25 August · III class · White Mass: Os justi (Common of a Confessor not a Bishop), with proper Collect Epistle: Wisdom 10:10–14 · Gospel: Luke 19:12–26
I. Identitas et Origines
Louis IX, King of France, was born at Poissy on 25 April 1214, the son of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile, granddaughter of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine. He himself was accustomed to sign as Louis de Poissy, holding that the font of his baptism there was a greater dignity than the throne of his coronation. Through his father he descended from Hugh Capet and Philip Augustus, the consolidator of the Capetian realm; through his mother, from the crusading houses of Castile and Plantagenet. The realm he inherited was one his grandfather had greatly enlarged and his father had held for only three years.
Louis VIII died on 8 November 1226, returning from the Albigensian campaign. The boy was crowned at Reims on 29 November 1226, aged twelve, and the regency fell to Blanche of Castile. The Queen Mother’s government, contested by a league of great barons and by the King of England, was vigorous and, in the end, successful; she is remembered in the sources both as the guardian of the crown and as the formator of the saint. Joinville transmits her saying to her son that she would rather see him dead at her feet than guilty of a single mortal sin, a word which the King repeated to the end of his life as the rule of his conscience.
In 1234 Louis married Margaret of Provence, eldest daughter of Raymond Berengar V; the marriage was fruitful, eleven children being born of it, of whom Philip succeeded him. The King’s brothers — Robert of Artois, Alphonse of Poitiers, and Charles of Anjou — each played a part in the great affairs of his reign, and each is a reminder that Louis governed a dynasty and not only a kingdom.
The primary witnesses to his life are unusually rich for a medieval king. Geoffrey of Beaulieu, his Dominican confessor for twenty years, wrote a vita within a few years of his death at the request of Pope Gregory X; William of Chartres, his chaplain, added a supplement; William of Saint-Pathus, confessor to Queen Margaret, composed a life drawing on the canonisation depositions; and above all Jean de Joinville, seneschal of Champagne and the King’s intimate companion on crusade, dictated in old age his Histoire de Saint Louis (completed 1309), an eyewitness memoir of rare candour. The canonisation inquiry itself, conducted at Saint-Denis in 1282–1283, gathered testimony from hundreds of witnesses, though its acts survive only in part.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The interior life of Louis is better documented than that of almost any layman of the Middle Ages, and the picture is consistent across the witnesses. He heard two Masses daily and the full Divine Office, rising at midnight for Matins; he made his confession weekly and took the discipline; he fasted on Fridays and through Advent and Lent with severities his confessor was obliged to moderate; he wore a hair shirt beneath the royal garments. None of this was ostentation. Joinville records the King’s distaste for singular displays and his insistence that virtue be worn as ordinarily as clothing, and Geoffrey of Beaulieu notes that he preferred plain dress after his return from the East and would not be persuaded to resume the splendour his rank permitted.
His charity was systematic. He fed the poor at his own table, washed their feet, and endowed hospitals, among them the Quinze-Vingts in Paris for the blind, and houses for penitent women. He visited lepers and dressed their sores with his own hands, to the alarm of his household; Joinville’s celebrated exchange with the King on whether one would rather be a leper or in mortal sin turns precisely on this practice. He founded and endowed monasteries — Royaumont above all, where he laboured with the workmen — and was a friend and patron of the mendicant orders, then in their first vigour.
Three virtues govern the record: justice, truthfulness, and a horror of sin. Of his justice the image is the oak of Vincennes, where he sat after Mass and heard the pleas of whoever approached him, without regard to rank; and the ordinance of 1254, the Grande Ordonnance, by which he reformed the conduct of his officers and established the enquêteurs to hear complaints against them. Of his truthfulness Joinville is the witness: the King would not swear, would not permit an oath in his presence, and held that a word once given bound him even to the disadvantage of the crown. Of his hatred of sin the sources are unanimous, and it extended to public sin: blasphemy, usury, prostitution, and judicial duelling were the objects of his legislation, and he punished blasphemy in his own household with a severity that his contemporaries found harsh.
The Enseignements he wrote for his son Philip — attested in substance by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and Joinville, and preserved in a French text of high authority — set the whole in order. He counsels his heir before all things to love God, to accept adversity in penance and prosperity in gratitude, to keep a good confessor, to hear the Office devoutly, to love justice and the poor, to defend the Church and the faith, and never to do a thing that he would not wish to have done to himself. It is the programme of a Christian prince, and the man who wrote it had lived it.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
Louis’s munus was the royal office itself, and he understood kingship as a ministry ordered to the salvation of his people and the liberty of the Church. Three aspects deserve notice.
