Louis believed he was on the point of accomplishing his desire. Towards the end of 1250, and again in 1252, the Sultan of Aleppo and Damascus, and the Emirs of Egypt, being engaged in a violent struggle, made offers to him, by turns, of restoring the kingdom of Jerusalem if he would form an active alliance with one or the other party against its enemies. Louis sought means of accepting either of these offers without neglecting his previous engagements, and without compromising the fate of the Christians still prisoners in Egypt, or living in the territories of Aleppo and Damascus; but, during the negotiations entered upon with a view to this end, the Mussulmans of Syria and Egypt suspended their differences, and made common cause against the remnants of the Christian crusaders; and all hope of re-entering Jerusalem by these means vanished away. Another time, the Sultan of Damascus, touched by Louis’s pious perseverance, had word sent to him that he, if he wished, could go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and should find himself in perfect safety. “The king,” says Joinville, “held a great council; and none urged him to go. It was shown unto him that if he, who was the greatest king in Christendom, performed his pilgrimage without delivering the Holy City from the enemies of God, all the other kings and other pilgrims who came after him would hold themselves content with doing just as much, and would trouble themselves no more about the deliverance of Jerusalem.” He was reminded of the example set by Richard Coeur de Lion, who, sixty years before, had refused to cast even a look upon Jerusalem, when he was unable to deliver her from her enemies. Louis, just as Richard had, refused the incomplete satisfaction which had been offered him, and for nearly four years, spent by him on the coasts of Palestine and Syria since his departure from Damietta, from 1250 to 1254, he expended, in small works of piety, sympathy, protection, and care for the future of the Christian populations in Asia, his time, his strength, his pecuniary resources, and the ardor of a soul which could not remain icily abandoned to sorrowing over great desires unsatisfied.
An unexpected event occurred and brought about all at once a change in his position and his plans. At the commencement of the year 1253, at Sidon, the ramparts of which he was engaged in repairing, he heard that his mother, Queen Blanche, had died at Paris on the 27th of November, 1252. “He made so great mourning thereat,” says Joinville, “that for two days no speech could be gotten of him. After that he sent a chamber-man for to fetch me. When I came before him, in his chamber where he was alone, so soon as he got sight of me, he stretched forth his arms, and said to me, ‘O, seneschal, I have lost my mother!’ ” It was a great loss both for the son and for the king. Imperious, exacting, jealous, and often disagreeable in private life and in the bosom of her family, Blanche was, nevertheless, according to all contemporary authority, even the least favorable to her, “the most discreet woman of her time, with a mind singularly quick and penetrating, and with a man’s heart to leaven her Woman’s sex and ideas; personally magnanimous, of indomitable energy, sovereign mistress in all the affairs of her age, guardian and protectress of France, worthy of comparison with Semiramis, the most eminent of her sex.” From the time of Louis’s departure on the crusade as well as during his minority she had given him constant proofs of a devotion as intelligent as it was impassioned, as useful as it was masterful. All letters from France demanded the speedy return of the king. The Christians of Syria were themselves of the same opinion; the king, they said, has done for us, here, all he could do; he will serve us far better by sending us strong re-enforcements from France. Louis embarked at St. Jean d’Acre, on the 24th of April, 1254, carrying away with him, on thirteen vessels, large and small, Queen Marguerite, his children, his personal retinue, and his own more immediate men-at-arms, and leaving the Christians of Syria, for their protection in his name, a hundred knights under the orders of Geoffrey de Sargines, that comrade of his in whose bravery and pious fealty he had the most entire confidence. After two months and a half at sea, the king and his fleet arrived, on the 8th of July, 1254, off the port of Hyeres, which at that time belonged to the Empire, and not to France. For two days Louis refused to land at this point; for his heart was set upon not putting his foot upon land again save on the soil of his own kingdom, at Aigues-Mortes, whence he had, six years before, set out. At last he yielded to the entreaties of the queen and those who were about him, landed at Hyeres, passed slowly through France, and made his solemn entry into Paris on the 7th of September, 1254. “The burgesses and all those who were in the city were there to meet him, clad and bedecked in all their best according to their condition. If the other towns had received him with great joy, Paris evinced even more than any other. For several days there were bonfires, dances, and other public rejoicings, which ended sooner than the people wished; for the king, who was pained to see the expense, the dances, and the vanities indulged in, went off to the wood of Vincennes to put a stop to them.”
