Louis IX

King of France (r. 1226-1270)

• Born: April 25, 1214
• Birthplace: Poissy, France
• Died: August 25, 1270
• Place of death: Near Tunis (now in Tunisia)

Louis IX reformed and centralized the French government and judiciary and increased the prestige of the royal house of France through his saintly life. In his international policy, he worked consistently for the twin goals of peace within Christendom and redemption of the Holy Land, participating in two Crusades.

Early Life

Louis (LEW-ee) was born at Poissy, near Paris, the son of the crown prince of France, Louis the Lion. His grandfather, Philip II Augustus, a contemporary of Richard I (Richard the Lion-Hearted), was still vigorous and ruled until Louis was nine years old. In 1214, the year of Louis’s birth, Philip won at Bouvines over King John of England and annexed the French territories of the English royal family. Louis’s mother, Blanche of Castile, a niece of John, had a claim to the English throne that led to an unsuccessful invasion of England by her husband in 1216. Blanche and Louis had twelve children, of whom nine survived infancy.

At the death of Philip II in 1223, Louis the Lion succeeded to the throne as Louis VIII and pursued vigorous policies of expansion of crown territories and repression of heretics. He died suddenly on November 8, 1226, on returning from a successful crusade against Albigensian heretics in southern France. Queen Blanche, regent through the terms of his will, arranged for the immediate coronation of her twelve-year-old son as King Louis IX.

The early years of the regency were marked by attacks from all sides. The great nobles of the realm often owed feudal allegiance to the crowns of both England and France and were likely to play one against the other. They were also tempted to replace the boy king with one of their own number. Hugh, count of La Marche, stepfather to Henry III of England, and Peter of Dreux or Peter Mauclerc, count of Brittany, actually invited Henry III to invade France but were unable to provide sufficient troops and supplies and eventually surrendered to the royal forces. Blanche succeeded in holding even the most vulnerable territories for her son.

Louis IX led his first military campaign at the age of fourteen and was soon recognized as an able and inspiring commander. By the time he married Marguerite of Provence in 1234, the worst of the domestic uprisings were over, and the realm of France settled into a period of peace. Along with her concerns of government, Blanche had devoted herself to the religious education of her children. Louis developed into a particularly devout man and maintained a close attachment to his mother. (Relations between Blanche and her daughter-in-law were notoriously poor.) The young Louis is described as tall and slender, blond, and with the face of an angel. He was firm in his character and endowed with humor and intelligence.

Life’s Work

No formal date is given for the end of Blanche’s regency. She continued as royal counselor and regent in Louis’ absence until her death in 1252. Gradually, Louis assumed more responsibility for government. His understanding of Christian monarchy demanded a high standard of personal virtue and continual effort to make salvation a possibility for all of his subjects. To that end, he pursued peace and justice in his kingdom. Under Louis IX, the royal government began to regularize and expand its role in administration and the judiciary. Originally, the king had ruled only within those territories that were his by feudal succession. Louis ruled a greatly expanded area through the gains made by Philip II and Louis VIII; as he extended the limits of his judicial power to these areas, he also assumed the same power in territories held by the great lords who owed him feudal allegiance. This process was a gradual one. Military considerations forwarded centralization, as did Louis’s growing popularity.

Louis IX was an exceptionally devoted Christian, practicing charity in unostentatious sincerity. He contributed liberally to cloistered religious orders and participated in the heavy manual labor of building the Cistercian monastery Royaumont. His unassailable piety allowed him to maintain the temporal rights of the French nation against the worldly power of the Catholic Church. He supported French bishops in their resistance to the papal practice of appointing Italians to open positions in the French church, opposed the bishops when they demanded that he use royal authority to enforce decrees of excommunication, and insisted on the maintenance or expansion of his own jurisdiction in contested areas.

Louis inherited a system of baillis and sénéchaux, royal administrators sent to govern the regions of France, to administer justice, to assist in military levies, and otherwise to represent the Crown. Louis regularized and reformed this governmental system, making administrative posts merit appointments and guarding against corruption by sending out a body of traveling enquěteurs, auditors and inquisitors who went to each region and investigated complaints.

Louis was deeply involved in the judicial system and is pictured by chroniclers such as Jean de Joinville as giving personal justice while seated under a huge oak tree near his castle at Vincennes. Because the laws were not codified, a judgment in any matter depended on regional tradition. Louis formed his decisions with a knowledge of feudal tradition, Roman and canon law, and his own vigorous common sense. He applied these decisions throughout his expanded realm. Many feudal nobles were incensed when he outlawed the practice of trial by combat. He did not hesitate to call the highest nobles to account and in many cases reversed decisions made in the courts of his royal brothers or the nobles.

