Forms of Devotion: The Religion of St. Louis of France
Saint Louis’ religion consisted first of all in his practice of worship. It was expressed through gestures and rituals that were regularly and frequently repeated throughout the day and even at night. His religion, however, was also a faith, a piety in harmony with the evolving religious practice of his time that always strove to reach the inner man and, in return, to make him the force of his spiritual life.
We are well informed about Saint Louis’ worship thanks to his many biographers, although we must not forget that they were also hagiographers. Some of them, actually the majority of them, wrote after his canonization in 1297. Others wrote about the king with the goal of having him canonized. Even though they did this with some emphasis, their intentions in any case led them to privilege this theme. Moreover, they were writing at a time when the Church and what we would call public opinion attached increasing importance to the exercise of virtues and one’s conduct in life (vita in its precise, limited sense, or conversatio), even though miracles remained the primary criteria for sainthood. The devotion they described for Saint Louis was not just the worship of a saint but of a particular saint: he was a layman (at a time when monks, bishops, and clerics had a quasi-monopoly on sainthood) and a king. His devotion was that of a layman who to a great extent tried to achieve his personal salvation through the exercise of his royal function. Louis IX had a strict notion of what distinguished a layman from a cleric, but he tried to exploit his eminent position in the secular hierarchy in order to come as close as possible to having the piety of clerics. Above all, he thought his highest duty was to pray even more for the salvation of his subjects than for his own salvation, or, rather, to make the two almost completely coincide. He prayed like a royal orant.
Saint Louis’ worship encompassed all the existing forms of devotion: services, confession, communion, the cult of the relics, respect for the Church (limited in the temporal realm), and penitential, charitable, and ascetic practices.
The Cistercian Model and the Mendicant Model
We must not neglect the attraction that monastic spirituality held for Saint Louis, especially that of the Cistercians who were the most important representatives of twelfth-century reformed monasticism. Their traditions were still very much alive in the thirteenth century and formed a link between the world of the monks prior to the thirteenth century and the Mendicant friars. This link was stronger than some historians have claimed. Louis frequented the Cistercians and the Mendicants with equal fervor. The first attracted him in their monastic solitude, the second in their urban sociability. These complementary natures allowed him to entirely realize his potential. His favorite place, however, the place where his heart and soul could flourish, was in the midst of nature among the Cistercians at Royaumont.
Some have nevertheless insisted on the closeness of his relations with the Mendicants, and it is true that they had a decisive influence on his public actions and his “politics.”
The two important Mendicant orders, the Minorites or Franciscans and the Preachers or Dominicans, were as old as Saint Louis. They established the essential part of their networks of convents before 1250. The Dominican convents were concentrated in the “large” cities, and the Franciscan convents in small towns. Louis favored and ushered in a new trend by supporting them and visiting them as he did. These new kinds of religious encountered extraordinary success throughout all Christendom. In contrast to the monks, they lived among men in the towns and mixed closely with laymen. They were great disseminators of religious practices, which they renewed profoundly with confession, the belief in Purgatory, and preaching. They entered people’s homes and minds, getting to know individuals and entire families. They practiced the fundamental virtues of primitive Christianity in the midst of a new society: poverty, charity, and humility.
They had no property of their own and became adept at taking collections. Thanks to the help of wealthy laymen like Louis, they built increasingly impressive convents, which went against the desires of their founders—the Spaniard Saint Dominic and the Italian Saint Francis. These apostles of poverty thus became specialists in monetary matters, one of the great problems of the century. They strove to moralize the new commercial and banking practices without condemning the most important ones, paving the way for a pre-capitalist society. They advocated methods of persuasion based on speech and example in order to assure the salvation of men and women. However, they depended directly on the papacy and not on any episcopal authority, so when the pope entrusted them with running the inquisitional tribunals for the repression of heresy in the 1230s, they carried out this task with more or less severity and usually with great zeal, although they did not all attain the same level of cruelty as the Dominican Robert who was nicknamed “le Bougre,” in other words, “the Bulgar.” This was one of the names for heretics, which points to the Oriental origins of certain heresies. A “Bougre” himself, Robert had converted and become a Preaching friar. With the fury typical of converts, he cruelly dealt with the heretics in the Kingdom of France in the late 1230s, especially in Flanders, a region whose economic prosperity encouraged the development of commercial practices quickly labeled usurious by our inquisitor. He covered Flanders with the fires of his victims burning at the stake. He soon became drunk with power and his appetite for these life-devouring flames. He burnt good people along with the bad, condemning innocent and simple-minded folk to death. In Matthew Paris’ words, he had become formidabilis, a terror. The pope was warned about his conduct, stripped him of his powers, and condemned him to life in prison. However, during his murderous reign of terror, Saint Louis gave him all the help he wanted, exhibiting just as much zeal for carrying out his duties as the secular arm of the Church. The English Benedictine communicated these facts to posterity.
Finally, despite Saint Francis’ reservations, the Mendicant friars determined that the apostolate should be sustained with knowledge. This led to the creation of the Mendicant schools for secondary and higher learning— the studia. It also led them to study at the universities. Some of them even became university masters, which was a source of strident conflict as some viewed their presence there as an intrusion, although in general their innovative instruction was a success with the students. (This was the case for Thomas Aquinas in Paris.) This also explains the strong attraction that Paris held for them as the great center for the study of theology in thirteenth-century Christendom. Saint Louis thus had the intellectual elite of the friars at his disposal, although, as we have seen, it was their piety, their knowledge of social problems, and their eloquence as preachers that interested him the most.
Al of his confessors seem to have been Mendicant friars. The most well known is the Dominican Geoffroy de Beaulieu, who wrote an invaluable Life of the king shortly after his death. His only other confessor whose name is known to us today was Jean de Mons. Because he always wanted to have a confessor available, he appointed two of them after his return from the Holy Land. One was a Dominican, and the other a Franciscan.
The Mendicants also played an important role in running his chapel. His chaplain Guillaume de Chartres accompanied him to Tunis like Geoffroy de Beaulieu. He too was a Dominican. Dominican friars also went to Constantinople to negotiate the purchase of the relics of the Passion, and they were the ones who brought them back to Paris. Saint Louis instituted three services to be held annually in their honor, one entrusted to the Dominicans of Paris, another for the Franciscans, and a third to be shared on a rotating basis among the other religious orders that had convents in the capital.
A great lover of sermons, Louis usually called on the Mendicants to preach privately to him, his family, and familiar circle in the Sainte-Chapelle. Although he failed to persuade the Franciscan Hugh of Digne to leave his convent of Hyères, he did succeed in getting one of the greatest preachers of the time to come there to preach to them. This was the Franciscan Saint Bonaventure who was master at the University of Paris since 1257 and general minister of his order. Of the 113 sermons that Bonaventure gave in Paris between 1257 and 1269, nineteen of them were preached before the king.
