St. Louis IX (1214-1270) has been considered by many to be the greatest king of medieval Christendom. As the quintessential Catholic monarch, he ruled over what contemporary popes called a “most Christian kingdom,”[1] a sacramental harmony in which the Catholic faith was the ordering and motivating principle for all levels of society. Louis was renowned in his own time for his just and fair rule, his personal humility and generosity, his fighting prowess and self-sacrifice, greater than any other king in Europe; for these reasons, he continued to be honored by the people of France in succeeding centuries. Nevertheless, over time, he has also been misunderstood in several ways, including by modern commentators who label Louis an “anti-Semite” or “Islamophobe” for his perceived persecution of Jews and proto-colonial wars against Islamic peoples.
In his kingdom of thirteenth-century France, Louis’s “reputation for piety and virtue was so great that contemporaries had no doubt he would one day be a saint.”[2] His subjects understood him according to the integralist medieval worldview within which the religious and the secular are not detached or opposed but form one ordered and unified whole. As Andrew Willard Jones explains, “Within the high medieval understanding, the secular was brought up into and fulfilled in the spiritual, and so essentialist divisions between the temporal and the spiritual dissolve.”[3] Louis was thus not only a king but a devout layman of the Church, whose “secular arm”[4] he wielded for the advancement and preservation of Christendom. Rather than perpetual violence, peace was the goal of Louis’s military activities, with the intention of facilitating that ultimate peace which St. Thomas Aquinas, a personal friend of Louis, identified as the telos (final end or purpose) of Creation.[5] Thus, Louis’s people saw his foreign Crusades and his enforcement of justice in France not as imperialism or tyranny but as part of his responsibility for bringing about Christian peace: “France was a Christian kingdom and, within Christianity, peace is the primordial condition and violence is sin, an aberration, a corruption, and ultimately something that does not even have real being—it is an absence.”[6] Dr. Steve Weidenkopf similarly observes, “participation in the Crusades was always voluntary, and violence [was] seen as a necessary evil that can only be entered into for serious and just reasons.”[7]
Louis IX: Saint or Racist?
Criticism of Louis today tends to centre on two accusations: that Louis was an anti-Semite, and that he was an Islamophobe. He is called an anti-Semite because of certain policies and actions which he enacted to restrict Judaism in France, including requiring Jews to wear an identifying badge. Most infamously, Louis ordered a public burning of the Talmud. He did this following the testimony of a Jewish convert to Christianity that the Talmud contained blasphemies against Jesus Christ.[8] Modern commentators portray this persecution as racist, a preview of anti-Semitic Social Darwinist ideologies which would become popular in the nineteenth century and finally culminate in the Holocaust.[9]
Louis is also labeled an Islamophobe primarily because of his leadership of the Seventh and Eighth Crusades. His attacks against Muslims, like his persecution of Jews, are seen as further evidence of his racism and, like the crusading movement in general, as proto-colonialism. Louis is thus construed as a medieval version of Western rulers who from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries colonized Africa, Asia and the New World; in this way, Louis is perceived, like these later colonists, as enforcing Western culture onto the native peoples of foreign lands and exploiting their resources through slavery, genocide and environmental destruction. Louis’s purported Islamophobia, as well as his anti-Semitism, were used as justifications for the attempted removal of a statue supposedly[10] representing him in St. Louis, Missouri, with the city itself also petitioned to be renamed, during the riotous destruction of monuments in 2020.[11]
A Sacramental Kingdom
Louis should be properly understood within what Henri de Lubac called the “complete act” of his own time and worldview, not according to modern biases, anachronisms and presumptions.[12] Louis desired first of all to be holy and thus centered his life on prayer, penance and charity, not politics or war; only his wife’s correction prevented him from abdicating and joining a religious order! According to his confessor, he practiced severe penance and disciplined prayer in a monastic spirit,[13] he never committed a mortal sin, he diligently studied Scripture and the Church Fathers, he promoted religious consecration particularly for the new Franciscans and Dominicans, he gave freely and liberally in alms to the poor, even serving them personally, and he was a loving husband and father, raising his children in the Faith.[14] For the cause of peace, Louis “outlawed private war and the duel.”