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WEEK 9 JOINVILLE

1. Some history
2. Genre mix
3. Hagiography
4. Travel literature
5. autobiography
6. "The other"
Thesis: Louis IX performed a rare feat, in managing to be a study in opposites, at once a king and a
saint
I History
We have seen the crusades already, with Roland. Now, once more, in 1250, we have Crusades again. I
could play you more of the Crusaders' Greatest Hits, but note we have the lyrics at the back of the book,
and we could almost sing along. See p. 341 for the love-duty dilemma, and the happy notion that duty
makes love stronger_ Sorry, my sweet, but I gotta go crusading! p. 342 is a very political song set in the
days after the defeat in Egypt, telling king Louis to bail his people out and take Jerusalem.
The last great crusade, but one. From the Christian point of view, a great disaster, but at the same time, a
legendary story which gave the French yet another patron Saint. Alongside to old original Saint Martin
and Roland's Denis and Paris's Genevieve, and Saint Jacques in Spain (Santiago in Spanish, the apostole
on whom Joinville called when in danger of death in battle, a French saint in that that is where the
pilgrims went, down the road to Spain, over the pass at Roncesvalles, where Roland really did die note
the death of King Louis and how he dealt with Denis, James, and Genevieve again) we now have also St
Louis, the sainted crusading king, for whom, 500 years later (1764) , explorers named an obscure trading
post on the Mississippi River. Called, of course, St. Louis Missouri. I was just in New Orleans and the
cathedral is all about S Louis, with Crusade windows.
In order to make better sense of the work of Joinville's, we should step back and survey some history.
Where are we?
First of all, when are we?
Joinville took part in the crusade of 1250 when he was barely older than most of you. Left France at 23 or
so. Already married, and had two small children, as he tells us.
At the time, the Franks, the western Christians, had been in Outremer for 150 years, since 1100, when, in
a great slaughter of Muslims and unlucky Jews, they took the place.
Outre-Mer: the Land Beyond the Sea: the place set up, a colony in which the colonizers learned
much from the colonized.

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[faranji: foreigner, as in tomato (or persimmon?): the Frankish plum, even now, as I learned in
Iran. The local name attaches to all who come.]
Although his recital is so vivid and so moving -- Joinville's story has all the freshness of good journalism
-- nevertheless, it is not the product of a fresh memory.
Rather, Joinville wrote this work in old old age, in 1309, at, what for the Middle Ages, was the
extraordinary age of 84.
So let us do the usual WWWWWs
When: As I said, 1309, but many scholars argue that the book has two times, one much closer to the
events described. A central part, the war story, a bit like the cream inside the oreo, and then the
intellectual book-ends about the good king and his cult, fore and aft, dating from 1309.
Where: hard to say for the older parts (the oreo cream), but the sandwich biscuits came from Joinville, as
small town, with its castle still there, in eastern France, in Champagne, on the upper Marne (I slept there
in the rain at your age, when I cycled from Amsterdam to Marseilles, all alone, and started learning
French just by talking). I point out the where because Joinville is outside royal France, at the time.
That fact matters to Joinvilles thinking.
Who: the senechal of Champagne: an official, not of Louis, who is NOT his lord until Joinville takes a
money fief in the Holy Land. Not old, at the time of fighting, and recently married.
What: half travel tale, half hagiography (i.e., a holy life to attest to holiness and sanctity)
What for: note at the end that Joinville has a chapel on his estate with relics of S Louis, by then
canonized. So the story validates the relics, and a lot more too. It revalidates the saintliness, and it also
uses Louis as a commentary on the kings who came after him, who do not, for Joinville, quite measure
up.
Language: medieval French
Some History to set the time of writing
By the time he dictated his reminiscences, Acre, the last western stronghold on the shores of the Middle
East had fallen to the Muslims in 1291. One or two forts had held out until 1303, and then Outremer was
no more. There remained only islands, such as Rhodes and Cyprus, still under Frankish control. His
sovereign, king Louis, was 39 years dead and had for more than a decade been an official saint of the
Roman church. That church that canonized him, too, was no longer the same. Louis's grandson, Philip,
in a move portentous and calamitous for the church, had unseated a pope and overseen the removal of
the papacy from Rome to Avignon, on French soil. In other ways, as well, the world of 1250 had
vanished. Alongside the papacy and Outremer, two other empires had collapsed:
The Frankish empire in Greece, founded under Venetian sponsorship by the fourth Crusade of 1204, had
disappeared. Since 1261, there had again been again Greek emperors on the throne in Constantinople
The so called Holy Roman Empire, which figures off and on in the Joinville-Louis story the HRE in
Germany founded by Charlemagne, had in 1268 gone into eclipse, undermined by the popes. It would

