by Robert Payne
So many of the knights died that the grooms wore their armor and stood guard at points of danger; and so many priests died that there were not enough of them to minister at the altars. The king himself fell ill. He sent Philip of Montfort to the sultan, offering to surrender Damietta to the Egyptians in exchange for Jerusalem and other places in the Holy Land that had recently fallen into Muslim hands. It was an offer that was too late by two months, for the Egyptians knew that he was in a hopeless position and that his whole army was at their mercy.
On April 5, the king at last gave the order for the retreat to Damietta. The Egyptians were on the alert. They attacked the Christians on all sides, massacring the defenseless, killing the knights weakened by pestilence, making prisoners of those who might be expected to pay heavy ransoms. They claimed afterward that they killed or captured fifty thousand men. The king escaped only because Geoffrey of Sargines, in charge of the bodyguard, succeeded in leading him to an abandoned village. Now very ill, the king lay in one of the village huts, while the chief of his bodyguard kept watch on horseback, charging along the village street at any Saracen who dared to show himself. The king was alone in the hut, and Geoffrey of Sargines was alone in the street: and those two lonely men symbolized the strange alteration that had come upon the great army that set out from Damietta.
A few days later, the king surrendered. At about this time disaster also struck the young Sultan Turanshah. He was weak and self-indulgent; he was afraid of Baibars’s Mamelukes, who had all the important positions in the army, and he was in the process of reorganizing the army and giving high commands to soldiers from the Jezireh when Baibars struck at him. On the night of May 2, while he was entertaining emirs in his tent, he heard a commotion outside, and a moment later Baibars burst into the tent at the head of a small group of army officers. Wounded in the hand, the sultan escaped to a wooden tower beside the river. Some of the emirs came with him.
Baibars and his fellow conspirators followed. Greek fire was hurled at the tower, which burst into flame. Turanshah jumped down and ran along the riverbank, until someone hurled a spear, which caught him in the ribs. Trailing the spear, he threw himself into the river, and the conspirators went swimming after him, while bowmen fired arrows at him. He was already dying when Baibars himself leaped down the bank and plunged a sword into him. The Arab historians who describe the event observed that he died three deaths: by fire, by iron, and by water.
The strange thing was that the death of Sultan Turanshah was observed by John of Joinville and by King Louis, who were being held on a galley moored in the river. A few minutes later a Mameluke general, Faris ad-Din Octai, came on board the galley, his hand blood-stained, for he had just cut out the sultan’s heart. Addressing himself to King Louis, he said, “What will you give me? For I have slain your enemy who, had he lived, would have slain you.” The king answered with a long silence.
A little while later some thirty Mamelukes came on board the galley, drawn swords in their hands and Danish axes hanging from their necks. The prisoners imagined they would be put to death. Instead, they were thrown into the hold where they were packed in tightly.
The next morning most of the prisoners, all of them knights or great officers of state, were released in order to discuss the terms of an armistice. Before King Louis would agree to the treaty, a good deal of time was spent in wrangling about the nature of the oath to be sworn by the Egyptian emirs. It was necessary that the oath should be binding on the Egyptians, and with the help of Nicholas of Acre a curious diplomatic formula was decided upon. The emirs agreed that they would carry out the terms of the armistice or they would be as dishonored as a Muslim who eats swine’s flesh, or goes uncovered on a pilgrimage to Mecca, or leaves his wife and then comes back to her again, for according to Muslim law such a man may not return to his wife unless he has seen her in another man’s arms.
When the terms were arranged to the satisfaction of the emirs, it was agreed that Damietta should be surrendered to the Egyptians and that the Christians should pay 400,000 livres tournois as an indemnity, half to be paid in Damietta, and half when the king reached Acre. The French for their part would receive all their siege engines and all their supplies of salted pork and their ships; the prisoners would be restored to them; and they in turn would surrender the few prisoners in their power. The king asked for Jerusalem in exchange for Damietta, which was held by a small garrison force aided by Genoese and Pisan sailors. Characteristically, the king refused to swear an oath. The Egyptians were incensed, and to punish the king they tortured the patriarch of Jerusalem by tying him to a post and binding his wrists in such a fashion that his hands swelled to the size of his face. The eighty-year-old patriarch faced the ordeal bravely, and at last they untied him and let him go free.
The torturing of the patriarch in front of the king was idle malice, for the Egyptians knew that the king would not change his mind. They were half in awe of him, and they considered giving him Jerusalem. There were even some who thought that, if he were converted to Islam, he would be a worthy sultan of Egypt. All through those confused negotiations we are aware of the king’s calm decisiveness, his passionate self-abnegation.
He had cause for self-abnegation, for he knew that the disaster at Man-sourah was due to his own follies, and most especially to his caution, the long weeks and months during which he ordered the army to stay put in Cyprus, in Damietta, and outside the walls of Mansourah. Because of him, perhaps fifty thousand men had died of pestilence or were butchered on the battlefield. A vast treasure had been squandered, and a huge ransom was being paid, equal to the entire yearly revenue of the king of France. The worst was the carnage: the canals swollen with the dead, the fields carpeted with the dying. None of this would have happened if he had been a better soldier. He found consolation in the thought that the dead would be received in heaven by a merciful God, but there were times when he fell into long fits of depression.