So soon as he had resumed the government of his kingdom, after six years’ absence and adventures, heroic, indeed, but all in vain for the cause of Christendom, those of his counsellors and servants who lived most closely with him and knew him best were struck at the same time with what he had remained and what he had become during this long and cruel trial. “When the king had happily returned to France, how piously he bare himself towards God, how justly towards his subjects, how compassionately towards the afflicted, and how humbly in his own respect, and with what zeal he labored to make progress, according to his power, in every virtue, all this can be attested by persons who carefully watched his manner of life, and who knew the spotlessness of his conscience. It is the opinion of the most clear-sighted and the wisest that, in proportion as gold is more precious than silver, so the manner of living and acting which the king brought back from his pilgrimage in the Holy Land was holy and new, and superior to his former behavior, albeit, even in his youth, he had ever been good and guileless, and worthy of high esteem.” These are the words written about St. Louis by his confessor Geoffrey de Beaulieu, a chronicler, curt and simple even to dryness, but at the same time well informed. An attempt will be made presently to give a fair idea of the character of St. Louis’s government during the last fifteen years of his reign, and of the place he fills in the history of the kingship and of politics in France; but just now it is only with the part he played in the crusades and with what became of them in his hands that we have to occupy our attention. For seven years after his return to France, from 1254 to 1261, Louis seemed to think no more about them, and there is nothing to show that he spoke of them even to his most intimate confidants; but, in spite of his apparent calmness, he was living, so far as they were concerned, in a continual ferment of imagination and internal fever, ever flattering himself that some favorable circumstance would call him back to his interrupted work. And he had reason to believe that circumstances were responsive to his wishes. The Christians of Palestine and Syria were a prey to perils and evils which became more pressing every day; the cross was being humbled at one time before the Tartars of Tchingis-Khan, at another before the Mussulmans of Egypt; Pope Urban was calling upon the King of France; and Geoffrey de Sargines, the heroic representative whom Louis had left in St. Jean d’Acre, at the head of a small garrison, was writing to him that ruin was imminent, and speedy succor indispensable to prevent it. In 1261, Louis held, at Paris, a parliament, at which, without any talk of a new crusade, measures were taken which revealed an idea of it: there were decrees for fasts and prayers on behalf of the Christians of the East and for frequent and earnest military drill. In 1263, the crusade was openly preached; taxes were levied, even on the clergy, for the purpose of contributing towards it; and princes and barons bound themselves to take part in it. Louis was all approval and encouragement, without declaring his own intention. In 1267, a parliament was convoked at Paris. The king, at first, conversed discreetly with some of his barons about the new plan of crusade; and then, suddenly, having had the precious relics deposited in the Holy Chapel set before the eyes of the assembly, he opened the session by ardently exhorting those present “to avenge the insult which had so long been offered to the Saviour in the Holy Land and to recover the Christian heritage possessed, for our sins, by the infidels.” Next year, on the 9th of February, 1268, at a new parliament assembled at Paris, the king took an oath to start in the month of May, 1270.
Great was the surprise, and the disquietude was even greater than the surprise. The kingdom was enjoying abroad a peace and at home a tranquillity and prosperity for a long time past without example; feudal quarrels were becoming more rare and terminating more quickly; and the king possessed the confidence and the respect of the whole population. Why compromise such advantages by such an enterprise, so distant, so costly, and so doubtful of success? Whether
