Old crusader's book records St. Louis rebuking him over mortal sin

JOINVILLE, Champagne, October 1309 AD — Jean de Joinville finished his book of the holy words and deeds of Saint Louis IX of France this month. Queen Jeanne of Navarre had asked him to write it, and he began it when he was nearly eighty. Joinville, the seneschal of Champagne, went on crusade with the king and was taken prisoner with him in Egypt. Near the front of the book he set down, as he remembered it, an answer of his own that the king rebuked him for.

Joinville took the cross in 1248 AD, following the king’s example. He spent six years in the king’s company on crusade and was captured with him in 1250 AD. They came home together in 1254 AD. St. Louis died in the army’s camp outside Tunis in 1270 AD, and Pope Boniface VIII declared him a saint in 1297 AD.

In the dedication Joinville says that Queen Jeanne, the wife of King Philip the Fair, “prayed me, as earnestly as she could, to cause a book to be written for her, containing the holy words and good deeds of our King St. Lewis”. He wrote it so that readers “will be able to see clearly that no layman in our time lived so holily all his days”. Queen Jeanne died in 1305 AD and did not live to see it done. Joinville addresses the finished book to her son Louis, King of Navarre.

The first part of the book gathers the king’s sayings. Once St. Louis called Joinville to him, with two monks in the room, and told him: “Because of the subtle mind that is in you I dare not speak to you of the things relating to God; so I have summoned these two monks that are here, as I want to ask you a question.” He asked Joinville what God is. Joinville said that God was so good that there could be nothing better. St. Louis told him: “Of a truth, you have answered well; for the answer that you have given is written in this book that I hold in my hand.”

Then St. Louis asked which he would rather, “either to be a leper, or to have committed a mortal sin”. Joinville gives his own answer in one sentence: “And I, who never lied to him, made answer that I would rather have committed thirty mortal sins than be a leper.”

The next day, after the monks had left, St. Louis called Joinville to him alone, made him sit at his feet and asked: “How came you to say that to me yesterday?” Joinville gave the same answer again. St. Louis told him: “You spoke hastily and as a fool.”

Then St. Louis gave his reasons. “There is no leprosy so hideous as the being in mortal sin,” he said, “inasmuch as the soul that is in mortal sin is like unto the Devil.” A man is cured of leprosy of the body when he dies, St. Louis went on. But a man who dies in mortal sin “cannot know of a certainty that he has, during his lifetime, repented in such sort that God has forgiven him; wherefore he must stand in great fear lest that leprosy of sin should last as long as God is in paradise.” St. Louis ended with a plea: “So I pray you, as strongly as I can, for the love of God, and for the love of me, so to set your heart that you prefer any evil that can happen to the body, whether it be leprosy, or any other sickness, rather than that mortal sin should enter into your soul.”

St. Louis also asked Joinville whether he washed the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday. Joinville told the king, “it would make me sick,” and said he would never do it. St. Louis told him “that was ill said; for you should never disdain what God did for our teaching,” and asked him, “for the love of God first, and then for the love of me,” to get used to washing the feet of the poor.

In 1282 AD Joinville was called to Saint-Denis as a witness by the examiners the Pope had sent to look into the life, works and miracles of St. Louis, and they questioned him over two days. A Life of the king written afterwards from the inquiry’s records tells the same exchange about leprosy and mortal sin, and names Joinville as the knight who said he would rather commit thirty mortal sins than be a leper.

Joinville closes his book by telling readers how far to trust it. He says he saw and heard “a great portion of what is here related”, and that the rest came from a book written in French. Of that part he writes: “I do not certify to you that they are true, because I myself, in person, neither saw nor heard them.” The last line gives the date: “This was written in the year of grace 1309, in the month of October.”