[15] He also “frequently broke bread with theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, and was a lover of knowledge, building and maintaining great libraries.” Despite, or perhaps because of, his magnanimity and erudition, Louis possessed an authentic joy and lightheartedness which are characteristic of saints. The king’s humility was such that he “regularly served those that others found repulsive”;[16] this included personally burying the Christians at Damascus whom the Muslims had massacred and left to rot,[17] washing beggars’ feet (particularly those of the blind, who could not identify him)[18] and hand-feeding a monk afflicted with leprosy.[19] He eschewed expressions of vanity or public celebration for himself and dressed in humble attire, particularly after returning home from his failed first crusade. All that Louis did was oriented toward his faith and leading his people closer to Christ – in a singularly great example of this, and to the joy of France, he acquired the Crown of Thorns, “a large piece” of the True Cross and, eventually, the Holy Lance, for all of which he commissioned the magnificent Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.[20]
Within his “sacramental kingdom”, Louis was a truly Catholic king, the defender and promoter of the Faith in his realm in subordination to the higher authority of the Church. While “all modern political thought, from theories of the divine right of kings to theories of representative republics, are ultimately about who is sovereign and how their monopoly on violence can be realized most effectively”, medieval Christians believed in positive social relationships founded on oaths of loyalty, charity and a shared faith. “I do not mean that the kingdom of France was a State with a Christian ideology. I mean that it was Christian, fundamentally. There was no State lurking beneath the kingdom’s religious trappings. There was no State at all, but a Christian kingdom. In this kingdom, neither the ‘secular’ nor the ‘religious’ existed. Neither did ‘sovereignty.’”[21]
Defender of the Faith
As a Catholic king of Christendom, Louis fought against any threats to the Church in France, just as his grandfather, Philip II, had combated the Albigensian heresy, and his cousin, St. Ferdinand III, triumphed in the Reconquista.[22] This is why Louis, while he “still obeyed the Catholic Church’s admonition that Jews were not to be harmed”,[23] in obedience to the command of the pope, publicly burned the Talmud, due to its blasphemous statements against Christ, such as that Jesus was conceived by Mary “during an adulterous interlude with a Roman soldier”, that Jesus was sexually promiscuous with Mary Magdalene and others and that He “is spending eternity in hell, boiling in excrement”.[24] One of Louis’s chief goals in doing so was to remove obstacles for future Jewish converts to Christianity.[25] His overriding intention was to protect his people from errors which could damn their souls and cause discord in society, as well as to defend the honor of God against blasphemies which offended both the Church and the Crown. The Catholic Church never officially condoned violence against Jews and strongly condemned both it and forced conversions, but political motives and, particularly in Louis’s case, the desire to preserve Catholic unity, exacerbated by the threat of Islam in the Crusades, inspired some restrictive measures.[26] Like other medieval Christians, Louis saw the Jews in Christendom as “an anomaly” and “found it difficult to dissociate the Jews of the time with those ancient Jewish leaders who advocated for Jesus’ death.” Nevertheless, Louis was not an anti-Semite:
Louis greatly desired the conversion of Jews in his kingdom and even served as the godfather for many Jews who sought baptism. Although he promulgated several edicts restricting and regulating Jewish life and practices in his kingdom, Louis overturned many of these laws towards the end of his reign. His actions toward the Jewish people must be viewed in light of the historical context in which he lived. It is inappropriate (and anachronistic) to label the king an ‘anti-Semite,’ since that term is a nineteenth century creation denoting a racial animus against the Chosen People. King St. Louis IX viewed the Jews through the lens of his faith and not through a disordered racial theory.[27]