The friar who probably had the closest ties with Saint Louis was the Franciscan master of theology in Paris, Eudes Rigaud. In 1248, he became archbishop of Rouen, the center of Normandy that had an important, special status in the kingdom. He remained a Mendicant on the episcopal throne. There is a unique document that has been passed down to us; it is the record of this conscientious prelate’s parish visits, which provides essential knowledge about the rural clergy and religious life in the middle of the thirteenth century. Louis was not satisfied with simply asking him to provide ecclesiastical assistance; for example, he also invited him to preach in the Sainte-Chapelle for Pentecost in 1261. He even presided over the mass at Royaumont when the king was there for Assumption Day in 1262. In 1255, he presided over the marriage between the king’s daughter Isabelle and Thibaud de Champagne, the king of Navarre. On November 8, 1258, he presided over the anniversary mass for the death of the king’s father, Louis VIII, at Saint-Denis. In 1259, he visited the sick king at Fontainebleau, although he was recovering from an illness himself. In January 1260, he came to console the king after the death of his son Louis. The king also entrusted him with political missions. As early as 1258, Eudes Rigaud often sat at the royal court and in the parlements held in the palace in Paris. He also negotiated for the king during treaty of Paris with England in 1259.
Beginning in 1247, when Saint Louis sent investigators throughout the kingdom in order to reform the royal administration and make reparations for injustices that had been committed, many of these investigators were Mendicant friars. Among the thirty-eight known investigators, eight were Dominicans and seven were Franciscans.
The manuals written for Saint Louis were also primarily the work of the Mendicant friars, from the encyclopedia by the Dominican Vincent de Beauvais to the Mirror of the Princes by the Franciscan Gilbert de Tournai.
When the liveliest episode in the quarrel between the ordinary and Mendicant masters at the University of Paris broke out between 1254 and 1257, the king supported pontifical decisions that favored the Mendicants. Again, when Pope Alexander IV condemned the leader of the ordinary masters, Guillaume de Saint-Amour, stripping him of all his charges and benefices, forbidding him from teaching and preaching, and exiling him from the Kingdom of France, Saint Louis rigorously executed the part of the sentence that depended on his role as the secular arm of the Church.
Finally, there was the malicious gossip that circulated stating that Saint Louis wanted to abdicate in order to become a Mendicant friar and that he renounced this project less due to the protests of Queen Marguerite and more out of the impossibility of choosing between the Dominicans and the Franciscans. All of this smacks of an invented anecdote. On the other hand, he did want his younger sons to enter each of the two orders, although he did not insist when they refused.
One thing that is definitely true is that in certain milieus and perhaps generally throughout much of the kingdom, people had the image of a king who was not only manipulated by the Mendicants but who himself acted like a religious upon the throne. One dubious anecdote that still expressed the actual prevalence of this opinion has him respond to a knight who blamed him for letting people say he behaved more like a religious than a king:
Pay no heed to what those imbeciles say. I am going to tell you about what sometimes happens when I am alone in my private chambers. I hear the cries of “friar Louis” and the insults uttered against me when people think I cannot hear them. At those times, I go inside myself and ask myself if I shouldn’t repress the people who say these things, but then I realize that it is to my advantage to put up with them for the love of God. And to speak frankly, I do not regret that this occurs.
Saint Louis’ Faith
Faith was the basis for Saint Louis’ religion, an unshakeable faith that consisted first of all in the love of God. He said this to his son Philip in his Enseignements: “Dear son, I instruct you first to love God with all your heart and all your power, for without that no one can be worth a thing.”
The God to love and believe in without the least doubt was the Son above all— the center of Saint Louis’ religion. His faith was “the faith of Jesus Christ.” It was also the faith of the traditions and teachings of the Church:
The saint king struggled with all his might to strengthen himself in the Christian law through his words. He used to say that we should believe the articles of faith so firmly that whatever happens—death or physical calamity—we would have no desire to renounce our faith through words or deeds.
And again:
The king used to say that faith consisted in believing, even though our certainty is based only on words [sur un dire]. On this point, he asked me my father’s name. I told him that his name was Simon. He asked me how I knew this, and I answered that I firmly believed it and held it for certain because my mother had told me this. “So,” he said to me, “you must firmly believe all the articles of faith on the testimony of the apostles as you hear it sung in the Credo on Sundays.”
This faith had to be defended against the doubt and temptation sent by the Enemy, the devil. It also had to be reinforced with the yearning for Heaven. The devil’s assault was particularly aggressive and dangerous at the moment of death. Saint Louis took part in this religious movement that focused more and more on agony and that led to the worship of the Artes moriendi, the “Arts of dying,” in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
He would say: “The demon is so subtle that at the moment of agony he works as hard as he can to make us die in doubt and failure in some point of faith, because he sees that he cannot take the good works that a man has accomplished away from him and, at the same time, that the person who dies in confessing the true religion is lost to him.”
He continues:
This is why we must defend and protect ourselves from this trap in such a way as to say to the Enemy when he sends us a temptation like this: “Be gone. You will not tempt me to the point of preventing me from firmly believing in all the articles of faith. Even if you were to cut off all my members, I would still live and die in this state of mind.” Whoever speaks like this vanquishes the Enemy with the same staff and sword that the Enemy wanted to use to slay him.
Louis tells Joinville what Simon de Montfort had said to him about his faith, and he had clearly made this faith his own.
The saint king told me that some Albigenses had come to see the count of Montfort who was occupying the lands of the Albigenses in the king’s name at that time. They invited him to come see the host that had transformed itself into flesh and blood under the hands of the priest. And he answered them: “Go see it for yourselves, you who don’t believe in it. As for me, I firmly believe in the real presence [in it], as the Holy Church teaches us. And do you know what I gain by believing in it in this mortal life, as the Holy Church teaches us? I will have a crown in the heavens more beautiful than any of the crowns of the angels who see God face to face and who earn nothing by believing in him.”
This what he again defined as a faith that guaranteed “being honored in the century and gaining Heaven at death.”
Saint Louis had never affirmed his faith as firmly and courageously as when he was held prisoner by the Saracens and called upon either to swear an oath that was incompatible with the Christian faith or be condemned to torture. He told them: “You can very well kill my body, but you will never have my soul.” In effect, for him, “there was nothing worse than being outside the faith of Jesus Christ.”
Military, physical, and psychological misfortunes were generally interpreted as trials that God sends us to punish us for our sins and to give us the chance to correct ourselves. Louis fully adhered to the Christian doctrine of evil as God’s punishment for the good of those men who knew how to understand it.
After they narrowly avoided a shipwreck, he told Joinville that great tribulations and great illnesses in particular were threats sent to us to make us think of our salvation: “He [God] wakes us with his threats so that we can clearly see our faults and rid ourselves of what displeases him.” This was his definitive explanation for the failure of his crusade.
The God of his faith was a lord, and he was his vassal. His faith also lay in the fidelity of the homage sworn to God during the coronation, and this homage was not expressed with hand gestures but through the soul. It made the king a unique vassal of his kind, a minister and image of God in his own kingdom. “Beautiful Sire God, I will raise my soul toward you and I will entrust myself to you.”
Finally, his faith was confident. Although fear of God [timor] and fear of the devil were indispensable for one’s salvation, Saint Louis’ God was not a God of wrath and anger. His religion was not a religion of fear. He took the words of Guillaume d’Auvergne (d. 1248), the bishop of Paris and advisor and friend in his youth, made them his own, and cited them in Joinville’s presence: “No one can sin so much that God would not be able to forgive him.”
