Saint Louis

 No, I'm not talking about the city in Missouri. I'm talking about the saint named Louis, after whom the city of Saint Louis was named.

Unlike some of the early martyr-saints (even Christopher has been dropped by the Catholic church -- no! not Christopher!), Saint Louis was totally real. He is usually better known as Louis IX, king of France (1226-1270).  He was part of the Capetian dynasty, descended from the tenth-century King Hugh Capet. Louis's grandfather, King Philip II "Augustus" (1180-1223), had essentially unified what we now think of France for the first time since the days of Charlemagne, and he drove the English out of most of the French territory (primarily Normandy) they had held since 1066, so young Louis was able to rule over a fairly peaceful kingdom.

We know quite a bit about Louis from the biography written about him by his friend, Jean de Joinville.  Not surprisingly, Louis always looks good in this account, but other sources tend to confirm the impression of a pious and conscientious king. 

He became king when he was only twelve, because his father, Louis VIII, died young, from dysentery, after only three years as king.  Young Louis IX was promptly crowned after his father's death in 1226, but for the next eight or nine years his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruled France as regent. When he was twenty (1234), Louis married Margaret of Provence, which marked the official end of his mother's regency. However, there are indications that Blanche was jealous of her son paying so much attention to his new wife and tried to keep them apart—ultimately unsuccessfully.

(One may note that Blanche had twelve children, and Louis was the first one to survive childhood.  An older sister and two older brothers (twins) had died in infancy. An older brother had been designated as heir to the throne but had died at the age of nine.   Perhaps we should not be surprised that Blanche wanted to cling to the first son who was perfectly healthy.)

(Louis and Margaret did not start having children until they had been married for six years, but they went on to have eleven. Of these two died in infancy, but the rest lived at least until their teen years and mostly well into adulthood.) 

Louis, Blanche, and Margaret were all highly religious people, and Louis genuinely tried to live as a Christian monarch.  He fully embraced chivalric ideals of gentleness toward the weak, generosity to the poor, and kindness to each other.  Knights at his court had to agree to fight fairly and not kill each other, not even a little bit, just because they felt insulted.  Louis outlawed trial by ordeal in his kingdom (which the organized church was also trying to end) and insisted that anyone, even of humble status, should have access to royal justice.  He also founded churches and was responsible for building the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, a gorgeous Gothic church built to house the Crown of Thorns (it's still there and has amazing stained glass; I recommend a visit).

He also sought to make sure that his younger brothers (more of those born after him lived at least until their teens than those born before him) and all his sons were well provided for.  At a time when aristocratic brothers were often at each others' throats over the inheritance, he made sure that everyone in his family was well provided for.

This was known as the apanage system, where a royal son or brother would receive an important county or duchy as his own, within the kingdom.  Most notably, he gave his youngest brother Charles the county of Anjou as an apanage, one of the territories Philip II had taken from the English crown.  Charles went on to become king of Sicily, but that's a different story.

But Louis's most notable activity was going on Crusade, not once but twice.  Although the numbering of Crusades gets a little vague in the thirteenth century, his are usually called the Seventh and the Eighth.  The Muslims had retaken Jerusalem and most of the Holy Land in the 1180s, and Europeans repeatedly launched efforts, all unsuccessful, to get it back.

Even by disastrous-crusade standards, Louis's efforts turned out really badly.  It was not due to a lack of planning.  For the Seventh (1249), the plan was to establish a base camp in Egypt from which to attack Jerusalem, rather than heading right there.

It didn't even vaguely work. Louis was immediately captured, along with much of his army, and was only freed after France paid a large ransom.  But this didn't make him lose faith in Crusading! Twenty years later, when he was in his mid-50s (and hence getting up there by medieval standards), he set out on Crusade again. This time they had the brilliant idea of setting up a base camp in Tunisia to attack Egypt from there, and then once they'd conquered Egypt....

You can tell what's coming.  But it was even worse than that. Louis almost immediately fell ill and died in 1270, and his army attempted nothing more.   (Louis's son John Tristan also died.) They boiled up Louis's bones so they could take the bones back to France, to be interred at the abbey of St.-Denis, where his father was already buried.

The monks of St.-Denis knew a saint-in-waiting when they saw one, and they had his relics right there! By this time one had to be formerly declared a saint by the pope, and in 1294 Louis's grandson, Philip IV, who was in a tense standoff with the pope, got the pope to declare Louis officially a saint.  Louis is not the only king to become a saint, but the list of king-saints is extremely short.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval rulers, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

 

Relic Collections

 As I have discussed previously, relics were an important part of medieval Christianity. The bones of a saint, or at least things associated with a saint (like a piece of clothing), created a tie between humans and a long-dead saint (though of course just being dead didn't keep a saint from being alive).

The first saints to have their relics gathered and put into altars in the West were martyrs. From the fourth century on, a lot of saints from the eastern half of the old Roman Empire had their relics dispersed to the West, where they were credited with working miracles. In subsequent centuries, more and more local or regional saints had their bones discovered and brought into town as relics. Most of these local saints had supposedly been martyred back in the second or third century and then been forgotten, until a vision took a pious Christian to their forgotten grave. So-called confessor saints, who had not had to die for their faith but who lived very holy lives (complete with miracles), soon joined the group.

Monasteries and other churches soon started collecting relics.  As well as having the relics of martyrs from their own region or of their own early bishops, they started collecting the bones of other saints.  A good place to get them was Rome, where the catacombs, the old quarries dug for the stone that built imperial Rome, were full of bones (the pagan Romans had wanted to put the dead somewhere far enough away that they were unlikely to come for them in the night).  Christian martyrs were reputed to make up a large proportion of the bones.

Churches could also swap with other churches.  Give another church a finger bone of one of your saints, get a foot bone or a piece of skull in return, and gain the attention of one more saint.  A reliquary could be made to house the body part appropriately.

 One could also steal relics if the saint was fed up with not receiving proper attention where she or he was now. Fed-up saints would appear in a vision, urging their removal from a less-than-ideal church, and protect the thieves as they triumphantly carried the relics home.

A church would usually have one principal saint (usually a local saint from late antiquity for a traditional monastery,  Saint Peter if one needed a good all-purpose saint, Saint Stephen quite frequently for a cathedral if not another local saint, the Virgin Mary for a Cistercian monastery).  But by the ninth or tenth century and certainly in later centuries, a church would have a whole collection of relics and would be happy to list them all.  If they didn't have a big enough bone for its own reliquary, a little scrap of linen would be pinned around it, with an identifying tag, and all these small relics could be kept in a box.

In the late Middle Ages, many fewer new saints were recognized, but the old ones could continue to be divided.  Some wealthy people, even one French king, had their own collections of (small) relics, which they could wear pinned to their clothing.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval Christianity, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.