Likewise, Louis was not an Islamophobe. He, like the leaders of past Crusades, recognized the existential threat which Islamic imperialism represented for Christendom, not only to its national borders but to the salvation of its people and of all mankind since, if Christianity were eradicated, the world would be lost. Accordingly, he and many of his contemporaries, including his friend and biographer Jean de Joinville, saw those who died on Crusade as martyrs for the Faith,[28] fighting against the brutality of Islam which by this time had already conquered the formerly Christian peoples of the Middle East and north Africa and still retained a foothold in Iberia. Louis’s crusades were thus understood as wars of liberation by both Christians and Muslims of the time.[29] “The main purpose of jihad is offensive through the conquering of territory in order to spread Islam throughout the world; Christian holy war is defensive and primarily involves the recovery of territory lost to an aggressor.”[30] This fact was fully grasped by both sides; hence Egyptian sultan al-Salih Ayyub, anticipating Louis’s intention to liberate Damietta, sent this message to the king: “No one has ever attacked us without feeling our superiority… Recollect the conquests we have made from the Christians; we have driven them from the lands they possessed; their strongest towns have fallen under our blows.”[31]
Miles Christi (Soldier of Christ)
However, like his crusading predecessors, Louis saw himself first as a penitent pilgrim, leaving France with the intention of going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land as an act of penance to remit the temporal punishment for his confessed sins – his invasions of north Africa were thus works of mercy to liberate the Holy Land from Islamic domination and protect Christian pilgrims and natives from Muslim harassment, enslavement, forced conversion and murder.[32] For this reason, before taking the Cross and leaving on his Crusades, Louis made sure to resolve any conflicts which his subjects may have had with the Crown, then received “the insignia of a pilgrim and the oriflamme at St. Denis. Louis went as a penitent to the cathedral of Notre Dame, where he participated in Mass, and then walked barefoot to the abbey of St. Antoine-des-Champs.”[33]
Contrary to more modern claims, the Crusades were not pursued for profit or conquest; in fact, Joinville, like many other crusaders, was practically bankrupted by his expenses, and Louis spent six times the annual royal income on his first crusade alone.[34] Despite his warfare against them, Louis was not unkind to Muslims and thus was not an Islamophobe. In fact, “he would never consent to lie to the Saracens as to any covenant that he had made with them”[35] and he helped many Muslims become Catholic.[36] He even instructed his men “to become acquainted with the Koran, in an effort to win Muslim souls.”[37] Indeed, Louis’s primary motivation for his second Crusade was to aid the ruler of Tunis, whom he had been told desired to become Catholic; as Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Louis’s biographer and confessor, explains, Louis was “led to believe by trustworthy men that this king of Tunis had great good will toward the Christian faith, and that he might quite easily become a Christian”.[38] Upon arriving, however, Louis soon learned that, like many other Muslim leaders, the sultan had either lied or else was too afraid of his own people to convert.[39]
King Louis made religious war against those he would have called ‘infidels,’ it is true, but it was not because he despised their DNA or the color of their skin. He despised infidelity. He denied their denial of Christ. He was eager to fight to secure supremacy for the Church. He was not an oppressor, but rather a king who wanted to liberate the world from the bonds of sin and error. He fought for the liberty of our Holy Mother Church, that all men might be free beneath her mantle.[40]
Louis’s deep religious faith and sanctity, instilled by his mother who famously told him that “she would sooner see him die than that he even once would offend his Creator through mortal sin”,[41] a lesson which he would one day teach his own children,[42] is especially evident in a letter written to his successor, Philip III, just before Louis’s death, in which he taught his beloved son to love God above all else, to avoid all mortal sin, to bear tribulations and to receive prosperity with humility and gratitude. He advised Philip “to make confession often and to choose upright and wise men as confessors,” to listen attentively to the Divine Office, to remain solemn and prayerful at Mass, to “have a pious heart toward the poor, the suffering, and the downtrodden”, to be discerning in the company he kept, to avoid calumny and correct blasphemy, to uphold justice with his subjects, to love, obey and “keep peace” with the Church and the pope and to always protect churches and the innocent if war was unavoidable, to be modest in expenses and to protect his realm from “blasphemy and heresy.” Lastly, Louis asked that his son pray for his soul and offer Masses for him should he die first and that Philip should remain ever holy so that one day they could worship God together in Heaven. As Geoffrey of Beaulieu concluded, “Behold the testament of a pious father to his sons! Oh, testament of life and peace!”[43]
Endnotes:
[1] Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2017), loc 439-448. Kindle.
[2] Thomas Madden, “In Defense of King Louis IX,” at First Things (7 July 2020), at www.firstthings.com.
[3] Jones, Before Church and State, loc 517.
[4] Walter Brandmuller, Light and Shadows, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 103.
