Medieval France
(ca. 1221–1295). Marguerite was the eldest of four daughters of Count Raymond-Berenguer V of Provence. In 1234, at the age of twelve or thirteen, she became queen of France by her marriage to Louis IX. The wedding and her coronation as queen were celebrated at the cathedral of Sens. Eleven children were eventually born to the couple. The marriage was difficult in a number of respects. From the beginning, Marguerite resented and was resented by her mother-in-law, Blanche of Castile; yet she admired Blanche’s influence with Louis.
She tried to achieve the same position with her son, the future Philip III, but provoked her husband to intervene and have the young Philip’s ill-considered oath to obey her until the age of thirty quashed. Though Marguerite by no means lacked in courage or ability (e.g., she successfully preserved order in Damietta in Egypt in 1250 at a particularly difficult moment in her husband’s first crusade), Louis almost always ignored her political advice.
After the king’s death in 1270, Marguerite became a more active political figure. She was particularly exigent—to the point of raising troops—in defending her rights in Provence, where her husband’s brother, Charles of Anjou, maintained his political authority and control of property after his wife’s (her sister’s) death, contrary to the intentions of the old count, who had died in 1245. Philip III had his hands full in restraining her. Only his death in 1285 and Charles of Anjou’s in the same year resolved the situation. At the behest of the new king, Philip IV, she accepted an assignment of income from Anjou as compensation for recognizing the preeminent rights of Charles of Anjou’s heirs in Provence. Her last years were spent in doing pious work, including founding in 1289 the Franciscan nunnery of Lourcines, which eventually became a focal point of the cult of her late husband, Louis. Although she does not seem to have testified for her husband’s canonization, Marguerite was active in the propagation of his memory: her confessor, Guillaume de SaintPathus, for example, wrote an important and reverential biography of the king. Marguerite died on December 30, 1295, nearly two years before the process of canonization was completed.
William Chester Jordan
[See also: LOUIS IX]
Le mariage de saint Louis a Sens en 1234. Sens: Musées de Sens, 1984.
Sivéry, Gérard. Marguerite de Provence: une reine au temps des cathédrales. Paris: Fayard, 1987.
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