King Louis IX (1214-1270) is usually described as Saint Louis, and he is the patron saint of France. It would be hard to find a saintlier king, although he had his failings, which unfortunately accorded with his times, and which are recognized by his recent biographer Jacques Le Goff, who introduces him with apologies for his behavior towards the Jews and other groups that Louis considered heretics. I chose him because I wanted to learn more about him, but also because I knew that his hairstyle was adopted as a decorative element in the late-thirteenth-century architecture of the south as part of the shift towards a unified France, a shift whose tensions are well-masked by his coif of smooth and undulating curls.
Louis cannot be divorced from his ancestry nor from his immediate family, both of which exercised enormous influence on his character. At the time of his coronation in 1226, he was the ninth Capetian (and by coincidence the ninth Louis) in a dynastic line which was preceded by the Carolingians and the Merovingians before them. By his name he is linked to the first Merovingian king, Clovis (465-511), and Clovis = Ludwig = Louis. When Clovis converted to Christianity c. 500, he began a tradition of saintly kingship that was made official about 400 years later when Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor and anointed with holy oil. Thereafter French kings were in a most powerful and unusual position in Europe in that they were considered as responsible for the spiritual health of their kingdom as they were for the general well-being. Religion and politics were one and the same, and this legacy was embedded in the background against which the French revolted in 1789.
Back in the fifth century, Clovis had a dream of a large, united kingdom of Franks and Christians with its center in Paris, and one could argue that Saint Louis realized the dream. Such an ambitious dream so simply put sounds too good to be true, and of course it is; just like the Pax Augustus of first-century Rome, many lives were lost and many suffered so that one man could claim the achievement of good for all. A few years before the birth of Louis, the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1218) descended on the south, on the Land of “oc,” or Languedoc (“oc” for “yes” in the south, “oeil” for “yes” in the north), ostensibly to crush heresy, but certainly with an eye on the wealthy resources there, and after many cruel battles which were overt during its official duration and covert for decades after, this great territory came under the control of the French monarchy. Louis was the inheritor of this conquest, but he left the project of taming the south to his brother, Alphonse de Poitiers, who had married the daughter of Count Raymond VII of Toulouse as part of a peace-term treaty. When Alphonse died in 1271 without a male heir, Languedoc definitively became part of the French kingdom.
Both Louis’ parents (Louis VIII and Blanche of Castille) took his upbringing seriously and they subscribed to the ideas presented in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. A king should be educated—an illiterate king was nothing but a crowned ass—and a king should be able to reason. Reason had been linked to good kingship by earlier writers (Isidore of Seville in the seventh century), but John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180 and Bishop of Chartres from 1176 until his death) lived in a time when these ideas found particularly fertile ground, and his advice to politicians published in 1159 had a huge influence on kings on both sides of the Channel.
Louis’ father only ruled for three years and passed away when the boy was twelve. Unlike his father, Louis enjoyed a long reign of 44 years, during which time his mother Blanche, who was a remarkable woman, often took an active role in governance. She was regent from the time of his coronation at age 12 until his majority, and also during his absence on Crusade, one of those rare female power figures of the Middle Ages. She and the counselors who surrounded Louis cultivated the image of him as a saintly king from his infancy, which wasn’t difficult given his humble and generous nature, but his reaction to an event in 1232 pushed his marketing team to hustle into damage control mode. A relic had been stolen from the royal abbey of Saint Denis in Paris, one of the nails used to attach Christ to his cross. The public reaction of Louis to this event was so sentimental and over-wrought that his counselors feared he would be seen as too spiritual; a weak king. So they solidly branded him as a saint in order to avoid scandal, a project that seems to have been a win-win for all. Louis was keenly aware of his public image, and he was the first king to promote self-reflection as a virtue; we might say he was living in the 60s of the Middle Ages. It was a heady time even if social roles were still quite rigid; the growth of universities, of merchant power, of increased literacy, and of popular literature resulted in new concepts of the individual.
In Paris, Louis inherited the impressive monuments put in place by his grandfather Philip Augustus (1180-1223), who defined the limits of the city with his famous wall, and planted a royal presence in the city center with the palace of the Louvre. And elsewhere in France, Philip had engaged in an ongoing competition with Henry II of England to innovate in military design. But Louis didn’t feel the need to continue a defensive building program, so instead he promoted projects related to his love of religious causes: a giant reliquary/chapel for himself, a tower/lighthouse and port to facilitate travel to the Holy Land and the crusades there, and several buildings for mendicants in Paris. He embarked almost simultaneously on two of these projects: the Saint-Chapelle in Paris and the castrum of Aigues-Mortes in the Rhone River delta, Sainte-Chapelle being the gigantic reliquary, and Aigues-Mortes (literally meaning “dead waters”) the launching pad for those headed overseas to the crusades.
