19. Louis IX.
CHAPTER XIX. Louis IX. (1226-1270)
The son of Louis VIII. was Louis IX., afterwards called Saint Louis, in memory of his goodness and of all he did for France. He was twelve years old when he became king, and his mother, Blanche of Castillo, managed all the business of the country for him till he was old enough to govern for himself. She gave him good tutors, and brought him up to be both a wise and a good man.
She had many troubles and difficulties while he was still young in resisting the chief nobles of the country, who thought this would be a good opportunity for winning back some of the power that they had lost in the two last reigns. Some of them refused to be present when the king was crowned, and afterwards went so far as to try to take Louis prisoner and have him brought up by one of his uncles who was their friend, instead of by Blanche. But Blanche managed to make the more powerful nobles her friends, and the people stood by her and their young king, so that she was able to resist all her enemies.
She had another great friend called the Legate, a name given to the ambassadors or messengers of the Pope, from a Latin word meaning messenger. The Pope, who liked to know about all that was going on in all the countries of Europe, often sent a Legate to live at the court of any king with whom he was friendly, to send him accounts of what was going on, to give the king good advice, and in particular to see that he did not ill-treat any clergyman, or take for himself any of the power which it was thought in those times ought to belong to the Pope. Louis was brought up chiefly by Churchmen, and he was taught to be respectful and obedient to the Pope, and to do as much as he could to please him and to make the Church great and powerful. On the whole, it was at that time a good thing that the Pope should have a good deal of power, as he was more likely to use it well than the fierce ignorant barons, or the people of the towns, who were nearly as fierce, and quite as ignorant about many things. But it sometimes happened that the Churchmen wanted something which would have been bad for the other subjects of Louis, and have brought the country into trouble, and then Louis knew the true duty of a king well enough to refuse to give it to them.
But Louis himself sometimes made mistakes, though he was one of the best men who ever were kings of France, and some of his mistakes brought great trouble and difficulty upon his country.
All the time that Louis was a child, the barons continued to make disturbances in the country. They asked Henry III. of England to come and help them, but though he brought an army into France and marched about from one place to another, he did nothing important. When Louis became a man he made peace with all his enemies. He gave lands to some, and bought their lands from others who were willing to part from them in return for a sum of money.
He made an arrangement with Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, that his daughter should marry one of the brothers of Louis, and that all his lands should go to this brother when Raymond died.
Louis loved peace and justice. He always settled a question fairly, without considering whether he himself should gain or lose by what he decided. Other kings and princes knew this so well, that they sometimes asked him to decide disputes in other countries with which he had nothing to do; but it was in France, and among his own subjects, that his virtues were best known. He cared for all his subjects, the poor as well as the rich, which may not seem wonderful in these days when many rich people think a great deal about the safety and comfort of the poor, but which was very unusual then, especially for a king. The rich and strong were apt in those times to consider the poor as things rather than people, as animals useful for digging the ground and doing other hard work, rather than as men with feelings and thoughts like themselves.
Louis used to sit under a great oak tree at a place near Paris called Vincennes, and any one, however poor or shabby, who had a complaint to make, might come and make it before the king, who inquired into the matter, and settled it as he thought right and just. He would give advice also to those who wished for it, and help to any honest person in distress.
But though the king loved his people, he did not fully understand what was his duty to them, or at least he did not think about it as we do at this day. It is now considered that the great duty of a king is to think of what will be good for his subjects. Louis thought less of their good than of pleasing God by doing something which he thought right, but which it was no part of his duty as king to do, and which he could not do without neglecting his people.
Europe had been attacked by a fierce band of savages, called Tartars; they came from mountains in the north of Asia, and are described by the people of the Holy Land (the place where they first showed themselves) as something very wild and terrible. The Saracens, who were first attacked, sent messengers to the French court asking for help against the Tartars, and saying that they would certainly attack Europe if they were not stopped in Asia. The messengers described them as men with enormous heads, eating the raw skins of animals, and even of men. A writer of those times says, speaking of the Tartars, "They are skilful in drawing the bow, and good sailors; they carry with them leather boats, in which they pass the rivers; they speak a language that no other people understand; their horses feed on leaves and the bark of trees, and are so swift that they can go as far, in one day, as the horses of Europe can in three." These Tartars took several towns and provinces in Asia, and at last made themselves masters of Judea; took Jerusalem, and murdered all the Christians who could not escape.