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come back, and live on into the age of Napoleon. The real thousand year Reich Hitler dreamed of
reviving, but momentarily in eclipse.
So the world of Joinville's old age did not at all resemble that of his youth. But there is very little
reflection of that later world in his text (save a few comments on later kings who would be well to heed
their ancestor Louis IX), which still feels fresh and lively and which carries us into the middle of the
thirteenth century. It is worth taking a moment for Reconnaissance before turning to more literary
matters.
1. The Crusader states: As political units, the Crusader states had suffered a good deal since the days of
their creation. No military command had ever been able to have Jerusalem back after Saladin's conquest
of 1187, though for several years, down to 1244, Christians had held it as the result of negotiation.
Geographically, in 1250, the frankish zone was coastal, most of it in what today we call Lebanon and
coastal Syria. By the middle of the 1240s, things were precarious; a mission to Lyons, in France, by the
bishop of Beirut, a Frank, had called the king for help.
The Latins in the Holy Land were few, highly militarized, and divided by ethnicity; Frankish knights in
tremendous castles, Italian merchants with trading rights in coastal cities, and a local peasantry,
Christian, Muslim, Druse, who spoke Arabic.
2. The Arabs are not united. There are several centres of power, one in Egypt, one in Damascus, one at
Baghdad, and another in what we now call Afghanistan. The borders and the alliances shift. Arab
disunity helps preserve the Latin kingdom and, increasingly, the Latins are drawn into the internal
politics of the region. So to speak, the barons 'go native' to use an odious colonialist expression. In the
part of Joinville we read, set in Egypt, Louis, as a true crusader, is very reluctant to deal with the
adversary, except under duress. But, after his release from captivity, he removes to Syria, where, for four
years, he pursues just such a set of policies, hoping to trade factional support to one side or another in
exchange for a new lease on Jerusalem.
Ayub, the Egyptian Sultan, is a Kurd, last in a line descending from the great Saladin, victor in 1181 and
adversary of Lion Heart. He rules with the help of an army of Mamlukes, officers from the Caucasus,
Circassians by tribe, and much like the ferocious Cechens in all but language. Just after his death, and
the murder of his son, these officers stage a palace coup (or camp coup) that will install a new Mamluke
dynasty, down into the early 16c when the Turks drive them out and annex Egypt
3. The Arab position is further complicated by the looming presence of a new Enemy, the Mongol
empire, founed in a series of lightning campaigns by Jenghis Khan, who died in 1229, but still expansive
under his successors. In the 1220's and 1230s' Mongol armies had been almost everywhere in the zone,
conquering, killing whole cities, exacting tribute. Their armies have also devastated Russia, Ukraine,
southern Poland, Hungary, and arrived even on the shores of the Adriatic, near Italy.

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On the theory that your enemy's enemy is your friend, the Mongols seem a likely prospect for the
Crusader states. To make things even better, they are religiously tolerant and there are Central Asian
Christians, often Turkish-seaking Nestorians, among them. They appear in Joinville, mislabeled as
Tartars, to whom the king sends emissaries and gifts. After three years, the emissaries will return with
the greak khan's expressions of appreciation for the gifts, which he reads as tribute, and with a request
that the pope and the western kings come to Karakoram, their capital, and submit themselves to the
horde. Of course, the westerers are expected to send such gifts annually as a mark of their subjugation.
So nothing came of the missionary endeavor. Needless to say, the pope did not mount a camel and go to
Mongolia to lie at the feet of the khan.
4. Also in the scene, or off stage, is the Emperor Frederick, a curious figure, at once a German HRE and
King of Sicily and Southern Italy, who speaks Arabic and keeps a harem, who is the sworn enemy of the
pope, who has waged a crusade while excommunicated, and who is much admired by the Arabs, whom
he understands; as Pierre Trudeau once said, "the best way to learn a language is in bed." That is why,
when Joinville is captured by the Muslim army, his real kinship with the German Emperor helps save his
life.
5. Why Egypt. It seems an odd way to retake Jerusalem. But Cairo is where the power is. The
Crusaders hope, by striking at the center and taking a major city hostage, to exchange it, to pry off a
piece of the periphery, Jerusalem. Although that city, in the politics of the twentieth or twenty-first
century, appears as very precious to Muslims, in the thirteenth it seems often to have been less important
to them than some of the useful ports on the Nile delta. The crusaders decide only when on Cyprus to
try this strategy. In the end, it starts well, but then proves disastrous.
How Penguin does not do books right: terrible maps (p. liii).
The local geography makes the task hard. Our map shows too simple a Nile delta. It is important to
picture the mouth of the Nile, with its 7 branches and its innumerable canals, to see how hard it is for an
army to move southwards, especially in the flood season.
A chart: where is Damietta, Cairo, Alexandria, Rosetta, Mansourah:
tc. sketch a good map here
Mansourah: "The Victorious" named for the fateful defeat of the earlier Crusade #5:
a chronlogy
1244: king almost dies of malaria
9/48 arrive in Cyprus
5/49 sail to egypt, arrive 4 June
old sultan Ayub is ill of TB, not of mat poison as Joinville has it
Damietta falls right away, but flood season is coming on.
its fall a disgrace: Sultan has leaders of a Bedouin tribe killed, and dismisses his general

