Louis IX of France (1214-1270) - Find a Grave Memorial

French Monarch. A native of Poissy, Louis IX served as King of France between 1226 and his death in 1270. A renowned patron of the arts, he married Margaret of Provence in 1234 and fathered eleven children. Louis IX built the famed Gothic Sainte-Chapelle in the royal palace complex on the Île de la Cité in the center of Paris. It was erected as a shrine for the Crown of Thorns and a fragment of the True Cross. Passing away in Carthage during the Eighth Crusade, probably of dysentery, his body was successively boiled so that the bones could be transported hygienically from distant lands back home. Some of his entrails are said to have been buried directly on the spot in what is now Tunisia, where the so called "Tomb of Saint-Louis" can still be visited to this day. His heart and other entrails were sealed in an urn and placed inside the Cathedral of Monreale, Sicily, while his bones were laid to rest at the Basilique Saint-Denis in a northern suburb of Paris. The latter, along with its magnificent monument, was destroyed during the French Revolution. Pope Boniface VIII canonized Louis in 1297. He remains the only French king to be declared a saint. His feast day is celebrated on August 25. This location contains his bones only.

Bio by: Eman Bonnici