Louis IX of France

Louis IX, known to posterity as Saint Louis, was born in 1214 at Poissy in the Île-de-France, the son of King Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile. Through his mother he was a grandson of Alfonso VIII of Castile and Eleanor of England, and thus a descendant of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. His father died in November 1226, and the twelve-year-old prince was anointed and crowned at Reims Cathedral as Louis IX. During his minority the government was conducted by Blanche, a capable and determined Castilian princess who suppressed baronial coalitions, negotiated with England, and secured the Capetian hold on the realm after the Albigensian Crusade had already extended royal power in the south. Blanche remained a decisive influence even after Louis reached adulthood, and the young king was formed in a household marked by rigorous personal piety, fasting, attention to the poor, and a strong sense of the sacred character of French kingship.

In 1234 Louis married Margaret of Provence, daughter of Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Provence, a union that bound the French crown more closely to the politics of the Midi and of the Empire and that brought four sisters onto the thrones or into the highest ranks of France, England, and the Empire. The couple had eleven children, among them Louis, who died in adolescence; Philip, who succeeded as Philip III; John Tristan, born at Damietta during the Egyptian crusade; Peter of Alençon; Robert of Clermont, from whom the Bourbon line later descended; and several daughters married into the houses of Navarre, Brabant, and Burgundy. Louis’s personal religion was unusually intense for a thirteenth-century monarch: he heard multiple Masses daily when possible, washed the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday, founded the Quinze-Vingts hospital for the blind in Paris and other charitable houses, and obtained from Baldwin II of Constantinople the Crown of Thorns and other relics of the Passion, for which he built the Sainte-Chapelle on the Île de la Cité as a monumental reliquary of rayonnant Gothic. He issued reforming ordinances against private war, judicial duel in some contexts, usury, and blasphemy, and he developed the Parlement of Paris as a professional court of appeal. His reputation for even-handed justice, including the oak of Vincennes under which the chronicler Jean de Joinville describes him hearing petitions, became a central element of his later cult.

Louis took the cross after a serious illness in the 1240s and led what is called the Seventh Crusade, sailing from Aigues-Mortes in 1248 for Cyprus and then Egypt, then regarded as the key to recovering Jerusalem. After the capture of Damietta in 1249, the army advanced toward Cairo. The campaign collapsed at Mansurah in 1250; Robert of Artois, the king’s brother, was killed, and Louis himself was captured by the Ayyubid forces. He was ransomed at great cost, Damietta being restored as part of the terms. Rather than return immediately, he remained in the Latin East for four years, fortifying Acre, Jaffa, Caesarea, and Sidon and attempting to stabilize the remnant crusader states, before returning to France in 1254. The disaster did not destroy his crusading conviction or his prestige at home; if anything, his patience in captivity and his subsequent works of fortification enhanced the image of a penitent and responsible Christian king.

In 1267 Louis again took the cross, against the advice of some counselors including Joinville. The Eighth Crusade, diverted toward Tunis in 1270, perhaps in the hope of converting the Hafsid ruler or of using Ifriqiya as a base against Egypt, landed near ancient Carthage. Disease swept the French camp in the summer heat. Louis died there on 25 August 1270, in his mid-fifties. Contemporary and near-contemporary accounts attribute his death to dysentery or a related camp fever. His bones were boiled for transport, according to the practice of the time, and were brought back to France to be interred at the royal necropolis of the Basilica of Saint-Denis; his viscera were buried at the Cathedral of Monreale in Sicily, in the territory of his brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily. A canonization inquiry, fed by miracle collections and promoted by the French court and by Franciscan circles that associated him with the Third Order, culminated on 11 August 1297 when Pope Boniface VIII enrolled him among the saints. Louis IX remains the only king of France to have been canonized. His feast is kept on 25 August. He became the model of the Christian prince in later medieval mirrors of princes and in early modern political thought, the namesake of cities such as Saint Louis in North America, and a patron of France, of the French monarchy, and of various crafts and charitable causes attached to his legend.