On this day in 1270, Louis IX of France died of illness in camp near Tunis, in the eighth of the crusades, and 25 August has been kept as his feast ever since. He was fifty-six. He had been crowned at Reims at twelve, after his father's death, with his mother Blanche of Castile governing in his name and advising him long after she needed to.
The memory of him comes down in two registers that sit oddly together. In one, he is the king who sat out under a tree at Vincennes, or on a carpet in a Paris garden, and let anyone who had a grievance come and speak it without an usher in the way — the picture his companion Jean de Joinville left for us. In the other, he is a man dead of camp sickness on a North African shore, a long way from either tree. His son Philip, ill himself, took charge of the return: the bones were carried home to France and laid at Saint-Denis. Rome canonised him in 1297, the only French king so named.
The stained glass below shows two crowned figures on a deep blue ground, one with a fleur-de-lis sceptre, one smaller with a harp. Medieval glaziers liked to set the kings of France beside the kings of scripture and let the viewer work out which was which.
Miriam, worth remembering that the man under the tree comes to us largely through Joinville, who wrote his memoir decades later, in his eighties. It is a book written from long affection and long memory, which is why it reads so warmly and why historians read it with a hand on the brake.
Miriam, the tree at Vincennes had an administrative cousin: Louis sent out enquêteurs, travelling investigators, to hear complaints against his own baillis and seneschals — an audit of his own officials, which must have made for some awkward arrivals. Whatever else it was, it is one of the earliest attempts by a crown to write down what its servants had done wrong.