He was wretchedly ill, sometimes he had to be carried about by a servant, and for a while, until someone gave him a rough gown to hide his nakedness, he had no clothes. Later the Egyptians gave him a gown of silk and miniver, so that he could attend the meetings of the armistice commissioners in proper attire.
Damietta was surrendered to the Egyptians. There was no difficulty in raising half the ransom money, but the king’s brother, Alfonso, Count of Poitou, had to remain at Damietta as surety for the remaining half of the ransom, which was to be paid in Acre. When at last, early in May 1250, the king and his retinue of knights sailed for Acre, he was carried on board the galley on the same mattress he had used in prison. He was still very ill, but the sea air seemed to revive him. Once, while on shipboard, he saw some knights gambling at backgammon; he was so angry that he threw the board into the sea and gave the knights a sermon on the sin of gambling on a Crusade.
The king, of course, was the greatest gambler of them all. He had gambled with human lives on a prodigious scale, recklessly and imprudently, with little understanding of the enemy or of the geography of the Nile Delta. His monumental ignorance of the enemy and the enemy’s land was fatal to his cause, and in his own way he contributed to the final defeat of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
Scorn for his misbegotten endeavors imbues this ironic Arab poem:
May God reward you for having brought to death the adorers of Jesus the Messiah.
You came to Egypt with the idea of conquering this kingdom,
And you believed you would meet here only hautboys and cymbals,
But instead by your imprudence you have led your men to the gate of death!
Fifty thousand men, and there is not one of them who is not dead, wounded, or in prison
God be merciful to you for such an enterprise!
St. Louis in Acre
HOW many defeats could the Crusaders withstand? It was as though a curse lay upon them, as though in some mysterious way they found themselves attracted to disaster, like men desperate to destroy themselves. Hattin, La Forbie
, and Mansourah were calamities of the first magnitude, and all of them could have been averted with a little common sense or with a fourteen-year-old boy’s knowledge of warfare. The Christian commanders were astonishingly ignorant, inept, and careless; they rarely looked at maps; they underestimated the strength of their enemies; while the knights were well cared for, they paid little attention to the provisioning of the foot soldiers; they allowed the enemy to choose the battleground. Into these death traps the Crusaders fell in the thousands.
Nor was it difficult to discover why they acted so precipitately, so unheedingly. They despised the Saracens, knew very little about them, believed that God was on their side, and were quite certain that their civilization was far superior to the civilization of the Arabs at a time when it would have been clear to a visitor from another planet that Arab civilization was in the ascendant. In the sciences, philosophy, theology, medicine, and poetry, the Arabs were far more advanced than the West. They knew where they were going; they had a social system which, in spite of its authoritarian character, was remarkably responsive to the wishes of the people. Their society was stable, while Western society was in flux, the feudal state giving place to the nation state, the cities dissolving into communes, the state itself dissolving into its commercial allegiances. The West was changing at a dizzy pace, but the East was changeless.
The Crusaders were, by their very nature, the inhabitants of a theocracy. If the theocracy sometimes took the form of the government of Acre, part princedom, part commune, part colony, this was because its ultimate ruler was the pope, who understood very little about its inner mechanisms; and even if they had been explained to him, he would not have understood them. Acre was in a state of perpetual civil war, with the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians at each other’s throats. Even when they were not fighting one another with weapons, they hated each other so vigorously that they were rarely capable of coming to any agreement.
When King Louis IX arrived in Acre, the people, having seen his flag flying from the mast, came down to the sea in procession to meet him. The clergy led the procession, the church bells pealed, and in the churches candles were lit for his safe arrival. Once more there was a king in Acre, and once more the business of the Crusades could go on.
At first, he seems to have had no intention of remaining in the Holy Land for any length of time. His mother was beseeching him to return to France; France and England were at loggerheads and war seemed imminent; people in France were protesting against the tithes spent on the upkeep of the Holy Land; and the queen was even sterner than her son, the king. He was needed in Paris, but he was also, as he saw clearly, needed in Acre. “If I depart,” he told his councillors, “this land is lost, for all those who are in Acre will follow after me, none daring to remain when the people are so few.” This was not a boast; it was the truth. By kingly power he could hold what was left of the kingdom together; without that power, the kingdom was almost certainly doomed.
He allowed his councillors eight days in which to come to their conclusions. When they met the king in council, nearly all of them agreed that he should return to France because the people were so few that it would be necessary to recruit another army in order to hold the Holy Land, even the little cliff-edge of it that remained. Only a few councillors, including the chronicler John of Joinville, thought he had a bounden duty to remain. There was another meeting eight days later, and the king announced that he was staying indefinitely, as long as he could be useful.
