The Glory of the Crusades (34 page)

The king traveled from Paris to Lyons where he met with Pope Innocent IV, and then made way to Aigues Mortes, which was a man-made port in royal territory. Louis thus became the first French king to leave for the Crusade from his own soil.
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His fleet departed on August 25, 1248 and sailed for Cyprus. They spent the winter on the island, and the delay, although understandable, “devoured supplies, sapped morale, and gave the Egyptians time to prepare their defenses.”
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The army left the island on May 30, 1249 en route to Egypt. Louis had decided to re-enact the Fifth Crusade and liberate Egypt in order to use it as a base of operations from which to liberate the Holy City.

Egypt

The French fleet arrived at Damietta on June 4, 1249 and once more the Muslim garrison prepared to fight Crusaders. The next morning the Crusaders undertook an amphibious landing with Louis in the lead. When warriors waded to shore the Muslim garrison commander, Fakhr al-Din, saw the strength of the Crusader army and decided to withdraw from the city to the sultan’s camp several miles away.

The city, now emptied of its defenders, was soon occupied by the French Crusaders in a surprisingly easy undertaking, which was the opposite of the siege during the Fifth Crusade. Indeed, “Damietta had fallen in hours instead of the seventeen months it had taken in 1218–19.”
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Louis found stockpiles of food, equipment, and material that the Muslims left behind in their hasty retreat. The king decided to spend the summer in Damietta while waiting for his brother Alphonse and other Crusaders to arrive. As winter approached, Louis thought an attack on Cairo would give the Christians complete control of Egypt and finish the task left undone by the Fifth Crusade, so he gave the command to march there in late November 1249. He left a garrison and his five-months-pregnant queen in Damietta and ordered the fleet to shadow the army’s movement offshore.

One of the main reasons for the eventual failure of Louis’s expedition was the inability to learn from the mistakes of the Fifth Crusade. Louis inadvertently made the exact same mistakes, one of which was the failure to build supply depots along the route to Cairo before the main army left Damietta.

The slow-moving Crusader army finally reached the outskirts of Mansourah in late December. Louis quickly ordered his troops to dig in and fortify their position. In order to capture Mansourah, the Crusaders needed to cross the Bahr as-Saghir river, but Muslim forces prevented them from building a causeway. After receiving intelligence about a ford upriver that offered an opportunity to surprise and outflank the Muslims guarding the town, Louis developed a carefully coordinated plan. It centered on an advance element under the command of his brother, Robert of Artois, capturing the ford during a surprise night attack and, once it was secured, awaiting the crossing of the main army before advancing on the town.

The Attack

The surprise attack on the ford occurred on February 7, 1250. It was successful but, in a fateful decision that ultimately doomed the entire Crusade, Robert failed to abide by the plan and instead advanced on the Muslim army camp without Louis and the main army.

Robert’s initial attack on Fakhr al-Din’s field camp was effective. The Crusaders easily surprised and overwhelmed the Muslim force. The surprise was so complete that Fakhr al-Din was killed during his morning washings, unable to defend himself from the onslaught of the Christian warriors.
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Some of the Muslim troops ran in haste to the safety of Mansourah, and Robert, flush with his stunning victory, pursued them in further violation of his orders. Robert’s unit advanced into Mansourah, where the majority of the Muslim troops were quartered. The hasty decision led to his death and the slaughter of his 300 knights, most of whom were killed by defenders throwing blocks of wood from the windows of city houses.
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It was a risky action undertaken in the heat of battle by a warrior raised and trained from an early age to ignore personal risk and seek glory and honor on the battlefield.

Louis was deeply grieved at the news of his brother’s death and regarded it as martyrdom. Upon his later return from the Crusade, Louis petitioned the papacy to recognize his fallen brother as a martyr but the pope refused the request.
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Louis’s reaction was in keeping with most Crusade veterans who consistently believed their fallen comrades should be regarded as martyrs, but the Church never identified the dead warriors as such. Although they fought for Christ and his patrimony, their deaths in combat (or from disease and starvation) were not the result of persecution for the Faith.

