She was at grips with two most formidable foes and perils. Through the crusades she had, from the end of the eleventh century, become engaged in a deadly struggle against the Mussulmans in Asia; and in the height of this struggle, and from the heart of this same Asia, there spread, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, over Eastern Europe, in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, a barbarous and very nearly pagan people, the Mongol Tartars, sweeping onward like an inundation of blood, ravaging and threatening with complete destruction all the dominions which were penetrated by their hordes. The name and description of these barbarians, the fame and dread of their devastations, ran rapidly through the whole of Christian Europe. “What must we do in this sad plight?” asked Queen Blanche of the king, her son. “We must, my mother,” answered Louis (with sorrowful voice, but not without divine inspiration, adds the chronicler), “we must be sustained by a heavenly consolation. If these Tartars, as we call them, arrive here, either we will hurl them back to Tartarus, their home, whence they are come, or they shall send us up to Heaven.” About the same period, another cause of disquietude and another feature of attraction came to be added to all those which turned the thoughts and impassioned piety of Louis towards the East. The perils of the Latin empire of Constantinople, founded, as has been already mentioned, in 1204, under the headship of Baldwin, Count of Flanders, were becoming day by day more serious. Greeks, Mussulmans, and Tartars were all pressing it equally hard. In 1236, the emperor, Baldwin II., came to solicit in person the support of the princes of Western Europe, and especially of the young King of France, whose piety and chivalrous ardor were already celebrated everywhere. Baldwin possessed a treasure, of great power over the imaginations and convictions of Christians, in the crown of thorns worn by Jesus Christ during His passion. He had already put it in pawn at Venice for a considerable loan advanced to him by the Venetians; and he now offered it to Louis in return for effectual aid in men and money. Louis accepted the proposal with transport. He had been scared, a short time ago, at the chance of losing another precious relic deposited in the abbey of St. Denis, one of the nails which, it was said, had held Our Lord’s body upon the cross. It had been mislaid one ceremonial day whilst it was being exhibited to the people; and, when he recovered it, “I would rather,” said Louis, “that the best city in my kingdom had been swallowed up in the earth.” After having taken all the necessary precautions for avoiding any appearance of a shameful bargain, he obtained the crown of thorns, all expenses included, for eleven thousand livres of Paris, that is, they say, about twenty-six thousand dollars of our money. Our century cannot have any fellow-feeling with such ready credulity, which is not required by Christian faith or countenanced by sound criticism; but we can and we ought to comprehend such sentiments in an age when men not only had profound faith in the facts recorded in the Gospels, but could not believe themselves to be looking upon the smallest tangible relic of those facts without experiencing an emotion and a reverence as profound as their faith. It is to such sentiments that we owe one of the most perfect and most charming monuments of the middle ages, the Holy Chapel, which St. Louis had built between 1245 and 1248 in order to deposit there the precious relics he had collected. The king’s piety had full justice and honor done it by the genius of the architect, Peter de Montreuil, who, no doubt, also shared his faith.
