Blanche and her son’s wife, Marguerite of Provence; Blanche also vigorously opposed
Louis’s decision in 1244 to take the crusader’s vow. Nonetheless, she remained a close
political adviser to the king, far closer than his wife, and Louis entrusted the reins of
government to Blanche when he embarked on crusade in 1248.
As a deeply devout and morally strict woman, an enthusiastic patroness of the church,
especially the Cistercian order, and a Castilian who grew up in an environment of fierce
commitment to the holy war of reconquest in Spain, Blanche’s opposition to her son’s
crusade remains something of a puzzle. But however she felt about his enterprise in the
abstract, she devoted her full energies to making certain that he was well supplied and
that he need not trouble himself about governance at home while he fought in the East.
She managed to negotiate a two-year extension of the clerical income tax of one-tenth in
order both to finance the war effort and to replenish the king’s coffers after the disastrous
early phase of the crusade that saw Louis captured and ransomed in Egypt. She acted
with her characteristic firmness in 1249, on the death of the count of Toulouse, when a
movement took shape to turn aside the settlement of 1229 that designated her son
Alphonse to be the new count of Toulouse. She thought well of the so-called Pastoureaux
(1251), Flemish and northern French rustics who proclaimed themselves crusaders
determined to rescue and otherwise aid the king. But when bands of these forces rioted in
Paris and pillaged other towns, it was she who authorized and oversaw their destruction.
Blanche died in November 1252. When her son, still in the Holy Land, received the news
some months later, he succumbed to a grief so profound that it troubled all who knew and
loved him.
William Chester Jordan
[See also: LOUIS VIII; LOUIS IX]
Sivéry, Gérard. Blanche de Castille. Paris: Fayard, 1990.
BLOIS
. Originally one of six pagi dependent on Chartres, Blois (Loir-et-Cher) became the
center of a county in the 9th century. The dukes of France installed a viscount there and
later assigned the county to one of their vassals, Thibaut le Vieux, viscount of Tours (r.
908–40). His son, Thibaut I le Tricheur, created a powerful principality in the middle
Loire Valley by adding the counties of Blois and Chartres to that of Tours (r. 940-ca.
975). Blois became the natural center of these lands, especially after the loss of Tours to
the Angevins (1044), as the counts had few lands or vassals in Chartres, which was
dominated by its bishop and cathedral chapter.
Count Eudes II (r. 996–1037) began to reorient the dynasty in 1021, when he claimed
succession, through his grandmother Liedgard of Vermandois, to the counties of Meaux
and Troyes in Champagne. To soften King Robert’s opposition to the impending
encirclement of the royal domain, Eudes enlisted Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, to plead his
case as rightful heir and loyal vassal. Having succeeded in planting the house of Blois in
Champagne, Eudes then managed to link the two lands through Berry by marrying the
last heiress of Sancerre (ca. 1030). The eastward thrust of the Thibaudians was reinforced
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