A KING OF FIRE AND LIGHT

French ruler Louis IX was a Catholic hero and a vicious anti-Semite, a patron of exquisite art and a fervent burner of books. Matthew Gabriele and David M Perry consider the tangled legacy of a man who embodies both the horrors and beauty of medieval Europe

- Matthew Gabriele and David M Perry

Saint and sinner?

Louis IX depicted in an illuminated manuscript from the 13th century. (The background image shows the stained glass of Sainte-Chapelle, his private chapel.) Some eight centuries after his birth, the French king's reputation is more contested than ever

It'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 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.