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King of France, son of Louis VIII and Blanche of
Castile, born at Poissy, 25 April, 1215; died near Tunis, 25 August, 1270.
He was eleven years of age when the death of
Louis VIII made him king, and nineteen when he married Marguerite of Provence
by whom he had eleven children. The regency of Blanche of Castile (1226-1234)
was marked by the victorious struggle of the Crown against Raymond VII in
Languedoc, against Pierre Mauclerc in Brittany, against Philip Hurepel in the
Ile de France, and by indecisive combats against Henry III of England. In
this period of disturbances the queen was powerfully supported by the legate
Frangipani. Accredited to Louis VIII by Honorius III as early as 1225,
Frangipani won over to the French cause the sympathies of Gregory IX, who was
inclined to listen to Henry III, and through his intervention it was decreed
that all the chapters of the dioceses should pay to Blanche of Castile tithes
for the southern crusade. It was the legate who received the submission of
Raymond VII, Count of Languedoc, at Paris, in front of Notre-Dame, and this
submission put an end to the Albigensian war and prepared the union of the
southern provinces to France by the Treaty of Paris (April 1229). The
influence of Blanche de Castile over the government extended far beyond St.
Louis's minority. Even later, in public business and when ambassadors were
officially received, she appeared at his side. She died in 1253. In the first
years of the king's personal government, the Crown had to combat a fresh
rebellion against feudalism, led by the Count de la Marche, in league with
Henry III. St. Louis's victory over this coalition at Taillebourg, 1242, was
followed by the Peace of Bordeaux which annexed to the French realm a part of
Saintonge.
It was one of St. Louis's chief characteristics
to carry on abreast his administration as national sovereign and the
performance of his duties towards Christendom; and taking advantage of the
respite which the Peace of Bordeaux afforded, he turned his thoughts towards
a crusade. Stricken down with a fierce malady in 1244, he resolved to take
the cross when news came that Turcomans had defeated the Christians and the
Moslems and invaded Jerusalem. (On the two crusades of St. Louis [1248-1249
and 1270] see CRUSADES.) Between the two crusades he opened negotiations with
Henry III, which he thought would prevent new conflicts between France and
England. The Treaty of Paris (28 May, 1258) which St. Louis concluded with
the King of England after five years' parley, has been very much discussed.
By this treaty St. Louis gave Henry III all the fiefs and domains belonging
to the King of France in the Dioceses of Limoges, Cahors, and Perigueux; and
in the event of Alphonsus of Poitiers dying without issue, Saintonge and
Agenais would escheat to Henry III. On the other hand Henry III renounced his
claims to Normandy, Anjou, Touraine, Maine, Poitou, and promised to do homage
for the Duchy of Guyenne. It was generally considered and Joinville voiced
the opinion of the people, that St. Louis made too many territorial
concessions to Henry III; and many historians held that if, on the contrary,
St. Louis had carried the war against Henry III further, the Hundred Years
War would have been averted. But St. Louis considered that by making the
Duchy of Guyenne a fief of the Crown of France he was gaining a moral
advantage; and it is an undoubted fact that the Treaty of Paris, was as
displeasing to the English as it was to the French. In 1263, St. Louis was
chosen as arbitrator in a difference which separated Henry III and the
English barons: by the Dit d'Amiens (24 January, 1264) he declared himself
for Henry III against the barons, and annulled the Provisions of Oxford, by
which the barons had attempted to restrict the authority of the king. It was
also in the period between the two crusades that St. Louis, by the Treaty of
Corbeil, imposed upon the King of Aragon the abandonment of his claims to all
the fiefs in Languedoc excepting Montpellier, and the surrender of his rights
to Provence (11 May, 1258). Treaties and arbitrations prove St. Louis to have
been above all a lover of peace, a king who desired not only to put an end to
conflicts, but also to remove the causes for fresh wars, and this spirit of
peace rested upon the Christian conception.
St. Louis's relations with the Church of France
and the papal Court have excited widely divergent interpretations and
opinions. However, all historians agree that St. Louis and the successive
popes united to protect the clergy of France from the encroachments or
molestations of the barons and royal officers. It is equally recognized that
during the absence of St. Louis at the crusade, Blanche of Castile protected
the clergy in 1251 from the plunder and ill-treatment of a mysterious old
maurauder called the "Hungarian Master" who was followed by a mob
of armed men—called the "Pastoureaux." The "Hungarian Master"
who was said to be in league with the Moslems died in an engagement near
Villaneuve and the entire band pursued in every direction was dispersed and
annihilated. But did St. Louis take measures also to defend the independence
of the clergy against the papacy? A number of historians once claimed he did.
They attributed to St. Louis a certain "pragmatic sanction" of
March 1269, prohibiting irregular collations of ecclesiastical benefices,
prohibiting simony, and interdicting the tributes which the papal Court
received from the French clergy. The Gallicans of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries often made use of this measure against the Holy See; the
truth is that it was a forgery fabricated in the fourteenth century by
juris-consults desirous of giving to the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles VII a
precedent worthy of respect. This so-called pragmatic of Louis IX is
presented as a royal decree for the reformation of the Church; never would
St. Louis thus have taken upon himself the right to proceed authoritatively
with this reformation. When in 1246, a great number of barons from the north
and the west leagued against the clergy whom they accused of amassing too
great wealth and of encroaching upon their rights, Innocent IV called upon
Louis to dissolve this league; how the king acted in the matter is not
definitely known. On 2 May, 1247, when the Bishops of Soissons and of Troyes,
the archdeacon of Tours, and the provost of the cathedral of Rouen,
despatched to the pope a remonstrance against his taxations, his preferment
of Italians in the distribution of benefices, against the conflicts between
papal jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of the ordinaries, Marshal Ferri
Paste seconded their complaints in the name of St. Louis. Shortly after,
these complaints were reiterated and detailed in a lengthy memorandum, the
text of which has been preserved by Mathieu Paris, the historian. It is not
known whether St. Louis affixed his signature to it, but in any case, this
document was simply a request asking for the suppression of the abuses, with
no pretensions to laying down principles of public right, as was claimed by
the Pragmatic Sanction.
