With Louis IX. on the throne a new day had dawned for France.  Louis was not a great soldier.  His reign was not one of territorial expansion but of wise administration, giving permanence and solidity to what already existed.  We are apt to think of Philip’s heavenly minded grandson chiefly as a saint.  But his service to the state was enduring and of the first magnitude, because it dealt with the sources of things.  When he established a King’s Court, which was a court of appeal from the rude justice, or injustice, of feudal counts, he undermined the foundation of feudal power.  In bestowing the right of appeal, his protecting hand reached down to the poorest man in the realm.  And when bewildered barons heard the uncomprehended language of the law-courts, and heard men not of their own order declaring private wars punishable by death, they felt their power slipping from under them, and that they were coming into a new sort of a world.

One of the greatest acts of this reign was the abolishing of the double allegiance, which had wrought such trouble since the Duke of Normandy’s conquest of England.  Feudal proprietors were forbidden to hold territory under a foreign king; and henceforth no conquered province could acknowledge allegiance to an English king; nor would an English king again be vassal to a king of France.

But in so fortifying his throne, this best of kings, and of men, would have been surprised had he been told that he was preparing the way for the greatest tragedy in history; that he was creating an absolute despotism which five hundred years later would require a revolution of unprecedented horror for its removal.  Such was the fact.  Every wise act in this reign was prompted by the spirit of fairness and justice.  And if at the same time these acts were drawing all the forces in the state to a central point, under the control of a single hand, it was the best development for France under existing conditions.

Saint though he was, and almost fanatic in his devotion to the Church, Louis resisted the pope or the bishop, if unjust, with as much energy as one of his own barons; and, in the same spirit of fairness, would punish his own too zealous defenders who had infringed upon the feudal rights of the peerage.

This was Louis the king.  But it is Louis the saint who holds the eye on the world’s canvas.  The real life was to him the life of the soul.  Francis Assisi himself did not live in an atmosphere of greater spiritual exaltation than this devout and heavenly grandson of Philip Augustus!  No monk in the Dark Ages attached such sanctity to relics!  When a portion of the crown of thorns was sent to him from Jerusalem, he built that exquisite Sainte Chapelle for its reception; and barefooted, bare-headed, carried it himself in solemn procession from Vincennes to Paris, placing it with reverent hands in that shrine we may visit to-day.

Christian knighthood had reached its one perfect flower in Louis; and the Crusades fittingly closed with the life of the most saintly crusader.  His first Crusade was disastrous, occupying years of his life; his mother, Blanche of Castile, dying during his absence.  His second and last was more costly still.  Near the ruins of Carthage, where he was in conflict with a Mohometan band, he was stricken with fever and died (1270).