Medieval Civilization

Dana Munro

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781531299873
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

THE Latin which gave birth to the Romance languages was vulgar Latin, that is, the Latin of the common people. It accompanied the soldiers of the legions, the colons, and the emigrants of every kind, from Italy into the provinces, and thus became the language of the people of all Western Europe--the spoken, not the written, language. We can reconstruct this language to a certain extent, with the aid of the hints let fall by different writers, but only in a most general way...

ST. LOUIS

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Adapted from C. V. Langlois, in Lavisse: Histoire de France

NOTHING is known about the youth of Louis IX except what the king later chose to relate to his friends. His mother, Blanche of Castile, told him many times that she would rather see him dead than have him commit a mortal sin. Her words made a vivid impression upon him. He also remembered with pleasure that, when he went to play in the woods or along the river bank, he was always accompanied by his tutor, who taught him his letters and from time to time thrashed him. He was brought up “like a nobleman,” as was fitting for a prince, but very piously, after the Spanish fashion. Every day he heard mass, vespers, and the canonical hours. He was a very good and sweet-tempered child. He shunned noisy games and did not care for playthings. He had no intimate companions; he did not sing the popular songs, and he made one of his squires who did sing them learn instead to sing the anthems of Notre Dame and of the Ave, maris stella, “although it was very difficult.” From his childhood he was charitable: Stephen of Bourbon reports that “according to the popular tradition, one morning, while he was still very young, a number of poor people were assembled in the court before his lodging awaiting alms. Taking advantage of the hour when everyone was asleep, he left his room, accompanied only by a servant, carrying a large number of pennies, and he distributed these to the poor. He was returning when a monk, who had perceived him from the corner of a window, said: ‘Sire King, I have seen your misdeeds.’’Very dear brother,’ replied Louis, ‘the poor are in my service. They bring upon the kingdom the benediction of peace. I have not paid them all that I owe them.’”

Old portraits of Louis IX are numerous enough, but indefinite and contradictory. We know, however, that from his grandmother, Queen Isabella, he had inherited the renowned beauty of the princes of the house of Hainault, which was perpetuated, through Philip the Rash and Philip the Fair, in the last Capetians of the direct line. “The king,” says the Franciscan, Salimbene, who saw him in 1248, “was tall and graceful, subtilis et gracilis, convenienter et longus, with an angelic air and a very gracious countenance.” Joinville says, in his account of the battle of Mansourah: “Never have I seen such a beautiful armed man, for he towered above his knights by a whole head. He wore a gilded helmet and held a German sword in his hand.” When he was young, he must have had thick blond locks. Later, and early in life, he was bald and a little bent. His body, which he subjected to excessive mortifications, was more shapely than strong. All who saw him agree in saying that his appearance was frank, affable, and thoughtful. He had the “eyes of a dove.” His costume was simple. His apologists, the monks, exaggerate when they say that after his twentieth year he entirely renounced the magnificent costumes to which Queen Blanche had accustomed him during his infancy, because of his rank. But, after his return from the crusade of 1248, a notable reform was seen in his manner of dress, as well as in the whole conduct of his life. He gave up costly furs, the vair, and the gris. After that, his robes were trimmed with lamb, rabbit, or squirrel; he renounced striking colors: in winter, he wore garments of dark wool, and in summer, of brown or black silk. The equipment of his horse was white, unadorned; his spurs and stirrups were of iron, ungilded. We shall always think of him just as Joinville saw him one summer’s day in his garden at Paris, “clad in a coat of camelot, a surcoat of linsey-woolsey without sleeves, a mantle of black sendal about his neck, very well combed and without coif, and a hat with a white peacock’s feather on his head.” This almost clerical costume undoubtedly helped as much as the reputation of the holiness of his person, to inspire the ill-natured description attributed to the count of Gueldre’s messenger: “This miserable devotee, this hypocritical king, with a wry neck and a cowl on his shoulders.”

