An introduction to some of the most astonishing architectural monuments the world has ever known—Gothic cathedrals. We shall study the art, literature, intellectual life, economics, and new social arrangements that arose in the shadow of the cathedrals and that were such an important part of the revival of cities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The goal of the course is a better appreciation of the High Middle Ages, a world that is still recognizably our own.
24.1 Louis the Crusader
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From the course by Yale University
Age of Cathedrals
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From the lesson
Saints and Kings
In Module 8 we explore Saint Louis’s building of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris as a house of glass, a new Ark of the Covenant, to house the relics he had amassed. Using Jean de Joinville’s Life of Saint-Louis as our source, we encounter the Saint King’s life as a crusader, his death, canonization, and the miracles performed by his body on his way to sainthood.
Meet the Instructors
Howard BlochSterling Professor of French
French
[MUSIC]
Welcome back to The Age of Cathedrals.
In our last time together, we examined some of the justifications
put forth in Jean de Joinville's Life of Saint Louis for
the French king's status as a saint and holy martyr.
Joinville insists upon Louis's bravery in suffering for
the Christian cause, his moderation, his love of justice and of peace.
Today, we shall examine Louis's own role in becoming a saint,
and the curious case of the transformation of his body into
relics with miraculous powers of healing, after his death.
Joinville, Louis' principal biographer, emphasizes the King's piety.
Louis was, of course, always praying, and
he celebrated the liturgical offices of the day.
He periodically visited the monasteries of the realm.
He even prayed on horseback, as on his way there and back.
And though Louis brought this wife Marguerite on Crusade with him, and
they had at least three of their 13 children while abroad.
Louis was alleged by another biographer,
William of Saint-Parthus, to have practiced abstinence.
In Joinville's account, Louis seems only to abstain, however,
from talking about his wife and children.
I am telling you these things, writes Joinville,
because I had already spent five years with him.
And never yet had I heard and speak about the queen or the children to me or
to anyone else.
And it seems to me that this conduct was not becoming, to be so
distant from his wife and his children.
William of Saint-Parthus recounts how Louis and
Margaret managed to meet each other in the royal palace at Pontoise.
Despite the surveillance, the close surveillance of Louis' mother,
Blanche of Castille.
The harshness of the Queen, writes William toward Queen Margaret.
Was such that Queen Blanche had use all her powers to prevent her son being in
his wife's company, except in the evening when he went to bed with her.
The residence that both the king and
queen Margaret most liked to stay at was at Pontoise.
Because there,
the king's chamber was on an upper floor, with the queen's chamber directly below.
They had arranged things so that they would hold their conversations in a spiral
staircase that led from one chamber to the other.
And they had organized it so that when the ushers saw a Queen Blanche coming to
her son the king's chamber, they would knock on the floor with their staffs.
And the king would run to his chamber to ensure that his mother would find him
there.
The ushers outside Queen Margaret's chamber did the same thing when
Queen Blanche was approaching, so that she would find Queen Margaret there.
Louis IX was extraordinarily dedicated to the church,
he demonstrated this by bringing relics from the Middle East to France.
But even more so by his participation in crusade,
which comes as a result of a miraculous cure of a mortal illness.
It was when Louis is taken so deathly ill that one of the women
attending him wanted to draw the sheet over his face.
That he asked for someone, writes Joinville, to give him the cross,
and they did.
This taking of the cross, which signifies a commitment to crusade, is contagious.
After he had taken the cross, writes his biographer, so
did the king's three brothers.
Robert, count of Artois, Alphonse, count of Poitiers, and
Charles, count of Anjou, who later became the King of Sicily.
Louis was brave, after his father's death,
he faced up to a coalition of rebellious barons.
He was only 12 at the time of his coronation, and
some of the most powerful barons of the realm conspired to make Philip
half brother of Louis father, Louis VIII, king of France.
But they had not reckoned with his mother, the formidable Blanche of Castile.
An assembly of barons gathered at Courbet.