Even before Louis heard this news, he had determined that he would at some time or other go upon a Crusade. He had once had an illness so severe that he at one time seemed to be dead. One of the ladies of his court thought that he was dead, another declared that he was still alive.
While they were disputing Louis opened his eyes and asked for the cross; they put it on his bed, and from that time he recovered. The cross on his bed was a sign that he considered himself a Crusader, and would at some time go on a Crusade. Many of his brothers and great lords had taken the cross at the same time.
When they heard of the Tartars having conquered Jerusalem, they determined to set out at once, and when Louis had been king for just twenty years, the Crusade began. The king determined this time to go to Egypt, a country on the north side of Africa, and to fight the Saracens there, instead of in the Holy Land. He felt no fears about the safety of his kingdom, for he left his mother there to govern for him, as she had done for so many years while he was a child. On his way to Egypt he stopped at the Island of Cyprus, where stores of food, wine, money, and such other things as his army would be likely to want, had been made ready for him. We read in a book about King Louis, of which I will speak presently, that the barrels of wine, set up in piles in the fields, looked from a little distance like great houses, and heaps of grain of different kinds had been piled up so high as to look like mountains. The king had with him between two and three thousand knights, and each knight had brought with him a larger or smaller body of men, so that this piles of food must have been a welcome sight. Leaving Cyprus, the French army went on to Egypt, and there they took the first town that came in their way, Damietta; for the Saracen army, which was waiting on the shore, tried in vain to prevent them from landing.
But having settled themselves at Damietta, there was a great difficulty to know what to do next. As usual in the Crusades, no one knew the way about the country. The Crusaders stayed near Damietta for many weeks; when they tried to go farther, they were attacked by the Saracens. Many of them, among others one of the brothers of the king, were killed. After this there were several days of fighting. The Saracens had a machine which threw out what was called Greek fire; the Christians could never find out how it was made, but it looked like a blazing ball of fire as it flew through the air, and did great hurt to the soldiers when it came to the ground amongst them. The Crusaders fell ill from bad food and the heat of the weather; and at last, when they were once more attacked by the Saracens, they could resist no longer. Louis and great numbers of the chief men were taken prisoners, and the common people were, for the most part, put to death.
The king and his chief nobles had been kept alive in order that the Saracens might receive a ransom from them. A ransom means the sum of money which a prisoner pays in order to be set free. In those days a person who took a prisoner was allowed to have, for his own, whatever ransom the prisoner gave; indeed, he might fix the sum himself, and refuse to let the man go till he had paid it. The King of the Saracens, who was called not king, but Sultan, fixed a very large sum for the ransom of Louis and his nobles. Louis at once agreed to pay it, and a truce for ten years was agreed upon.
Still the king would not go home, though many of his barons advised him to do so; he thought of all his soldiers who had been made prisoners, and of the other Christians who were prisoners in towns belonging to the Saracens in Asia. He knew that if he went back to Europe, there would be no hope for them of ever being set free, so he went to fight in Asia, where he had no special success; but though he never succeeded in reaching Jerusalem, he was able, by making friends with some of the Saracens, to persuade them to give up to him several hundred Christians whom they were keeping prisoners, and a number of Christian children who had been taken from their friends when they were very young, and were being brought up as Mahommedans. All this time Queen Blanche was governing France, and governing it wisely and well. So long as she was there, the king felt no fear for the safety of his kingdom, but when at last news reached him that she was dead, he left the Holy Land at once and set sail for France. He arrived safely, but sad at not having seen Jerusalem after all his troubles, and at thinking of all the confusion and unhappiness which the Crusade had brought upon so many of his subjects.