The envoy of Gueldre was not the only one who accused Louis IX in his lifetime of hypocrisy. Among his subjects, who were, in general, little devout, very many, lords and common people, smiled or were indignant at the extreme piety of the king. They called him “brother Louis,"frater Ludovicus. The same idea is expressed by the well-known anecdote of the woman named Sarete de Faillouel, who saw the king one day just as he was leaving his apartments, and addressed him in these terms: “Fie! Fie! Are you the man to be king of France? It would be better that another should be king in your place, for you are only king of the Minorites and of the Dominicans, of the priests and of the clergy. It’s an outrage that you should be king of France. It’s a great marvel that they don’t put you out.” Were these popular sarcasms and the more discreet criticism of welleducated persons justifiable? Is it true that St. Louis was better adapted for the cloister than for the world, as has been said, both in his own day and ours?

The clerks who were the biographers of St. Louis or the witnesses who testified during the process of his canonization, certainly tell remarkable stories about the devotion of this prince. The biographers, Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres, give the schedule of the hours which Louis passed daily in prayer. At midnight he dressed, in order to take part in the matins in his chapel; he went back to bed, half-dressed, and, for fear lest he might prolong his sleep too much, he told his attendants to wake him for prime when the candle had burned a certain distance; after prime, each morning he heard at least two masses: a low mass for the dead, and the mass of the day, chanted; then, during the rest of the day, the offices of tierce, sext, and none, vespers and compline; in the evening, after fifty genuflections and as many Ave Marias, he went to bed, without drinking, although it was then customary before going to bed. Even when traveling, he did not interrupt the regularity of these observances. “When he was riding on horseback, at the hour prescribed by the Church, tierce, sext, and none were chanted by his chaplains, on horseback about him, and he himself with one of the company said them in a low tone, as if he were in his chapel.” Often, kneeling, without cushions, on the pavement of a church with his elbows upon a bench, he became absorbed in such long meditations—such extremely long ones—that his servants, who were waiting at the door, grew impatient. Then, he asked God with so much fervor for the “gift of tears” that he sometimes rose all confused, seeing only obscurely, and saying, “Where am I.” On special festivals he had the divine service celebrated with so much solemnity and slowness that, as the Confessor of Queen Marguerite naïvely avowed, everyone was tired.

The chapter on his abstinences and mortifications, in the biographies written by the clerks, is no less edifying than the chapter on his prayers. Louis IX, from a feeling of penitence, deprived himself of things which he loved: early vegetables, large fishes, particularly the pike. He detested beer, as was clearly shown by the face which he made when he drank it; nevertheless he drank it, during the whole of Lent, precisely because he wished “to bridle his appetite for wine.” Very few people, moreover, put as much water in their wine as he did, and he put water even in the sauces, when they were good, so as to make them insipid. Of course, he fasted frequently and severely. Shortly before his death, one Saturday, he refused to take the mulled egg recommended by the doctors, because his confessor was not present to grant him permission. He never laughed on Fridays, or, if he began to be cheerful, forgetting what day it was, he stopped short as soon as he remembered. On that day, in memory of the crown of thorns, he did not wear any hat, and he forbade his children to wear garlands of roses, as was the custom of the time. He who, in the words of Geoffrey of Beaulieu, committed no mortal sin, confessed every Friday, and had the discipline administered to him by his confessors with five little chains of iron; he was heard to say smilingly that some of these ecclesiastics did not have the “dead hand.” In vain did brother Geoffrey attempt to show him that the use of haircloth was not fitting to his position; he wore it and he made presents of similar instruments of penitence to his friends, his kinsmen, and his daughter, the queen of Navarre.