[5] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II-II, q. 29, a. 4, at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.
[6] Jones, Before Church and State, loc 457.
[7] Steve Weidenkopf, The Glory of the Crusades (El Cajon, CA: Catholic Answers, 2014), loc 529. Kindle.
[8] Mark White, “Who Won the Disputation of Paris?” Father Mark White Blog, 30 July 2020, at https://frmarkdwhite.wordpress.com.
[9] Lahav Harkov, “Muslims, Jews Petition to Remove Statue of St. Louis’ Crusader Namesake,” at The Jerusalem Post (21 June 2020), at www.jpost.com.
[10] Madden, “King Louis IX.”
[11] Harkov, “Muslims, Jews petition.”
[12] Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, vol. 1, trans. Mark Sebanc (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), xix.
[13] Raymond Ibrahim, Defenders of the West (New York: Bombardier, 2022), 188.
[14] Geoffrey of Beaulieu, The Life and Saintly Comportment of Louis, Former King of the Franks, of Pious Memory, in The Sanctity of Louis IX, ed. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean Field, trans. Larry Field (Ithaca and London, Cornell, 2013), loc 1767, 1846-1853, 1896-1955, 1975, 2023, 2043, 2187. Kindle.
[15] Jones, Before Church and State, loc 356.
[16] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 187-188.
[17] William of Chartres, On the Life and Deeds of Louis, King of the Franks of Famous Memory, and on the Miracles that Declare His Sanctity, in The Sanctity of Louis IX, ed. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean Field, trans. Larry Field (Ithaca and London, Cornell, 2013), loc 3379-3388. Kindle.
[18] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 187.
[19] Pope Boniface VIII, Papal Bull Gloria laus, in The Sanctity of Louis IX, ed. M. Cecilia Gaposchkin and Sean Field, trans. Larry Field (Ithaca and London, Cornell, 2013), loc 4189. Kindle.
[20]Geoffrey of Beaulieu, The Life and Saintly Comportment of Louis, Former King of the Franks, of Pious Memory, ed. Gaposchkin and Field, trans. Field, loc 2206-2217, 2329.
[21] Jones, Before Church and State, loc 67, 388-405, 448.
[22] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 168.
[23] Madden, “King Louis IX.”
[24] Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton, 2016), 17-18.
[25] White, “Disputation of Paris.”
[26] Stark, Bearing False Witness, 19, 23-24.
[27] Steve Weidenkopf, “The Real Story of King St. Louis IX,” at Catholic Answers (10 July 2020), at www.catholic.com.
[28] Jean de Joinville, Chronicle of the Crusade of St. Lewis, in Chronicles of the Crusades, trans. Frank Marzials, (Digireads.com, 2010), 111. Kindle.
[29] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 168.
[30] Weidenkopf, The Glory of the Crusades, loc 538.
[31] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 166.
[32] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 160-162, 172, 189-192.
[33] Weidenkopf, The Glory of the Crusades, loc 3570.
[34] Weidenkopf, The Glory of the Crusades, loc 3560-3570.
[35] Jean de Joinville, Chronicle of the Crusade of St. Lewis, trans. Marzials, 113.
[36] Geoffrey of Beaulieu, The Life and Saintly Comportment of Louis, Former King of the Franks, of Pious Memory, ed. Gaposchkin and Field, trans. Field, loc 2255.
[37] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 194.
[38] Geoffrey of Beaulieu, The Life and Saintly Comportment of Louis, Former King of the Franks, of Pious Memory, ed. Gaposchkin and Field, trans. Field, loc 2455-2465.
[39] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 194.
[40] Sean Fitzpatrick, “Saint Louis IX: Racist or Religionist?” at Crisis Magazine (25 August 2020), at https://crisismagazine.com.
[41] Geoffrey of Beaulieu, The Life and Saintly Comportment of Louis, Former King of the Franks, of Pious Memory, ed. Gaposchkin and Field, trans. Field, loc 1757.
[42] Ibrahim, Defenders of the West, 163.
[43] Geoffrey of Beaulieu, The Life and Saintly Comportment of Louis, Former King of the Franks, of Pious Memory, ed. Gaposchkin and Field, trans. Field, 1896-1955.