CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CONFESSOR KING, : PRAYING TO SAINT MAURICE AT SENLIS1

Anne E. Lester

On 11 August 1297 Louis IX was officially canonized as a confessor saint of the Church. Although there were political considerations behind Pope Boniface VIII’s decision, Louis’s holiness was widely recognized long before his death. Yet there were some who criticized the pope’s decision, believing that Louis merited the rank of a martyr saint, especially because the king had died on crusade after taking the cross a second time in 1267, at the age of fifty-three.2 The devotional acts Louis fostered, in particular the relic cults he sponsored, shed light on his mindset—as he made this controversial decision—and suggest that Louis may have supported the idea that his final, self-sacrificing crusade was a kind of martyrdom. Close attention to the movement of objects, like relics, and the significance of material, like monastic habits, provide another window into Louis’s world and the care that he took in administering the details of the spiritual life of his realm. In the decade leading up to his death in Tunis in 1270 Louis enacted numerous long-term charitable projects: founding houses for the Filles-Dieu, for the poor and sick, the beguines and the blind, as well as convents for friars of all varieties. Among these was the foundation in 1261 of a small, but significant, house of Augustinian canons dedicated to the third-century martyr Saint Maurice and his companions, built into

1 This essay takes as its inspiration Bill Jordan’s focus on aspects of Louis’s rule that “owed their form and content to the king’s personal attention” (Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton, 1979) p. xii). It is indebted to Bill’s scholarly model and his exhor- tation to his students to strive to “think the thoughts of medieval men [and women] as they thought them” (his paraphrase of Frederick William Maitland in Louis IX, p. 213). I am grateful for Bill’s generosity, friendship, and example. Thank you to Cecilia Gaposchkin and Scott Bruce for comments on an earlier draft and to the colleagues and staff at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton where most of the essay was drafted. 2 See M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, The Making of Saint Louis: Kingship, Sanctity, and Crusade in the Late Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2008). 196 anne e. lester his palace chapel in the city of Senlis.3 The documents and rituals sur- rounding the creation of St.-Maurice—as a focus of the king’s personal attention—allow us to think with Louis about martyrdom, sanctity, and crusading in the years before his death. Senlis had been a royal city, an urbs regia, from the time of the first Capetians and it was a favored residence of the kings of .4 Then, as now, it was also a rather modest city, crowned by a small and elegant cathedral directly adjacent to the royal palace.5 Between 1255 and 1265 Louis IX made frequent visits to Senlis.6 It was during this time that he conceived of building a second royal chapel, with splendid colored glass and delicate tracery—a mirror image of the Sainte-Chapelle—to honor the newly acquired relics of the Roman martyr, Saint Maurice, and twenty- three of his companions among the , who were martyred in 287 during the persecutions of Diocletian. Eclipsed by Louis’s larger foun- dations, the priory of St.-Maurice has received little sustained study.7 Yet the careful planning Louis dedicated to the chapel, the personal role he played in escorting the relics to their new home, in selecting the rule and customs of the community, and in providing its endowment, illuminates deeply held convictions at the center of the king’s personal devotions and his conception of himself as a pious leader.

A Royal and Public Foundation

We do not know precisely when Louis became interested in the relics of Saint Maurice housed in the abbey of St.-Maurice d’Agaune (see Map).8

3 See Gallia christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa, 16 vols. (Paris, 1715–1865), 10: 1522–25 (hereafter GC). Original charters are in Beauvais, Archives departémentale de l’Oise, H836 and H838. Two of these are edited in Edouard Aubert, Trésor de l’abbaye de Sainte-Maurice d’Agaune, vol. 1 (Paris, 1872), pp. 226–31, nos. 23 and 25. 4 Louis Carolus-Barré, “Senlis, Ville Royale,” reprinted in his Etudes et documents sur l’Ile de France et la Picardie au moyen âge, vol. 2 (Compiègne, 1996), pp. 37–40; and Marc Durand, “Senlis,” Revue archéologique de Picardie, special issue 16 (1999): 179–85. 5 Delphine Christophe, Notre-Dame de Senlis: une cathédrale au coeur de la cité (Beauvais, 2006). 6 See Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996), p. 535. 7 Exceptions to this include Isabelle Isnard, “Le prieuré de Saint-Maurice de Senlis: Etat de la question,” in L’art gothique dans l’Oise et ses environs (XIIème-XIVème siècle) (Beauvais, 2001), pp. 11–22; and the essays in Politique, société et construction identitaire. Autour de saint Maurice, ed. N. Brocard, A. Wagner, and F. Vanotti, Actes du colloque de Besançon et Saint-Maurice, septembre 2009 (Saint-Maurice, 2011). 8 In 1225, Abbot Nantelme (r. 1223–1258) of St.-Agaune elevated the bones of Saint Maurice and his companions from the crypt to display them in the main church,