Documents prove that St. Louis did not lend an
ear to the grievances of his clergy against the emissaries of Urban IV and
Clement IV; he even allowed Clement IV to generalize a custom in 1265
according to which the benefices the titularies of which died while
sojourning in Rome, should be disposed of by the pope. Docile to the decrees
of the Lateran Council (1215), according to which kings were not to tax the
churches of their realm without authority from the pope, St. Louis claimed
and obtained from successive popes, in view of the crusade, the right to levy
quite heavy taxes from the clergy. It is again this fundamental idea of the
crusade, ever present in St. Louis's thoughts that prompted his attitude
generally in the struggle between the empire and the pope. While the Emperor
Frederick II and the successive popes sought and contended for France's
support, St. Louis's attitude was at once decided and reserved. On the one
hand he did not accept for his brother Robert of Artois, the imperial crown
offered him by Gregory IX in 1240. In his correspondence with Frederick he
continued to treat him as a sovereign, even after Frederick had been
excommunicated and declared dispossessed of his realms by Innocent IV at the
Council of Lyons, 17 July, 1245. But on the other hand, in 1251, the king
compelled Frederick to release the French archbishops taken prisoners by the
Pisans, the emperor's auxiliaries, when on their way in a Genoese fleet to
attend a general council at Rome. In 1245, he conferred at length, at Cluny,
with Innocent IV who had taken refuge in Lyons in December, 1244, to escape
the threats of the emperor, and it was at this meeting that the papal dispensation
for the marriage of Charles Anuou, brother of Louis IX, to Beatrix, heiress
of Provençe was granted and it was then that Louis IX and Blanche of Castile
promised Innocent IV their support. Finally, when in 1247 Frederick II took
steps to capture Innocent IV at Lyons, the measures Louis took to defend the
pope were one of the reasons which caused the emperor to withdraw. St. Louis
looked upon every act of hostility from either power as an obstacle to
accomplishing the crusade. In the quarrel over investitures, the king kept on
friendly terms with both, not allowing the emperor to harass the pope and
never exciting the pope against the emperor. In 1262 when Urban offered St.
Louis, the Kingdom of Sicily, a fief of the Apostolic See, for one of his sons,
St. Louis refused it, through consideration for the Swabian dynasty then
reigning; but when Charles of Anjou accepted Urban IV's offer and went to
conquer the Kingdom of Sicily, St. Louis allowed the bravest knights of
France to join the expedition which destroyed the power of the Hohenstaufens
in Sicily. The king hoped, doubtless, that the possession of Sicily by
Charles of Anjou would be advantageous to the crusade.
St. Louis led an exemplary life, bearing
constantly in mind his mother's words: "I would rather see you dead at
my feet than guilty of a mortal sin." His biographers have told us of
the long hours he spent in prayer, fasting, and penance, without the knowlege
of his subjects. The French king was a great lover of justice. French fancy
still pictures him delivering judgements under the oak of Vincennes. It was
during his reign that the "court of the king" (curia regis) was
organized into a regular court of justice, having competent experts, and
judicial commissions acting at regular periods. These commissions were called
parlements and the history of the "Dit d'Amiens" proves that entire
Christendom willingly looked upon him as an international judiciary. It is an
error, however, to represent him as a great legislator; the document known as
"Etablissements de St. Louis" was not a code drawn up by order of
the king, but merely a collection of customs, written out before 1273 by a
jurist who set forth in this book the customs of Orlians, Anjou, and Maine,
to which he added a few ordinances of St. Louis. St. Louis was a patron of
architecture. The Sainte Chappelle, an architectural gem, was constructed in
his reign, and it was under his patronage that Robert of Sorbonne founded the
"Collège de la Sorbonne," which became the seat of the theological faculty
of Paris. He was renowned for his charity. The peace and blessings of the
realm come to us through the poor he would say. Beggars were fed from his
table, he ate their leavings, washed their feet, ministered to the wants of
the lepers, and daily fed over one hundred poor. He founded many hospitals
and houses: the House of the Felles-Dieu for reformed prostitutes; the
Quinze-Vingt for 300 blind men (1254), hospitals at Pontoise, Vernon,
Compihgne.
The Enseignements (written instructions) which he
left to his son Philip and to his daughter Isabel, the discourses preserved
by the witnesses at judicial investigations preparatory to his canonization
and Joinville's anecdotes show St. Louis to have been a man of sound common
sense, posssessing indefatigable energy, graciously kind and of playful
humour, and constantly guarding against the temptation to be imperious. The
caricature made of him by the envoy of the Count of Gueldre: "worthless
devotee, hypocritical king" was very far from the truth. On the contrary,
St. Louis, through his personal qualities as well as his saintliness,
increased for many centuries the prestige of the French monarchy (see
FRANCE). St. Louis's canonization was proclaimed at Orvieto in 1297, by
Boniface VIII. Of the inquiries in view of canonization, carried on from 1273
till 1297, we have only fragmentary reports published by Delaborde
("Memoires de la societe de l'histoire de Paris et de l'Ilea de
France," XXIII, 1896) and a series of extracts compiled by Guillaume de
St. Pathus, Queen Marguerite's confessor, under the title of "Vie
Monseigneur Saint Loys" (Paris,1899). source: EWTN
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