What is to be said of his charity? “His liberality toward the unfortunate,” a contemporary declares, “passed all bounds.” Every day, wherever the king was, more than a hundred poor received their pittance. His almsgiving, abundant and continual, cost him dear, for it sometimes extended to entire regions and often took the form of lasting foundations. “One year, when famine desolated Normandy, the hogsheads bound with iron that the wagons ordinarily brought to Paris filled with the receipts of the treasury, were seen making the journey in the opposite direction.” The hospital foundations of Louis IX, at Paris and in the neighborhood, are celebrated. Among them were the Filles-Dieu, for the prostitutes, the Quinze-Vingts, for the blind, the hospitals of Pontoise, of Vernon, of Compiègne, etc., for the sick. “As a writer who has made his book,” says Joinville, “illuminates it with gold and azure, the king illuminated his kingdom . . . with the great quantity of maisons-Dieu that he built there.” But, if we must believe some of his clerical associates, this man, who was naturally charitable, was not contented with doing well. In an ascetic spirit of humility, as if eager for mortification, he preferred, among good works, the most repugnant, not because they were the most useful, but because they were repugnant. Thus, when he invited beggars to his royal table—which happened very often —he had the dirtiest seated by him; he served them, and cut their meat and bread. That is not all: he ate the remnants they left, out of the plates they had held with their unclean hands, cum manibus ulcerosis et immundis. Even that is not all: he washed their “scabby and disgusting” feet, and, after drying them, he kissed them. The hagiographers, full of their subject, record details which are sickening. More brutal and more disgusting still are their stories about lepers. Louis IX assisted the lepers,—frightful objects—with his own hands every time he met them. “Now there was at the abbey of Royaumont a brother named Leger, who had been isolated because he was so consumed with leprosy that his nose was eaten up, his eyes gone, and his lips cracked open; running with pus, he was abominable. This brother Leger became the favorite of the king, who begged the abbot to go and see Leger with him. The abbot, as he declared later, was terrified enough in doing so. Louis kneeled before the leper, and fed him.” Louis also entered the hospitals, in spite of the “corruption of the air” and the odor of infection which inconvenienced his attendants, and there he felt it necessary, from time to time, to perform the most disgusting offices. At Sidon, in Palestine, he aided in burying the putrified remains of the Christians.

When we read the list of good works, abstinences, and observances attributed to Louis IX, even admitting that the witnesses at the process of canonization embellished the truth (and they surely embellished it involuntarily in representing certain exceptional acts of the saint as customary), we can understand well enough the invectives of Sarete.

Louis IX understood perfectly that the excess of his devotions and certain forms of his charity would tend to displease his people: Sarete taught him nothing. Consequently, as he was devoted to his task as king, he did not surrender himself unreservedly to the exercises of humility. One day, when he manifested a desire to wash the feet of the monks, the abbot of Royaumont, who was a prudent man, dissuaded him, saying, “People would talk about it.""And what would they say?” replied the king. But he knew well what they would say, and he refrained from doing it. During his frequent sojourns at the abbey of Royaumont, he often visited the infirmary, and, with the doctors, inspected the sick; but, “when he did these things, he desired that few people should be present, and only those who were his trusted companions.” The poor whose feet he washed every Saturday were blind. He had them gathered with great care and “brought very privately to his closet,” and “it was thought that he chose the blind more willingly in order that they should riot recognize him and tell about it outside.” Louis IX attempted, then, to conceal, from modesty, and from a desire not to lessen the royal dignity, such of his good works as he judged—not without reason—might shock the public. His subjects certainly did not have any suspicion about most of his macerations, which were revealed after his death only by his most intimate confidants.

Nevertheless, he did not have any fear of the world. “There are some noblemen,” he said to the Sire de Joinville, “who are ashamed to do right, by going to church and hearing the service of God. They are afraid that people will say: they are hypocrites.” For his own part, he bore it cheerfully when his conduct was blamed. When the nobles murmured at seeing him pass so much time at the religious services, he said that, if he lost twice as much time playing dice or hunting, no one would find fault. To those who reproached him with spending too much in charity to the poor, he replied: “Be silent. God has given me everything that I have. That which I spend thus is best spent.” Or else: “I prefer that my excessive expenditures should be in alms for the love of God rather than in luxury or in the vainglory of this world.” Robert de Sorbon recounts that a certain prince dressed modestly and that it displeased his wife. “Madam,” he said to her, “you wish me to wear costly garments. I agree; but, since the conjugal law is that the husband must seek to please his wife and vice versa, you are going to give me pleasure by laying aside your beautiful ornaments. You shall conform to my habit, and I to yours.” When Louis issued his ordinance against blasphemers, there were protests; but he declared that he was better pleased with the curses thus brought upon him than with the benedictions which certain works of public utility won for him at the same time. To Sarete he replied, without getting angry: “You tell the truth, assuredly. I am not worthy to be king, and, if it had pleased our Saviour, another would have been ill my place, who would have known better how to govern the kingdom.”

