In that age, when virtue was so much
admired and so seldom achieved, King Louis stood out far above his
fellow-potentates. It was natural that he should wish to go Crusading; and his
actual adherence to the movement was greeted with delight. A Crusade was
desperately needed. On 27 November 1244, just after the disaster at Gaza,
Galeran, Bishop of Beirut, sailed from Acre to tell the princes of the West, on
behalf of the Patriarch Robert of Jerusalem, that reinforcements must be sent
if the whole kingdom were not to perish. In June 1245, Pope Innocent IV, driven
from Italy by the forces of the Emperor, held a Council in the Imperial city of
Lyons, to discuss how Frederick should be restrained. Bishop Galeran joined him
there, together with Albert, Patriarch of Antioch. Innocent was somewhat
offended with Louis, who scrupulously refused to condone all his actions
against the Emperor, but hearing the sombre report brought by Galeran from the
East, he gladly confirmed the King’s Crusading vows, and sent Odo,
Cardinal-Bishop of Frascati, to preach the Crusade throughout France.
1248: King Louis sails from Aigues-Mortes
The King’s preparations lasted for three
years. Extraordinary taxes were levied to pay for the expedition, and the
clergy, to their fury, were not exempted from paying them. The government of
the country had to be settled. The Queen-Mother Blanche, whose ability as a
ruler had been proved during her son’s stormy minority, was entrusted once more
with the regency. There were foreign problems to solve. The King of England
must be persuaded to keep the peace. Relations with the Emperor Frederick were
particularly delicate. Louis had won Frederick’s gratitude by his strict
neutrality in the quarrel between Papacy and Empire; but in 1247 he had to
threaten intervention when Frederick proposed to his allies an attack on the
Pope’s person at Lyons. Moreover, Frederick was the father of the legal King of
Jerusalem. Without King Conrad’s permission Louis had no right to enter his
country. It seems that French envoys kept Frederick fully informed of the
intended Crusade, and that Frederick, while expressing his sympathy, passed the
information on to the Court of Egypt. Then ships had to be found to carry the
Crusade to the East. After some negotiations Genoa and Marseilles agreed to
supply what was needed. The Venetians, who were already annoyed at a scheme
that might interrupt their good commercial arrangements with Egypt, were
thereby made still more hostile.
At last, on 12 August 1248, King Louis
left Paris and on the 25th he set sail from Aigues-Mortes for Cyprus. With him
were the Queen and two of his brothers, Robert, Count of Artois, and Charles,
Count of Anjou. He was followed by his cousins, Hugh, Duke of Burgundy, and
Peter, Count of Brittany, both of whom had been Crusaders in 1239, by Hugh X of
Lusignan, Count of La Marche, King Henry III’s stepfather, who had been as a
young man on the Fifth Crusade, by William of Dampierre, Count of Flanders, by
Guy III, Count of Saint-Pol, whose father had been on the Third and Fourth
Crusades, by John, Count of Sarrebruck, and his cousin John of Joinville,
Seneschal of Champagne, the historian, and by many lesser folk. Some of them
embarked at Aigues-Mortes, others at Marseilles. Joinville and his cousin, who
had nine knights each, chartered a boat from the latter port.
An English detachment under William, Earl
of Salisbury, grandson of Henry II and Fair Rosamond, followed close behind.
Other English lords had planned to join the Crusade, but Henry III had no wish
to lose their services and arranged for the Pope to block their passage. From
Scotland came Patrick, Earl of Dunbar, who died on his journey at Marseilles.
The royal squadron reached Limassol on 17
September; and the King and Queen landed there next morning. During the next
few days the troops for the Crusade gathered in Cyprus. In addition to the
nobles from France, there arrived from Acre the Acting Grand Master of the
Hospital, John of Ronay, and the Grand Master of the Temple, and many of the
Syrian barons. King Henry of Cyprus received them all with cordial hospitality.
When the plan of campaign was discussed,
everyone agreed that Egypt should be the objective. It was the richest and most
vulnerable province of the Ayubite Empire; and men remembered how during the
Fifth Crusade the Sultan had been willing to exchange Jerusalem itself for
Damietta. When the decision was made, Louis wished to start operations at once.
The Grand Masters and the Syrian barons dissuaded him. The winter storms would
soon begin, and the coast of the Delta, with its treacherous sandbanks and rare
harbours, would be dangerous to approach. Besides, they hoped to persuade the
King to intervene in the family squabbles of the Ayubites. In the summer of
1248 the Prince of Aleppo, an-Nasir Yusuf, had driven his cousin al-Ashraf Musa
out of Horns, and the dispossessed prince appealed for help from Sultan Ayub,
who came up from Egypt and sent an army to recover Horns. The Templars had
already entered into negotiations with the Sultan suggesting that territorial
concessions would win him Frankish auxiliaries. But King Louis would have
nothing to do with such a scheme. Like the visiting Crusaders of the previous
century, he had come to fight the infidel, not to indulge in diplomacy. He
ordered the Templars to break off their negotiations.
1245-7: Pian del Carpine’s Mission to Mongolia
The scruples that forbade the King to come
to terms with any Moslem did not apply to the pagan Mongols. He had a good precedent.
In 1245 Pope Innocent IV had supplemented his efforts to save Christendom in
the Nearer East by sending two embassies to Mongolia to the Court of the Great
Khan. One, led by the Franciscan John of Pian del Carpine, left Lyons that
April and, after travelling for fifteen months across Russia and the steppes of
Central Asia, reached the Imperial camp at Sira Ordu, close to Karakorum, in
August 1246, in time to witness the Kuriltay that elected Guyuk to supreme
power. Guyuk, who had many Nestorians among his advisers, received the Papal
envoy kindly; but when he read the Pope’s letter requiring him to accept
Christianity, he wrote an answer ordering the Pope to acknowledge his
suzerainty and to come with all princes of the West to do him homage. John of Pian
del Carpine on his return to the Papal Curia at the end of 1247 gave Innocent,
together with this discouraging letter, a detailed report in which he showed
that the Mongols were only out for conquest. But Innocent would not allow his
illusions to be entirely shattered. His second embassy, under the Dominican
Ascelin of Lombardy, had set out a little later and travelled across Syria, and
met the Mongol general Baichu in May 1247, at Tabriz. Baichu, whom Ascelin
found personally offensive and disagreeable, was ready to discuss the
possibility of an alliance against the Ayubites. He planned to attack Baghdad,
and it would suit him to have the Syrian Moslems distracted by a Crusade. He
sent two envoys, Aibeg and Serkis, the latter of whom was certainly a Nestorian,
back with Ascelin to Rome; and, though they had no plenipotentiary powers, the
hopes of the West rose again. They stayed about a year with the Pope. In
November 1248 they were told to return to Baichu with complaints that nothing
further was happening about the alliance.
While King Louis was in Cyprus, in
December 1248, two Nestorians, called Mark and David, arrived at Nicosia,
saying that they were sent by a Mongol general, Aljighidai, who was the Great
Khan’s commissioner at Mosul. They brought a letter talking in fulsome terms of
the Mongols’ sympathy for Christianity. Louis was delighted and at once
dispatched a mission of Dominicans under Andrew of Longjumeau and his brother,
who both spoke Arabic. Andrew had indeed been the Pope’s chief agent in recent
negotiations with the Monophysites. They carried with them a portable chapel,
as a suitable gift for a nomad convert Khan, and relics for its altar and other
worldlier presents. They left Cyprus in January 1249, for Aljighidai’s camp,
and were sent on by him to Mongolia. On their arrival at Karakorum they found
that Guyuk had died and his widow Oghul Qaimish was acting as Regent. She was
gracious to the mission, but regarded the King’s gifts as the tribute from a
vassal to a sovereign, while dynastic difficulties at home prevented her, even
had she so intended, from sending any large expedition to the West. Andrew
returned three years later with nothing more than a patronizing letter in which
the Regent thanked her vassal for his attentions, and requested that similar
gifts should be sent every year. Louis was shocked by this response, but still
hoped some day to achieve a Mongol alliance.
1249: The Crusade Arrives off Damietta
The sojourn of the Crusade in Cyprus was
thus wasted diplomatically. Almost a year previously King Louis had sent agents
to collect food and armaments for the army. The latter task was usefully
performed, but the commissariat had not expected to have to feed so many mouths
for more than a month or two. It was, however, not till May 1249, that it was
practicable for the expedition to sail against Egypt. When spring came Louis
applied to the local Italian merchant colonies to provide him with ships. The
Venetians disapproved of the whole Crusade and would not help. In March there
began an open war between the Genoese and Pisans along the Syrian coast, and
the Genoese, on whom Louis principally relied, had the worst of it. John of
Ibelin, lord of Arsuf, managed after some three weeks to make the colonies in
Acre sign a truce for three years. By the end of May it was possible to find
the ships that the Crusade required. Meanwhile Louis received visitors and
embassies at Nicosia. Hethoum of Armenia sent him rich gifts; Bohemond of
Antioch asked for and obtained a company of six hundred archers to protect his
principality from Turcoman brigands. The Latin Empress of Constantinople, Maria
of Brienne, made the journey there to beg for help against the Greek Emperor of
Nicaea. Louis was sympathetic, but told her that the Crusade against the
infidel must take precedence. Finally, in May, William of Villehardouin, Prince
of Achaea, arrived with twenty-four ships and a regiment of Franks from the
Morea. The Duke of Burgundy had spent the winter with him at Sparta and had
persuaded him to join the King. The army assembled in Cyprus was reaching
formidable proportions. But the pleasures of the gracious island softened its
morale; and the stocks of food that were to have sufficed for the Egyptian
campaign were almost exhausted.
On 13 May 1249, a fleet of one hundred and
twenty large transports and many smaller vessels lay off Limassol, and the army
began to embark. Unfortunately a storm scattered the ships a few days later.
When the King himself set sail on 30 May, only a quarter of his army sailed
with him. The others made their way independently to the Egyptian coast. The
royal squadron arrived off Damietta on 4 June.
Sultan Ayub had spent the winter at
Damascus, hoping that his troops would finish the conquest of Horns before the
Frankish invasions began. He had first expected Louis to land in Syria, but
when he realized that an attack was to be made on Egypt, he lifted the siege of
Horns and himself hurried back to Cairo, ordering his Syrian armies to follow
him. He was an ill man, in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, and could no
longer lead his men in person. He ordered his aged vizier, Fakhr ad-Din, the
friend of Frederick II, to take command of the army that was to oppose the
Frankish landing, and he sent stores of munitions to Damietta and garrisoned it
with the tribesmen of the Banu Kinana, Bedouins famed for their courage. He
installed himself at Ashmun-Tannah, to the east of the main branch of the River
Nile.
On board the royal flagship, the
Montjoie,
the King’s advisers begged him to wait till the rest of his transports
arrived before attempting to disembark. But he refused to delay. At dawn of
5
June the landing began in the teeth of the enemy, on the sands to the west
of the river mouth. There was a fierce battle on the very edge of the sea; but
the fearless discipline of the French soldiers, with the King at their head,
and the gallantry of the knights of Outremer under John of Ibelin, Count of
Jaffa, forced the Moslems back with heavy losses. At nightfall Fakhr ad-Din
drew off his men and retired over the bridge of boats to Damietta. Finding the
population there in panic and the garrison wavering, he decided to evacuate the
city. All the Moslem civilians fled with him, and the Banu Kinana followed
them, after setting fire to the bazaars but neglecting his orders to destroy
the bridge of boats. Next morning the Crusaders learned from Christians who had
remained in their homes that Damietta was undefended. They marched triumphantly
over the bridge into the city.
1249: Louis at Damietta
Their easy capture of Damietta astounded
and delighted the Franks. But, for the moment, they could not follow it up. The
Nile floods were soon due to begin; and Louis, profiting from the bitter
experience of the Fifth Crusade, refused to advance further till the river
should go down. Besides he was waiting for the arrival from France of
reinforcements under his brother, Alfonso, Count of Poitou. In the meantime
Damietta was transformed into a Frankish city. Once again, as in 1219, the
Great Mosque became a cathedral and a bishop was installed. Buildings were
allotted to the three Military Orders and money benefices to the leading lords
of Outremer. The Genoese and Pisans were rewarded for their services by a
market and a street apiece, and the Venetians, repenting their hostility,
begged successfully for a similar gift. The native Christians, Coptic
Monophysites, were treated with scrupulous justice by King Louis and welcomed
his rule. The Queen, who had been sent to Acre with the other ladies of the
Crusade when the army left Cyprus, was summoned to join the King. Louis also
welcomed another distinguished if impoverished friend, Baldwin II, Emperor of
Constantinople, whom he had known in Paris where the Emperor had visited him in
order to raise money by selling him relics of the Passion that had survived the
Crusaders’ sack of the Imperial capital. Throughout the summer months Damietta
was the capital of Outremer. But to the soldiers this inaction in the humid
heat of the Delta brought demoralization. Food began to run short, and there
was disease in the camp.