They agreed that the Count of Brittany, Peter Mauclerc, whose image we encountered
below the South Rose of Chartres Cathedral, should lead to rebellion.
To see, writes Joinville, whether the count could get the better of the queen,
who as you have heard, was a foreigner.
And they had not reckoned with divine intervention as well.
God's help, as Joinville phrases it, in the person of Joinville's lord,
Theobald of Champagne, who later became king of Navarre,
arrived with 300 knights to save the day.
As a matter of principle, the king went into battle with his men,
as we see in the landing of the crusaders at Damietta, in the Middle East.
To our right, writes Joinville, a good crossbow shot's length away,
the galley carrying the standard of Saint-Denis landed.
When they had come ashore, one Saracen charged into their midst.
Either because he could not hold his horse, or because he thought the rest of
his companions would follow him, but he was cut all to pieces.
When the king got word that the standard of Saint-Denis had landed,
he strode quickly across the deck of his boat.
And, undeterred by the objections of his companion the legate,
he leapt into the sea, where the water came up to his armpits.
He went with his shield at his neck, his helmet on his head and
his lance in his hand, to join his men who were on the shore.
When he came to land and saw the Saracens,
he asked what the people these were and was told that they were Saracens.
He set his lance under his arm and his shield in front of him, and would have
charged at the Saracers if the preudommes who were with him had allowed it.
The Battle of Al Mansurah, an attempt to move from the West,
from Egypt, upon Jerusalem, which had been lost for the second time in 1244,
was one of the great defeats for the French army.
It was there that the king's brother, Robert d'Artois,
was killed, and the Knights Templar were annihilated.
The king, however, acted like a hero from one of the old French epics,
like a hero from The Song of Roland.
In Joinville's telling of it, the lord of Courtenay and my lord John
of Seignelay recounted to me how six Turks came and took the king by the bridle.
And were leading him away captive,
when he single-handedly freed himself with the great sword blows he gave them.
There is, in fact, the hint of the deeds in the battlefield been turned into
poetry, in the remark of the count of Soissons.
While we were there, the good count of Soissons, writes Joinville, joked with me.
And said, Senechal, let the pack of hounds howl, for
by God's coif, this was the oath he must often swore.
We'll talk of this day again, you and I, in the ladies' chamber.
It was in the aftermath of the Battle of Al Mansurah, and
of the disease that set in in the French camp, that Louis was taken prisoner,
through the clever strategy of the Mamluks,
slaves who became Egyptian solders.
And who took control of Egyptian forces to block the retreat of the French
along the Nile Valley.
Louis eventually negotiated his and his men's release.
As soon as the Saracens had sworn the king promised the emirs that he would
willingly pay the 500,000 pounds for the deliverance of his people
and he would return Damietta to secure his own release,
since a man of his rank should not buy his freedom with money.
Louis was loyal, he not only kept his oaths, and those he swore.
But he showed a steadfastness to the cause, especially the cause of Crusade,
that is truly remarkable.
Once released from prison,
he had done his duty and was free, morally, to return to France.
The matter, in fact, was debated at royal council.
Joinville writes, this is what he, [my Lord Guy Mauvoisin] told the king.
My lord, your brothers and the great men here have considered your situation.
And have concluded, that for your own honor and that of your kingdom,
you cannot remain in this country.
Out of all the knights who came in your company,
you brought 2,800 to Cyprus, not a hundred remain in the city.
So they advise you, my lord, to go to France, and raise men and
money with which you might speedily return to this country.
In order to avenge yourself on the enemies of God, who held you in their prison.
Louis, however, went against the wishes of his councilors, and
decided to stay as long as his men were there.
I have considered, he said, what the barons of this land are saying.
That if I leave the kingdom of Jerusalem will be lost,
since no one will dare to stay there after I have gone.
And so I have determined that I will not for any price leave the kingdom
of Jerusalem to be lost, since I came to conquer and defend it.
My decision is to stay for the time being.
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