Louis spent sixteen years in his country, ruling on the whole wisely and well. Peace and justice were still the two things which he chiefly valued. When he wanted for any reason to be master of land belonging to another prince, instead of going to war with him and trying to take it by force, or thinking of some excuse for saying it was his already, and trying to get it by a kind of trick, Louis IX. would say honestly that he wanted it, and offer some other piece of land in exchange. He did this with the King of England, Henry III. Henry had always complained that some land had been taken from him unjustly by the grandfather of Louis IX. Louis offered him some other provinces instead of those which he had lost. Henry took them and was quite satisfied, but the nobles of France were vexed at their king having parted with the provinces, and asked him why he had done it, as there had been no real reason why Henry should have them rather than he. Louis said that he knew the King of England had no right to the land, but that he had given it in order that there might be love and friendship between himself and Henry. This would have been a good answer if Louis had made Henry some present which belonged only to himself, but he did not consider what the people of these provinces would think at being made subjects of King Henry. Henry governed very badly, and his subjects were not happy, so that the people who had lived happily under Louis IX. were very angry at having to live under a king whom they liked so much less well. They were so angry that when, after his death, the Pope said that he was to be considered a saint, to be called St. Louis, and to have one day in the year kept in honour of him, the people of these provinces would never take any notice of his day, nor pay him honour of any kind.
No doubt King Louis did wrong about this, and I think that he acted foolishly in going on the Crusade which did really no good, for though he set free some Christian prisoners, yet many more Christians were killed in the battles he fought; I think there can be no doubt that he would have done his duty better by staying at home, and attending to his own work of governing France, unless he had found it necessary to march against the Tartars; who, as it was, might have attacked his country while he was away, and have done a great deal of harm there, if they had not been stopped by the Emperor of Germany. But on the whole Louis governed better than almost any other king who has reigned in France. He improved the laws; he made arrangements about money, how it was to be made and how much each piece of money was to be worth; he encouraged people to make beautiful buildings of all kinds, particularly churches; he made many plans by which bad people might be found out and punished, and good people be protected. One of his plans was to send some of his servants, whom he knew he could trust, to different parts of the country to see what went on there, and to bring him back word. One of the things he was very anxious to prevent, was a plan people had in those days for finding out whether a man had or had not done any bad thing which some one else thought he might have done.
In these days there would be what is called a trial. The man who was supposed to have done wrong would be brought before a man called a judge, whose duty it is to know what are the laws of the country, and any one who knew anything about what had happened would be obliged to come and say what he knew, and the judge would ask questions of all the people who had seen what really did happen. If some people said one thing, and some another, twelve men who are sitting by on purpose, and who had listened to all that was said, would settle among themselves which story they thought was really true, and would tell the judge, and he would say how the man was to be punished if it were settled that he had done wrong, and would say he was to be set free and go away to his own home again if it were settled that he had done no harm. This is a very long business, but it is likely that the truth will be found out at last. In the time of King Louis there was a much shorter plan. If one man said another had done wrong, and the second man said it was not true, the two fought together, and whichever won was considered to have been right. This was a quick but a very unjust way of settling the question. It made people who could fight well able to say what they liked about their weaker neighbours, and to get them punished for what they had never done. King Louis did a great deal to prevent this habit, and to make people who had disputes come before a judge and have a trial, something like what I have described. He also prevented the barons from making war upon one another when any two of them had a quarrel; which they still did very often at the beginning of his reign.
But all this time Louis was meaning to go, whenever it was possible, on another Crusade. Nothing could turn him away from this, and at last, when he was fifty-three years old, though he was so ill that he could hardly stand, he called all his barons together, and took the cross in spite of all that the wisest of them could say to prevent him. He sailed three years afterwards, and landed in Africa; but before he had had time for anything further, he was seized with a severe illness, and died at the age of fifty-six, having been king for forty-four years.
Most of what we know about St. Louis is told us by one of his barons, who was his faithful friend and servant all through his life, and who went with him on the first Crusade. His name was the Baron de Joinville, and when you are old enough to read his book, you will find many stories about the things which that good and great king did and said, which I have not room to tell here, but which will amuse and interest all my readers very much.