It was after the purchase of the crown of thorns and the building of the Holy Chapel that Louis, accomplishing at last the desire of his soul, departed on his first crusade. We have already gone over the circumstances connected with his determination, his departure, and his life in the East, during the six years of pious adventure and glorious disaster he passed there. We have already seen what an impression of admiration and respect was produced throughout his kingdom when he was noticed to have brought back with him from the Holy Land “a fashion of living and doing superior to his former behavior, although in his youth he had always been good and innocent and worthy of high esteem.” These expressions of his confessor are fully borne out by the deeds and laws, the administration at home and the relations abroad, by the whole government, in fact, of St. Louis during the last fifteen years of his reign. The idea which was invariably conspicuous and constantly maintained during his reign was not that of a premeditated and ambitious policy, ever tending towards an interested object which is pursued with more or less reasonableness and success, and always with a large amount of trickery and violence on the part of the prince, of unrighteousness in his deeds, and of suffering on the part of the people. Philip Augustus, the grandfather, and Philip the Handsome, the grandson, of St. Louis, the former with the moderation of an able man, the latter with headiness and disregard of right or wrong, labored both of them without cessation to extend the domains and power of the crown, to gain conquests over their neighbors and their vassals, and to destroy the social system of their age, the feudal system, its rights as well as its wrongs and tyrannies, in order to put in its place pure monarchy, and to exalt the kingly authority above all liberties, whether of the aristocracy or of the people. St. Louis neither thought of nor attempted anything of the kind; he did not make war, at one time openly, at another secretly, upon the feudal system; he frankly accepted its principles, as he found them prevailing in the facts and the ideas of his times. Whilst fully bent on repressing with firmness his vassals’ attempts to shake themselves free from their duties towards him, and to render themselves independent of the crown, he respected their rights, kept his word to them scrupulously, and required of them nothing but what they really owed him. Into his relations with foreign sovereigns, his neighbors, he imported the same loyal spirit. “Certain of his council used to tell him,” reports Joinville, “that he did not well in not leaving those foreigners to their warfare; for, if he gave them his good leave to impoverish one another, they would not attack him so readily as if they were rich.” To that the king replied that they said not well; for, quoth he, if the neighboring princes perceived that I left them to their warfare, they might take counsel amongst themselves, and say, ‘It is through malice that the king leaves us to our warfare; then it might happen that by cause of the hatred they would have against me, they would come and attack me, and I might be a great loser there-by. Without reckoning that I should thereby earn the hatred of God, who says, ‘Blessed be the peacemakers!’ So well established was his renown as a sincere friend of peace and a just arbiter in great disputes between princes and peoples that his intervention and his decisions were invited wherever obscure and dangerous questions arose. In spite of the brilliant victories which, in 1212, he had gained at Taillebourg and Saintes over Henry III., King of England, he himself perceived, on his return from the East, that the conquests won by his victories might at any moment become a fresh cause of new and grievous wars, disastrous, probably, for one or the other of the two peoples. He conceived, therefore, the design of giving to a peace which was so desirable a more secure basis by founding it upon a transaction accepted on both sides as equitable. And thus, whilst restoring to the King of England certain possessions which the war of 1242 had lost to him, he succeeded in obtaining from him in return “as well in his own name as in the names of his sons and their heirs, a formal renunciation of all rights that he could pretend to over the duchy of Normandy, the countships of Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and, generally, all that his family might have possessed on the continent, except only the lands which the King of France restored to him by the treaty and those which remained to him in Gascony. For all these last the King of England undertook to do liege-homage to the King of France, in the capacity of peer of France and Duke of Aquitaine and to faithfully fulfil the duties attached to a fief.” When Louis made known this transaction to his counsellors, “they were very much against it,” says Joinville. “It seemeth to us, sir,” said they to the king, “that, if you think you have not a right to the conquest won by you and your antecessors from the King of England, you do not make proper restitution to the said king in not restoring to him the whole; and if you think you have a right to it, it seemeth to us that you are a loser by all you restore.” “Sirs,” answered Louis, “I am certain that the antecessors of the King of England did quite justly lose the conquest which I hold; and as for the land I give him, I give it him not as a matter in which I am bound to him or his heirs, but to make love between my children and his, who are cousins-german. And it seemeth to me that what I give him I turn to good purpose, inasmuch as he was not my liegeman, and he hereby cometh in amongst my liegeman.” Henry III., in fact, went to Paris, having with him the ratification of the treaty, and prepared to accomplish the ceremony of homage. “Louis received him as a brother, but without sparing him aught of the ceremony, in which, according to the ideas of the times, there was nothing humiliating any more than in the name of vassal, which was proudly borne by the greatest lords. It took place on Thursday, December 4, 1259, in the royal enclosure stretching in front of the palace, on the spot where at the present day is the Place Dauphine. There was a great concourse of prelates, barons, and other personages belonging to the two courts and the two nations. The King of England, on his knees, bareheaded, without cloak, belt, sword, or spurs, placed his folded hands in those of the King of France his suzerain, and said to him, ‘Sir, I become your liegeman with mouth and hands, and I swear and promise you faith and loyalty, and to guard your right according to my power, and to do fair justice at your summons or the summons of your bailiff, to the best of my wit.’ Then the king kissed him on the mouth and raised him up.”
