In July 1269, King Louis IX of France was planning a campaign in Egypt or the Holy Land. One year later, his fleet landed on Sardinia, and in a war council held on July 13 Louis declared Tunis the target of the crusade. What happened between July 1269 and July 1270 to send the expedition in this unexpected direction is shrouded in secrecy. By expanding the narrative to incorporate Mediterranean‐wide networks of interaction, this chapter identifies several key turning points: the visit of the Dominican linguist Ramon Martí to Tunis in 1269; the attendance of Tunisian envoys at the baptismal ceremony of a French Jew at Saint‐Denis in October; the arrival of a Mongol embassy in Paris toward the end of the year; and the dispatch of an Angevin envoy to Tunis the following April, a month after Louis had lifted the oriflamme at Saint Denis to launch the campaign.
The two Rouen provincial councils that were held in May 1281 and October 1282 are known only from three petitions addressed to Pope Martin IV that survive in a single manuscript. One was printed by Champollion-Figeac in 1839, another by Professor Gaines Post in 1936, but the third remains unpublished because its historical interest has not been apparent. The first two can be readily related to famous events of their day: one urged the canonization of Louis IX, while the other protested the renewal of papal privileges to the mendicant orders. The third, however, has been neglected because its contents do not seem to rise above the commonplace and trivial.
M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Sean L. Field, eds., and Larry L. Field, trans., The Sanctity of Louis IX: Early Lives of Saint Louis by Geoffrey of Beaulieu and William of Chartres. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Paper. Pp. xviii, 197; 5 black-and-white figures and 3 maps. $18.95. ISBN: 978-0-8014-5137-9.
