On August 19, 1239, King Louis IX entered Paris at the end of a solemn procession, carrying barefoot and dressed in a simple penitent's tunic the crown of thorns that he had just acquired from the Latin Emperor of Constantinople, before placing it in the chapel of the royal palace.
A treasure traded for half of the kingdom's annual budget
In dire financial straits, the Latin Emperor of the East, Baldwin II of Courtenay, had pawned the precious relic to Venetian bankers before offering to sell it to the young King of France. Louis IX accepted, paying a colossal sum estimated at around 135,000 livres, roughly half the annual budget of the Kingdom of France at that time—a choice that testifies to his sincere piety as much as to his desire to make Paris a new Jerusalem.
The relic, accompanied by twenty-one other pieces related to the Passion of Christ, was first received on August 10, 1239 in Villeneuve-l'Archevêque, in Burgundy, where the chronicles report the presence of a huge crowd who came to pay their respects as it passed by.
A gesture of humility that gave birth to the Sainte-Chapelle
Barely twenty-five years old, Louis IX abandoned his royal attire to don a simple penitent's tunic, and it was with his brother's help that he himself carried the relic to Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, whose construction had just been completed. To provide a fitting setting for this treasure, the king then commissioned the construction of the Sainte-Chapelle, completed in just six years and consecrated in 1248.
Kept today in the treasury of Notre-Dame de Paris after surviving the French Revolution and the Concordat of 1801, the crown of thorns remains, eight centuries later, one of the most venerated Christian relics in the world.
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