First, his government of the realm. He completed the pacification his mother had begun, defeated the coalition of Henry III and the Count of La Marche at Taillebourg and Saintes (1242), and then, having the upper hand, made peace on terms his own barons thought too generous: the Treaty of Paris (1259) restored to England territories the crown might have kept, because, as Joinville reports, the King judged that peace between the two kingdoms, and the friendship of a brother-in-law, were worth more than land. The same spirit governed the Treaty of Corbeil (1258) with Aragon. His reputation for justice was such that he was chosen as arbiter between Henry III and his barons in the Mise of Amiens (1264). He reformed the coinage, restrained private war, extended the appellate jurisdiction of the royal court, and built a monarchy whose authority rested on equity more than on force.
Second, his devotion to the Passion and its relics, and the Sainte-Chapelle. In 1239 he obtained from Baldwin II, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, the Crown of Thorns, which had been pledged to the Venetians; the King and his brother went barefoot to receive it at Villeneuve-l’Archevêque and carried it into Paris. Further relics of the Passion followed in 1241. To house them he built the Sainte-Chapelle in the palace on the Île de la Cité, consecrated on 26 April 1248: a reliquary in stone and glass, and the most perfect expression in architecture of the thirteenth century’s Christocentric piety. The Crown of Thorns survives, and the chapel stands.
Third, the crusades. Louis took the cross in December 1244 while recovering from a near-fatal illness, against the advice of his mother and his counsellors. The Seventh Crusade sailed from Aigues-Mortes in August 1248; Damietta fell in June 1249; the advance up the Nile ended in disaster at Mansurah in February 1250, where Robert of Artois was killed, and the King, sick and in retreat, was taken prisoner at Fariskur in April with the greater part of his army. Joinville, who was with him, describes the captivity: the King’s steadiness under threat of torture, his refusal to purchase his own release before that of his men, his exactness in paying the ransom to the last coin even when the Saracens, by their own error, had undercounted. Released in May 1250, he remained four years in the Holy Land, refortifying Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa, and Sidon, and returned to France only in 1254 on the death of his mother. In 1267 he took the cross again; the Eighth Crusade sailed in July 1270 for Tunis.
With the crusades belongs his legislation concerning the Jews of his kingdom, which the record does not permit one to pass over in silence. In 1240 the Talmud was put on trial at Paris, and in 1242 copies were burned; Louis restricted usury and, in 1269, ordered the wearing of the badge. These measures reflect the mind of thirteenth-century Christendom and the King’s own zeal against what he took to be blasphemy; they are to be understood historically and not to be read as a norm.
IV. Mors et Cultus
The crusading army landed near Carthage in July 1270 and was at once ravaged by disease. The King’s son John Tristan, born at Damietta during the first crusade, died on 3 August. Louis himself fell ill and, knowing that he was dying, gave his last instructions to Philip — Geoffrey of Beaulieu records them — and asked to be laid on a bed of ashes in the form of a cross. He received the last sacraments with full consciousness, recited the psalms, and was heard to pray for his people and to say, in words the witnesses preserved, Jerusalem, Jerusalem. He died at about three in the afternoon on 25 August 1270, the hour of Our Lord’s death on the Cross. He was fifty-six.
His body was treated by the custom of mos teutonicus: the flesh was boiled from the bones, and the entrails were given to Charles of Anjou, who deposited them at Monreale in Sicily, where they remain. The bones were carried through Italy and France amid reports of miracles and were interred at Saint-Denis on 22 May 1271. The canonisation inquiry followed under Martin IV, and Louis was raised to the altars by Boniface VIII on 11 August 1297 in the bull Gloria laus, the last king to be canonised in the Middle Ages and the only King of France ever so honoured. The feast was assigned to 25 August, the day of his death. His head was translated to the Sainte-Chapelle in 1306; the relics at Saint-Denis were largely dispersed in the sixteenth century and the Revolution, and a rib is venerated at Notre-Dame de Paris, while the entrails at Monreale and portions elsewhere survive.
His cultus spread swiftly through the Capetian and Angevin lands and was later carried by the French to the New World; the city of Saint Louis on the Mississippi bears his name, as does the Basilica there, and the Cathedral of New Orleans. He is patron of the Third Order of St. Francis, of the French monarchy, of barbers, and of many confraternities. In the Roman calendar of 1962 his feast is of the third class; it was among the feasts retained without alteration through the successive reforms, its position on the day of death never disturbed.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
The spiritual bequest of St. Louis is contained chiefly in three texts.
The Enseignements à Philippe, his instructions to his heir, survive in French and, in a shorter Latin recension, in Geoffrey of Beaulieu. They are brief, practical, and wholly free of rhetoric: love God above all and keep from mortal sin; bear adversity as a purification and prosperity with thanksgiving; have a good confessor and hear his correction; be liberal to the poor and just to all; keep the peace of the realm; honour the Church and defend the faith; be a father to your subjects. The counsel that runs through them is that the prince is the first of penitents and the servant of his people.