Three years later Louis gave not only to the King of England, but to the whole English nation, a striking proof of his judicious and true-hearted equity. An obstinate civil war was raging between Henry III. and his barons. Neither party, in defending its own rights, had any notion of respecting the rights of its adversaries, and England was alternating between a kingly and an aristocratic tyranny. Louis, chosen as arbiter by both sides, delivered solemnly, on the 23d of January, 1264, a decision which was favorable to the English kingship, but at the same, time expressly upheld the Great Charter and the traditional liberties of England. He concluded his decision with the following suggestions of amnesty: “We will also that the King of England and his barons do forgive one another mutually, that they do forget all the resentments that may exist between them; by consequence of the matters submitted to our arbitration, and that henceforth they do refrain reciprocally from an offence and injury on account of the same matters.” But when men have had their ideas, passions, and interests profoundly agitated and made to clash, the wisest decisions and the most honest counsels in the world are not sufficient to re-establish peace; the cup of experience has to be drunk to the dregs; and the parties are not resigned to peace until on or the other, or both, have exhausted themselves in the struggle and perceive the absolute necessity of accepting either defeat compromise. In spite of the arbitration of the King of France the civil war continued in England; but Louis did not seek any way to profit by it so as to extend, at the expense of his neighbors, his own possessions or power; he held himself also from their quarrels, and followed up by honest neutrality ineffectual arbitration. Five centuries afterwards the great English historian, Hume, rendered him due homage in these terms: “Every time this virtuous prince interfered in the affairs of England, it was invariably with the view of settling differences between the king and the nobility. Adopting an admirable course of conduct, as politic probably as it certainly was just, he never interposed his good offices save to put an end the disagreements of the English; he seconded all the measures which could give security to both parties, and he made persistent efforts, though without success, to moderate the fiery ambition of the Earl of Leicester.” (Hume, History of England, t. ii. p. 465.)
It requires more than political wisdom, more even than virtue, to enable a king, a man having in charge the government of men, to accomplish his mission and to really deserve the title of Most Christian; it requires that he should be animated by a sentiment of affection, and that he should, in heart as well as mind, be in sympathy with those multitudes of creatures over whose lot he exercises so much influence. St. Louis more perhaps than any other king was possessed of this generous and humane quality: spontaneously and by the free impulse of his nature he loved his people, loved mankind, and took a tender and comprehensive interest in their fortunes, their joys, or their miseries. Being seriously ill in 1259, and desiring to give his eldest son, Prince Louis, whom he lost in the following year, his last and most heartfelt charge, “Fair son,” said he, “I pray thee make thyself beloved of the people of thy kingdom, for verily I would rather a Scot should come from Scotland and govern our people well and loyally than have thee govern it ill.” To watch over the position and interests of all parties in his dominions, and to secure to all his subjects strict and prompt justice, this was what continually occupied the mind of Louis IX. There are to be found in his biography two very different but equally striking proofs of his solicitude in this respect. M. Felix Faure has drawn up a table of all the journeys made by Louis in France, from 1254 to 1270, for the better cognizance of matters requiring his attention, and another of the parliaments which he held, during the same period, for considering the general affairs of the kingdom and the administration of justice. Not one of these sixteen years passed without his visiting several of his provinces, and the year 1270 was the only one in which he did not hold a parliament. (Histoire de Saint Louis, by M. Felix Faure, t. ii. pp. 120, 339.) Side by side with this arithmetical proof of his active benevolence we will place a moral proof taken from Joinville’s often-quoted account of St. Louis’s familiar intervention in his subjects’ disputes about matters of private interest. “Many a time,” says he, “it happened in summer that the king went and sat down in the wood of Vincennes after mass, and leaned against an oak, and made us sit down round about him. And all those who had business came to speak to him without restraint of usher or other folk. And then he demanded of them with his own mouth, ‘Is there here any who hath a suit?’ and they who had their suit rose up; and then he said, ‘Keep silence, all of ye; and ye shall have despatch one after the other.’ And then he called my Lord Peter de Fontaines and my Lord Geoffrey de Villette (two learned lawyers of the day and counsellors of St. Louis), and said to one of them, ‘Despatch me this suit.’ And when he saw aught to amend in the words of those who were speaking for another, he himself amended it with his own mouth. I sometimes saw in summer that, to despatch his people’s business, he went into the Paris garden, clad in camlet coat and linsey surcoat without sleeves, a mantle of black taffety round his neck, hair right well combed and without coif, and on his head a hat with white peacock’s plumes. And he had carpets laid for us to sit round about him. And all the people who had business before him set themselves standing around him; and then he had their business despatched in the manner I told you of before as to the wood of Vincennes.” (Joinville, chap. xii.)