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sultan offers Jerusalem in exchange, but Louis foolishly refuses to deal w infidel [not in Js story]
-reinforcements: 24 ships of Guillaume de Villehardouin, wi. barons of Morea (S. Greece)
10/49, Nile goes down and Louis can leave Damietta heading for Cairo
23/11 Ayub dies and his mother appoints his son regent and puts the old general back in charge,
keeping death a desperate secret.
march south, stuck at river branch until 8 Feb., 1250. Battle of Mansourah = costly victory, death
of the Comte dArtois the kings brother and 285 of 290 Templars. Take the Arab camp and kill
the leader, but then the skirmish in the town is impossible for mounted warriors. Loss of
Templars is altogether catastrophic. Archers stuck across the river, and knights are badly
exposed. Templars are soldier monks w. monastic discipline and an strong team spirit.
11/2/50 another great battle many arrows: the tactic is to fill the enemy with arrows and then
charge.
army stuck for 8 weeks hoping politics will turn for the better, but blockage of boats lifted to the
river on camel back ---> starvation, dysentery and scurvy, ---> rout as described in Joinville.
slaughter of common soldiers, too numerous and dangerous to keep, and not worth much in the
exchange market, and careful ransoming of the rest. The queen bribes the Italians not to flee
Damietta, so she can trade it, and 500,000 gold bezants, for the king's ransom.
1253, after 3 years in Syria, propping things up, Blanche the Queen Mother dies, regent back
home in France, and Louis must go back to hold France together.
The German emperor's ability to cross the barrier between Christendom and Islam is not unique. As we
see in Joinville, there are other renegades, on both sides, men who manage to cross the frontier or at least
to see across it. Joinville, a recent arrival, is less flexible, but, at the same time, he is not altogether closed
to the Muslim world. One of the fascinations of the book is the portrait if affords of the meeting of two
cultures and the ways one strikes the other.
II Genre
I cannot give a lecture without the term
What have we here? Not a chronicle, despite the title on the Penguin edition, if a chronicle is a
year-by-year account of recent events. One darned thing after another is a chronicle. This year it
rained a lot. This year the locusts came. This year the Vikings sacked the monastery, Oh Lord, protect
us.
Rather As often, something mixed. There are two main components to Joinville's work
Hagiography the life of a saint
Military history
at the same time, this is something of a travel book, and a personal memoir, though neither has a formal
genre in his time
III Hagiography