The Instructions à Isabelle, addressed to his daughter the Queen of Navarre, are of the same character, adapted to a woman’s state, and are witnesses to the King’s conviction that the interior life is not the monopoly of religious.
Joinville’s Histoire is not the King’s own composition, but it preserves his words with a fidelity that has few parallels. Here are the sayings on the leper and on mortal sin; the question whether it is better to be a leper or in sin; the definition of faith as that certainty by which the Christian, if the whole Sacrament were assailed by doubt, would not yield; the instruction that a layman should not dispute with a misbeliever but should defend the faith with the sword. Here too is the King’s argument, against Joinville himself, that the kingdom of France and the salvation of its King alike required that he keep faith with the Saracen who had trusted his word.
To these may be added the Sainte-Chapelle itself, a document in stone: the King’s confession that the Passion of Christ is the centre of all things and that a kingdom exists to guard what the Passion has won.
VI. Oratio
Deus, qui beátum Ludovícum Confessórem tuum de terréno regno ad cæléstis regni glóriam transtulísti: ejus, quǽsumus, méritis et intercessióne; Regis regum Jesu Christi Fílii tui fácias nos esse consórtes: Qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
O God, who didst translate blessed Louis, Thy Confessor, from an earthly kingdom to the glory of the heavenly kingdom: grant, we beseech Thee, through his merits and intercession, that we may be made companions of Jesus Christ Thy Son, the King of kings: Who with Thee liveth and reigneth in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
The Collect gathers the whole life into a single movement, de terreno regno ad caelestis regni gloriam: the crown of Reims was a figure and a trust, the crown above the only kingdom. And it names the King under the title that Louis himself would have chosen — Regis regum — asking not that we share Louis’s throne but that we share his King.
VII. Aspiratio
Sancte Ludovíce, rex qui regnum tuum ad regnum Christi ordinásti, óbtine nobis ut in quocúmque statu nos posúerit Deus, primum sanctitátem quærámus et ómnia cétera ut adjécta habeámus; ut pacem amémus, justítiam fáciamus, páuperes velut Christum suscipiámus, et fidem datam étiam cum damno servémus; et sic, ex hoc terréno peregrinátu, ad Jerúsalem cæléstem, quam moríens invocásti, pervenire mereámur. Amen.
Saint Louis, king who ordered thy kingdom to the kingdom of Christ, obtain for us that in whatever state God has placed us we may seek holiness first and hold all else as things added; that we may love peace, do justice, receive the poor as Christ, and keep a word once given even to our own loss; and so, from this earthly pilgrimage, deserve to arrive at the heavenly Jerusalem which thou didst invoke in dying. Amen.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Primary witnesses
- Jean de Joinville, Histoire de Saint Louis (Vie de Saint Louis), ed. Natalis de Wailly (Paris, 1874); ed. Jacques Monfrin (Paris, 1995). English: M. R. B. Shaw, Chronicles of the Crusades (Penguin); Caroline Smith (Penguin, 2008).
- Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Vita Ludovici noni; William of Chartres, De vita et actibus … Ludovici; both in Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, vol. XX. English: Larry F. Field, trans., The Sanctity of Louis IX (Cornell, 2014).
- William of Saint-Pathus, Vie de Saint Louis, ed. H.-F. Delaborde (Paris, 1899).
- Enseignements and Instructions à Isabelle: David O’Connell, The Teachings of Saint Louis: A Critical Text (Chapel Hill, 1972).
- Boniface VIII, Gloria laus, bull of canonisation (11 August 1297).
Hagiographic apparatus
- Acta Sanctorum, Augusti V, under 25 August.
- Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina 5042–5055.
- Martyrologium Romanum (1956), 25 August.
Studies
- Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996; English trans. Notre Dame, 2009) — the fullest modern study; to be read with awareness of its methodological scepticism.
- Jean Richard, Saint Louis: Crusader King of France (Cambridge, 1992).
- M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell, 2008) — on the canonisation and the liturgical cult.
- William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton, 1979).
Learning paths
- Lives of the Saints: the lay and royal saints — St. Stephen of Hungary, St. Henry the Emperor, St. Edward the Confessor, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. Ferdinand of Castile (Louis’s cousin).
- Church History: the crusades of the thirteenth century; the Latin Empire of Constantinople; the mendicant orders and the thirteenth-century synthesis.
- Sacred Liturgy: the Common of a Confessor not a Bishop (Os justi); the veneration of relics of the Passion; the Feast of the Crown of Thorns (Friday after Ash Wednesday, pro aliquibus locis).