The Sainte-Chapelle was built in the palace grounds of the Louvre between 1239 and 1248 to house perhaps the most precious relic of them all, the Crown of Thorns that Christ wore during the final days of his life. Like most relics, the provenance of this one can be questioned, and it has a juicy financial history. The actors in our story did not question the provenance. For them, it was enough that the mother of Constantine, Helen (a saint in her own right) claimed the authenticity of this relic as one that she had guarded in Constantinople during her lifetime there in the fourth century. The financial history is more complicated, and involves the desire of western merchants and kings to seize control of eastern trade routes as much as to claim the Holy Land as their own. Never mind that Jewish people had an even longer history of holding this land sacred, or that Muslims had established the Dome of the Rock as a critical shrine in Jerusalem. The thunder clouds of Pope, King, and Knights Anxious for Action gathered in force to launch the First Crusade from France in 1096, and by the time Louis came to power six crusades had resulted in many deaths, invaluable lessons about military architecture learned in the East, a much-enriched Venetian Republic, and new military orders such as the Knights of the Temple; to name only a few of the side-effects.
In 1237 Baldwin of Flanders was struggling to defend Constantinople against the Greeks. He came to Paris to seek aid from his cousin Louis, and while there received word that his men in charge back home had decided to pawn the Crown of Thorns to the Venetians for boats and supplies. Yikes! Louis and his mother immediately seized on the opportunity to come to the rescue and secure this incredible coup for a king already considered a saint and for a France that was seen by contemporary historians as the “New Holy Land.” Two Dominican emissaries were sent back to Constantinople with Baldwin, and they arrived in the nick of time to save the relic from those greedy Venetians. But the Crown would have to pass through Venice before it came to Paris, and so, regardless of the fact that it was December, boats set sail from Constantinople and made their way to Venice. The entourage passed safely through Venice, where Brother Jacques delivered the payment (amount unknown but you can guess), and then was moved overland to France. It was August 9, 1239 when Louis and his entourage first viewed the Crown. To simulate Christ’s humility Louis and his brother Robert wore nightshirts and, in their bare feet, carried the precious object to various important sites for viewing before it was finally deposed in his chapel at the Louvre palace.
Louis immediately began planning a new chapel worthy of his expensive prize, and the Sainte-Chapelle was consecrated in April of 1248, two months before he left on Crusade. The building is extremely simple in its plan and extremely complex in its decoration. An undercroft, or lower, ground-level area, was used as a chapel for non-royals who lived in the palace, and supports the soaring volume of the royal chapel above. It was a highly visible building in medieval Paris. From base to ridgeline the building rises over 42 meters, and the upper chapel is almost as high as it is long. Its dimensions recreate those of the palace of Solomon described in the Bible, and themes from the Old Testament fill nine of the ten window panels that flank the “nave,” placing emphasis on kingship. The tenth tells the story of the translation of the Crown of Thorns. The apse of the chapel is filled with scenes of the Passion of Christ, and the rose window at the other end is thought to have been an Apocalypse scene. As is the case with many medieval stained-glass panels, these have been variously replaced, destroyed, sold, or restored through the centuries, and sometimes rearranged to suit the restorer’s vision of the narrative. Regardless of later re-arrangements or erratic narrative, these 47+ feet high window panels, which dominate the space, are a spectacular sight to behold.
The Sainte Chapelle never won any prizes from historians for its innovative architecture; rather it is credited with its role as a stellar example of what is called the Rayonnant Style of Gothic architecture. You will know Rayonnant buildings when you see the points of the Gothic pointed arches pushed to extremes, their edges adorned with crockets and baubles; when you see delicately carved, naturalistic foliage, and three-and-four-leafed clover everywhere; when you see such large openings for stained glass that you wonder how they remain standing. For me, the best part of La Chapelle is its paradox: the stunning complexity of its decoration displayed in the simplest of volumes. As a volume it might as well be a barn, or even a shed, and, existing as it does as a walk-in version of a much smaller object, could be thought of as the ancestor, the progenitor even, of the famous Decorated Shed of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi (Learning from Las Vegas, 1972). I find it a delicious antidote to the mess of Notre-Dame, which has been an ongoing architectural laboratory since the day it was born (I understand the sentiment to replace the burnt spire but think it would be more in keeping with the spirit of that hopelessly hybridized building to try something new). And if you have not yet visited this brilliant gem of a building, please put it on your list the next time you visit Paris.
