by Robert Payne
While they were marching on Jaffa, Peter of Dreux, Count of Brittany, learned from a spy that a rich caravan was moving up the Jordan Valley toward Damascus. Included in the caravan was a great herd of cattle and sheep intended to provision Damascus in the event of a Crusader attack, which as-Salih Ismail had been expecting for some time. The count of Brittany decided that the herd could be put to better use by the Crusaders. Without asking permission of the king of Navarre, he detached about two hundred knights from the main army to form a raiding party. He rode off into the hills the same evening, and at dawn found himself close to the castle where the caravan, which was well guarded by bowmen and cavalry, had camped for the night. The spy had given the count of Brittany an accurate report of the castle and the approach roads, and it was therefore possible to set up an ambush. One of the approach roads entered a narrow defile, and the count hoped that the caravan would pass through the defile. He divided his troops, posted himself in the defile, and gave Ralph of Nesles command of the alternate road. What was certain was that the caravan would have to pass along one of those roads.
The caravan came along the road that led to the defile, and here the count of Brittany pounced upon it. There was some savage hand-to-hand fighting, during which the count of Brittany was nearly killed. The bowmen were too close to the Crusading knights to be able to discharge their arrows, and the knights were always at their best in close combat. There were probably fewer than three hundred men in the raiding party, and only half of these were attacking in the defile. The horn was sounded. Ralph of Nesles brought up his troops in time to decide the battle. The enemy fled to the castle, pursued by the knights, who seized the herds of cattle and sheep, killed many of the defenders, and made others captive. For the rest of the day, and for two more days, the Crusaders guarded the herds on the way to Jaffa.
Meanwhile the king of Navarre learned that the sultan of Egypt had sent an army to Gaza. Al-Adil II was not witless; he had large armies and was prepared to use them; and he was well aware of the threat posed by the king’s arrival in the Holy Land. Some of the knights, dazzled by the success of the count of Brittany’s raiding party, began to think of a raid on Gaza. Hugh IV, Duke of Burgundy, was one of those who favored the raid, and his standing among the knights was almost as high as that of the king of Navarre. When the ever-cautious king of Navarre discovered this plan, he objected strongly. So did the Templars and Hospitallers. But it appeared that there were only a thousand enemy troops at Gaza and, according to the conspirators, it would be easy to overwhelm them. Let them go forward, attack Gaza, and if the signs were propitous, march into Egypt. The king of Navarre insisted that the army should move forward as a single unit. The count of Brittany and the heads of the military orders protested just as strenuously. The king reminded them that they had all taken an oath to obey him as their military leader. They were rebellious and refused to listen.
The rebels rode off with Count Henry of Bar in command. The king held a council of war, where it was decided that at first light the main army would march south in the hope that they would be able to protect these foolhardy knights.
From Jaffa the rebels rode all night, swept past Ascalon, reached the brook that formed the frontier of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, crossed it, and continued along the coast in the direction of Gaza. It was a bright moonlit night, very beautiful, and every shrub or tree stood out clearly among the shimmering sand dunes. They took no precautions at all. They spread cloths on the sand and sat down for supper, while others slept and still others groomed their horses. They had sent out no patrols and they were totally unaware that they were being watched at every moment. Suddenly there was an uproar. The Egyptian army came out above the dunes, bowmen and slingers shouting at the top of their voices.
Even then it was possible to make decisions. Gauthier of Brienne and the duke of Burgundy believed they could still fight their way back to Ascalon. Count Henry of Bar and Amaury of Montfort argued that they must stand firm, because only the cavalry could escape and they had no intention of abandoning the foot soldiers. Gauthier of Brienne and the duke of Burgundy and a small handful of knights slipped away. The rest fought under appalling conditions. There were wild skirmishes in the sand. Count Henry used his bowmen well, but they were no match for the enemy. Amaury of Montfort saw a steep passage between two dunes where he thought he could take shelter from the enemy bowmen. He threw his cavalry into the passage defended by Egyptian infantry. The cavalry cut down most of the infantry, but at the other end of the passage the Egyptian cavalry was waiting for them. The Egyptian cavalry then performed a classic maneuver. They fled, with the Frankish knights in full pursuit. Then the Egyptians blocked the passage with their infantry, and their cavalry swung around and charged the knights.