His Religious Knowledge
Louis was neither an intellectual nor a theologian, but he was concerned with instructing himself in matters of religion. He read the Bible and the Church Fathers, discussed religion with his entourage, and, notably, questioned the learned clerics he met. To sum this up perfectly: “Saint Louis is a great cleric according to the cultural categories of the thirteenth century. This is not in the sense of the great clerics of our churches, but on the level of culture . . . a cleric with a solid culture that was closer to that of the rather traditional culture of the French Dominicans than that of the great foreign intellectuals like Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.”
His appetite for religious knowledge struck his contemporaries. Guillaume de Saint-Pathus dedicated an entire chapter, the seventh chapter of his Life, to the theme of “Studying Holy Scripture”:
Judging that people should not waste their time on trifling things or strange demands of this world, and that people should spend their time on better and more weighty things, the holy king Louis worked on reading Holy Scripture, for he had a glossed Bible and the original writings of Saint Augustine and of other saints and other books of Holy Scripture which he often read and had read before him between dinner and bedtime. . . . On the days he would take a nap, if he did not have any important affairs to attend to, between his nap and vespers, he would summon religious or other honest people with whom he would speak about God, his saints, and their acts, stories from the Holy Scripture, and the lives of the Fathers. After complines were said by his chaplains in his chapel, he would go into his room, light a candle that was about three feet high, and for the entire time it burnt he would read in the Bible or some other holy book. . . . And when he was able to have people of reverence with him at his table, he would gladly invite them, whether they were men of religion or even laymen, and he would talk to them about God at his table in imitation of the lesson they read in the convents when the friars are gathered round the table.
Sometimes he went to Royaumont to sit down with the monks at the times when they held school. And
like a monk he would sit down at the feet of the master who was giving the lesson and diligently listen to him. Several times he went to the school of the Preaching Friars in Compiègne, and he would sit down on a block on the ground in front of the master who was reading from the pulpit and he would listen to him with diligence. The friars who were seated on chairs above the ground wanted to go down and sit on the ground with him, but he would never let them. In the refectory of the Preachers of Compiègne he would go up to the lectern and stand next to the friar who was reading the lesson there.
We find the same theme along with other details in Geoffroy de Beaulieu: when he was overseas, the faithful king heard of a powerful Saracen sultan who looked for books of all kinds that could be of use to the Saracen philosophers, and he had them copied at his own expense and kept them in his library. This way, the people who could read were able to use the books they needed.
The pious king decided that the sons of darkness were wiser than the sons of light, and that they were more zealous for their error than the sons of the Church were for their true Christian faith. He conceived the plan to have all the useful and authentic books of holy Scripture transcribed at his own expense when he returned to France, so that people would be able to find them in the libraries of the various abbeys, and so that he and other literate men would be able to study them for their own benefit and the benefit of their associates. After his return, he realized his plan and had an appropriate and well-defended place built to this effect. This was the room of the treasury of the Sainte-Chapelle, in which he collected most of the original writings of Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory, and the books of other orthodox scholars. When he had free time, he liked to study there and gladly allowed others to study there too. . . . He preferred to have new copies of these books made instead of buying old ones because this way the number and use of these holy books was increased.
In his testament, he bequeathed a part of these books in his library in Paris to the Minorite Friars [of Paris], one “part to the Preaching Friars [of Paris], and the rest to the Cistercian monks of the abbey of Royaumont that he had founded.” We have to wait for Charles V to see the establishment of a royal library handed down from king to king and that would become a national library after the fall of the monarchy. It is true Saint Louis set aside his luxurious illuminated manuscripts that were obviously few in number. Here is one last bit of information in which we can find the king of the French language:
When he was studying in these books in the presence of some of friends who did not know Latin, as he read the text and understood it, he would translate it into French for them with excellent precision.
His readings were still all closely related to his faith: “He did not like to read the writings of the [university] masters, but the books of the authentic and confirmed saints.”
This explains Saint Louis’ desire to be instructed in Christian doctrine from the important clerics. Here, he took advantage of a conversation with Saint Bonaventure who came to preach before him:
Friar Bonaventure, the general minister, reports that His Royal Highness Louis, the king of France, asked him this question: could a man prefer not to exist at all to always suffering torments as in hell, for example? He answered him: “Sire, this is a twofold question. First of all, it implies a perpetual offense against God, for God who is a just judge would not inflict a perpetual punishment for any other reason; and, on the other hand, there is the interminable suffering of the punishment, and no one should choose to remain in a state of perpetual offense in relation to God. Therefore, one would have to prefer not to exist rather than being God’s perpetual enemy.” The very pious and very Christian king faithful to God added: “I adhere to Friar Bonaventure’s opinion and I can assure you,” he said to the people in attendance, “that I would rather not exist at all and be reduced to nothingness than live eternally in this world and always rule as I rule now in a state of perpetual offense against my Creator.”
Finally, there he was again, with a holy book in his hand, asking a question about religion and not the least important one he could ask, as he liked to do unexpectedly. He asked one of his close associates, Joinville to be specific: “Seneschal, what is God?”—“Sire, it is a thing so good that there can be nothing better.” We know that Joinville’s answer made Louis happy.
Worship and Asceticism
As a convinced disciple of the holy books he read and teachings of the Church that he listened to, along with the love of God, Louis based his worship on the meaning of sin and its consequences and the will to repent. He had an almost physical horror of mortal sin, which was all the stronger since his own mother inculcated it in him. Here is another question he tossed Joinville: “So, I ask you which would you like better, to be leprous or to have committed a mortal sin?” Joinville’s reply: “I would rather have committed thirty of them than be a leper.” Saint Louis did not respond to this immediately because there were witnesses present, but the next day he let him have it: “You were speaking like an idiot and a fool [hâtif musard] who talks without thinking, because the soul that is in mortal sin is like the devil.”
Under the risk of death, drastic remedies were called for. This was the source of the king’s “stiff penitence,” this penitential rigor that was the subject of the fourteenth chapter in Guillaume de Saint-Pathus’ Life. Penitence was first of all the rejection of pleasure, hence the king’s abstinence at the dinner table and in bed. His confessor Geoffroy de Beaulieu testified to the purity of his manners and his chastity in two chapters of his biography, the fifth chapter “On the Purity and Innocence of His Life,” and the eleventh chapter “On His Chastity and Continence in Marriage.” His preferred form of penitence was fasting, which was both the most physical and the most spiritual act of repentance as it gave to the soul what it withheld from the body. He had such an excessive desire to fast that according to his confessor people had to prevent him from fasting on Mondays in addition to the other days of fasting as he wished to do. “He gave in to the advice of his entourage.”
This was not the only penitential excess he committed and that his religious advisors failed to persuade him to give up. They were torn between admiration and serious reservations about a layman, a king, moreover a sickly king, who behaved like a monastic ascetic. At the very most, they managed to persuade him to mitigate these mortifications of his body. They had the same discussions over his self-flagellation and practice of wearing a hair shirt.