The main body of the Crusade army crossed the river while Robert was engaged in his folly and, after his death, the Muslim army counter-attacked. The fighting was intense and lasted all day as hand-to-hand melees broke out across the battlefield. Joinville also recorded the intensity of the combat as he was hit by five arrows and his horse by fifteen during the struggle.
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The Crusaders were finally victorious as the Muslim forces retreated into the town, but the victory was costly, It would also prove to be “the prelude to catastrophe.”
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Time to Retreat

Although Louis’s personal bravery during his Egyptian campaign cannot be questioned, his military strategy was deficient, and the discipline of his army (or at least that of his brother) proved an Achilles heel. His brother’s rash advance resulted in high casualties, and now Louis did not have enough troops to attack Mansourah—let alone Cairo. He was faced with a critical decision: stay and try to press the attack or retreat immediately to Damietta to regroup and refit.

Unfortunately, the king proved the leadership axiom that a bad leader is not someone who makes bad decisions, but someone who makes no decisions. He opted to hold the army in place in an untenable tactical location surrounded by water in a virtual cul-de-sac. The Crusaders remained for almost two months from February 11 to April 5, their food supplies dwindling to a critical level and the Muslim forces gathering strength. The Egyptians knew the supply line to the Crusader army was the key to victory, so they attacked and captured relief convoys.

The situation became unbearable as disease, particularly scurvy and dysentery, broke out among the Crusaders, further weakening their military effectiveness. Even the king was afflicted to the point where the back of his trousers was cut open to deal with the nasty effects of dysentery.
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The king gave the order for a general retreat on April 5 and the army began the slow return march to Damietta. They never made it. “Hampered by enemy forces, illness, hunger, fatigue, difficult terrain, and collapsing morale, the shattered army on land, shadowed by a rag-bag navy increasingly vulnerable to enemy shipping on the Nile, effectively disintegrated.”
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The next day Louis sued for peace.

The Muslim army surrounded the pitiable Crusader host and immediately executed all the sick, wounded, and poor Crusaders. Louis and the French nobility were captured and sent to the prisons of Mansourah. The sultan of Egypt, Turan Shah, giddy at the capture of the noble French king, further humiliated him by sending his captured royal cloak to Damascus where it was paraded through the city as a war trophy.
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Having thus gloated, Turan Shah now needed to assess the reality of the situation. He was faced with the same decision as his grandfather al-Kamil was during the Fifth Crusade. The Crusader field army was defeated but the city of Damietta was still in Christian hands. Should he undertake a costly siege to recapture the city or find a diplomatic settlement?

He chose the latter and entered into detailed negotiations with the imprisoned king. After a few weeks, they reached a deal. Louis agreed to return Damietta and to pay 800,000 bezants , or more than three times the annual royal income, for his freedom. Turan Shah agreed to release the king after payment of half the ransom with the stipulation Louis remain onboard ship off the coast of Damietta until the second half was paid. Queen Marguerite worked tirelessly to collect the required funding and, after delivery of the 400,000 bezants, Louis was released.

His captivity had lasted a month during which time his captors tried to convince him to renounce his faith and embrace Islam. The saintly king had refused, telling his captors “You can very well kill my body, but you will never have my soul.”
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The king also maintained his honesty and integrity despite the harsh conditions and the humiliation of defeat. Despite his verbal agreement to remain on ship off the coast of Damietta until the second half of the ransom, his barons tried to convince him to leave without paying the second half; he steadfastly refused.
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Once safely back among his remaining army, Louis learned the initial ransom payment was left purposefully short by 10,000 pounds. He was furious at the deception and immediately ordered it paid to Turan Shah.
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Ruling the Kingdom of Jerusalem

Upon his release from prison, Louis discussed his plans with his nobles. The king was determined to stay in the Holy Land but allowed those who wanted to leave to do so. Louis wrote a letter to his subjects explaining why he was remaining in Outrémer for an unspecified time. He told them he was staying in order that “something good, the deliverance of the captives, the preservation of the castles and fortresses of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and [of obtaining] other advantages for Christendom” would result.
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He urged his subjects to take the cross and journey to the Holy Land to join him in these endeavors.