This was the end of the battle of the dunes. For miles around the sands were strewn with the dead. Count Henry of Bar was killed, Amaury of Montfort was taken prisoner, and eighty knights were captured. Altogether twelve hundred Crusaders were killed and half as many were taken prisoner.
There was madness in the moonlit battle, and when the king of Navarre reached Ascalon and met Gauthier of Brienne and the duke of Burgundy, he quickly became aware that everything had happened as he thought it might—a disaster that was totally senseless and totally explicable.
At Ascalon he held a council of war which ended in tentative decisions: to advance, to retreat, to wait for more information? What happened, perhaps inevitably, was that they did all these things. Finally the king decided to advance across the brook in order to help the scattered fugitives. Then he advanced deeper to see the battlefield and to make contact with the enemy, and when the enemy pulled back, the king’s forces withdrew all the way back to Acre. The king himself was inclined to attack Gaza, but the Templars and Hospitallers pointed out sensibly that the enemy would probably cut the throats of all the prisoners if they did so. The prisoners had become hostages for the good behavior of the king’s army.
It has been suggested that the king of Navarre had no reason to retreat to Acre, and it might have been better if he had strengthened the fortifications of Ascalon, or captured Gaza, or made one last effort to take possession of Jerusalem. The Rothelin manuscript, a document that details these events, describes the misery of the people as they watched the great cavalcade on its way back to Acre. “In all the places they passed through there was great weeping and great crying out because so many great Christians were returning after having accomplished nothing at all.” It was precisely because of this sense of futility that they returned to Acre, the largest and most powerful city belonging to the Crusaders.
There was also another reason for returning to Acre. The interminable wars between Damascus and Cairo were about to begin again with undiminished fury. As-Salih Ayub had taken refuge in Kerak with al-Nasir Daud, King of Transjordania. His uncle, as-Salih Ismail, had Damascus completely under his control. Suddenly in May 1240, with the assassination of al-Adil II and the return of as-Salih Ayub to the Egyptian throne with the help of the king of Transjordania, it was clear that there would be a fight to the death between uncle and nephew. By moving back to Acre, the king of Navarre was placing himself at an equal psychological distance from Cairo and Damascus so that he could bargain with both of them, extract concessions from them, and perhaps arbitrate between them.
The political map of the Saracenic Near East at this time showed remarkable fragmentation. Between Damascus and Cairo there were about a dozen principalities. Some were at war with one another; others were searching for allies; still others were quite capable of abandoning their alliances at a moment’s notice. In this way it happened that Muzaffar, Prince of Hama, having fought a border war with the prince of Aleppo, sent an ambassador to Acre, promising that, in exchange for help against Aleppo, he would give the use of his castles to the Christians and all his people would become Christians. The prince of Hama wanted the King of Navarre to send troops to his aid, or at least to make a show of force. The King of Navarre led his
troops northward along the coastal road to Tripoli, and he seems to have intimidated the prince of Aleppo. Although the prince of Hama reneged on his promise to let the Crusaders use his castles and convert his subjects, there were indications that more useful alliances would soon be formed.
A few weeks later, when the king of Navarre’s army was encamped at Sephoria in the Galilee, an ambassador arrived from as-Salih Ismail of Damascus with an offer to surrender the castles of Belfort, Tiberias, and Safed, and large areas of the Galilee and the hinterland of Sidon, in exchange for an agreement that the Christians would make no truce with Egypt and that they would defend Jaffa and Ascalon against the Egyptian forces. The king of Navarre agreed to these terms, and marched to Jaffa, where, strangely enough, his army was met by a large detachment of the army of Damascus.