Louis IX faced an unstable world. England and France had been at war for decades. The Holy Roman Empire was in disarray; Frederick II of Sicily had been handpicked to rule by Pope Innocent III, but conflicts had arisen, and even though Frederick recovered Jerusalem in 1229, Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him and preached a crusade against him. Hordes of Mongols were beating at the gates of Europe. A succession of crusades were preached by the popes of these times crusades to rescue the Holy Land (Jerusalem fell again in 1244) and crusades against heretics within Europe.

Louis went on two Crusades himself, the Seventh (1248-1254) and the Eighth (1270). His endeavors to remain on good terms with Frederick II as well as with the Papacy reflect his desire for Christian peace and his need of aid from both sources for the prosecution of his Crusades. He was able to arrange a stable truce with Henry III of England before leaving France in 1248. On his return, he worked for the establishment of a formal peace with England and succeeded with the Treaty of Paris of 1259.

At the beginning of Louis’s reign, the abbey of Royaumont was built as a memorial to his father. He took great interest in the process. He also presided over the translation of the remains of his royal ancestors to the royal necropolis of Saint-Denis. In 1239, Louis acquired several relics of Christ’s Passion, including the Crown of Thorns, and he began the construction of the Sainte Chapelle next to the royal residence on the Île de la Cité in Paris to house them. In all these things, Louis responded to his own sense of religious fervor and his role as anointed leader of his people. Following his recovery from a serious illness in 1244, he determined to go on a Crusade. His departure with the flower of French nobility in 1248 was seen as a special grace.

Louis’s Crusade (the Seventh Crusade) began with elaborate preparations, provisions stockpiled during a period of years, the building of a French Mediterranean port at Aigues-Mortes, and a general settling in order of all temporal concerns. Queen Marguerite accompanied her husband and bore three children while on Crusade. The city of Damietta in Egypt was the first target; it fell almost without a fight, and she remained there, holding the city. In 1250, Louis and his men were captured as they retreated in disarray from the city of Mansourah. Near death from dysentery, Louis refused to leave his troops and insisted on staying with them until every survivor was ransomed. Damietta was part of the payment. Louis remained in the east, fortifying the Christian kingdoms of Outremer. Only the death of Queen Blanche in November, 1252, succeeded in calling him home. The news reached Louis in Sidon during the summer of 1253; he arrived in Paris in early September, 1254. The Crusade, in spite of early good luck, was a fiasco fatal to many, including Louis’s favorite brother, Robert of Artois, and nearly cost the king his life.

Louis’s long absence damaged France less than it might have, thanks to Blanche’s able regency, but disorders had arisen, and Louis set to work to clean house. He was a humbled man, conscious of the failure of his Crusade and seeking a renewal of his own spiritual life through redoubled asceticism and penitence. From his first moments back in France, he began to plan a return trip to the east, and his efforts to amend any disorder may be seen as tending toward this goal. While in Syria, he had been distressed to see that the libraries for Islamic scholars were superior to those available to Christians in France. On his return, he assembled a royal library, copied as many manuscripts as possible, and gathered what would be the beginning of the French National Library. He encouraged the University of Paris and favored the establishment of the Sorbonne by his counselor Robert de Sorbon. He gathered the greatest biblical scholars of his day and delighted in their debates. Thomas Aquinas dined at his table. The years between the Crusades were also devoted to the pleasant duties of education and marriage of his children, the last of whom was born in 1260.

The Treaty of Paris with Henry III of England dates from this time of peace and order. This treaty, unpopular on both sides of the Channel, ended Plantagenet claims to French lands, at the price of large money grants from Louis IX to Henry III. Louis made Henry the gift of several parcels of land from his own properties and accepted Henry’s feudal homage, making him a peer of France. Louis was also called on by the English barons to arbitrate their disputes with Henry III. In January, 1264, he gave an award, the Mise of Amiens, which upheld Henry on almost every point. The barons ignored it, and by August, 1264, Henry had relinquished almost all the concessions made to him in the Treaty of Paris for money to use in civil war against his barons.

The death of Frederick II in 1250 left the Holy Roman Empire in complete disarray. Charles of Anjou, Louis IX’s brother, became king of Sicily by papal invitation and ruled from 1266 to 1285. His influence may have guided Louis’s plans for his second Crusade (the Eighth Crusade). In spite of the king’s frail health, Louis and his sons sailed from Aigues-Mortes in early July, 1270. Louis’s first Crusade had attacked Egypt. This Crusade was directed against Tunis, directly across the Mediterranean from Charles’s Sicily. The heat and unsanitary conditions led to an almost immediate outbreak of severe dysentery among the French. Louis’s son, John Tristan, born at Damietta in 1250, died on August 3, 1270. Louis himself died on August 25. His remains were returned to France by his heir, Philip III, and entombed at Saint-Denis in May, 1271. Almost immediately after his funeral, his tomb was credited with miracles. His canonization was celebrated in 1297.