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Disputed history of the MS: written in one slice or is it an oreo, with an earlier fresher centre and
later hagiographic wafers fore and aft. Likely, for internal reasons, to be an oreo with an older war story.
We know from the end of the book that the elderly Joinville had set a chapel to St. Louis in a church on
his estate. He had a dream Louis came to visit and wanted to stay, says he. He addresses Louis's
grandson, the king of Navarre, hoping for some relics for the altar. He also says that, when it come time
to canonize the king, the commission had questioned him for two days late in the 1280s, about 22 years
earlier, seeking details to testify to the sanctity of the king. Saints were no longer just local; the rise of
Rome meant that central administration had to vet their promotion by a kind of judicial inquest. Thus, in
a sense, Joinville's work has some things in common with a kind of testimony one gave at canonization
trials, now that the papacy had taken over from local custom the business of verifying and authenticating
saints.
Louis was a saint, in the large, because he died on his second crusade, in 1270, though not in
battle, but of disease. His last words, according to legend, thought not to Joinville's own version, were
"Jerusalem Jerusalem" It was a crusader death. But, at the same time, Louis could be a saint because of
how he had lived. And, notably, Joinville chides him for having gone. But still, a saint is a saint
But if this is a saint's life, there are few of the hallmarks of the kind one sees in usual
hagiography
There are no prophecies, no visions, no cures, exorcisms and raisings of the dead, no testimonies
to the efficacy of bones, clothes, dust from tombs. [though on pp. 334-5, he mentions miracles at the
tomb, but tells us nothing about them. He does remember dreams of the king who appears outside his
chapel at Joinville] Not that Joinville denies such things, but they play no part in his tale.
Rather, we have the story of a good and saintly king.
Now, we all know that Christian values were in tension with honour, and that honour was
central to kingship. It was therefore hard indeed to be a king, and an effective one, and a saint, at the
same time. That is why very, very few kings succeed in being canonized. There are a few, some of them
the converters of their nations. But I can think of none since the year 1100. A king has to say no, to fight,
to punish. A king, usually, is rich and proud; if not, he cannot function.
If we look at Louis, as depicted, what do we see?
1. Justice and rectitude. In Joinville's version, Louis so amazes his captors with his honourablity,
his fidelity to his word, that they even think of making him their new Sultan.
2. His religious observances: hearing mass in the morning, vespers or compline in the evening
His piety mixes knightly and Christian ideas. So, he tells a story about the bishop of Paris who
told a doubter that a heart that knows doubts is like a border fortress on the hostile English

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border, the more contested, the more the honour to its keeper. Whether or not the story
originated with the bishop, it clearly appealed to the king, who remembered and retold it [159]
Louis' intolerance has a similar cast, as in the king's story of the knight who hit the rabbi with his
crutch [155]
'a layman, whenever he hears the Christian religion abused, should not attempt to defend its
tenets, except with his sword' said the king, according to Joinville
In all this, Louis is a friend to the church. But the conflicts between his Christian and his royal
inclinations comes out clearly in the passage where the bishops ask the king to enforce their
excommunications, confiscating the goods of the condemned. Joinville's Louis refuses adamantly, on the
grounds that the justice of the church may be faulty. This combination of strong piety with royal
suspicion of the institutional church will appear in many monarchs in European history, even pious ones.
3. his insistence on moral purity, as in his objections to the whoring of the army in Damietta
4. Several Christlike qualities interesting to ponder.
Christ is an oxymoronic figure: high yet low, remote yet intimate. He has a double nature (rejected by the
monotheisms of the Jews and Muslims, who want divinity unalloyed). This double nature reappears in
Louis, who likewise "condescends", mixing high with low.
--as Christ suffered for us, the king suffers with us. He could escape the rout, but he stays with his men.
He could leave by sea, but he waits for his army. Joinville does not point this out, but, implicitly, just as
Christ chose to suffer when he could easily, as God, have escaped, so Louis too foregoes the privileges of
king and stays among his men
--his martyrdom: and remember that all martyrs imitate Christ. The king's suffering in the war, because
he is a king, render him Christlike. Notice that Joinville is in no way squeamish, and is content to show
the king with dysentery, with his drawers cut away
--his humility: Christ as humble is not so much a figure of the early MA as he becomes after ca 1200.
The notion of Christ as poor and humble and human in his infirmities is much championed by the
preaching friars, like the Franciscans, who much spread after 1220. This new emphasis on the humanity
of Christ contrasts with the earlier image of Christ the angry judge at the end of time. Certainly the
Christ of Christmas about to burst upon us now is the sweet human Christ, not the angry judge or
scourge of sin.
-but how to be regal and humble at the same time? The king's humility, like that of Christ, loses all its
meaning if the man is not at the same time royal, as Christ was godlike. Then we have handsome
condescension.