What happened at Jaffa has never been satisfactorily explained. The army of Damascus seems to have melted away after some desultory fighting with the Crusaders, who had meanwhile occupied most of the Galilee and its powerful fortresses. Then as-Salih Ayub, now sultan of Egypt, sent an embassy to win the Franks over to him, with an offer to release all the prisoners taken in the moonlit battle at Gaza and to confirm that the Crusaders had possession of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Like Frederick II, the king of Navarre had accomplished by diplomacy what he had failed to accomplish by force of arms. The Kingdom of Jerusalem had been restored to its historical limits, except for the regions around Nablus and Hebron. The king had accomplished his purpose. He rode to Jerusalem to pay his respects to the tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and then returned to Acre for a last meeting with the barons before sailing back to Spain. Somewhere in the Mediterranean, his small fleet would pass the much larger fleet of Richard, Earl of Cornwall and brother of King Henry III of England, who would take the king of Navarre’s place as the acknowledged leader of the continuous Crusade.
Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was one of those curious men who go through life wearing great titles they can never live up to. His uncle was Richard the Lion Heart; his father the lackluster King John; his mother Isabelle of Angoulême, who after her husband’s death married Hugh of Lusignan, Prince of the Galilee; his sister, another Isabelle, was married to the Emperor Frederick. He therefore had wide family connections with the Holy Land, and since he came as a kind of royal legate on behalf of his brother, King Henry III of England, he seemed to be invested with kingly power and the barons of Jerusalem accepted him as they had accepted the king of Navarre.
He was intelligent and affable, and he had very few illusions about the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In one of his letters home he wrote, “In the Holy Land peace has been replaced by discord, unity by division, concord by civic loathing. The two fraternal orders, although they were brought into being in defence of their common mother, are swollen with pride because they have an excess of wealth, and they quarrel mercilessly in her breast.” Apparently the relations between the Hospitallers and the Templars were strained to the breaking point. The Hospitallers were concentrated at Acre, the Templars at Jaffa. The Hospitallers favored Egypt, while the Templars were in alliance with Damascus. Richard, who had brought eight hundred knights with him, represented a third force, which held the balance of power.
November saw a turning point. Richard threw in his lot with the Hospitallers and came to an understanding with Sultan as-Salih Ayub of Egypt, who confirmed the agreements reached with the king of Navarre. There was a brief period of euphoria. It seemed that the kingdom was secure and that all the disruptive forces might be held in check. Richard was the balance wheel. For a few months he represented the power and might of the Crusader army, the more powerful because it was in alliance with Egypt.
Actually it was Frederick II who was acting behind the scenes, although Richard became the beneficiary. During that winter, Frederick sent two ambassadors to as-Salih Ayub. They came with a retinue of a hundred men, laden with expensive gifts for the sultan. This embassy was greeted as no other embassy had ever been greeted before. The sultan ordered that everyone in Cairo should welcome the ambassadors and their retinue, who were given Nubian horses from the sultan’s own stables. The streets and the public buildings were illuminated. There were parades and audiences and celebrations, and the sultan spoke kindly to the ambassadors and their retinue, lodged them in his palaces, and gave them mountains of gifts. The members of the embassy were invited to go on hunting expeditions, to practice with their crossbows, to amuse themselves as they pleased. Winter is always the best time of the year in Cairo, and as-Salih Ayub seemed determined to impress Frederick with his liberality and generosity in a good season.
Richard, well aware of the success of the embassy, seems to have felt that his services were no longer needed. He fortified Ascalon, did his best to resolve the quarrels of the barons, and in May 1241 he returned to England, taking his knights with him.
