How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Elizabeth Boyle O'Reilly

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СКАЧАТЬ invasion? So St. Louis took the crusader’s vow, and with him went the turbulent lords whose departure gave France some needed years of peace. He had in vain tried to negotiate peace between Papacy and Empire, in whose protracted duel he remained neutral.

      In Cyprus, in 1248, the crusaders paused before descending on Egypt, and there St. Louis and Joinville drew together. The hereditary seneschal of Champagne was a very great lord, his mother being of Burgundy’s Capetian line, and his Joinville forebears notable crusaders.[94] The contingent which he provided for the holy wars consisted of nine knights and seven hundred men, but because of the long winter’s halt in Cyprus he found himself in straits to meet their expenses. Louis IX, ten years his senior, came to his aid, although the ruler of Champagne and not the king of France was Joinville’s suzerain. Side by side the two friends went through the disastrous campaign in Egypt—the delayed march on Cairo, which ended in Mansourah’s defeat. Together they shared imprisonment, and the king’s elevation of soul won the Mussulmans’ respect. Then, their ransom paid, they sailed together for Palestine, and there, in the daily intimacy of years, the affection of these two loyal knights struck deep root. To Joinville the king intrusted his wife and children in the perilous overland journey in Syria, before they embarked for France.

      When, in 1254, Louis IX came back from the East, he gave himself up for fifteen years to his country’s welfare, “the most conscientious man who ever sat on a throne,” touched to the core by that divine unrest which is man’s highest faculty and does lasting work for God, revered by the “little people of the Lord” as their champion for justice and social progress. “Il est en doulce France un bon roy Loeys,” sang the minstrels then. Never did king love more la doulce France and prove it more conclusively. Justice was inherent in him. A most sensitive feeling of duty ruled his every act. Yet he knew how to mete out deserved punishment unflinchingly. From his shrewd and capable grandfather, so little of a saint, he had learned that no one could govern well who could not refuse as well as grant.

      That Louis IX understood his age is shown in his dealings with the feudal system. He made no attempt to destroy it, which would then have been impossible, and, moreover, his respect for the rights of others always kept him from extreme measures; but he regulated its excesses, knowing that organized anarchy could be broken only by organized laws. One of the best laws he passed was that of the quarantaine-le-roy, which forbade any baron to wage war on his fellows without a notice of forty days. The king favored the written law to offset the law of custom, on which feudal abuses were based. During a generation he had his agents all over France collect old laws and customs—Roman law, canon law, feudal privileges, and from their composite mass was created the great code called the Établissements de St. Louis. He substituted jurisprudence by inquest, and witnesses for that by force, and he made a supreme court by instituting the right of appeal. Admirable were some of his treaties such as that which made the Pyrenees the natural boundary between Spain and France. His reform of the coinage was another link of unity for France.

      In Paris he organized a police, protected commerce by regulations, put an end to the selling of magistratures, and he began, there, the library which to-day is the richest in Europe. In the garden of the Cité and under the oaks of Vincennes, the king held open courts of justice, and when his youngest brother, Charles d’Anjou,[95] tried to browbeat one of lesser rank, the king gave a legal councilor to the poor knight who won the case against the prince. Louis IX’s very enemies chose him as arbiter. Little wonder that the people of France have sung of him:

      Ha! le bon Roy!

       Simples, ignorans supportait

       Pauvres, mendians confortait,

       Observant de Jhusys la foi,

       Redoutant Dieu—

       Ha! le bon Roy!

      Joinville has drawn for all time the picture of the years between the saint-king’s two crusades, a golden age, if ever there was one. The friendship begun during their years of Syrian comradeship continued, and the seneschal often came up to Paris. It was he who arranged the marriage of the king’s daughter with his own suzerain, the son of Thibaut IV, the song maker, in whose court of Champagne Joinville had acquired his delightful mode of speech.

      Then, again, came the call of the East. Jaffa and Antioch had fallen to Islam, and the condition of the Oriental Christians was heartrending. Louis IX could not resist their cry for aid. In 1270, twenty-two years after his first departure from Aigues-Mortes, the king sailed again from that half-finished fort by the dead waters. Joinville was not with him, for he was needed by his “little people,” an excuse which his friend acknowledged.

      The crusaders had scarcely landed on the coast of Africa when plague struck them down. First died Tristan, the son born to St. Louis in the sorrowful, earlier days in Egypt. Then the saint-king himself passed away; and on his lips was the prayer that his race might learn to despise the prosperity of this world and not to fear adversity, and that France might never deny the name of Christ. The night before he died they heard him singing, “Nous irons en Jerusalem,” the holy city he had never seen, the aspiration, the magic name that stirred those strong generations.[96] Before the century closed the Church canonized him. “House of France,” announced the pope, “rejoice to have given the world so great a prince, and to heaven so great a saint. People of France, rejoice to have had so great a king.”

      “If ever the golden age of the good old times existed,” wrote Sainte-Beuve, “it certainly was under St. Louis, and it is by the pen of Joinville that it exists for us. They believed then in their king, they believed above all in their God, as if God were present in the smallest occurrences of daily life.” In the Histoire de St. Louis by Jean, sire de Joinville, there is not a mawkish note, and considering what happens to too many saints in their biographies, it must be acknowledged that the seneschal accomplished a feat. As depicted by his contemporaries, Louis IX is so convincingly himself that later efforts to stereotype him as the sacristan’s ideal of piety have failed. His “pleasant manner of speech seasoned with wit” had nothing of the prig in it. From his childhood to his deathbed of ashes in ancient Carthage (birthplace of his favorite Augustine), St. Louis possessed a direct personal touch with God. “Beau Sire Dieu, garde-moi mes gens!” he rose at night to petition with insistent outstretched arms when, in Egypt, the “Greek fire” was hurled into the Christian camp. And Joinville, who had a wholesome dread of the Saracens’ projectiles, turned to rest, feeling secure while such prayers were beseeching Heaven.

      Louis IX was a tireless student of the Bible and works of the Church Fathers. He had a passion for the liturgy. The number of hours which he spent in prayer has roused the sarcasm of our indifferent generation. His hours before the Tabernacle bore fruit in deeds. His temper was naturally quick, and he had a keen sense of irony, but his friend, the seneschal, was able to bear witness, at his canonization process, that in an intimacy of over twenty years never had he heard a word of disparagement of others fall from the king’s lips. “There was something in the mere sight of him that found a way to the heart and affections,” wrote one who knew him; “the eyes of a dove,” said another. “He seemed pierced to the heart with pity for the unfortunate,” wrote Queen Marguerite’s chaplain who had daily intercourse with him. An observant Italian who saw the king on his way to his first crusade described the something of rare refinement and grace in his bearing.

      Not a touch of self-consciousness was in Louis; barefooted, in a white tunic, he carried the Crown of Thorns through the streets of Paris. In his sublime other-worldliness, he bathed the feet of beggars, dressed the sores of lepers, and when he felt that his soul needed it he scourged himself. And at the same time he was a model of knightly prowess, who many a time had fought

      For Jesu Christ in glorious Christian field,

       Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross

       Against black pagans, Turks, СКАЧАТЬ