Episode: “A Saint Between Worlds: A Global History of the Relics of Saint Louis of Toulouse” August 2026:

In the early hours of 23 November 1423, a Catalan fleet entered the port of Marseille under the cover of darkness. Over the next two days, soldiers led by King Alfonso V of Aragon plundered and burned the city as its residents fled into the countryside. Before the ships left, Alfonso’s men entered a safehouse and stole the relics of Saint Louis of Toulouse (d. 1297).

They carried off Louis’s relics to Valencia Cathedral, where Alfonso turned the Angevin saint into a symbol of Aragonese control of the Kingdom of Naples. Between 1423 and the eighteenth century, Louis of Toulouse’s relics were translated (translatio) around the Spanish World to churches in Iberia, southern France, the Philippines, and California. As a symbol of Spanish imperial conquest inside and outside of the Iberian peninsula, a French-Italian saint was transformed into a symbol of empire across geographies.