His age experienced great penitential disturbances. Epidemics of public, collective flagellation erupted throughout Christendom from time to time. This was the case in 1260, a year that the Joachimite millenarians expected to usher in the end of the world. Saint Louis was more discreet. His flagellation took the form of private penitence. After each confession, he received discipline from the hand of his confessor in the form of five small pliable iron chains kept in the bottom of a small ivory box. He always wore this pyxis hanging from his belt like a purse, although he kept it out of sight. He had more than one of them, and sometimes he offered them as gifts to his children and close friends as a means of encouraging them to do penance. The vigor of this form of penance depended on his confessors’ temperament. Geoffroy de Beaulieu happened to know that one of them would strike with excessive force, seriously wounding the king’s flesh, which was soft. If any confessor tried to spare him any pain, the king would ask him to strike harder and signaled when the desired intensity had been attained. (Geoffroy was probably alluding to his own experience here.)
Louis also wanted to wear a hair shirt right on his skin for Advent, Lent, and every Friday. His confessor (Geoffroy de Beaulieu) had to tell him several times that this kind of penance was not appropriate for a king, and that he should replace it with alms for the poor and greater expediency in his administration of justice. Saint Louis ended up giving in to his pleas. However, for Lent he continued to wear a section of a hair shirt that formed a large belt around his waist. Every Friday during Advent and Lent, he secretly had his confessor give out forty sous parisis to the poor. This was a substitutive form of penance that the Church began to increase. Saint Louis engaged in this ecclesiastical accounting for spiritual life that benefited from the spread of the monetary economy, which counted for more than a little in the revolt of someone like Luther and the outburst of the Reformation. Not that these acts of penance were easy for him. They actually represented a struggle and a renunciation for him. This was also what set the price to be paid. Louis was hot-blooded, he had carnal needs, he was a gourmand, he loved life, and he liked to joke and laugh. Hence, his decision not to laugh on Fridays, to abstain from laughing as well: “The saint king abstained from laughing as much as he could on Fridays, and, if sometimes he started to laugh unexpectedly, he would stop himself immediately.”
We should not limit Saint Louis’ forms of worship to his gestures alone. His biographers underscored his habit of constantly listening to his conscience and the quality and the sensitivity of his conscience. Guillaume de Saint-Pathus’ fifteenth chapter treats the subject of “what beauty of conscience is” “because more than any of the other good qualities of the soul, pure conscience delights the watchful eyes of God, and the blessed king Saint Louis was of such great purity that he was able to delight God’s watchful eyes.”
On the other hand, Saint Louis was disheartened that the grace of the gift of tears, a sign of God’s acceptance of the sinner’s contrition and an expression of contrition in the traditional spirituality marked with the monastic seal of approval, had been refused him. This was “the gift of tears refused to Saint Louis,” which struck Michelet when he read the thirteenth-century biographies. However, “although the Lord sometimes granted him several tears while he was praying, when he felt them softly run down his cheeks into his mouth, he would savor them very sweetly not only in his heart but also on his tongue.” Louis needed these physical pleasures in his devotion, especially when they came from inside him.
His Conscience
Saint Louis’ religious devotion can be situated on the threshold between two distinct styles of spirituality. The first of these was traditional and monastic; it emerged in bursts of contrition and tears. The second was associated with a new conception of sin as something judged according to the sinner’s intentions and centered on conscience and the examination of conscience. Saint Louis’ refusal to cry was no doubt related to his individual sensibility, but it was also a part of this change in spirituality. Conscience tended to dry up all tears.
This conscience fed into a group of Saint Louis’ virtues. First of all, it nurtured one of his fundamental virtues, his quasi-Franciscan humility. We have already examined so many of the signs of this virtue within him, and he was often astonished when he found it lacking in certain churchmen. This occurred, for instance, after his meeting with Pope Innocent IV in Cluny in 1246 when he failed to convince the pontiff to reconcile with Frederick II in order to unify Christendom in view of the upcoming crusade.
When His Lordship the Pope had proudly and haughtily refused, His Royal Highness the king of France went away angry and indignant that he had not been able to find the least sign of humility in the man who bore the title of the servant of the servants of God.
Conscience also fostered Saint Louis’ patience, another essential virtue for this man-king who was always turning to the man-Christ. He was a suffering king who viewed himself as an image of Jesus in his suffering, who wished to be the Christ of the Passion. His biographers and hagiographers made a great deal of this virtue of patience. Let’s listen to the testimony of one of the more independent chroniclers, the Englishman Matthew of Paris: “The very Christian king stayed in Acre, silently and patiently putting up with this adversity.” Louis confided to the king of England in a friendly conversation: “Getting back to myself, and getting back to my heart and looking inside it, I am more overjoyed with the patience the Lord has granted me through his grace than I would be if I ruled the entire world.”
His contemporaries frequently related his loyalty and his passion for truth to his conscience. One of Joinville’s anecdotes illustrates this:
People have pointed out Saint Louis’ loyalty in his reception of Sir Renaud de Trie who brought him a letter containing the donation of the county of Dammartin-en-Gohelle to the heirs of the countess of Boulogne who had recently died. The letter’s seal had been broken, showing only half of the king’s legs in the image and the cushion on which he rests his feet. The king showed it to us and asked for our advice.
Without a single exception we all agreed that he was in no way bound to execute the letter. He then ordered his chamberlain John Sarrasin to show him the letter. As he held it in his hands, he said, “Lords, this is the seal I used before going overseas, and anyone can plainly see that the imprint of the broken part of the seal is connected to the whole seal. Because of this then, I could not dare keep this county with a good conscience.” Then, he summoned Sir Renaud de Trie and told him: “I am giving you the county back.”
There is no better example of Saint Louis’ loyalty than the demonstration he gave by observing it in his relations with the Muslims. His contemporaries were so used to considering that the moral rules Christians were normally supposed to respect were suspended in their dealings with the Muslims that this incident made a powerful impression on them. Boniface VIII mentioned it in his canonization sermon of August 6, 1297. Joinville witnessed this episode and narrates it in his Histoire de Saint Louis, but he had already mentioned it in his deposition for the canonization proceedings, so Guillaume de Saint-Pathus was able to include it in his Life because he had access to the record of the proceedings. I am relying on his version of these events here. After paying 30,000 of the 200,000 pounds demanded by the Muslims for the ransom of the king and the other French prisoners, the Saracens released the king on the condition that he promised to stay on his ship off the coast of Damietta until the entire sum was paid. Saint Louis gave his promise orally and not in writing. The barons who were with him advised him to take advantage of the situation and set sail. He answered that there was no question of his not keeping his promise, even if the Saracens broke their promise by massacring the Christian prisoners in Damietta. Some time later, they informed the king that the entire ransom had been paid.
But His Lordship Philippe de Nemours, the holy king’s knight, told him: “The sum of money has been paid in full, but we cheated the Saracens out of 10,000 pounds.” When the saint king heard these words he became very angry and said: “Know that I want the 200,000 pounds to be paid in full, because I promised them and I don’t want a single pound to be missing.” At that moment, the seneschal of Champagne interrupted His Lordship Philippe, winked at him, and told the king: “Sire, do you believe what His Lordship Philippe says? He is only joking.” And when His Lordship Philippe heard the seneschal’s voice, he remembered the saint king’s incredibly great desire for truth, and then continued and said: “Sire, His Lordship the seneschal is telling the truth. I only spoke like that to sport and joke and to hear what you would say.” The saint king replied: “Do not expect any congratulations for this game and this test, but see to it that the sum of money is paid in its entirety.”
