Once upon a time there was a prince. What he liked above all things were knightly pursuits. When he was nine his father became king and he the heir apparent; at twelve he had lost his father and was king himself. At twenty he married, and at thirty he fell gravely ill. Medicine offering no great hope in those days, he turned to faith instead. And faith, multiplied by knightly swagger, drove him off on a crusade.
The done thing was to take one’s crusade to Israel. The principal amusement on offer there was fighting the Saracens.
Do you know, by the way, who the Saracens were, and why they were so called? Lat. saracēnus, Gk. σαρακηνός, from the Arabic شرق /šark/ ‘east.’ It began as the name of a Bedouin tribe living along the Syrian frontier, and was subsequently extended to Muslims at large.
Well then: the king set sail for Israel, failed to arrive, and fetched up instead in the Nile Delta. The local Saracens proved rather unaccustomed to knightly entertainments and, instead of allowing themselves to be gallantly defeated, treacherously took our king prisoner. The king bought his freedom, waited a while for reinforcements with which to avenge himself upon the treacherous Saracens, and then Maman passed away back home, so he decided he had better return and attend to the affairs of state he had left lying about.
Reforms, and a Fatal Miscalculation in Tunisia
At home he introduces the presumption of innocence, builds handsome Gothic cathedrals, and forbids the Jews to practise usury or to read the Talmud. But the crusade remains a piece of unfinished business, and the king assembles another. Once again he misses Israel—and this time washes up in Tunisia.
There the king falls ill (modern research indicates scurvy for certain, and possibly a parasitic infection into the bargain) and dies. As the custom then was—the so-called Mos Teutonicus ‘Teutonic custom,’ or Mos Gallicus ‘Gallic custom’—the body was dismembered for transport, the heart and viscera salted, and the bones boiled down to assemble a clean skeleton. The heart and viscera are kept to this day in a cathedral in Sicily, while the bones were returned home and interred in the royal necropolis.
Canonisation, and a Legacy in Stone
The son promptly set the canonisation of his father in motion; it was the grandson who lived to see it granted. Kings, as a rule, are seldom saints—power does tend to corrupt—but this one contrived it. And it is to him that his countrymen are fond of dedicating their churches abroad. There is one in Moscow, a short walk from the Lubyanka.
And there is another, raised immediately after the establishment of the protectorate over Tunisia, on the Acropolis of ancient Carthage. Look closely and its dome recalls the outline of the “white elephant” of Montmartre—the Sacré-Cœur.
Well then—you will have guessed by now which king this was? Just so: Louis IX of France, Saint Louis. Full marks to the class!