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sitting under the oak tree dispensing justice [157]

inviting men to sit with him their garments touching his [151]
A problem of interpretation: Art imitates life, life imitates art....
We have here not the real king Louis, just as we never have the real Martin or even the real Abelard and
Heloise. What we have is rather a representation, coloured by genre. What can we, as readers, learn
about the real king Louis? How much sugar coating have we here? How much myth-making? Even in
our culture, there is a temptation to hagiography in military history, even in the life-time of the veterans,
or, as just now, with the soldier shot at the cenotaph in Ottawa. The true nature of a campaign is hard
even for us to reconstruct, with our thousands of records, photographs, memoirs, films and artifacts.
Certainly, we have here selective memory. Joinville perceived, remembered, and told the story though
assorted lenses, some of them very hagiographic. So, at every point along this lens-line, Joinville can be
striving to sanctify his king. At the same time, the king, who knew well what it meant to be a saint, may
have participated in the creation of his own legend. With a cultured king like Louis IX, Literature shapes
behaviour which in turn shapes literature. Or, to put it in a neat form, not only does art imitate life, as
Aristotle said, but life in a sense imitates art. This profound fact much complicates our attempts to see
through a representation to the world behind it. What holds of Louis here holds of us as well, for we fall
in love and go to war with an eye to the formative arts of our culture.
Very similar considerations hold for the crusade in Egypt; Men who know the chanson de Roland will
modify their behaviour
IV What we learn about the history of warfare and feudal society
Fascinating, the degree to which, on the field, a feudal army acts like a society, not like the machine that
is the ideal of the modern military. Only the Templars, who are monks, are, to a degree, obedient.
Otherwise, the fighting units are more or less on their own. Military individualism, a struggle for
reputation
[184] Joinville is told to follow the flag of S Denis, but he refuses
Gautier [188] rides out against the enemy all by himself and is clubbed down.
At one point, Joinville remarks that a baron and his forces have done very well in the thick of the fight,
and then explains that this must be because they are all kin and vassals
Also, note how much, in the midst of battle, there is still a notion of right conduct shaped by honour and
reputation
***[201-202] Erard de Sivery with his nose hanging down: We did this in the hall and I asked: Why this
council of war in the midst of extreme danger? Note the echoes of Roland, re being reproached, and
ones heirs being reproached. OK to blow the horn for help? OK to go for help?

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All this scene reminds us of Roland and Olivier: Go blow your Oliphant!. Oh, how can I? I will be
disgraced among my progeny!
Note how Erard asks his captain (Joinville) but then he asks all the other men at the besieged house.
Why? Because they are not a structure, with its line of command, but a social group of fighting men,
who fight as a social unit among other social units out on the field. Students in the hall were quick to
note the loose structure of the feudal army, which is not a rigid hierarchy but a society of complex ties.
V Joinville as good lit
-The artlessness appeals to a modern sensibility. Good war writings are moving. The enormity of the
suffering, the extraordinary courage.
scenes I like
the last mass of Joinville's priest, when he falls down
Joinville thinks he has an abcess in his throat [226] (actually, he cannot swallow thanks to stress)
killing the priest who stumbles [227]
sorting the corpses at the bridge; circumcized go over [217-18]
VI Joinville and the other
Europeans in the Middle ages had little experience with ethnic diversity. True, there were all sorts of
languages and dialects, and local customs, which differentiated them. But there was little sense that
these mattered. The nationalism that today, and in the recent past, has cost so many lives, was all but
unknown, this, largely, because political structures were based on personal relationships. In the
Crusading armies, there were Germans, Englishmen, Flemings, French, Italians, but there is little sense
of national difference.
At the same time, the Crusades brought the Europeans face to face with other religions: a strong sense
of the boundaries between us and them.
A kind of religious xenophobia. One mark, the sudden appearance of pogroms agains the Jewish
minority that had lived peacefully for centuries. Another, the frictions with the Greeks. And, obviously,
the violent confrontation with the Muslims
These, the Christians did not know very well: their view of them was full of error, caricature
In Joinville, the enemy is often monstrous: as in their faithlessness, their supposed fatalism, their
beheading of prisoners, their breaking of the promises to keep the sick, the meat, the war engines in
Damietta, their murder of their sultan

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10

At the same time, the enemy at times seems human: Joinville can see them as often courteous,
honourable, as having a faith which is sincere, though wrong. In the later parts of the book, many of
them after our reading stops, he describes the Saracens at some length. The two parts of the picture
never quite converge. In France, looking back six decades, Joinville has no great need to reconcile his
double vision: his audience and he have no need to bring the distant Muslims into clear focus.