Sacramental Practice
Saint Louis attached great importance to the rites and necessary mediation of the Church and the priests in the religious life of laymen, including the king’s. Since the twelfth century, the theology of the sacraments was regularized within the framework of a sacramental septenary. In particular, this had been the case since the appearance of Hugh of Saint Victor’s De sacramentis. Louis believed that the Church was never more indispensable than in its role of dispensing the sacraments.
Saint Louis’ attitude typified what Father Gy says about sacramental practices in the thirteenth century: “There are two sacraments that are indispensable for everyone: one is baptism, and the other is confession for anyone who has committed a mortal sin.” We have seen the importance Saint Louis attached to his own baptism and his zeal for baptizing non-Christians. Baptism marked one’s entry into the Christian community as one’s true birth, one’s spiritual birth, and the basic necessary condition that allowed someone to hope for salvation and to go to Heaven. The site of one’s baptism, which was often one’s birthplace, was always considered one’s true birthplace. This explains Louis’ insistence on being called Louis de Poissy after the place he was baptized.
Confession was of great concern to Saint Louis because it was the one sacrament that erased mortal sins, recreating the conditions of purity of baptism. The thirteenth century was the century of confession. In 1215, the year after Saint Louis’ birth, the Fourth Lateran Council instituted obligatory annual confession for all Christians. Annual confession was not enough for Saint Louis. It left too many long intervals in which the power of mortal sin was too great and too dangerous. Weekly confession provided a safer regimen, and the ideal day of the week was the one that had been specifically designated for penance: Friday. The king, however, was afraid of committing a sin that might be mortal between any two Fridays, especially at night—this time for temptations, the devil’s favorite time for mounting his assaults. So, the king felt it was necessary to keep a daytime confessor and a nighttime confessor near his room and had the two trade off to hear his confessions.
Some may be surprised to see eucharistic practice lag behind these two others in the order of Louis’ sacramental activity. However, in the thirteenth century more emphasis was placed on the conditions that were supposed to make the sinner worthy of receiving the Eucharist—confession and penance: “Before taking communion, it is necessary to test one’s conscience.”
Thus Louis did not frequently take part in communion. Guillaume de Saint-Pathus explains this in more detail:
The blessed king had such fervent devotion when he took the sacrament of the true body [the body of Our Lord], because he would stay to take communion six times each year at the very least. This was on Easter, Pentecost, the Ascension Day of the Blessed Virgin Mary, All Saints’ Day, Christmas, and for the purification of Notre-Dame.
This text also informs us about the hierarchy ordering his worship: worship for Christ (three communions), for the Virgin (two communions), and for the saints (one communion).
Louis, however, surrounded these communions with recommended “conditions of dignity” and humility. He honored Christ’s body by surrounding his communions with fasts, periods of continence, and prayer—in addition to preliminary confession. He had an impressive array of gestures he employed in the very act of communing.
And he would go to receive his savior with such great devotion that he would wash his hands and mouth and remove his hood and headdress beforehand. Once he had entered the church choir he would not walk on his feet to the altar, but he would walk up to it on his knees. And when he was before the altar, he would say his Confiteor.
The thirteenth century was also a period of expansion for the eucharistic cult. In 1264, Pope Urban IV instituted the Festival of Corpus Christi in which the host was carried in a procession under the dais. This action launched the tradition of the sanctifying object that soon spread to princely secular ceremonies. Eucharistic miracles occurred more frequently in the thirteenth century as well.
As for the other sacraments, of course Louis had received the sacrament of marriage. He celebrated his own as devoutly as possible for the time, incorporating a mass into the wedding ceremony and observing the “three nights of Tobias,” although the marriage liturgy in the Middle Ages did not have “the importance that it would acquire later on.”
This was also the case for the Extreme Unction. If the dying person was still conscious, it was confession that counted the most, as well as prayer, gestures of humility like lifting the dying person from his bed and laying him on a sheet or even on the ground, or dressing the body in a monastic habit, although royal dignity undoubtedly forbade this in Saint Louis’ case. Blanche of Castile died at Maubuisson in a Cistercian robe. Saint Louis’ biographers, however, insisted on pointing out that he received the Extreme Unction while he was still conscious on his deathbed in Carthage.
Saint Louis and Prayer
Prayer seems to lie at the heart of Saint Louis’ worship. It consisted in love and established a direct relationship between God and the person who prayed through traditional texts taught by the Church and the clerics. This connection was all the more important when the praying man was a king and the leader of his people.
Descriptions of Saint Louis praying are most common in the Lives of his confessor Geoffroy de Beaulieu and Guillaume de Saint-Pathus. On the other hand, we find little information on his praying in the works of the other biographers and particularly in Joinville, the bull for his canonization, and the two sermons given for the occasion by Boniface VIII. Only two allusions to Saint Louis’ prayer can be found in the canonization bull. Boniface VIII emphasized that the king’s piety became stronger after his return from the first crusade. During Lent, Advent, the days before the festival days and the Ember Weeks, “he would commit himself to fasting and prayer” (in jejuniis et orationibus existebat). The pope stressed the length of his prayers and his way of settling into prayer, although this was not the most important thing that made a saint from the perspective of the curia. Boniface also recalled the prayers the king said on his deathbed. They allowed him to die the good death: “By recommending his soul to God with devout prayers and by pronouncing the following words to the letter—‘Father, I am putting my spirit in your hands,’ he happily passed on to Christ” (suam Domino devotis precibus animam recommendans, ac literaliter exprimens verba sequentia, videlicet—Pater, in manus tuus commendo spiritum meum, feliciter migravit ad Christum). Louis relied on prayers and customary formulae, but he did not repeat them mechanically; he gave the words their profound true meaning—literaliter exprimens.
We can compare this mention of the praying king with the recommendations for his son written in his Enseignements. At church during mass, one must express oneself “with one’s mouth and in thought.” It was necessary to meditate on a prayer’s words at the same time one uttered them. Prayer should become more meditative as one proceeded from the consecration to the communion. In Joinville’s version, he gave his son the following advice: “Pray to God with your heart and your mouth especially during the mass [while] the consecration is being made,” and, further on, he advised him again: “and willingly engage in prayers [proieres] and pardons [indulgences].” The king’s devoutness moved along the overlapping border between heartfelt enthusiasm and objectively predetermined rites.
Joinville mentioned the king’s prayers on only two occasions. The first occurred after his mother’s death, which Saint Louis only learned about several months afterward. We know that this one time his grief made him lose his sense of moderation. Among his reactions, there was his act of sending “a ledger [to France] full of letters for prayers to the churches so that they would pray for her.”
Joinville reintroduces the subject of Saint Louis’ prayers when he narrates his death as an eyewitness, Pierre the count d’Alençon, the king’s son reported it to him.
When he was getting close to death, he called on the saints to assist him and help him, especially on His Grace Saint Jacques, as he said his oraison that begins with the words Esto, Domine, in other words, “God, be the sanctifier and guardian of your people.” He then called on the assistance of His Grace Saint Denis of France by saying his prayer that goes: “Lord, God, grant us the power to scorn the wealth of this world in such manner that we have no adversity to fear.”
