sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 7/8

Marie Dejoux: Saint Louis après Jacques Le Goff

Few medieval monarchs have attracted as much attention as Louis IX, despite the difficulty of distinguishing the 'true' Louis IX from the topoi and models employed to portray him as idealized king and saint, a point stressed by Jacques le Goff's best-selling Saint Louis (1996). This carefully curated collection of articles assesses the influence of Jacques le Goff's tome, while correcting and supplementing it with more recent scholarship on the canonization and commemoration of Saint Louis, on Louis IX's family and entourage, and on surviving documents that shed light on Louis's 'redemptive governance', including his conception and implementation of justice and peace, his treatment of Jews, and the activities of his enquêteurs.

Although Le Goff largely avoided this documentary evidence as too lacunary and fragmented (71-2), it provides a crucial corrective to the narrative and hagiographical accounts which idealized Louis IX and influenced the depiction of his family. Exploiting household accounts, Lindy Grant shows that Louis's mother, Blanche of Castille, shared her sons Alphonse of Poitiers' and Charles of Anjou's love of luxury and courtly culture even while sponsoring religious houses and overseeing the education, marriage, and commemoration of Louis IX and his siblings.

Contesting the portrait of Alphonse of Poitiers as a faithful lieutenant of his older brother, Gaël Chenard attributes the conflict between Louis and his two surviving brothers to differing political interests and regional traditions. Jacques Dalarun and Sean Field delineate the shared spiritual aspirations of Louis IX and his sister Isabelle; through their experience of dangerous illness and vow-taking, love of asceticism, conversion of others, and charitable works, both participated in the monasticization of thirteenth-century lay society.

Part of the problem, as the volume's editor notes, is that there are so many facets of Louis to consider: economic policies, personal history, sainthood, crusade and conversion, peace-making, activities as warrior and knight. One way to cut through the hagiographical veneer is to emulate William Chester Jordan and John W. Baldwin in investigating the specific exercise of royal rule. The first registers of the rulings of Parlement (a flexible and adaptable court summoned by the king), demonstrate that Louis IX helped to hold regular sessions, normalize procedures, and to keep more systematic records from the 1230s onwards, probably drawing on initiatives of his immediate predecessors (Pierre-Anne Forcadet).

Liam Tuttle uses the same register (Olim) to trace how the ideal of punishing malefactors for the sake of the common good was enacted in cases dealing with infringements of royal authority, acts of disobedience or abuse of power, and the problems posed by accomplices and collective guilt. Judges weighed intentions, circumstances, and material actions to set penalties within the boundaries of customary law, drawing on a range of punishments similar to those utilized by other secular courts.

Turning to the famed investigations of 1247, Marie Dejoux finds that rather than personally overseeing their operations and directly receiving reports, Louis IX delegated his authority to clerical and mendicant enquêteurs, who created documents to oversee financial restitution within their jurisdictions. These early inquests were not administrative or reforming (officials were not dismissed or replaced), but reparative, seeking to make restitution of possessions unjustly acquired in the king's name in order to extend peace, royal power, and justice throughout his realm (including newly annexed territories), and to earn the love of his subjects before Louis IX departed on crusade. By contrast, the ordinances of 1254 saw Louis IX taking direct personal responsibility for the offenses of his officials and 'his' Jewish usurers; the latter's possessions were confiscated and financial reparations were made on the king's behalf. Louis' actions should be contextualized by contemporary confessors' promotion of greater self-scrutiny and restorative justice, and testify to his individual conception of how the royal office should be exercised rather than the consolidation of royal power through surveillance and record-keeping (86).

Crucially, Rowan Dorin redates Louis' dedication to redemptive governance to a period well before his crusade vow in 1244. His article shows that the Nova constitutio of 1235, which used the threat of banishment to order royal Jews to cease interest-taking and live from manual labor or honest commerce instead, was reiterated and combined with wider-sweeping attempts, upon Louis' return from crusade, to purify his kingdom from sin (including usury, prostitution, taverns and dice) in multiple surviving versions and reissues of the ordinance of 1254 (299). However, it would seem that the threat of expulsion was removed in 1256, and that implementation of it before that date was erratic and localized. Never entirely a king of peace, Louis IX regularly deployed violence against heretics and Muslims, while seeking to quell private wars among his subjects. He invoked the 'fractio pacis' to pressure warring parties into coming to lasting peace agreements by imposing truces secured by the surrender of sureties and royal protection for persons and possessions (Vincent Martin). With the Peace of Paris (1259), Louis IX initiated a cycle of truces with his brother-in-law, Henry III, the king of England through significant territorial concessions. No spineless appeaser, Louis was motivated not only by familial ties and redemptive governance but practical issues including restive barons, royal involvement in Sicily, and finances (Amicie Pelissie du Rausas).

Similarly, drawing on his recently published book [1], William Chester Jordan stresses that Louis IX shared others' conviction that crusade and conversion were complementary means of creating the conditions necessary for the Second Coming. During his first crusade, Louis converted Muslims, many of whom he relocated into his own lands and those of his deceased brother, Robert of Artois. Some of these converts may have become involved in royal administration and/or the teaching of Arabic to future missionaries. Louis' visits to these converts, prior to departing on his second crusade, may indicate that he envisaged that campaign as a crusade of conversion.

Crucially, as Cecilia Gaposchkin explains, the cult of Saint Louis, initially promulgated by the construction of royal sanctity and the vitae, liturgy, rituals, and relics deployed by the Capetian dynasty, spread swiftly to the religious orders they patronized. Louis' cult and image were refashioned in response to crises and to validate political positions and specific ideologies, such that he became both a royal and later national saint. Towns and cities were named after him to symbolize the triumph of the church and France both in missionary efforts and colonial domination, an image countered by a legend from Tunisia that Louis converted to Islam and adopted a new Muslim identity (301).

As a whole, this volume illustrates how the exploitation of a wider range of sources can shed new light even on figures as familiar as Louis IX, and should furnish graduate students and scholars alike with inspiration for future research into the ideals and realities of royal power, sanctity, and governance.

Note:

[1] See William Chester Jordan: The Apple of His Eye: Converts from Islam in the Reign of Louis IX, Princeton 2019.