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Louis IX King Of France
Marguerite De Provence
 
King of France son of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile, born at
Poissy, 25 April, 1215; died near Tunis, 25 August, 1270.
Name/byname: Also called: Saint Louis (canonized on August 11, 1297)
French: Louis le Saint.
Louis was the fourth child of King Louis VIII and his queen, Blanche
of Castile, but, since the first three died at an early age, Louis
became heir to the throne. Louis VIII died on November 8, 1226, on
returning from a victorious expedition, and Louis IX, who was not yet
13, became king under the regency of his mother.
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]. 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 Périgueux;
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 Pasté 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 Anjou, 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, 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 Orléans, 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, Compiégne.
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, possessing 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. 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 ("Mémoires de
la société 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).
 Throughout
the latter part of his reign Louis IX was obsessed by the idea of a
new crusade. In 1269 he decided once again to go to Africa. The
expedition landed near Tunis at the beginning of July 1270 and at
first won a succession of easy victories. Carthage was taken, but
plague struck the army, and Louis IX could not withstand it. After
having entrusted the future of the kingdom of France to his son
Philippe (future Philippe III , he died on August 25, 1270.
Burial Location: Saint Denis Basilique, Paris, France. His finger
only. The rest of him is buried in Carthage.
Louis' mother, Blanche de Castille, was regent during his minority
(1226-34); she was his chief adviser until her death. During the
early years of the reign, the queen mother suppressed several revolts
of the great nobles, led by Pierre Mauclerc, duke of Brittany, and
supported by Duke Raymond VII of Toulouse and King Henry III of
England. In 1240-43, Louis subdued new revolts in South France,
securing the submission of Poitou and of Raymond VII, and repulsing a
weak invasion (1242) by Henry III. Under Louis IX, France enjoyed
unprecedented prosperity and peace. Louis continued the reforms of
his grandfather, Philippe II He curbed private feudal warfare,
simplified administration, improved the distribution of taxes,
encouraged the use of Roman law, and extended the appellate
jurisdiction of the crown to all cases. Louis was pious and ascetic,
yet a good administrator and diplomat.
Great Seal of Louis IX
Louis IX King of France is the 22nd great grandfather
of the Molloys.
 
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legitimate
heir (15 Oct 1001), Robert went to war against the rival claimant
Otte-Guillaume, count of Mácon. After the years of warfare,
Robert was finally recognized the duke of Burgundy (1016) with the
support of Lambert, bishop of Langres. In 1022 Robert acted as a
mediator between the duke of Normandy and count of Champagne. In
1030, the sons of Robert, Henri and Robert, joined their forces
against the king in a struggle for territorial possessions. The
king's army was defeated and he took refuge in Beaugency. In the
course of the civil war, Robert died on 20 Jul 1031. Burial Location:
Saint Denis Basilique, Paris, France. 