The vocabulary for “prayer” was rather simple: in Latin it was orare, oratio, and only rarely preces; in French it was “oraison” or, more rarely, “orer” and, less frequently “prie” or “prières (proieres).” Nevertheless, Saint Louis’ biographers, and Geoffroy de Beaulieu and Guillaume de Saint-Pathus in particular, described all of his manners of praying.
When dealing with his devoutness in attending mass and sermons, Geoffroy described his manner of praying in detail.
The prayer services that he listened to daily were the canonical hours and the hours of the Virgin, and he always wanted to hear them accompanied by song. When he was traveling he also wanted to hear them and said them in a soft voice with his chaplain. He said the service for the dead accompanied by nine lectiones every day with his chaplain, even on the days of the ceremonial festivals. The lectiones were passages selected from Scripture or the writings of the Church Fathers and integrated into a service. He listened to two masses almost every day and he even frequently heard three or four of them. When he heard that some of the nobles were muttering things against the amount of time he spent attending so many masses and sermons, he replied that no one would say anything if he spent twice as much time playing dice games and running through the forests hunting.
It was his custom to get out of bed around midnight to sing matins with his chaplains and clerics in the royal chapel. Upon returning from matins, he took a break to rest [quietum spatium] and prayed at the foot of his bed. If the Lord had inspired him to worship, he had no fear of being interrupted by any intruders in these moments. He wanted to continue praying for as long as matins lasted in the church. However, as he did not want to get up too early for prime in case any urgent affairs arose, and because staying up weakened his body and head and placed a serious burden on them, on the advice and insistence of his friends he ended up waking for matins at one o’clock, which allowed him to hear prime, the masses, and the other canonical hours in a row with only a short pause in between. He did not want to be distracted by any conversations when they were singing the hours, except in the case of an emergency, and even in that case he only briefly stopped praying. He did the same thing whether he was staying in a royal castle or in a monastery or convent as he often did.
He paid close attention to the celebrations of the important festivals and was very visible when they took place. He loved the songs sung during the services and as he increased the number of clerics in his chapel, he also increased the number of singers there. He was particularly fond of the “Good Children” (les Bons-Enfants), in other words the children who sang in the choir who were usually poor students who ended up forming a veritable choir school.
For Saint Louis, prayer was a sensual experience, and he hoped that it would move him to the point where he had tears running down his cheeks into his mouth.
When he visited a house of congregation, he immediately asked the religious to pray for him and his people, both the living and the dead. When he made this request on his knees in the chapter houses, the humility of his pose often brought them to tears. In his quest for suffrages (prayers and masses) for his associates, servants, and deceased friends in addition to himself and his family members, he showed the same loyalty and solidarity for this “artificial” family formed by his entourage as for his natural family. Prayer expressed blood ties and ties of the heart.
According to Guillaume de Saint-Pathus in his chapter “On Devoutly Praying to God,” prayers and works formed an inseparable pair in Saint Louis’ devotional practice. To pray meant “to put one’s spirit present before God,” it was “having God’s contemplation, consolation, and assistance in order to accomplish a good work.”
When he was not sick, the king prayed every evening after complines with a chaplain in his chapel or in his dressing room. After the chaplain left, he kept praying whether he was in the chapel, his dressing room, or at the side of his bed. He prayed leaning toward the ground with his elbows on a bench. He usually prayed for such a long time that the people in his service [la maisnie de sa chambre] grew impatient waiting outside. Fifty times each night, he knelt down, stood back up, and knelt down again as he slowly said an Ave Maria. Instead of drinking a glass of wine each night before bed as was the custom of many of his contemporaries, he did not take any “bedtime wine.” Before his first crusade, he always went to bed after matins, even in winter. After his return from the crusade, he rose after matins but well before daybreak, reciting matins a little later and then saying a solitary prayer before the altar or at his bedside. He prayed hunched over with his head bowed so low toward the ground that his eyesight and his mind were weakened by it and he could not get back into bed on his own.
Guillaume de Saint-Pathus highlighted his numerous requests for prayers from others. When he visited a convent or a monastery, Louis knelt before the religious whom he asked for prayers. He sent an annual letter to the Cistercians that solicited their prayers. Each monk had to say three masses for him every year: one mass of the Holy Spirit, one mass of the Holy Cross, and one mass of Notre-Dame. He wrote to his daughter Blanche to ask her to pray for him after his death. He put the same request down in his own hand in his Enseignements for his son and daughter. Before leaving for Tunis, he visited the Parisian convents and knelt before the friars as he asked them to pray for him in front of his household, knights, and everyone else in attendance.
Guillaume cited other exceptional examples of his prayers and requests for prayers. At the very moment of his liberation in Egypt, people heard an uproar in the Muslim camp: the king was making his people say the service of the Holy Cross, the service of the day, the service of the Holy Spirit, the service of the dead, “and all the other good prayers he knew.” At Sidon, he had the patriarch give a sermon and made the Christian populace attend it “barefoot and in rags [woolen shirts]” so that they could pray to God for a sign indicating whether it was better for Louis to stay in the Holy Land or to return to France. Finally, when he had a difficult problem to resolve with his council, he often asked the convents of religious to beseech God in their prayers to inspire the king with the right solution. Thus, even before making his most important decisions, Saint Louis surrounded himself with an army of praying men charged with the task of drawing the secrets for success from God.
He combined individual and collective prayer, praying aloud and praying quietly (“with the mouth or in thought”). However, praying aloud was what predominated in his practice even when he was alone. We should remember that “silent reading” was only slowly beginning in this period. Saint Louis tried to strike a balance between individual and collective prayer. He often prayed with his chaplain or the clerics of his chapel, but he also liked to pray alone.
His prayer was also a royal prayer in its form. He carried it out either with his chapel, which was a royal chapel more numerous and more brilliant than all those belonging to any other nobles and powerful men in the kingdom, or alone. When he engaged in private prayer, it was not just an individual’s prayer that this expressed in the thirteenth century, but also the prayer of the solitary leader.
Collective prayer was for important occasions, the festival ceremonies where he played his role as king. In these ceremonies, he was particularly attentive to what seemed to him like a natural continuation of prayer, its mystical envelope—song.
Louis’ practice of prayer tended to become ubiquitous; he prayed everywhere and at almost any time—on land and at sea, on horseback and in fixed domiciles, in private and in public, day and night. He still had to accept the interruptions in its exercise. During the day, he reserved two necessary moments for it in the morning and the evening. However, the disruptions also arose from the exceptional moments of the great festivals and great dangers. Prayer shaped Saint Louis’ exceptional experience as much as his daily experience, his ceremonious experience as much as his habitual experience. The general trend, however, resided in his daily, frequent, and lengthy practice. His hagiographers underscored the impatience of his entourage when they were confronted with the length of his prayers, and they did this to show how much the king was different from and superior to others and distinct from them on the basis of the extent of his praying. His prayer was the prayer of a saint.
