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. 

 

 

Miracle stories

 Medieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously.  But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.

Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints.  All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified.  (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.)  Throughout the Middle Ages, an account of a saint's life and activities, his or her vita as it was called, was routinely accompanied by a second volume, stories of the miracles the saint worked after death.

Major shrines to particular saints all had collected stories of miracles their saint had performed.  By far the majority of these miracles involved healing, everything from the pox to a broken arm to gout, even an infected toe.  In an era without modern medicine, when few people could expect to live past their 50s, they turned to whatever healing procedures might be available.  And they may well have worked!  Who are we to dismiss their testimony, when we weren't even there? (and are in a society that has seen some, well, unlikely "cures" promoted for Covid-19).

Miracle stories tended to be very detailed.  The person who was healed was named, as was the specific ailment for which they had suffered.  We often learn a lot about such a person, their social status, their occupation, even which friends and relatives helped them reach the shrine if they did not walk there themselves.  (Pilgrims on the Santiago route, from Burgundy to northwestern Spain, walked 20 miles a day, pretty impressive considering a lot of them were sick and seeking healing or redemption.)

The specificity of the miracle stories added a note of verisimilitude that would not have been possible if they just spoke of generic people being healed of generic diseases.  The stories always stressed that saints were ready to help even the poorest petitioner, and that even the mightiest might need their help.  The miracle stories also tended to stress one particular kind of healing if the saint had a specialty; Saint Foy of Conques, for example (village seen below), was noted for cures of the eyes.

 

Often the miracle stories would speak of someone who had long suffered from an ailment, had visited shrines to other saints without relief, but had finally found healing when appealing to this particular saint.  Those healed were expected to be suitably grateful.  They needn't make a monetary offering (though it was never refused), but they would leave their crutches as a marker of being able to walk again or the like, and they were expected to live a properly virtuous life in the future.  A sinner who had been cured of an ailment was likely to sicken again if he returned to his sin.  And of course it was hoped that those healed would spread the good word about the saint's power.

The miracle stories then could be seen as a form of advertisement for a particular shrine, but they also stressed that the saints listened to people of all economic or social status, and that a moral, virtuous life was needed to accompany a healthy life.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Medieval Rome

As I have discussed previously, the idea of a "fall of Rome" ushering in the Middle Ages is a misconception.  Both the city of Rome itself and the idea of a Roman empire continued throughout the Middle Ages.  Since after Charlemagne was crowned Roman emperor by the pope in 800 there were Roman emperors right there in western Europe, as well as the Roman emperors in Constantinople, it's kind of hard to say that Rome disappeared.

But many things were different.  For one thing, Roman emperors were rarely in Rome.  The western emperors were also kings of Germany for much of the Middle Ages and would come to Rome to be crowned by the popes, maybe have a brief war with some Italian city states, and head north again.  For all practical purposes, the real rulers of medieval Rome were the popes, revered at least in the abstract as heirs of Peter.  They had their headquarters at the Lateran palace until the fifteenth century, when they moved to the Vatican to be closer to the basilica of Saint Peter's—the Lateran palace is not even in the modern city-state of the Vatican (officially its own country only since 1929).

Just as the rulers of Rome had changed since antiquity, so had the city itself.  Ancient Rome had been an enormous city, at least a million people, stretched over its seven hills, with a long wall (some twenty kilometers long) surrounding it, punctuated by guard towers.  But with the population declines of the early Middle Ages, it shrank to a fraction of its former size, maybe only twenty thousand people, getting a new set of walls well within the old set, to surround the population of a much smaller city.  (The Colosseum and forum in the center of this shrunken city.)

In between the old, imperial walls and the medieval walls were woodlots, orchards,  and many ancient monuments.  Some of these were monuments of antiquity, while others were basilicas or churches (or remnants thereof) that honored the early Christians who had been martyred by the pagan Romans.  Medieval pilgrims who came to Rome, of which there were always a large number, would visit both the Christian sites and the monuments erected by the ancient Caesars.  There was indeed a popular twelfth-century guidebook, "The Marvels of Rome," which instructed pilgrims on many of the interesting things to see.

Even now, Rome is thick with ancient sites that disrupt traffic and hopelessly delay things like subway tunnels or new sewer lines.  With a thousand year less of wear and tear, medieval Rome had even more.

In my most recent book, "The Knight of the Short Nose," the hero goes to Rome on pilgrimage and, following the guidebook, visits many of these sites.  (He also ends up in a fight to the death with the champion of a king who wants to sack Rome, but you have to read the book to find out what happens.)

The most important site in Rome was the basilica of Saint Peter's.  It was built over what was supposed to be the tomb of Peter, leader of the apostles, and there was a grate in the floor through which the faithful could lower bits of cloth to touch his bones, thus creating their own tertiary relics.  It was not actually within the walls of the medieval city, being instead on the outskirts, across the Tiber river.  The pope built walls around Saint Peter's and the immediately surrounding area in the ninth century.

This was not the Renaissance basilica of Saint Peter's that is there today; that was built only in the sixteenth century.  Old Saint Peter's went back to the fourth century and was considered hopelessly dark and old-fashioned when it was replaced.

Peter was certainly not the only saint venerated in Rome.  In fact, the city was thick with them, both saints who had died in Rome and saints who had died elsewhere but were honored there, with their own altars if not indeed own churches.  And then there were the countless people buried in the catacombs, tunnels below the city where originally building stone had been quarried out (see image below).  The catacombs had become a Roman graveyard, and early Christians met there if they feared persecution, not fearing the dead as did the pagan Romans.  Relics from Rome saw a brisk trade throughout the Middle Ages.

A good recent book on early medieval Rome is by Maya Maskarinec, City of Saints (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval churches and pilgrimage, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.