Saint Louis of France

King

Feast Day

August 25

Life

1214–1270

Canonized

1297

Order

Third Order of Saint Francis (Secular Franciscan)

Born

Poissy, Kingdom of France

Saint Louis was born Louis IX, Capetian King of France, at Poissy on April 25, 1214, son of King Louis VIII and Queen Blanche of Castile. He succeeded to the throne at age twelve in 1226 on his father's death; until 1234 his mother Blanche acted as regent and continued throughout her life as his most trusted counselor. In 1234 he married Margaret of Provence, by whom he had eleven children.

Louis's reign of forty-four years (1226-1270) is widely regarded by historians as the high point of medieval Christian kingship. He extended royal justice through the famous oak of Vincennes, where, according to Joinville's eyewitness Life of Saint Louis (the principal source for his sanctity), the king sat as judge to receive the petitions of the humblest of his subjects directly. He undertook major reforms of royal administration, currency, and law (the Etablissements de Saint Louis, 1257-1270), prohibited private warfare among the nobles of his domain, and was sought repeatedly as arbiter among the princes of Europe (notably between King Henry III of England and his rebellious barons by the Mise of Amiens, 1264).

His personal life was marked by daily Mass, frequent confession to the Dominican William of Saint-Pathus, daily recitation of the Divine Office, almsgiving on a vast scale (he financed the great religious foundation of the Quinze-Vingts hospital for blind veterans), and the wearing of a hairshirt under his royal robes during Lent. He served the lepers of his realm by personal visits and meals, washing their feet and feeding them with his own hand. He purchased from the Latin Emperor Baldwin II the principal relics of the Passion (the Crown of Thorns, a fragment of the True Cross, the Holy Lance, and others) and to house them built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris (consecrated April 26, 1248), the masterpiece of High Gothic architecture.

Twice Louis took the cross. The Seventh Crusade (1248-1254), led personally by him, captured Damietta on the Nile but ended in the catastrophe of Mansurah (April 1250), in which Louis himself was captured and held until ransomed at vast cost. He spent four further years in the Holy Land at Acre, refortifying the Latin coast. The Eighth Crusade (1270) was directed against Tunis, where Louis hoped to convert its emir; instead, dysentery broke out in the army shortly after landing, and Louis died in his tent at Carthage on August 25, 1270, with the words Jerusalem, Jerusalem on his lips. His son Philip III brought his bones back to France for burial at Saint-Denis. Pope Boniface VIII canonized him on August 11, 1297. The Memorial in the General Roman Calendar is observed on August 25.