The hagiographers and notably Guillaume de Saint-Pathus noted Saint Louis’ gestures in prayer. In this age of renewed attention to gestures that the Church attempted to codify, this man of moderation and the happy medium was prone to excess. His frequent worship, all his kneeling and other tiring gestures, his exaggerated bowing toward the ground that warped his senses, all of this far exceeded the normal practice of prayer. However, no saints existed without excesses like these.
Even though the king took part in the joyous prayers for the great festivals (Easter, notably), even though he was sensitive to songs of rejoicing, prayer was still primarily a form of penance for him.
To whom did he address his prayers? He addressed them to God—seen mainly with the traits of Christ the Son, to the Holy Spirit, and to the Virgin Mary—who virtually became a fourth figure in the Trinity in the thirteenth century.
When he came back from the crusade in 1254 grief-stricken with remorse over his defeat as it sent tremors through all Christendom, “they sang a mass in the honor of the Holy Spirit so that the king would receive consolation from He who is above all else.” As for the Virgin Mary, we have seen her appear as an important mediator on men’s behalf with her son Jesus. This therefore generally made her a special object for the worship of rulers who commended themselves to her with their subjects. She was especially venerated by Saint Louis who often prayed to her in the Marian sanctuaries and who had the service for the Virgin said every day. In his Enseignements for his son, he asked him to repress “everything that is done or said against God or Our Lady,” and advised him to pray to God to protect him “through his great mercy and through the prayers and merits of his blessed mother, the Virgin Mary.”
For whom does he pray? He prayed for himself. Prayer was first of all the means of attaining personal salvation. However, he also prayed for others. As a king devoted to his lineage, he prayed for the memory of his ancestors, for his father, and perhaps even more for his grandfather Philip Augustus, for his mother whom he cherished more than anyone else, for his brothers and sisters, and for his children (the queen belonged to a different lineage). Saint Louis practiced a dynastic form of prayer.
As a king who valued friendship, full of recognition for his servants and his entourage, Saint Louis was also the center of an “artificial” family held together by prayer within a religious and eschatological perspective. The king was aware of his duties to his people (“sa gent,” as he says of his soldiers on the crusade and his subjects in general); he made his royal prayer for the kingdom and its inhabitants into one of the most demanding responsibilities of his function. A good Christian king was a king who prayed for his people.
Perhaps above all else, Saint Louis prayed and had others pray for the dead. As the king of a dynastic kingdom with very great funerary ambitions, as a contemporary of the spread of the belief in Purgatory that required suffrages from the living for the dead, and as the heir to an important monastic and aristocratic tradition of worshipping the dead for whom the orders endowed with a clientele of deceased figures prayed since the foundation of Cluny, he accorded a disproportionate importance to services for the dead, although in this he followed meticulously the practice of his time. He was a king of the dead just as much as a king of the living.
No doubt people prayed in order to assure their own personal salvation and the salvation of others in this form of penitence and humility, but people also used prayer to accompany good works. However, at the end of prayer worship, there was direct contact with God, the contemplation of God, and the direct appeal for help for oneself and for others that the person who prays addressed to God. By praying, the king fulfilled the mission explicitly confided to him by the clerics on the day of his coronation and crowning, the mission for him to serve as the intermediary between God and his subjects.
Another characteristic of the period led Louis to practice individual prayer. This was the trend of seeking to worship and practice charity in secrecy. Hidden charity was a response to the shameful poverty that was increasing among certain types of the people.
Following one of the attitudes advocated by the rules of piety in his time and in particular by Mendicant devotion for humility, he hid his actions in order to do good. He tried to conceal his dietary rigor with pious ruses, but at the same time did not entirely manage to rein in the exhibitionism particular to asceticism. If we were to try to situate him within the evolutionary development of medieval worship, we would have to simplify things by saying that although he partook of a certain “Gothic” love of life, he also articulated the beginnings of a certain “flamboyant” asceticism.
Louis assiduously frequented the Cistercians and the Mendicant friars, who often continued the Cistercian practices and spirit of devotion into the thirteenth century. Finally we must not forget that Louis viewed prayer as a means for a layman to come as close as possible to having the same conduct, the same status, and the same chances of pleasing God as the religious. His praying may above all have been a monastic form of prayer. This was compatible with the global image of the king that a number of his contemporaries had, particularly those like Geoffroy de Beaulieu who thought he had seriously entertained the idea of joining a Mendicant order. One of his other biographers, Guillaume de Chartres, wrote that “his manners, his actions, and his gestures were not just those of a king but those of a religious.”
His Worship of the Saints
Although the Virgin was the privileged intermediary between God and men, the saints represented another group of mediators for the king. He imagined them existing as part of a heavenly government functioning on the model of a feudal monarchical regime. He also saw them as auxiliaries for realizing his project of melding religion and politics together—to succeed on earth and in heaven, or, rather, in heaven as on earth. Other wealthy and powerful individuals in the thirteenth century shared this personal vision of Saint Louis’. The relation between heaven and earth had somehow been inverted in relation to the Augustinian model in which the earthly city has to strive to imitate the heavenly city. A significant parallelism still existed here, but it had been reversed. It was no longer “on earth as it is in heaven,” but “in heaven as it is on earth.” The merchant wanted to possess both money in this life and eternal life in the beyond. The powerful man should have “honor” on this earth and “glory” in heaven.
Louis exposed his plan for realizing this project to an astonished Joinville: “Would you like to learn how you can have honor and please men in this world and have God’s grace and glory in the time to come?” The means for achieving this relied on the saints:
The saint king told the knight to attend Church during the ceremonious festivals for the saints and to honor the saints, and he said that the saints in Heaven are like the king’s advisors on earth, because whoever has business with an earthly king, he asks who has good relations with him, who can ask him for something he will be sure to obtain, and to whom does the king listen? And when he knows who this person is, he goes to find him, and asks him to ask the king on his behalf. This is how things work with the saints in heaven who are the intimate friends [privés] of Our Lord, and his familiar circle and who can ask him without hesitation, because he listens to them. So, you should go to church on their festival days, honor them, and pray to them so that they can pray Our Lord for you.
Did Louis ever dream that in becoming a saint he would be able to play this same role in Heaven as a mediator at God’s side that he played on earth as king between God and his subjects? Isn’t the fate of a good king to become a saint who can exercise his function in perpetuity?
Saint Louis’ Devotional Obsessions
Furthermore, I can identify four types of worship in which he invested a virtually obsessive commitment: listening to sermons, the cult of the relics, acts of charity, and the construction of religious buildings.
I have already discussed Saint Louis’ love of sermons at length (and didn’t he also often act like an amateur preacher?), so I will content myself with presenting an anecdote that conveys a sense of the quasi-magical character of this passion of his:
He very frequently wanted to listen to sermons, and, when he liked them, he would retain them very well and was able to repeat them to others with great success. During his return voyage from the crusade, which lasted six weeks, he ordered them to give three sermons a week on his ship. When the seas were calm and the ship did not need the sailors to work on it, the pious king wanted these sailors to hear a special sermon on a theme that was of particular concern to them such as the articles of faith, manners, and sins, in light of the fact that these types of men very rarely heard the word of God. . . .
