (2 Cor 8:9). Louis's holiness does not consist in despising temporal government — he would moreover exercise it, with meticulous care, in his diocese of Toulouse — but in refusing to make that government an end or a security for himself, preferring the radicality of the sequela Christi to the legitimacy, real though it was, of his dynastic birthright.

A choice that did not desert government

It would nevertheless be inaccurate to reduce Louis to a mere renouncer. Once a bishop, he governed his diocese with rigour: he strove to cut the sumptuous expenditure of his office, personally saw to the welcome of the poor, and showed himself concerned, according to several Provençal witnesses, to meet on his journeys both civil authorities and religious leaders — the sign of a genuine sense of government, placed wholly in the service of an ideal of poverty rather than abolished by it.^[93] In this sense, Louis illustrates a constant lesson of Catholic tradition: the evangelical counsels do not dispense from responsibility, they purify it of all seeking after honours.

Simone Martini: the crown laid down

The most famous work devoted to Saint Louis of Toulouse is the great panel painted by Simone Martini about 1317, preserved today in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples.^[94] The painting shows Louis, in episcopal and Franciscan dress, crowned by two angels, while he himself sets a crown upon the head of his brother Robert, kneeling at his feet — a composition originally intended to give visual legitimacy to Robert's succession to the throne of Naples.^[95][96] The iconography that then prevailed throughout medieval and Renaissance art takes up this type: a young bishop in a cope adorned with the Angevin fleurs-de-lis, letting the Franciscan habit show through, a crown sometimes set down or abandoned at his feet. Donatello, Piero della Francesca and other great Italian artists would take up the saint's figure in the following centuries.^[97]

From Marseille to Valencia: the relics

Buried at the Franciscan convent of Marseille the day after his death, Louis remained venerated there for over a century. In 1423, King Alfonso V of Aragon had his relics transferred to Valencia Cathedral, in Spain, where they still rest today and where the saint became patron of the city — the paradoxical sign of a kingdom that had once held him captive and afterwards devoted itself to him in a particular way.^[98][99] His parents bought back, after his death, the library and probably the episcopal cope that Louis had bequeathed to the Franciscan convents, to make them the treasure of the royal basilica of St Mary Magdalene at Saint-Maximin, in Provence — a cope still described today among the pieces associated with the saint.^[100][101] In the twentieth century, the theft and then the restitution of three of his vertebrae filled the columns of the Marseille press — a sign that devotion to this saint, little known to the general public, never quite died out.^[102]

A cult across the centuries

The cult of Saint Louis of Toulouse, strong in Provence and southern Italy, also knew a particular radiance in Hungary, his mother's homeland: his nephew Charles I of Hungary promoted it by founding sanctuaries in his honour, and gave the name of Louis to his own son, who reigned as Louis I of Hungary.^[103] For the ceremony of his canonization in 1317, an isorhythmic polyphonic motet was composed in his honour — a rare practice, reserved for the most solemn liturgical events of the time — and it is preserved in the medieval manuscript known as the Ivrea Codex.^[104] The saint is still today the patron of several Provençal communes and of the Californian city of San Luis Obispo, founded in 1772 by the Franciscans under his patronage.^[105] His liturgical feast is fixed on 19 August, the anniversary of his death.^[106][107]

Eight months as bishop, twenty-three years of life: the brevity of Louis of Toulouse's course contrasts with the depth of the sign he leaves to the Church. He recalls that one and the same man can receive, without contradiction, the charge of government and the radical call to poverty — that holiness lies not in fleeing responsibilities, but in refusing to make them a possession. His closeness to the most demanding currents of nascent Franciscanism, without ever falling into the theological excesses that some Spirituals knew after him, makes him a figure of balance: faithful to the spirit of Francis of Assisi, faithful too to obedience towards the authority of the Church which made him a bishop against his own desire.

His story resounds at last as a fraternal echo of that of his great-uncle Louis IX of France, canonized in the very year of his own death: two Capetian princes, one remaining on his throne to sanctify it from within, the other leaving it to follow the poor Christ more nakedly — two paths, equally Catholic, towards the same holiness.

• Read Saint Louis (1214-1270): the great-uncle canonized in the same year as Louis of Toulouse's death, the model of the Christian king who remained on his throne.
• Read Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226): the founder from whom Louis received the habit and the ideal of evangelical poverty.
• Read Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274): the great Franciscan doctor who, a generation before Louis, had to arbitrate the same tension between Spirituals and Conventuals over poverty.
• Read Pope John XXII (1316-1334): Louis's former familiar at Toulouse, become pope and his canonizer.
• Read The Franciscan Order: on the foundation and general organization of the Friars Minor to whom Louis belonged.
• Remember the essentials: a Neapolitan prince turned Franciscan, Louis of Toulouse renounced a crown for the poverty of Christ, governed his diocese for only eight months before dying at twenty-three, and was canonized twenty years later by a pope who had known him personally.