Prudence without false shame, good humor, and smiling irony are some of the traits which have nothing in common with the exalted mysticism that the pious folly of his attendants saw exclusively in Louis IX. In fact, the holiness of this excellent man was not at all monastic, and, although posterity has often been deceived concerning it, just as the crowd was in his own day, never was any saint less ecclesiastical (papelard) and more laic than he. This king, who did not love beautiful garments for his personal use, did not forbid others to wear them: “You ought,” he said to his son Philip and his son-in-law Thibaut, “to dress well and neatly, because your wives will love you better, and because people will think more of you, for, as the wise man said, one ought to wear such a costume and arms that the best men of this age shall not say that he is overdoing it nor the young people that he is deficient.” This king, who was so generous to the poor and to the churches, thought that Thibaut, his son-in-law, who was in debt, was spending too much for the convent of the Dominicans that he was building at Provins; he did not like to have people “give alms with another’s money.” This king, who was so passionately devoted to pious exercises, sometimes preferred chatting to edifying reading: “When we were together in private,” Joinville recounts, “he sat down on the foot of his bed, and, when the Dominicans and the Cordeliers, who were there, mentioned the books which he loved to hear, he said: ‘You shall not read to me at all, for reading, after a meal, is not as pleasant as quolibet, that is, when each one says what comes into his head.’” This king, although his manners were simple, was careful about the dignity of his court: “In spite of the great sums that the king spent in almsgiving, he expended as much each day on his household. He was magnificent and liberal in his dealings with the parlements and with the assemblies of barons and knights. He had his court served bounteously and luxuriously—more so than had been the case for a long time in the court of his predecessors.” Joinville, who was a connoisseur in such matters, is not the only one who attests this. Geoffrey of Beaulieu, also, states that the household establishment of Louis IX was more brilliant than that of the former kings. Finally, this pretended papelard made fun quietly of the devout, and, to tease Master Robert de Sorbon, he pretended, when he was gay, to prefer the virtue of the knights (of the gentlemen), prud’homie, to the virtue of the clerks. “Seneschal,” he said to Joinville, “tell me the reasons why a prud’homme is better than a béguine.” Then Master Robert and Joinville disputed, and, when the quarrel had lasted long enough, the king gave his decision in these terms: “Master Robert, I would prefer to have the renown of a prud’homme, and to be so truly, and that all the rest should remain for you; for prud’homie is such a great thing and such a good thing that even in naming it it fills the mouth.”

The works of charity and penitence of Louis IX would not be enough to distinguish him from a host of other medieval princes who were exemplary Christians; not even from his contemporary, King Henry III of England, who also waited on lepers, who frequented churches even more assiduously than his brother-in-law of France, and yet was a fool. That which renders Louis IX preeminent is his bright, refined, pure nature as a moralist and as an honorable man.

The “saintly king” can be known truly by hearing him speak. He spoke well, easily, and wittily. Joinville and the witnesses at the inquest concerning his canonization fortunately have preserved many of his sayings. Why has no one ever thought of collecting these and uniting them to the Instructions that the saint dictated, toward the end of his life, for his son Philip and for his daughter Isabel? These sayings of St. Louis, compared with the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, would illustrate the differences which separate these two great and excellent men, who have so often been compared. It would be Louis IX painted, so to speak, by himself, with his simple virtues, in no way superhuman, and also with his faults, his weaknesses, and his mistakes.

The most marked trait in the character of Louis IX was the intensity of his religious and moral preoccupations. Throughout his life, he conscientiously sought truth and justice, with the fixed idea of making his beliefs and acts conform to them.

His religious beliefs were, up to a certain point, the result of thought. Everyone about him noticed that in the matter of spiritual exercises he preferred sermons, the reading of the sacred texts, and theological discussions to the observance of rites. “The king,” wrote the Confessor of Queen Marguerite, “heard the word of God very gladly and very often; when he took a ride, if an abbey was near the road, he turned aside and had a sermon preached there, while he himself sat upon the straw and the monks in their stalls.” On his return from the Holy Land, while he was at Hyères in Provence, a Cordelier named Hugh, who was a popular orator, happened to pass. The king asked him for a sermon, but this brother Hugh was no courtier; he began rudely in these words: “My lords, I see too many monks in the court of the king and in his company who ought not to be there—first of all myself.” He spoke, however, so well that Joinville advised his master to keep this bold adviser near him. “But the king said to me that he had already asked him and that brother Hugh was unwilling. Then the king took me by the hand and said, ‘Let us go and ask him again.’”

