By Misbahuddin Mirza

May/June 2023

In June 2020 a large group of people gathered at the statue of King Louis IX atop Art Hill in Forest Park, St. Louis, Mo., demanding its removal. The Associated Press reported, “‘The lines are clear,’” said Umar Lee, one of the protest leaders, who converted to Islam at 17. ‘We have one side calling for the removal of this hateful man to create a city of love.’ Lee said he started a petition drive to remove the statue and rename the city. Meanwhile, Catholics have been praying at the park every night this week, hoping the statue stays put.”

Why the demand for its removal?

King Louis IX of France (r. 1226-70) was canonized for leading the seventh (1248-54) and eighth crusades (1270-91) — the only French monarch to enjoy such status. This veneration also led to the naming of several cities in lands then under French rule, after him, including St. Louis. 

One Vatican criteria that must be satisfied before a deceased person can be placed on the path to sainthood is the verification of two miracles performed by the individual. Louis IX didn’t meet these criteria, yet in 1297 Pope Boniface VIII canonized him for leading these two failed crusades. Why did this Pope bend canonic law for someone one who led his armies into wholesale slaughter, got captured, had a hole cut in his breeches and marched in the rear of the army because of his own dysentery — an illness that killed him when he landed on the African coast? 

Awarding Catholicism’s highest honor to a person who learned nothing from the Fifth Crusade, which resulted in the massacre of his own armies, makes no sense. To fully understand the disaster this “saint” brought upon France, we need to revisit the Seventh Crusade.

At that time, Louis IX was the only European monarch eager to embark upon a new crusade. This, along with the efforts of the papal legate Odo of Chateauroux, caused a massive enrollment in his army. His three brothers — Robert of Artois, Alphonse of Poitiers and Charles of Anjou — all joined. Selecting Cyprus as his staging base, Louis spent two years stockpiling so much food and wine that these vast storage piles looked like hills from far off. Aigues-Mortes, located on France’s south coast, was the expedition’s European base of operations.

France’s annual revenue was less than 250,000 livres tournois (weight of the gold “pounds” used in Tours). During the preparation’s first two years, Louis spent 2 million livres tournois and the Pope granted him one-tenth of all ecclesial revenues in France for three years. Other crusaders were also encouraged to raise their own funds.

On June 12, 1248, Louis set off from Aigues-Mortes with an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 men, including 2,800 knights, 5,600 mounted sergeants and 10,000 infantries. An additional 5,000 crossbowmen, using technologically advanced and accurate bows, signed up, as did the Knights Templar, the Knights Hospitaller, the Teutonic Knights and the Kingdom of Navarre. 

After a few months in Cyprus, Louis’ armies set sail to attack Egypt with a mighty fleet of around 120 large galleys and about 1,000 smaller vessels. Joinville described this as “it seemed as if all the sea, as far as the eye could behold, was covered with the canvas of the ships’ sails” (Thomas Asbridge; “The Crusades,” 2010, p.585).

In his letter to al-Salih Ayyub (r. 1240 & 1245-9 CE), the sultan of Egypt, Louis confidently expresses his intention to both take back Jerusalem and conquer Egypt and the Levant. “I will assault your territory, and even were you to swear allegiance to the cross, my mind would not be changed. The armies that obey me cover mountains and plains, they are as numerous as the pebbles of the earth, and they march upon you grasping the swords of fate” (Maalouf, p.227; worldhistory.org).

Once Louis’ forces landed on the beach, the Egyptian garrison vacated Damietta, a decision that caused the sultan to have them swiftly executed. A few months later, Louis moved south toward Mansourah, the sultan’s city. The vanguard, led by his brother Robert of Artois, stormed into the city. The legendary Mamluk soldiers of the ferocious Kipchak Turkic group, known then as Dawlat al-Turk and led by the celebrated general and future sultan Baibars, closed the city gates behind the Crusaders’ vanguard and set about killing Artois and the entire vanguard of Louis’ army. 

Louis could have fallen back across the Tanis River with his remaining army — tantamount to admitting defeat and returning home with the bulk of his army intact. Instead, he decided to stay put. The Mamluks then initiated massive and sustained dawn-to-dusk onslaughts on his forces, the ferocity and persistence of which terrified the Crusaders. He later wrote that the Mamluks’ attacked “so persistently, horribly, and dreadfully” and they had never seen such a bold and violent assault (Asbridge, p.600).

