Ecumenical Commemoration
King of France
August 25 · d. 1270
also known as Louis IX, Saint Louis
Louis IX (1214-1270) was king of France for over forty years and the only French king ever canonized, the medieval model of the just and Christian ruler. He reformed the law so that the poorest subject could find justice, fed beggars at his own table and tended lepers with his hands, and built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to house the Crown of Thorns. He died of fever on crusade outside Tunis, and was made a saint within a generation.
Louis was born in 1214 and became king of France at twelve, when his father died, and for years his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruled in his name and formed his soul. She was fierce about it. His friend Joinville remembered her telling the boy that she loved him above all the world, but that she would rather see him lying dead at her feet than know he had fallen into mortal sin. The son took it to heart, and grew into the rarest of things, a powerful king who was also, in plain truth, a holy man.
He ruled France long and ably, but what his people remembered was the kind of king he was. He would sit under an oak tree at Vincennes and let any subject, however poor, bring a case straight to him. He reformed the law so that royal justice would be honest and within reach of the weak. He fed beggars at his own table, washed the feet of the poor, and went among the lepers whom everyone else fled. He built in Paris the Sainte-Chapelle, a chapel like a casket of glass and light, to house the Crown of Thorns, and he meant the most precious thing in his kingdom to be not his own crown but Christ's.
Twice he took the cross and went to war in the East, and both times it ended badly. On the first crusade his army was destroyed in Egypt and the king himself taken prisoner, and he bore his captivity with a calm that astonished his captors, and was ransomed at great cost. He came home graver and holier than he had gone.
Near the end he wrote down for his son and heir what he had learned of being a king and a Christian. "Dear son," it began, "I instruct you first to love God with all your heart and all your power, for without that no one can be worth anything." Then, old and ill, he took the cross one last time, and died of fever in his camp outside Tunis in 1270, on crusade to the end.
He was made a saint within a generation, the only king of France ever canonized, and for the rest of the Middle Ages he was the very picture of what a Christian king should be: just, humble, merciful, and answerable to God. The crown he wore is long gone and the crusades he led came to nothing, but the king who fed lepers with his own hands and would sooner have died than sinned has stayed in the church's memory as proof that even a throne can be a place of holiness.
Louis is one of the best-documented laymen of the Middle Ages, above all through The Life of Saint Louis written by Jean de Joinville, a nobleman who served at his side, loved him, and testified at his canonization; to this are added the official records of the reign, the canonization inquiry, and the life by Geoffrey of Beaulieu, his confessor. He was born in 1214, became king in 1226 under the regency of his mother Blanche of Castile, consecrated the Sainte-Chapelle in 1248 for the relics of the Passion he had purchased from the Latin emperor at Constantinople, and reformed French law and administration through the great ordinances of the 1250s. He led the Seventh Crusade to Egypt in 1248, was captured at Mansurah in 1250 and ransomed, and died of disease before Tunis on the Eighth Crusade on 25 August 1270; he was canonized by Pope Boniface VIII in 1297.
His holiness was real and is well attested, and so are the hard edges that holiness wore in a thirteenth-century king. His justice and charity toward his own poor were extraordinary; his zeal also fell heavily on others, in his treatment of the Jews of his kingdom, including the burning of the Talmud after the Paris disputation of 1240, and in the crusading wars whose human cost later ages weigh differently than his own did. The church and the historians have held both together: a man of genuine and humble sanctity, and a king of his age, whose faith expressed itself in the forms, generous and cruel alike, that his century made available to it.
Louis is commemorated on 25 August, the day of his death, across the Western calendars; his liturgical color is white. He is patron of France, of the Franciscan Third Order, which he joined, of barbers and builders and others, and his name is carried by cities and churches on two continents, most famously the city of Saint Louis on the Mississippi.
His memorial is partly stone and partly idea. The Sainte-Chapelle still stands in Paris, one of the supreme achievements of Gothic art, built as a reliquary for the Crown of Thorns. And the figure of Louis became, for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond, the very type of the good king: the ruler who held his power as a trust from God, who made himself accessible to the humblest petitioner, and who measured his crown against Christ's. In art he is shown crowned and royally robed, often holding the Crown of Thorns or a model of the Sainte-Chapelle, sometimes with the hand of justice, the king who knelt to wash the feet of the poor.
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The Life of Saint Louis(Old French, c. 1309)
Recommended: Caroline Smith, in Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades (Penguin Classics)
Joinville knew Louis, crusaded beside him, and wrote the warmest and most intimate life of any medieval king; the Penguin Classics volume gives it in a readable modern translation.
Further reading. The indispensable source is Joinville's eyewitness Life of Saint Louis, listed above. The standard modern biography is Jacques Le Goff's monumental Saint Louis (translated by Gareth Evan Gollrad, University of Notre Dame Press), exhaustive and humane.
Online resources. Excerpts of Joinville's Life, including the Teachings to Prince Philip, are gathered at Fordham's Internet Medieval Sourcebook, the standard online home of the medieval sources in English.
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Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servant Louis, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with him, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21