The active benevolence of St. Louis was not confined to this paternal care for the private interests of such subjects as approached his person; he was equally attentive and zealous in the case of measures called for by the social condition of the times and the general interests of the kingdom. Amongst the twenty-six government ordinances, edicts, or letters, contained under the date of his reign in the first volume of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, seven, at the least, are great acts of legislation and administration of a public kind; and these acts are all of such a stamp as to show that their main object is not to extend the power of the crown or subserve the special interests of the kingship at strife with other social forces; they are real reforms, of public and moral interest, directed against the violence, disturbances, and abuses of the feudal system. Many other of St. Louis’s legislative and administrative acts have been published either in subsequent volumes of the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois, or in similar collections, and the learned have drawn attention to a great number of them still remaining unpublished in various archives. As for the large collection of legislative enactments known by the name of Etailissements de Saint Louis, it is probably a lawyer’s work, posterior, in great part at least, to his reign, full of incoherent and even contradictory enactments, and without any claim to be considered as a general code of law of St. Louis’s date and collected by his order, although the paragraph which serves as preface to the work is given under his name and as if it had been dictated by him.
Another act, known by the name of the Pragmatic Sanction, has likewise got placed, with the date of March, 1268, in the Recueil des Ordonnances des Rois de France, as having originated with St. Louis. Its object is, first of all, to secure the rights, liberties, and canonical rules, internally, of the Church of France; and, next, to interdict “the exactions and very heavy money-charges which have been imposed or may hereafter be imposed on the said Church by the court of Rome, and by the which our kingdom hath been miserably impoverished; unless they take place for reasonable, pious, and very urgent cause, through inevitable necessity, and with our spontaneous and express consent and that of the Church of our kingdom.” The authenticity of this act, vigorously maintained in the seventeenth century by Bossuet (in his Defense de la Declaration du Clerge de France de 1682, chap. ix. t. xliii. p. 26), and in our time by M. Daunou (in the Histoire litteraire de la France, continuee par des Hembres de l’Institut, t. xvi. p. 75, and t. xix. p. 169), has been and still is rendered doubtful for strong reasons, which M. Felix Faure, in his Histoire de Saint Louis (t. ii. p. 271), has summed up with great clearness. There is no design of entering here upon an examination of this little historical problem; but it is a bounden duty to point out that, if the authenticity of the Pragmatic Sanction, as St. Louis’s, is questionable, the act has, at bottom, nothing but what bears a very strong resemblance to, and is quite in conformity with, the general conduct of that prince. He was profoundly respectful, affectionate, and faithful towards the papacy, but, at the same time, very careful in upholding both the independence of the crown in things temporal, and its right of superintendence in things spiritual. Attention has been drawn to his posture of reserve during the great quarrel between the priestdom and the empire, and his firmness in withstanding the violent measures adopted by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. against the Emperor Frederick II. Louis carried his notions, as to the independence of his judgment and authority, very far beyond the cases in which that policy went hand in hand with interest, and even into purely religious questions. The Bishop of Auxerre said to him one day, in the name of several prelates, “‘Sir, these lords which be here, archbishops and bishops, have told me to tell you that Christianity is perishing in your hands.’ The king crossed himself and said, Well, tell me how that is made out!’ ‘Sir,’ said the bishop, ‘it is because nowadays so little note is taken of excommunications, that folk let death overtake them excommunicate without getting absolution, and have no mind to make atonement to the Church. These lords, therefore, do pray you, sir, for the love of God and because you ought to do so, to command your provosts and bailiffs that all those who shall remain a year and a day excommunicate be forced, by seizure of their goods, to get themselves absolved.’ Whereto the king made answer that he would willingly command this in respect of the excommunicate touching whom certain proofs should be given him that they were in the wrong. The bishop said that the prelates would not have this at any price, and that they disputed the king’s right of jurisdiction in their causes. And the king said that he would not do it else; for it would be contrary to God and reason if he should force folks to get absolution when the clergy had done them wrong. As to that,’ said the king, ‘I will give you the example of the Count of Brittany, who for seven years, being fully excommunicate, was at pleas with the prelates of Brittany; and he prevailed so far that the pope condemned them all. If, then, I had forced the Count of Brittany, the first year, to get absolution, I should have sinned against God and against him.’ Then the prelates gave up; and never since that time have I heard that a single demand was made touching the matters above spoken of.” (Joinville, chap. xiii. p. 43.)