Muaazzam Turanshah, the heir apparent of Egypt, arrived from Syria and blocked Louis’ food supplies from Damietta. A Latin observer described the situation of Louis’ army in the following terms, “Everyone expected to die, no one supposed he could escape. It would have been hard to find one man in all that great host who was not mourning a dead friend, or a single tent or shelter without its sick or dead” (Asbridge, p.601). 

Finally, on April 4, 1250, the Crusaders were ordered to retreat under cover of darkness. However, the Mamluks, in no mood to show clemency, learned about it. King Louis, the mighty king of France, got separated from most of his army and was so ill with dysentery that he had to have a hole cut in his breeches and hide in a small village. He was captured while hiding inside a filthy hut, cowering in fear.

Megan Cassidy-Welsh, writing on Louis IX’s imprisonment during the Seventh Crusade, quotes partially from a 13th-century text, “Who can tell this story or recall it without tears, when such noble, such elegant, such prominent Franks were massacred, trodden down, or like thieves seized by base men and dragged off to imprisonment, subjected to the judgment and the grinning mockery of God’s enemies? Here the oriflamme was torn to pieces, the beauséant trampled underfoot, a sight nobody remembers having ever beheld. Over there the standards of magnates, since ancient times an object of dread to the infidel, were bespattered with the blood of men and horses and, spurned under the heels of a triumphant enemy who blasphemed against Christ and ridiculed our men, were most vilely destroyed and treated with contempt” (A Templar, c. 1250, in Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol.6, Additamenta, pp.191-97, in Peter Jackson, ed., The Seventh Crusade, 1244–1254: Sources and Documents (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, p.102).

In her “Jean De Joinville and his Biography of Saint Louis on the Seventh Crusade,” Katherine Blakeney writes, “Interestingly, his compassionate descriptions are not confined to commoners and soldiers only. He gives a moving and very human account of the pregnant queen’s fear and suffering at Damietta. Three days before the child’s birth, she develops an obsession with the idea that Saracens will barge into her room and capture her and the infant. To protect herself from this horror she convinces an old knight to ‘lie down beside her bed and hold her by the hand.’ She also requests that he swear that ‘if the Saracens take this city, you will cut off my head before they can also take me.’ Joinville does not see her as a lifeless political symbol, but rather as a frightened young woman, thrust by circumstances into an unfamiliar land when she is in a fragile and vulnerable state.”

A Muslim witness wrote, “A tally was made of the number of captives, and there were more than 20,000; those who had drowned or been killed numbered 7,000. I saw the dead, and they covered the face of the earth in their profusion … It was a day of the kind the Muslims had never seen; nor had they heard of its like” (Asbridge, p.605). 

Asbridge, who teaches history at the Queen Mary University of London, holds Louis IX responsible for this disaster. “Louis was largely responsible for this ruinous state of affairs. In mid-February, he had failed to make a realistic strategic assessment of the risks and possible rewards involved in maintaining the crusaders’ southern camp, holding on to the forlorn hope of Ayyubid disintegration. He also grossly underestimated the vulnerability of his Nile supply line and the number of troops needed to overcome the Egyptian army at Mansourah. Some of these errors might have been mitigated had the king now acted with decisive resolution — recognizing that his position was utterly untenable” (_{Asbridge, pp 602}).

To date, the Vatican has removed 93 saints from its list. Louis IX doesn’t meet the requirement for a verifiable miracle for canonization. In fact, he couldn’t even cure his own recurring dysentery, which eventually claimed his life. In addition to emptying French coffers to pay his astronomical ransom, Louis brought indescribable pain, suffering, illness and death to thousands of Christians. Bending the canonic law to make embarking on two violent crusades to kill Muslims a criterion for attaining sainthood is a great affront to the world’s 2 billion Muslims. It’s time for the Vatican to correct its mistake by decanonizing Louis IX. 

Misbahuddin Mirza, M.S., P.E., is a licensed professional engineer, registered in the States of New York and New Jersey. He served as the regional quality control engineer for the New York State Department of Transportation’s New York City Region. He is the author of the iBook Illustrated “Muslim Travel Guide to Jerusalem.” He has written for major U.S. and Indian publications.

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