Not only did he like sermons and desire that others should like them, but he was a connoisseur and distinguished the good from the bad. For a layman, Louis IX was very well versed in the Scriptures and in the early Christian literature. “Each day after compline he went to his room; a candle, three feet or thereabouts, was lighted, and, as long as it burned, he read the Bible or some other holy book.” While he was in the Orient, he was struck with the richness of the Saracen libraries, and accordingly gathered one at Paris in the treasury of his chapel and opened it freely to his friends. There were gathered together, above all, “the original works of Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Gregory, and of other orthodox doctors.” For he read by preference “the authentic books of the saints rather than those of the masters of our own time.” His sacred learning, thus drawn from the sources, sometimes enabled him to confound arrogant scholastic erudition: “A learned clerk,” Robert de Sorbon relates, “often preached before the king of France. He had just said the following: ‘All the apostles, at the moment of the passion, abandoned Christ, and faith was extinguished in their hearts; the Virgin Mary alone preserved it; in memory of this, in the holy week, at the matins all the lights are extinguished except one, which is kept for lighting the others at Easter.’ An ecclesiastic of high rank then rose to question the orator and to lead him to affirm only what was written: the apostles, in his opinion, had abandoned Jesus Christ with their bodies and not with their hearts. The clerk was at the point of being compelled to retract publicly, when the king, rising in his turn, intervened. ‘The proposition is not false,’ he said, ‘it is in the Fathers. Bring me the book of St. Augustine.’ He was obeyed, and the king showed a passage in the commentary upon the gospel of St. John, where, in fact, the illustrious doctor expresses himself thus: Fugerunt, relicto eo corde et corpore. . . .” Such was his appetite for apologetics that, in company with grave and orthodox persons, Louis IX discussed the faith even at table. He often invited to share his repast some “religious or even seculars, with whom he could speak of God, and this is the reason why he did not often dine with his barons.”

It is certain that Louis IX was sometimes tormented by the antinomies which exist between reason and faith. According to the testimony of Joinville, he strove with all his might “to have his barons believe very firmly” and to put them on their guard against these temptations of the enemy (he avoided naming the devil) which sometimes caused doubt. “The devil is so subtle! It is necessary to say to him: ‘Avaunt; you shall not tempt me not to believe firmly all the articles of the faith; you can cut me in pieces: I wish to live and die in this condition.’” Nevertheless, why is it necessary to believe? On this point the king one day asked Joinville what his father’s name was. The seneschal replied, “ Simon.” “And how do you know it?""I told him that I believed it to be certain because my mother had told me. Then he said to me: ‘Then you ought to believe firmly all the articles of the faith that the apostles bear witness to, as you hear it chanted on Sunday in the creed.’” It ...

Table of contents

• Victory of the Latin Language
• The Landed Aristocracy and the Beginning of Serfdom
• Taxation in the Fourth Century
• Influence of the Migrations
• Germans in the Roman Empire
• Faith and Morals of the Franks
• The Hippodrome at Constantinople
• Christian Missions in Gaul and Germany in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries
• The Economic Influence of Monasteries
• Cluny
• Monks of the Twelfth Century
• The Elements of Feudalism
• Mutual Obligations of Lord and Vassals
• The Realities of Feudalism
• Feudal Wars
• The Church and Feudalism
• The Church and Feudalism
• The Exercise of Feudal Rights over the Church in Languedoc, 900-1250
• The Non - Universality of Feudalism
• Byzantine Civilization
• Moslem Civilization in Spain
• Chivalry
• Character and Results of the Crusades
• Ibn Jubair’s Account of his Journey through Syria
• Material for Literature from the Crusades
• Classical Learning in the Middle Ages
• The Latin Classics in the Middle Ages
• The Development of the Romance Languages, Especially Those of France
• Evolution of the German Language
• Life and Interests of the Students
• City Life in Germany
• Advice of St. Louis to his Son
• Life of Gerbert
• Saint Bernard
• Southern France and the Religious Opposition
• The Intellectual Movement of the Thirteenth Century
• The Antecedents of the Renaissance
• St. Louis
• The Relation of Antiquity to the Renaissance
• The French Army in the Time of Charles VII