One special fact in the civil and municipal administration of St. Louis deserves to find a place in history. After the time of Philip Augustus there was malfeasance in the police of Paris. The provostship of Paris, which comprehended functions analogous to those of prefect, mayor, and receiver-general, became a purchasable office, filled sometimes by two provosts at a time. The burghers no longer found justice or security in the city where the king resided. At his return from his first crusade, Louis recognized the necessity for applying a remedy to this evil; the provostship ceased to be a purchasable office; and he made it separate from the receivership of the royal domain. In 1258 he chose as provost Stephen Boileau, a burgher of note and esteem in Paris; and in order to give this magistrate the authority of which he had need, the king sometimes came and sat beside him when he was administering justice at the Chatelet. Stephen Boileau justified the king’s confidence, and maintained so strict a police that he had his own godson hanged for theft. His administrative foresight was equal to his judicial severity. He established registers wherein were to be inscribed the rules habitually followed in respect of the organization and work of the different corporations of artisans, the tariffs of the dues charged, in the name of the king, upon the admittance of provisions and merchandise, and the titles on which the abbots and other lords founded the privileges they enjoyed within the walls of Paris. The corporations of artisans, represented by their sworn masters or prud’hommes, appeared one after the other before the provost to make declaration of the usages in practice amongst their communities, and to have them registered in the book prepared for that purpose. This collection of regulations relating to the arts and trades of Paris in the thirteenth century, known under the name of Livre des Metiers d’Etienne Boileau, is the earliest monument of industrial statistics drawn up by the French administration, and it was inserted, for the first time in its entirety, in 1837, amongst the Collection des Documents relatifs d l’Histoire de France, published during M. Guizot’s ministry of public instruction.
St. Louis would be but very incompletely understood if we considered him only in his political and kingly aspect; we must penetrate into his private life, and observe his personal intercourse with his family, his household, and his people, if we would properly understand and appreciate all the originality and moral worth of his character and his life. Mention has already been made of his relations towards the two queens, his mother and his wife; and, difficult as they were, they were nevertheless always exemplary. Louis was a model of conjugal fidelity, as well as of filial piety. He had by Queen Marguerite eleven children, six sons and five daughters; he loved her tenderly, he never severed himself from her, and the modest courage she displayed in the first crusade rendered her still dearer to him. But he was not blind to her ambitious tendencies, and to the insufficiency of her qualifications for government. When he made ready for his second crusade, not only did he not confide to Queen Marguerite the regency of the kingdom, but he even took care to regulate her expenses, and to curb her passion for authority. He forbade her to accept any present for herself or her children, to lay any commands upon the officers of justice, and to choose any one for her service, or for that of her children, without the consent of the council of the regency. And he had reason so to act; for, about this same time, Queen Marguerite, emulous of holding in the state the same place that had been occupied by Queen Blanche, was giving all her thoughts to what her situation would be after her husband’s death, and was coaxing her eldest son, Philip, then sixteen years old, to make her a promise on oath to remain under her guardianship up to thirty years of age, to take to himself no counsellor without her approval, to reveal to her all designs which might be formed against her, to conclude no treaty with his uncle, Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, and to keep as a secret the oath she was thus making him take. Louis was probably informed of this strange promise by his young son Philip himself, who got himself released from it by Pope Urban IV. At any rate, the king had a foreshadowing of Queen Marguerite’s inclinations, and took precautions for rendering them harmless to the crown and the state.