With the balance wheel gone, the barons of Jerusalem leaped at each other’s throats: The Templars fought the Hospitallers, there were murderous raids by the Templars into the territory of al-Nasir Daud, and by the Hospitallers against Aleppo; Richard Filanghieri, the imperial viceroy, was thrown out of Tyre by a consortium of barons, who were incensed when he attempted to organize a coup d’état in Acre. Balian of Ibelin was emerging as the chief of the barons. Neither King Conrad, who reached the age of fifteen in 1243, nor the aging John of Brienne were able to exercise kingship in the Holy Land, and the barons decided that the title Queen of Jerusalem should be granted to Queen Alix of Cyprus, who became regent. The barons were in the ascendant, with no king of Navarre or earl of Cornwall to curb their recklessness, their stupidity, or their avarice. Each was prepared to defend his own property against all comers. The Kingdom of Jerusalem scarcely existed, there was only the sum of its parts.
If the barons had been united under a war leader of proven excellence—another Godfrey, another Leper King, another Richard the Lion Heart—it would have made very little difference during the days that followed the departure of the earl of Cornwall. The forces confronting the kingdom were vast and incalculable, and even the Templars, with their network of spies and secret agents in Damascus and Cairo, could not measure the extent of the horrors about to be visited on them.
In June 1244, the Khwarismian horsemen swept out of the Hauran, invaded the Galilee, captured Tiberias, put all the Christians to the sword, and then swung toward Nablus and Jerusalem. This long column, more than ten thousand strong, had crossed the Euphrates in boats made of animal skins earlier in the year. They had been summoned by Syltan as-Salih Ayub, who wanted them to create havoc in their southward march, join the Egyptian army at Gaza, and then march north against the Christians along the seacoast and east against Damascus. With the help of the Khwarismians, he hoped to destroy both the Christians and the armies of his uncle, as-Salih Ismail.
The Khwarismians were mercenaries, out for plunder, living off the land. They wore wolfskins and sheepskins; they survived on boiled herbs, water, milk, and a little meat. They were admirable bowmen, skilled lancers; they were quick, with their short hunting knives, at cutting throats. They brought their women and children with them, and the women fought beside the men. They sacked Tiberias and Nablus, but these were small towns. Jerusalem was not so easily sacked by wild tribesmen.
The Christians had been slow to realize the danger. Robert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, now hurried to the holy city with the masters of the Temple and the Hospital, hoping there was time to put the defenses in order. Part of the Christian population was evacuated. Then, on July 11, 1244, the Khwarismians broke into the city, murdering and plundering as they raced through the narrow streets. They reached the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, desecrated the tombs of the kings of Jerusalem, and cut the throats of the priests who were celebrating mass at the high altar. They opened the graves of the kings, searching for treasure; they found only bones, which they threw into a fire. But the garrison held out for a few weeks. The Crusaders made a surprisingly vigorous defense,
and they did not surrender until August 23. The Khwarismians then offered to let the Christians go free. About eight thousand survivors of six weeks of murder and pillage took the road to Jaffa.
They had gone only a little way down the road when they looked back and saw Frankish flags waving on the walls. Thinking that Jerusalem had somehow been recaptured by the knights, they turned back, only to fall into an ambush carefully laid by the Khwarismians, who had had second thoughts about letting the Christians go free. They amused themselves with another massacre. The Arab tribesmen in the neighborhood smelled blood. The Christians who survived the massacre were hunted down by the tribesmen and killed. Only three hundred survivors, out of the eight thousand, reached Jaffa.
In this way Jerusalem fell finally and completely into the hands of the Muslims. Except for an anomalous six-month period in 1300, 673 years would pass before a Christian army would enter the city again. On December 9, 1917, the Turks surrendered the city to General Sir Edmund Allenby.
The Khwarismian invasion brought about changes in the fragile system of alliances. The barons threw in their lot with Damascus; the king of Transjordania and the prince of Hims joined the Christians; the Templars and the Hospitallers seemed to bury their quarrels. When the prince of Hims arrived in Acre, he was welcomed with enthusiasm and jubilation; cloths of gold, silks, and carpets were spread out before him wherever he walked or rode through the city. He was known to be an excellent soldier and a master of diplomacy; and he liked and understood the Christians.