Louis left for his first Crusade two months after the Sainte Chapelle was consecrated, and was able to set sail from his newly-created castrum of Aigues-Mortes. His choice of this location for a new port was strategic; Aigues-Mortes was tucked away in the first well-protected harbor west of the Rhone River, and had the potential to become a profitable commercial port, encouraging the Italians who were already providing Crusade ships and provisions to the French to settle there. His project worked for his lifetime, but towards the end of the thirteenth century when France had officially gobbled up the South and the already-bustling port of Montpellier, Aigues-Mortes began its decline. One might have seen it coming—would you want to live in a place called “Dead Waters?” At one point the inhabitants tried to change the name to Bonne par force, or, “Good by dint of insistence,” but life there was never easy.
The first building constructed was the Tower of Constance, built on the foundations of an existing Carolingian tower. The origin of the name is unknown; perhaps related to the great-aunt of Louis or to the idea of constancy, a quality Louis would have valued. The tower is a massive defensive structure, but it was most useful as a lighthouse and a watchtower to monitor naval traffic for purposes of taxation. The walls of Aigues-Mortes, which took a while to build, were needed more to keep the drifting sand from the marsh out of the poorly-oriented grid of the town than they were for protection. During its short life, however, Aigues-Mortes must have been a lively place, as it was filled with traders, sailors, and merchants, and due to extensive trade with Syria, had its own Syrian neighborhood. If you visit the town today, you will see that what was once a port on the sea is now land-locked in the middle of a massive marsh famous for its salt and white horses.
Louis didn’t have such a good time on Crusade. He lost his brother Robert on the battlefield in 1250 and was captured by the Muslims in the same year. After his ransom was paid, he spent four more years in the Middle East and returned to Paris in 1254. He was to all evidence crushed by his experience and at one point wanted to retreat from his duties as king and become a friar. But he rallied, continued to be a good administrator for the duration of his rule, and gifted the city of Paris with several new buildings to serve existing and new mendicant orders as well as institutions that served women in distress. And at the age of 56 he once again departed on Crusade, only to die a few months later near Tunis.
The significance of Louis’ architectural legacy is most visible in two ways in my opinion: the enduring beauty of the Sainte-Chapelle, and the less-known aspect of his influence on the architecture of Languedoc, especially on the decorative elements of moldings and sculptures. Before Louis, architectural decoration in the south was marked by a variety of styles; Cistercian abstraction and simplicity, Mozarabic themes of geometric interlace (many stone carvers working in the Toulouse region had worked in Spain), rough and expressive figural sculpture, and the lovely, linear style that marks the relief sculptures seen at the Abbey of Moissac or at Saint-Sernin in Toulouse. The first evidence of Parisian influence on southern architecture appears in the Tower of Constance and at the Château of Najac in the Rouergue (about two hours north of Toulouse), where Louis’ brother Alphonse de Poitiers directed an extensive re-building of the castle. In these buildings, the tower ceilings were vaulted, and their stone ribs were given the same graceful profiles used for the Sainte-Chapelle and other Rayonnant buildings in Paris. In addition, the corbels supporting the ribs often featured portraits of Louis and his family members, and because of the frequency of these images, a new hair style associated with Saint-Louis was made popular.
It's a sweet irony that this man who was simultaneously humble about his appearance and extremely conscious of his public image became immortalized for his hair style. In this he joined the ranks of other celebrated heads of hair like those of Pericles of Greece or Alexander the Great. There is no end to the stories of prominent people borrowing on the street cred of those preceding them to gain authority in the public eye; witness our new breed of astronaut!
In this brief essay I’ve barely touched on the rich life and times of King Louis IX, but perhaps I’ve piqued your interest to explore more on your own. And may we all have good hair days…
References for Weeks 31 through 34: Saint Louis
Websites:
Website for the Sainte-Chapelle: http://www.sainte-chapelle.fr/#
Website for Aigues-Mortes: https://ot-aiguesmortes.com/
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Boutaric, Edgard. Saint Louis et Alphonse de Poitiers :Etude sur la réunion des provinces du Midi & de l’ouest à la Couronne et sur les origines de la centralisation administrative d’après des documents inédits. Paris : Henri Plon, 1870.
Cohen, Meredith. The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy: Royal Architecture in Thirteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Jordan, Alyce A. Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle. Belgium: Brepols, 2002.
Le Goff, Jacques. Saint Louis. Paris : Gallimard, 1996.
Morize, Jean. “Aigues-Mortes au XIIIe siècle,” in Annales du Midi, XXVI:103, 1914, pp 313-348.
Pradalier-Schlumberger, Michèle. Toulouse et le Languedoc : la sculpture gothique XIIIe – XIVe siècles. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998.
Toy, Sidney. Castles : Their Construction and History. Dover Reprint from 1939 Edition, 1985.