Philip Augustus had followed justice because he believed that it paid, and his subjects had feared and respected him. His grandson, with his keen sense of honour, shrank from injustice as something unclean; and we are told that the people ‘loved him as men love God and the Saints’.
Like nearly all the kings of France, Louis was a devout son of the Church, and it was under his protection that Innocent IV resided safely at Lyons when Frederick II had driven him from Rome.[24] Nevertheless the King’s sincere love of the Faith, that later won him canonization as a Saint, never hindered his determination that he would be master of all his subjects, both lay and ecclesiastical. If the clergy sinned after the manner of laymen he was firm that they should be tried in the lay courts; and while his contemporary, Henry III of England, remained a feeble victim of papal encroachments, Louis boldly declared, ‘It is unheard of that the Holy See, when it is in need, should impose subsidies on the Church of France, and levy those contributions on temporal goods that can only be imposed by the King.’
No storm of protest was aroused, for the Papacy in its bitter struggle with the Empire was largely dependent on French support; while Louis’s transparent purity of motive in maintaining his supremacy disarmed indignation. An Italian friar, who saw him humbly sharing the meal of some Franciscan brethren, described him as ‘more monk than king’. This assumption was at first sight borne out by his daily life: his simple diet and love of sombre clothes; his habit of rising from his bed at midnight and in the early mornings to share in the services of the Church; his hatred of oaths, lying, and idle gossip; his almost reckless charity; the eager help he offered in nursing the sick amongst his Paris slums and in washing the feet of the most repulsive beggars who crowded at his gate. ‘He was frail and slender,’ says the same Italian, ‘with an angelic expression, and dove’s eyes full of grace.’
Perhaps, if Louis had not been called to the life of a king, he might have become a friar; but living in the world he loved his wife and children, and would sometimes tease the former by protesting, when she complained how poorly he dressed, that if he put on gaudy clothes to please her she also must go in drab attire to please him.
Those of his subjects who saw Louis on the battle-field describe him as ‘the finest knight ever seen’, and recount tales of their difficulty in restraining his hot courage, that would carry him into the fiercest hand-to-hand conflict without any thought of personal danger. Yet this king was a lover of peace in his heart. He wished to be friends with all his Christian neighbours, and, well content with the lands that already belonged to the French crown, he negotiated a treaty by which he recognized English claims to the Duchy of Guienne. Less successful was his effort to act as mediator between popes and emperors; but if he could not secure peace he determined at least to remain as neutral in the struggle as possible, refusing the imperial crown when the Pope deposed Frederick II. Nor would he reap advantage out of the anarchy that followed on that emperor’s death.
War between Christians was hateful to Louis because it prevented any combined action against the Turks; for in him, as in Innocent III, burned the old crusading spirit that had never quite died out in France.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century a French peasant lad, Stephen, had preached a new crusade, saying that God had told him in a vision that it was left for Christian children to succeed where their elders had failed in recovering the Holy Sepulchre. Thousands of boys and girls, some of them only twelve or thirteen years of age, collected at Marseilles in eager response to this message. They expected that a pathway would be opened to them across the sea as in the days of Moses and the Chosen People, and when they had waited for some time in vain for this miracle, they allowed themselves to be entrapped by false merchants, who, though Christian in name, would allow nothing to stand in the way of the gold that they coveted. Enticed on board ship, disarmed, bound, and manacled, the unfortunate young crusaders were sold in the market-places of Egypt and Syria to become the slaves of the Moslems whom they had hoped to conquer.
When he had first heard of the Children’s Crusade, Innocent III had exclaimed, ‘The children shame us indeed!’ and St. Louis, the inheritor of their spirit, felt that his kingship would be shamed unless he used his power and influence to convert and overthrow the Turk.
The Seventh Crusade
One of his subjects, who loved him, the Sieur de Joinville, has left a graphic personal account of the expedition undertaken against Egypt. From Cyprus, the head-quarters of the crusaders, a fleet of some one thousand eight hundred vessels, great and small, sailed to Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile; and Louis, seeing his ensign borne ashore, would not be restrained, but leaped himself into the water, lance in hand, shouting his battle-cry of ‘Mont-joie St. Denys!’