14 - The Masculine Experience and the Experience of Masculinity on the Seventh Crusade in John of Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis

Summary

John of Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis is one of the key historical accounts of the career of the saint-king Louis IX of France (d. 1270). Most scholarship on this text has, therefore, concerned itself primarily with Louis. However, Joinville's narrative offers far more than just a hagiography of the Capetian saint, as the passages in which Joinville recalls his own experiences and reactions to events, particularly in a crusading context, are highly significant – for example, in relation to the recent scholarly emphasis on investigating the expression of emotions in medieval narratives. Building on this work, the following chapter considers how ideals of masculinity found in Joinville's text were embodied and enacted on the Seventh Crusade (1248–54) – an expedition led by Louis, which, despite swiftly capturing Damietta on 6 June 1249 and achieving a pyrrhic victory in the battle of Manṣūra (8–11 February 1250), failed to wrest Jerusalem from Ayyūbid control. Importantly, Joinville's account of this enterprise offers the first, or at least the most detailed, attempt by a crusade participant to offer first-person insights into the crusading mindset, more particularly that of an elite male crusader. Although participant crusade texts date back to the First Crusade (1096–99), such as the anonymous Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, and were composed for each of the major crusading expeditions thereafter, including Geoffrey of Villehardouin's and Robert of Clari's accounts of the Fourth Crusade (1202–04), all of these works were written, at least for the most part, in the third person. Earlier crusade authors, therefore, did not look to place the focus upon themselves, nor could they be termed homodiegetic. Part of Joinville's significance rests on the fact that the inclusion of his own perspective was intended to lend authority to the events described.

This chapter also adds to the recent spate of fruitful studies of crusading masculinity, exemplified by the 2019 essay collection Crusading and Masculinities. Despite this work, Joinville's Vie has hitherto not been subjected to a detailed gendered reading, with the notable exception of Joanna Phillips’ consideration of Louis’ illness and its implications for his masculinity. In this, Phillips concluded that masculine ideals were intrinsically linked to embodiment, and that illness negatively affected both the leadership capacity and masculine reputation of crusade leaders.