Significance

Louis IX’s great genius and great folly was to incarnate the thirteenth century ideal of kingship. Even his faults, such as his anti-Semitism, were consistent with his desire to further the salvation of his people. He was extremely generous to converts, but the unconverted Jew or heretic was a danger to wavering Christians. His Crusades were disasters on a worldly level, costing many lives and resources, yet they served to give a focus to Louis’s reforms and reorganization in France. As a simple nobleman would set the affairs of his estate in order before going on crusade, so the king did for his kingdom.

Louis saw the performance of government at all levels as a reflection of his personal performance as monarch. This view gave a special resonance to his administrative reforms. In 1254, the Great Ordinance was promulgated, formulating and regularizing the higher standards of justice and tighter royal control in the courts that Louis sought throughout his reign. Crown officials were publicly sworn to accept a severely practical code of ethics and stringent auditing. His Treaty of Paris of 1259 was not a simple political gesture but an idealistic personal one. His intent in making generous personal concessions to Henry III was to ensure friendship between their children and to gain Henry’s personal loyalty to him as feudal lord. In his most idealistic actions, Louis was also most immediately personal. It was his embodiment of the medieval Christian ideal that made Louis the focus of French national spirit and mystic prestige for the crown of France for centuries to come.

The Capetians

Reign

• Ruler

987-996

• Hugh Capet

996-1031

• Robert II the Pious

1031-1060

• Henry I

1060-1108

• Philip I the Fair

1108-1137

• Louis VI the Fat

1137-1179

• Louis VII the Younger (with Eleanor of Aquitaine, r. 1137-1180)

1179-1223

• Philip II Augustus

1223-1226

• Louis VIII the Lion

1223-1252

• Blanche of Castile (both queen and regent)

1226-1270

• Louis IX (Saint Louis)

1271-1285

• Philip III the Bold

1285-1314

• Philip IV the Fair

1314-1316

• Louis X the Stubborn

1316

• Philip, brother of Louis X (regent before birth of John I and during his short life)

1316

• John I the Posthumous

1316-1322

• Philip V the Tall

1322-1328

• Charles IV the Fair

Bibliography

Cartlidge, Cherese. The Crusades: Failed Holy Wars. San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 2002. Provides a history of the Crusades from the perspective of the Europeans, Byzantines, Muslims, and Jews. The author argues that the Crusaders were overly cruel and violent and ultimately were focused on riches instead of religion.

Dahmus, Joseph. Seven Medieval Kings. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967. This book presents Louis as one of seven outstanding monarchs spanning the period of the Middle Ages. Louis’s character and achievements are placed in historical perspective.

Fawtier, Robert. The Capetian Kings of France: Monarchy and Nation, 987-1328. Translated by Lionel Butler and R. J. Adam. London: Macmillan, 1960. This is a standard work on France under the Capetian Dynasty, to which Louis belonged, and includes a substantial section dedicated to him and France under his rule.

Hallam, Elizabeth M, and Judith Everard. Capetian France, 987-1328. 2d ed. New York: Longman, 2001. This excellent and scholarly book is firmly grounded on the most basic and practical aspects of the Capetian era. Chapter 5, “Louis IX: The Consolidation of Royal Power, 1226-1270,” directly discusses Louis. The book as a whole places Louis within the context of his ancestors and descendants. Includes maps, genealogical tables, and a bibliography.

Joinville, Jean de. The Life of Saint Louis. London: Sheed and Ward, 1955. This basic primary work, a memoir by a friend and crusading companion of Louis, was written in the author’s old age for Louis’s grandson. It is often referred to by writers on the period and is the source for many personal anecdotes that succeed in revealing the more human side of Louis.

Jordan, William Chester. Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership. 1979. Reprint. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. This study concentrates on the development of Louis’s character and his philosophy of rulership through his preparation for and involvement in his crusades. The text unites psychological analysis with detailed economic and political data. Includes maps, illustrations, appendices, and an extensive bibliography.

Labarge, Margaret Wade. Saint Louis: Louis IX, Most Christian King of France. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. This complete, readable, and well-documented biography of Louis presents maps, illustrations, a table of dates, a chart of family relationships, an annotated list of sources, and a general bibliography.

Lloyd, Simon. “The Crusades of Saint Louis.” History Today 47, no. 5 (May, 1997): 37-43. The author presents a clearly written overview of Louis’s legacy and achievements, especially his devotion to the Crusades. Includes several photographs.

Pernoud, Régine. Blanche of Castile. Translated by Henry Noel. London: Collins, 1975. This biography of Louis’s mother, Blanche, illuminates his family background, childhood, and early reign. The author supplies family charts, illustrations, and a bibliography.