I
t’s a beautiful spring day in Paris
sometime in April 1248 as sunlight
streams through the south-facing
windows of Sainte-Chapelle.
Natural light tangles with the glow
of countless candles and smoke
traces the lines of the stone as they
vault towards the ceiling. Fire and light, a
radiant king dressed in gold, the relics of
Jesus’s crucifixion gleaming on the altar
making the case that Jesus himself now
resides in Paris, a new Jerusalem, the new
centre of the world. But light can consume
even as it illuminates, it can guide the
harvesters who take in the wheat, and it can
burn that which they consider weeds.
It’s another beautiful day in June 1242
and a crowd has gathered across the Seine
from the Île de la Cité, almost directly
opposite the nearly completed cathedral of
Notre Dame, its stone towers visible above
the warren of wooden structures along the
right bank of the Seine. Perhaps that crowd
could even catch sight of the king’s palace,
the site that would become Sainte-Chapelle.
What lit this crowd was not the sun, but
rather a great fire. The people in the Place
de Grève, a great plaza and site of public
executions in the medieval city, had come
together not to burn bodies but to burn
books – 24 cartloads of a text deemed
dangerous and heretical: the Talmud.
It’s June 2020 and about 200 people have
gathered in the heart of St Louis, Missouri, an
ocean and a world away from 13th-century
Paris. Here, opposing factions shout at each
other in front of the Apotheosis of King
Louis IX (pictured over the page), a statue of
the king mounted on horse, in armour, sword
in hand but pointed downwards so that the
hilt forms a cross. One faction demands the
statue comes down, moving in harmony with
the uprising that began in the wake of the
murder of George Floyd, citing the medieval
king’s violence against Jews and Muslims.
The other prays with their rosaries, accompa-
nied by a priest who blesses the statue with a
supposed relic of the king and saint. At one
point members of a motorcycle gang, one
with a long history of alleged criminal
activity, step in between the factions to
supposedly keep the peace.
Messy in the middle
The life, death and afterlife of Louis IX
reveals the paradox of fire and light of
medieval Europe. As The Bright Ages, our
new history of medieval Europe, narrates,
this was no Dark Age, but a human age, with
all the beauty and horror contained in any
era. But how both beauty and horror mani-
fest, how the messiness in the middle unfolds,
does change from era to era, and perhaps
Louis IX’s tangled legacy
nothing embodies both extremes
more than the story of this French
king and saint. He was a “good”
Christian king according to his
own merits, with both great acts
of charity and financial support
for magnificent churches and
works of art that we rightly
cherish today. He also waged war
in north Africa on behalf of
Christianity, consumed by the
confidence that his violence
against Islam would earn him
treasures in heaven. And to
finance his campaigns, to attempt
to unify his kingdom under a
more cohesive Christian identity
and maintain the support of
church leaders, Louis persecuted
the Jews.
In 1239 Pope Gregory IX asked
rulers throughout Christendom to
investigate a book for possible her-
esy. The pope was concerned the
book deviated from biblical truth.
Most ignored the papal request,
but the young Louis IX of France
responded enthusiastically and
commissioned a tribunal in 1240.
The queen mother presided. The
chancellor of the University of
Paris, alongside the bishop of Paris, the
archbishop of Sens, and several friars would
lead the prosecution.
This was the early era of the papal inquisi-
tion, but that body – formed in the wake of a
war against the so-called Cathars in southern
France – was specifically designed to locate
Christian heretics. Here in Paris, however,
the defendants were rabbis, facing the charge
that Jews who used the Talmud – a collection
of commentary of law and tradition critical
to the development of medieval rabbinical
Jewish practice – were heretics from what
the pope considered “biblical” Judaism.
The outcome of the tribunal, of course,
had a foreordained conclusion, with the Jews
of Paris never given a chance to prevail.
Medieval Jews had a theoretically protected
status in European Christian kingdoms, but
one always bounded by intellectual antago-
nism that could – and often did – quickly slip
into physical violence.
The Jews, according to Christian thinkers
like the fifth-century Augustine of Hippo,
proved the truth of Christianity through
history; Augustine pointed to the Jews’
servitude across the Mediterranean and the
destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the
Romans, all as God’s punishment for the
failure to accept Jesus. As the historian David
Nirenberg has shown, medieval Christians
believed that Jews needed to be reminded of1 The stained-glass windows of Sainte-
Chapelle. Louis ordered that each window be
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GZRGFKGPVCPFTGNKIKQWUN[OGTKVQTKQWULouis was confident
that his violence
against Islam would
earn him treasures
in heaven
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