Men at the Center: Redemptive Governance under Louis IX

Chapter One: Robert of Sorbon, Churchman

1 Robert of Sorbon, Church man Sorbon, today a tiny village of about two hundred souls, was very small in the thirteenth century. It is located in a region, the Ardennes, which has a rugged grandeur. The now defunct local journal, Les Ardennes françaises, devoted to the region’s history, used as its motto, “Faisons connaître et admirer le Beau Pays d’Ardenne” (“Let us proclaim and gaze with pleasure on the beautiful Ardennes countryside”). Nevertheless , it was an economically unproductive land by the robust standards of most other regions in France in the thirteenth century. In part this was because the terrain of the Ardennes was rough and unwelcoming. Transport in and out of the hilly, boggy and heavily forested region was difficult. The too-compact soil produced hardwood trees that grew gnarled and were less desirable for lumber than those of many other regions , and such timber as woodsmen did harvest was, given the terrain, difficult to convey to major urban Chapte r O ne book.indd 1 2012-09-12 15:39:19 2 markets or to ports for transshipment. Moreover, at the start of the thirteenth century the Ardennes was in many respects a lawless region, as traditional historians of the state conceive law, though not perhaps as a legal anthropologist would. For every society has rules and norms even in the absence of state authority. However, neither the royal government of France nor the administrations of any of the great seigneurs who claimed rights in the area could exercise them as they wanted to in peace.1 On either side of the year 1200 the Ardennes saw German, Flemish and French armies in conflict as part of two larger struggles then being waged. The first was between England and France and ultimately led to the English loss of Normandy and many of the other continental provinces to the king of France. The other was the warfare between supporters of Otto of Brunswick, on the one hand, and Philip of Swabia and, later, Frederick of Hohenstaufen and Pope Innocent III, on the other, over claims to the imperial throne. Germans and Flemings were either by direct monetary inducement or by political or economic commitment generally drawn more to the En­ glish side in the first conflict but they were woefully divided in the second. In any case, for all of these contending forces, the Ardennes and neighboring regions constituted a great and enduring arena in the opening book.indd 2 2012-09-12 15:39:19 3 two decades of the thirteenth century for bloodshed and death, for arson and pillage. On October 9, 1201, a son was born in the village of Sorbon, in the heartland of the holdings of the count of Rethel, to a peasant couple who had him baptized Robert.2 Almost nothing is known of the child’s early life, except that he manifested a singular intelligence in the local schools, to the roisterous culture of which he seems to have made reference in comments later in life.3 His parents, like so many other local parents, would have known the Ardennes of the period as a difficult place for advancement or, as we might say, for social mobility. And they would have known, like many others, that the best licit way for a peasant boy to improve his lot was to rise through the church. Robert of Sorbon4 trained for the priesthood and rose steadily . He augmented his education, it has been suggested, by a period of instruction at the College of Ret(h)el in Paris, an association of scholars and economically disadvantaged students from the Rethélois, where he had passed his childhood years.5 His studies culminated in his becoming a secular master of theology, that is, a professor, at the University of Paris.6 By about 1250 he had drawn and was drawing income, sequentially, from prebends he held as a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame of Cambrai and then as a canon of the cathedral of Notre-Dame book.indd 3 2012-09-12 15:39:19 4 of Paris.7 Insofar as he was making a reputation in the capital, it was as a preacher and stern moralist denouncing gambling, the vernacular theater, bawdy songs, hypocrisy , prostitution, gossip, usury, lax attention to duty, pride in mastering theology, and generally being unchristian and thus doing the works of the...