The king of Jerusalem was Conrad II (IV of Germany), the son of Frederick II, but he lived in Europe and so the kingdom suffered from an absent monarch. Louis filled the vacuum by taking command of the Christian areas in the kingdom. Although he had no legal authority to act as the king, he had a
gravitas
that was recognized and welcomed by the Christians of Outrémer.

The saintly king spent his time building up the kingdom’s coastal city defenses, feeling duty-bound to provide as best he could for the needs of the local Christians. During his stay Louis received a letter from the sultan in Damascus offering him safe conduct to visit the Holy City as a pilgrim. Louis wanted to go but knew he could not. Instead he followed Richard the Lion-Hearted’s lead and refused to set foot in Jerusalem while it was still occupied. He understood that “he must renounce seeing Jerusalem in order to sustain the will and the hope of holding it and possessing it.”
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Louis’s presence in the Holy Land for six years had been a pivotal time in the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, during which he “restored . . . cohesion, unity, and the idea of a state” to the Christian inhabitants of Christ’s patrimony. However, the time was at hand to return to his beloved France.
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The Return to France

In the spring of 1253, Louis received news that his mother, Blanche, had died on November 27, 1252. The news prompted Louis to make arrangements to leave Outrémer and return home. Despite the king’s preparations and best intentions, his first Crusade had been a catastrophe, resulting in his brother’s death and his own imprisonment. He repeated the mistakes of the Fifth Crusade by failing to secure his rear areas and supply lines, made poor tactical decisions, and commanded an ill-disciplined army that collapsed when his brother foolishly charged into the town of Mansourah unsupported. Louis’s Crusading career was not over but it would take another fifteen years for the king to ride once more unto the breach.

Baybars the Merciless

In the fall of 1260, a large Mongol army under the command of Kitbogha left Damascus on a campaign to conquer Egypt. The Egyptians responded with an army commanded by a general named Baybars. The forces met at Ain Jalut in Galilee on September 3, where the Mongols were decimated in a decisive victory for Baybars and the Egyptians. The battle marked the first time the Mongols were overwhelmingly defeated on the battlefield.

Baybars, a blue-eyed Russian Turk, was a “savage and treacherous wild beast but a soldier of genius and an incomparable administrator.”
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After his victory the Mamluk warrior installed himself as sultan of Egypt and Damascus and effectively reestablished Saladin’s empire. He was a great warrior, better than Saladin, and the scourge of Christians in Outrémer, primarily because he was a man with “a complete absence of scruples.”
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Baybars began a campaign of
jihad
to eradicate the Christians in the Holy Land, providing a “means to consolidate his power as well as establish his credentials as a worthy Islamic ruler.”
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Baybars engaged in a scorched-earth policy to compel the elimination of the Christian presence from Outrémer. He ordered the destruction of all captured Christian cities in order to prevent their liberation and resettlement. His preferred methods in dealing with Christian populations were massacre and enslavement. The campaign was swift and deadly, and the prospect that the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem could fall into the Mamluk’s hands looked promising.

Urgent appeals were sent to Europe for another major Crusade. Meanwhile, Baybars sacked Jaffa in 1268 and, in the spring of 1271, captured the previously impregnable fortress of Krak des Chevaliers, the Hospitaller stronghold that not even Saladin had been able to conquer. Panic reached a heightened state after the merciless Baybars sacked the city of Antioch after a four-day siege. His troops killed every Christian in the city, including all the women and children. It was the single greatest massacre in Crusading history. Baybars ensured the remembrance of the massacre by sending a description of it to the absent ruler of Antioch, Bohemond VI: