Holy Warriors (44 page)

The Khwarazmians’ power prompted the Muslims of Damascus and Homs to join forces with the remaining Franks. The Levantine coalition met their enemy, who were reinforced by Egyptian troops, at La Forbie near Gaza. Faced by far superior forces, the Christians’ allies were soon driven from the field and in spite of fighting bravely the Franks were doomed. The level of slaughter was stupefying: the Military Orders fared especially badly—of 348 Templars, 36 escaped; from 351 Hospitallers, 21 survived; and of 400 Teutonic Knights, only 3 lived. Thousands of crossbowmen and foot soldiers perished and many of the Frankish nobility died too; the fighting strength of the kingdom of Jerusalem was all but erased.

Faced by this unprecedented crisis, Patriarch Robert of Jerusalem dispatched an embassy to Europe to plead for help. So grave was the situation that envoys risked a midwinter sea voyage to convey their calamitous news and to urge a response. The interminable tension between the papacy and Frederick II ruled out German involvement, Henry III of England was too fearful of the French to cooperate, and the Spanish were preoccupied with their own reconquest. Fortunately for the settlers, one monarch was prepared to act—Louis IX of France declared himself ready to lead the greatest crusade of the century as he tried to preserve and strengthen the Christian hold on the Holy Land.

Louis was an intriguing character, a man of immense piety for whom the crusade was the defining event of his reign; he would feel the most profound sense of personal responsibility for the failure of the 1248–54 campaign and died in a second attempt to capture Jerusalem in 1270.
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Unlike men such as Richard the Lionheart or Frederick II, his desire to advance the
Christian cause above all other considerations was conspicuously the dominant aspect of his life. Louis took the cross in late 1244, in part as a reaction to the news from the Levant, and in part to fulfill a vow made during his recovery from a near-fatal illness. Family honor also influenced him: Louis was from a long line of crusaders—his father, Louis VIII, had died returning from the Albigensian Crusade in 1226; his grandfather, Philip, had fought on the Third Crusade; his great-grandfather, Louis VII, took part in the Second Crusade; and his great-great-uncle, Hugh of Vermandois, was a senior figure on the First Crusade. It was inevitable that Louis responded to the weight of this immense crusading tradition.

Louis knew that it would cost a fortune to recover Jerusalem, and to gather the requisite funding he drew upon his kingdom’s increasingly advanced administration. For the first time in crusading history we have a reasonably full set of accounts for an expedition, and we learn that it cost a total of 1.5 million livres.
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The crown had an income of 250,000 livres per annum, with most of that taken up by ongoing expenses such as warfare, building projects, and subsistence; some economies could be made but clearly extra funding would be needed. Louis turned to the towns and cities of his realm to raise 250,000 livres; the sums extracted varied: Paris gave 10,000 livres, the tiny settlement of Bonnevaux four livres, yet the point is clear—everyone, no matter how great or small, contributed. The king also pressured the French Church into providing a tenth of the revenue from its benefices, although the monastic orders claimed exemption. In spite of their grumbling the clergy eventually yielded 1 million livres over the course of the expedition, two-thirds of the total cost.

Louis was concerned to gain God’s favor and he endeavored to create an appropriate moral climate for his crusade; thus he sent out enquêteurs to resolve complaints against baillis (royal officials). The results were startling: between 1247 and 1249 the eighteen bailliages changed hands twenty times to mark a thorough purge of the corrupt. Aside from ending possible causes of disquiet, such a process demonstrated the king’s interest in his people’s welfare and also increased the efficiency of his administration.

Louis and his advisers tried to learn from the failure of previous crusading expeditions and noted that a breakdown in food provision had been a recurrent problem. While there were practical limits as to what was possible, some useful measures were feasible. With the capture of Cyprus in 1191 a safe forward base was available for westerners who planned to campaign
in the East. The French sent huge supplies of grain and wine ahead: “along the shore his people had laid out large stacks of wine barrels that had been bought two years before his [Louis’s] arrival. They had been placed one on top of another so that when they were seen from the front they had the appearance of barns. The wheat and grain had been heaped in piles . . . rain that had fallen on the grain . . . made the outermost layer sprout so that all that could be seen was green grass . . . [but underneath] the wheat and barley were as fresh as if they had just been threshed.”
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The French monarch had to set his affairs in order; most importantly, he made peace with Henry III of England to prevent an invasion during his absence. Louis’s choice of regent was easy; the natural candidate was his formidable mother, Blanche of Castile. Blanche had already managed to overcome the perceived handicaps of being both foreign and female to govern on Louis’s behalf during his minority. So controlling was Blanche that she conceded little authority to her son until he was twenty-one, even though the age of majority was more usually fifteen. She is said to have disapproved of the king’s affection for his young wife, Queen Margaret. At the royal castle of Pontoise the couple’s bedrooms were in a tower, one above the other, but connected by a narrow staircase as well as the main flight of steps. If Blanche appeared unannounced, servants were to knock on the door and the couple could separate quickly and use the back staircase to avoid a scene. Once the coast was clear they might rejoin one another with ease.
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The arrival of eleven royal offspring indicates that their strategy succeeded. It has been suggested, perhaps a touch mischievously, that Louis went on crusade to escape from his mother. When, many years later, Blanche died, the news was broken to the queen thus: “The woman who hated you most is dead.”
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As usual with the launch of a crusade, special spiritual preparations took place as well. Probably the most tangible manifestation of Louis’s piety was (and remains) the beautiful, if restored, Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Constructed between 1242 and 1247, it displays a dazzling combination of architectural brilliance and religious devotion.
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It was built on two levels, the lower floor for servants, the upper, a nonpareil reliquary for the religious and political hierarchy of France. In 1238 Louis had acquired the Crown of Thorns, worn by Christ during the crucifixion, pieces of the True Cross, the holy sponge and fragments of the Holy Lance, all purchased from the penniless Latin emperor of Constantinople. Given the momentous significance
of such items Louis deemed it proper to create a monument of appropriate splendor to house them, and he commissioned a building that blended beautiful colored glass, dizzying vertical lines, frescoes, sculpture, and metalwork. Sainte-Chapelle also emphasized Louis’s role as a king in the biblical tradition, the legitimate heir to David and Solomon in the Holy Land. The relics themselves were placed within a structure of precious metals and gems. A fourteenth-century poet wrote:

We have a superb insight into Louis’s personality through the account of John of Joinville, who, as he never tires from telling his reader, was a reasonably close companion of the king. He was also a man saturated in the chivalric and literary ideals of the age and his lively, gossipy style and acute observations constitute probably the most readable crusader narrative of all.
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His writing was a product of the highly literate courtly culture of the county of Champagne, and there are moments when it takes very little effort to imagine an aging Joinville (he lived to be ninety-two) sitting in front of a roaring fire, surrounded by young knights and squires, telling them (again and again) of his heroic deeds on the Nile. In Joinville we can see a vivid blend of the pilgrim and the holy warrior along with the status-conscious, honor-bound, secular knight.

Joinville offered his own version of the heartbreaking moment shared by all crusaders when, aged twenty-one, he had to set out for the Holy Land. In the period prior to his departure he had called together his household and, on a smaller scale than Louis’s
enquête
, resolved any outstanding disputes. He went to Metz and mortgaged the greater part of his lands, perhaps to one of the Jewish moneylenders in the city. Then, before the hardships of the voyage began, he organized several days of feasting. Finally came the day to leave; Joinville neatly captured the gnawing emotions of departure: “I did not want to cast my eyes backwards towards Joinville at all, fearful that my
heart would melt for the fine castle and the two children I was leaving behind.”
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The startling omission of his wife may (just about) be explained by the fact that by the time he wrote this section of the work in the 1270s there was a second Madame Joinville (the first had died in 1260) and the author may have felt it inappropriate to include too emotional a tribute to the previous incumbent. On his way out of Champagne he also made a short pilgrimage—on foot, in his shirt and with legs bare—to local family shrines where he prayed for divine aid and was given relics and precious objects to help him on his journey. For Joinville at least, a pilgrim’s devotion, so important to the First Crusaders over 150 years previously, formed a significant aspect of his own motivation as a crusader.

Louis’s army numbered 2,500 knights, 5,000 squires and sergeants, 5,000 crossbowmen, 10,000 foot soldiers, and 7,000 to 8,000 horses. Special vessels were constructed to transport the horses and Joinville was impressed when his animals were led through a door on the side of the boat and down into the hold; the entrance was then carefully sealed because when the ship was fully loaded and underway it would be below the waterline.
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The king reached Cyprus in September 1248 although he needed to wait for the myriad of other French contingents to arrive. The stay over the winter was not a happy one; 250 knights died of illness; thus one-tenth of the prime fighting force was eliminated before it had seen action. Egypt was, again, to be the target for the crusade. The familiar strategic arguments remained valid—as Ibn Wasil, a contemporary Muslim writer, commented, Louis “was a devoted adherent to the Christian faith and so his spirit told him that he should recover Jerusalem for the Franks . . . but he knew that he would achieve this only by conquering Egypt.”
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A document said to be the last testament of Sultan Ayyub confirmed this point even more plainly: “Know, my son, that Egypt is the seat of the empire and from it you can defy all other monarchs: if you hold it, you hold the entire East and they will mint coins and recite the khutba in your name.”
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The Seventh Crusade already had one stroke of good fortune: Sultan Ayyub was suffering from a debilitating illness and the political situation in Cairo became increasingly tense as people positioned themselves for the
succession. Among the most important of the factions to emerge were the Bahri Mamluks, a group created by Ayyub to be his fighting elite. The Muslim rulers had long purchased slaves from central Asia or the Crimea for their armies, and Ayyub decided to separate the most promising of them and sent them to the island of al-Rawda in the Nile (Bahr al-Nil may explain their name Bahri) where they converted to Islam, lived in barracks, and trained exceptionally hard. Conversion aside, in these other respects they bore some similarities to the Christian Military Orders. After completing their training they were emancipated and came to form the sultan’s military household.

Bad weather and the need to fabricate special landing craft meant the French ships could not set sail from Cyprus until May 1249. Just like the Fifth Crusade they headed for the northern Egyptian port of Damietta. A terrible storm scattered the boats and it took a while to regroup; it was only on June 5 that Louis prepared to land. As the vessels grounded, a detachment of Muslims charged the Christians but a volley of crossbow fire forced them back. The crusaders poured onto the beach, headed by the standard of Saint Denis, the patron saint of France. The king saw the flag ahead of him and leaped into the water up to his armpits, determined to follow the emblem of his sovereignty; truly this was a French, royal crusade. The invaders pursued the fleeing Muslims and their commander, Fakhr al-Din (whom we met as an ambassador to Frederick II), simply fled. Ayyub was furious because some Muslim writers judged the city to have been so well provisioned that it could have held out for two years if properly defended. Thus the crusaders walked into Damietta—something they could scarcely believe was possible given that their predecessors on the Fifth Crusade (who included men such as Joinville’s father) had spent eighteen months outside it. The Muslim world was appalled: “It was a disaster without precedent . . . there was great grief and amazement, and despair fell on the whole of Egypt, the more so because the sultan was ill, too weak to move, and without the strength to control his army, which was trying to impose its will on him instead.”
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In one sense this unexpected turn of events completely baffled the crusaders; nowhere in their plans had they catered for the prospect of an immediate victory—what should they do next? A council of the French nobles gathered; the options were either Alexandria or Cairo. The former was the preeminent commercial port of the Mediterranean and could act as an assembly
point for crusader forces before they headed up the Nile. The alternative was to go straight to Cairo (or Babylon as it was often known) via Mansourah, just as the Fifth Crusaders had tried. The arguments swung to and fro with most favoring Alexandria; finally, however, one of Louis’s brothers, Count Robert of Artois, pressed the case for Cairo: “to kill the serpent, first you must crush the head.”
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This pithy strategic metaphor won the day and the assembly resolved to head southward. First, however, they decided to wait for the arrival of another royal brother, Alphonse of Poitiers. More seriously, they were worried by the annual Nile flood because it was only a month before the river would begin to rise. It is possible that had the crusaders simply pressed on after taking Damietta they could have gotten ahead of the flood, crossed the sections of the Nile that caused them such problems later on, and exploited Ayyub’s frailty to devastating effect, yet—fatally—they were much more cautious.