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The royal patron behind the Parisian “court style” of Gothic art and architecture was King Louis IX.  The grandson of Philip Augustus, Louis inherited the throne when he was only 12 years old, or so until he reached adulthood six years later his mother, Blanche of Castile the granddaughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine served as France’s regent.  The French regarded Louis as the ideal king, and in 1297, 27 years after Louis’s death, Pope Boniface VIII declared him a saint.  Louis was revered for his piety, justice, truthfulness and charity.  His almsgiving and his donations to religious foundations were extravagant.  He especially favored the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans.  He admired their poverty, piety, and self-sacrificing disregard of material things.  It for these reasons, that we should embrace his philosophies in our time capsule to not lose the lesson on how the Sainte-Chapelle became to be.<!--more-->

Louis launched two unsuccessful Crusades, the Seventh and the Eighth.  He died in Tunisia during the latter, as a crusading knight who lost his life in the service of the Church; Louis personified the chivalric virtues of courage, loyalty and self-sacrifice.  Saint Louis united in his person the best qualities of the Christian knight, the benevolent monarch and the holy man.  He became the model of medieval Christian kingship.

Louis’s political accomplishments were also noteworthy.  He subdued the unruly French barons and between 1243 and 1314 no one seriously challenged the crown.  He negotiated a treaty with Henry III, king of France’s traditional enemy, England.  Such was his reputation for integrity and just dealing that he served as arbiter in at least a dozen international disputes.  So successful was he as peacekeeper that despite civil wars through most of the 13<sup>th</sup> century, international peace prevailed.  Under Saint Louis, medieval France was its most prosperous, and its art and architecture were admired and imitated throughout Europe.  In addition to properly sheltering his holy relics, Sainte-Chapelle was a result of Louis' political ambition to be the central monarch of western Christendom. At the time Louis' royal chapel was constructed, the imperial throne at Constantinople was occupied by a mere Count of Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire was in uneasy disarray.

Sainte-Chapelle was planned in 1241, started in 1246 and quickly completed: it was consecrated on April 26, 1248.  Just as the Emperor could pass privately from his palace into Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, so now King Louis could walk directly from his palace into the Sainte-Chapelle. The king died of the plague on a crusade, was later canonized by the Pope, and is now known as Saint Louis.

During the French Revolution, the chapel was converted to an administrative office, and the windows were obscured by enormous filing cabinets. Their all-but-forgotten beauty was thereby inadvertently protected from the vandalism in which the choir stalls and the rod screen were destroyed, the spire pulled down and the relics dispersed.  Most of Louis' precious <strong>relics </strong>were lost or destroyed in the French Revolution; the few that remain are in the treasury of Notre-Dame Cathedral.