Louis also had a quasi-fetishistic attraction for relics. He no doubt considered his acquisition of the relics of the Passion as the greatest accomplishment of his reign. He had the Sainte-Chapelle built for them and created three annual services for them. He also acquired the relics of Saint Maurice and built a church in Senlis to house them, organizing a grand procession of the saints’ bodies for the occasion.
His third great obsession was charity, and we have already seen many examples of this in two basic forms: serving the poor at the supper table, caring for the sick, and, above all, distributing alms either secretly or publicly, and sometimes even in an ostentatious way. This occurred on his journeys throughout the kingdom, his almsgiving tours where he was assailed by legions of poor people. For Saint Louis, faith and devoutness could not exist without works. According to Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, “These two things agree with one another in the eyes of Our Lord almighty—that works should be backed up with prayer and prayer with works.” And the thirteenth century was a time when works of charity were strongly advocated by the Mendicant friars and became an essential element of piety, especially for wealthy and powerful laymen. This was the theme of Guillaume de Saint-Pathus’ eleventh chapter, “Works of Charity.” Louis’ acts of providing aid for the sick, particularly for the “ill-sighted” and the blind for whom Louis built the hospice of the Quinze-Vingts in Paris that was intended to house three hundred blind persons, dressing people who had no clothes, giving food to people who were starving, giving alms to the poor, lodging the homeless, providing for the needs of the widows of crusaders who died across the sea, delivering prisoners from the infidels, taking care of lepers, burying the dead properly as he did in the Holy Land, staying at the bedside of people who were dying as he did in the hospital of Compiègne and at the Cistercian abbey of Chaalis are all so many illustrations.
Joinville was a witness to it all:
The king was such a generous almsgiver that everywhere he went in his kingdom, he would give to the poor churches, the lazar houses, the hospitals, the hospices, and to poor noblemen and noble women. Every day, he would feed a multitude of poor people, without counting the ones who ate in his chamber, and many times I saw that he would slice their bread and give them to drink with his own hands.
To these good works we must add his construction of religious buildings. Saint Louis practiced this passion of kings (and of certain leaders of republican states to this day) to the utmost degree. He had a passion for building monuments and leaving them as signs of memory. He only constructed a few non-religious buildings, palaces or strongholds, but he endowed some of them with holy chapels, notably at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Palais de la Cité in Paris. With combined admiration and reproof for the excess of his expenses, his biographers smugly wrote up the list of the religious buildings he had built in his lifetime as well as those built after he died thanks to his gifts that made up the largest part of his testament. Joinville gives a detailed list that includes the Cistercian abbey of Royaumont, the monastic Cistercian abbeys of Lys and Maubuisson built at his mother’s request, the convent of Saint-Antoine near Paris (in the current faubourg of Saint-Antoine), several convents of the Preachers and the Cordeliers, the hospitals of Pontoise and Vernon, the house for the blind in Paris, and the abbey of the Lady Cordeliers of Saint-Cloud at the request of his sister Isabelle. In order to satisfy these pious obsessions, the king of probity forgot his desire to respect moderation and to be economical. He claimed that he preferred the prud’homme to the béguin, the devout man without openness or moderation, but he still often behaved like a layman of excessive piety in all of this, like a king who had everything but the religious habit.
His Religious Devotion on the Crusade
At this point, we must briefly return to the topic of Saint Louis on the crusade. Even though I do not give the crusade as central and far-reaching a place in Saint Louis’ life and reign as Jean Richard and William Jordan, the crusade was still his most important religious experience, and it was still the one great adventure of religious devotion for Christians in the middle of the thirteenth century. Because everything about Saint Louis seems to target Christian perfection, some have asked whether he was the “ideal crusader.”
If we refer to the concept of the “ideal crusader,” we can see that Saint Louis was one of the best incarnations of this imaginary character in the eyes of his contemporaries, posterity, and modern historians.
He was an “ideal crusader” first of all because he carried out his preparations for the “pilgrimage overseas” better than most of the leaders of the other crusades, and he also made more preparations for his crusade. Like the chivalric adventure, the crusade was a religious expedition that required a moral preparation including various rites of purification. Saint Louis’ biographers noted the change in his attitude after the first expedition: he renounced luxury in dress and ostentation in his eating habits. They dated this change from his return from the Holy Land and observed that it lasted until his second crusade and his death. His life would henceforth be a long act of penance and a slow preparation for his new and final “passage.” However, this transformation really dated from the day he took the cross as noted in the legislation for the crusade decreed by the pontifical bulls.
His grand tournées (tours) through the heart of the kingdom, in Île-de-France, from the Orléans region to Vexin, undertaken in 1248 and again in 1269–1270 were important preparatory actions. And, as Louis IX never separated his concern for his worldly kingdom from his religious aims, he launched the important campaign that sent his investigators throughout the kingdom in 1247, and later dispatched a new wave of them after issuing the edict of 1254. He launched these campaigns with the intention of putting an end to the abuses committed by royal officers.
The crusade can also be associated with his preparations in terms of his devout worship of the Christ of the Passion, the historical (and divine) Jesus of the Holy Land, through the relics of the Passion, their reception at Villeneuve-l’Archevêque, the barefoot procession that escorted them from Sens to Vincennes after their ceremonious arrival, their transfer to the royal palace, and the construction of the Sainte-Chapelle, which was inaugurated on April 25, 1248 just before the departure for the crusade. Once again, the fact that Louis’ preparations consisted in acts of religious devotion is essential.
Louis IX may also be considered an ideal crusader for having united the proper motives of a crusader in the thirteenth century; these were the motives of conquest, mission, and penitence. When he left in 1248, he had rejected the diplomatic path opened by Frederick II and the new missionary plan for the crusade that Innocent IX had just defined—“he is a crusader in the old-fashioned mode.” He was the valiant soldier of the crusade that Joinville laid eyes upon one day in Egypt, armed for battle and resplendent: “the most beautiful knight he had ever seen.” However, he was also an impassioned partisan of conversion that took the salvation of the souls of the sultan of Egypt in 1248 and of the sultan to Tunis in 1270 as its supreme objective.
Paradoxically, however, he was also an “ideal crusader” because he failed, and because his crusades were almost anachronous. Saint Louis came up against the two great misfortunes any crusader could meet with: captivity and death. In a society where the model of Christ presented the Passion as a supreme victory over the world, these two failures gave Saint Louis a halo purer than any that victory could have conferred upon him. Even though the Church refused to recognize him as a martyr of the crusade, in the eyes of his contemporaries like Joinville his trials and tribulations earned him this honor. According to his confessor Geoffroy de Beaulieu, this characteristic that he had as an expiatory victim and host made him resemble Christ. Nevertheless, it seems to me that this “popular” aura was more commonly attributed to him as a king of suffering than as a crusading martyr.
For posterity, he was still the last great crusader. After him, the adventure of the crusades was over. His expeditions were to the crusades what “the death of King Arthur” was to the great epic courtly romance—a twilight of the heroes, a funerary and quasi-suicidal apotheosis. Saint Louis possessed the dual grandeur of having been an anachronistic crusader who closed the book on a heroic adventure and who simultaneously paved the way for a nostalgic utopia—at the turning point between a real but dead history and an imaginary history to come.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from Saint Louis, by Jacques Le Goff. It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read our excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.