He felt responsible for the men who were still in captivity in Egypt; he felt a greater responsibility for Jerusalem, which he hoped, in spite of the defeat at Mansourah, to reclaim for the Christians; and he felt that perhaps his greatest responsibility was to strengthen those fortresses that still remained in Christian hands, so that the kingdom could endure. Repairing and building fortresses became his constant preoccupation: and so at Acre, Jaffa, Caesarea, and Sidon he could be seen mingling with the masons, carrying stones and baskets full of quicklime. The Saracens were making frequent forays near Acre, and he took part in repulsing them.
He was war leader, chief justice, prince, and gravedigger. He regarded himself as the only person allowed to make treaties, and when the master of the Temple made an agreement with the sultan of Damascus about some land on the borders of the kingdom, he was incensed because he had not been consulted. The sultan’s ambassador was invited to the king’s tent, the treaty was given back to him unsigned, and he was then invited to watch a long procession of Templars, headed by the master, all of them barefoot, their heads bowed in penitence. Thereafter, the sultan of Damascus knew who signed treaties.
While he was in Acre the king entertained envoys from the Old Man of the Mountain, who still maintained the stronghold at Masyaf, and still sent out Assassins to murder kings. Indeed the murdering of kings was one of his major occupations. He had a long Danish ax, the haft silver-plated with many knives affixed to it, which would, on ceremonial occasions, be carried before him by a herald, and everyone would know that those were the knives the Assassins had used when they struck down kings.
Louis was prepared to receive envoys from Masyaf: such receptions were dangerous, but it was also dangerous not to receive them. There were three members of the embassy. First, there was the ambassador, a man of high position. Behind him was a young man who held in one hand a knife that consisted of three knives, two of the blades being inserted in the handles of other knives. This three-bladed knife was an offering signifying defiance in the event that the king refused to accede to their demands. A third youth carried a winding sheet of coarse linen cloth wrapped around his arm; this, too, was intended as a present for the king if he disobeyed the orders of the Old Man of the Mountain. The Assassins went to some pains to cultivate terror.
The king had cautiously arranged that the ambassador should sit immediately below his throne, with the youths sitting behind the ambassador. He knew the reputation of the Old Man of the Mountain and was taking no chances.
The ambassador began by asking the king whether he knew the Old Man of the Mountain. The king replied that he had heard of him but had never met him.
“Well then,” said the ambassador, “since you have heard of him, I marvel greatly that you have not sent him such gifts as would assure his friendship. The Emperor of Germany, the King of Hungary, the Sultan of Egypt, and all the rest, send gifts to him every year. They know very well that they live out their lives only at my lord’s pleasure. And if it does not please you to do this, then at least acquit him of the tribute he has to pay to the Hospitallers and the Templars, and he will be quits with you.”
The king was infuriated by the conduct of the ambassador and by the fact that he had brought the two aides bearing the symbolic instruments of murder and death. Nevertheless, the king kept his temper. He told them he would see them in the afternoon, after he had given some thought to the matter.
In the afternoon he met them again, and this time both the master of the Temple and the master of the Hospital were in attendance on the king, standing beside his throne. The ambassador repeated what he had said earlier in the day. The two masters were incensed. They told the ambassador that if it were not for the king’s honorable intentions in receiving them, they would be thrown into the sea outside Acre. Instead they were to be sent back to the Old Man of the Mountain, from whom they must return within fifteen days with suitable letters and jewels to be offered to the king in order to appease him. The king rejected the threats implied in the three-bladed knife and the winding sheet, and wanted something better.
The ambassador returned within fifteen days. We hear no more about the two youths. This time he came with more suitable offerings: the Old Man’s shirt—“This has been closest to me, and therefore I present it to you,” and a gold ring of very fine workmanship bearing his name—“With this ring I espouse you, and we shall be one.” In addition there were many jewels, crystal animals and fruit, and various table games. All these presents were heavily scented with
ambergris tied to them with fine gold thread. The king, in return, sent the Old Man of the Mountain a chest full of jewels, rolls of scarlet cloth, horse snaffles of silver, and cups of gold.
In this way, the French king who was to become a saint formed an alliance with the murderous Old Man of the Mountain, whose real name was Najm ad-Din. It was a strange confrontation.
The king was intrigued by the character of the prince of the Assassins. He sent his own interpreter, Yves le Breton, to stay at Masyaf, and to report on the beliefs and political prospects of the strange community living on top of the mountain.
The report is lost, but Joinville was able to obtain some portions of it or he remembered what Yves le Breton told him. Joinville knew the interpreter well and had a high regard for him. He belonged to the Order of the Preaching Brothers. His task was to convert the Saracens to the Christian faith, and for this purpose he spoke Arabic. He was one of the few Christians who had any interest in Islam. Yves le Breton told Joinville one day about his encounter with an old woman who wandered down the street with a dish full of fire in her right hand and a bowl full of water in her left hand. “What are you doing with these things?” he asked her. She answered that with the fire she would burn up Paradise until nothing remained of it, and with the water she would put out the fires of Hell until nothing remained of them. “Why would you do this?” Yves asked her. She answered, “Because I want no one to do good in order to receive the reward of Paradise, or from fear of Hell; but solely out of love for God, who is wholly worthy and can do all manner of good to us.”