Margaret of Provence (French: Marguerite; 1221 – 20 December 1295) was Queen of France by marriage to King Louis IX.

[4] As a sign of her authority, Blanche dismissed Margaret's uncles and all of the servants she had brought with her from her childhood shortly after the wedding.

She was said to be "pretty with dark hair and fine eyes",[5] and in the early years of their marriage she and Louis enjoyed a warm relationship.

Her Franciscan confessor, William de St. Pathus, related that on cold nights Margaret would place a robe around Louis' shoulders, when her deeply religious husband rose to pray.

[6][7] The chronicler Jean de Joinville, who was not a priest, reports incidents demonstrating Margaret's bravery after Louis was made prisoner in Egypt.

For example, she decisively acted to assure a food supply for the Christians in Damietta and went so far as to ask the knight who guarded her bedchamber to kill her and her newborn son if the city should fall to the Arabs.

When she realized her mistake, she burst into laughter and ordered the messenger, "Tell your master evil days await him, for he has made me kneel to his camelines!"

In a moment of extreme danger during a terrible storm on the sea voyage back to France from the Crusade, Margaret begged Joinville to do something to help; he told her to pray for deliverance and to vow that when they reached France she would go on a pilgrimage and offer a golden ship with images of the king, herself and her children in thanks for their escape from the storm.

[8][9] Her leadership during the crusade had brought her international prestige and after she returned to France, Margaret was often asked to mediate disputes.

Margaret subsequently failed as well to influence her nephew King Edward I of England to avoid a marriage project for one of his daughters that would promote the interests in her native Provence of her brother-in-law, Charles of Anjou, who had married her youngest sister Beatrice.

[citation needed] King Louis IX of France and Margaret of Provence had eleven children[3] together: