God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The attack across the ford, so deep that only the cavalry could cross with their horses having to swim, began at dawn on 8 February. The infantry and engineers were left in the camp under the duke of Burgundy and the Outremer barons to wait for a chance to cross once the opposite bank had been secured by the knights’ bold outflanking move. The choice of only the French regiments indicated an understanding of the need for discipline. The tricky manoeuvre worked and almost paid off. The advance guard under Robert of Artois, stiffened by Templars and Hospitallers and afforced by the English squadron under William Longspee, successfully crossed the river. But instead of staying at the bridgehead to wait for the king and the rest of the cavalry, the count’s force immediately charged the enemy camp outside Mansourah, catching the defenders completely off guard. The Muslim commander and effective ruler of Egypt, Fakhr al-Din, was killed in the attack; unarmed, he had been interrupted during his morning ablutions.61 The terrified Egyptians fled towards the refuge of the town. Flushed with sudden victory, Robert and his division flouted clear previous orders. Instead of pausing while the whole army could gather, they pressed on in pursuit of the fleeing enemy into Mansourah itself. A fortified town where the bulk of the Egyptian forces were billeted, Mansourah’s narrow streets rendered the Christian cavalry ineffective. Count Robert’s triumphant foray turned into a massacre, as his knights became separated, hemmed in and trapped. The morale of the Muslims held, buoyed by the leadership of the Bahriyya Mamluks stationed in the town. The crusader advance-guard was soon wiped out. Louis and the main cavalry force, now safely across the Bahr al-Saghir, were left with their backs to the Nile to face the brunt of a newly confident Egyptian counter-attack.

  The battle lasted all day, with desperate fighting along the whole front. The king’s tactics were to force a path towards a position directly opposite the Christian camp from where he could expect reinforcements, especially of infantry and crossbowmen. In places, the line broke into splintered skirmishes. Elsewhere, the cavalry were sorely harried by enemy arrows. Joinville claimed to have been hit by five, his horse by fifteen.62 Protected by armour and padded quilts, they must have resembled monstrous pin cushions. The weight of constantly reinforced enemy troops prevented the deployment of the usual Frankish cavalry charge, much of the fighting reduced to hand-to-hand combat, ‘maces against swords’ in Joinville’s phrase, adding, rather sententiously, ‘it was a truly noble passage of arms, for no one there drew either bow or crossbow’, weapons regarded by knights like Joinville as plebeian.63 However gilded by memory, composition and the subsequent need to explain, justify and glorify his saintly hero, Joinville’s account of the battle of Mansourah provides one of the most vivid pictures of the experience of medieval fighting, the chaos, cameraderie, improvisation, horror and sheer bravery of the battlefield. In the heat and stress of combat, even the chivalric patina cracked. In a rather Wellingtonian moment, Count Peter of Brittany, veteran crusader and political intriguer, wounded and fearful of the press of his own men as they scrambled to the safety of the main formation around the king, spitting blood from his mouth, swore at them, ‘Good Lord, did you ever see such scum!’64 As the day ended, the Christians held the field. Reinforcements had arrived from their camp opposite, giving them covering fire and access to supplies. The Egyptians withdrew into Mansourah. But their army had not been destroyed. The road to Cairo remained blocked.

  The bitter-sweet victory outside Mansourah was the prelude to catastrophe. Apart from showing Louis’s personal courage, in his gilded helmet and sword of German steel,65 the battle exposed the weakness of his strategy. He had driven his army into a cul-de-sac that could easily become a trap. The consequences of the failure to annihilate the Egyptian army were so dire that blame needed to be directed away from the future saint. Robert of Artois’s rashness supplied the ideal excuse for chroniclers attempting to deflect responsibility from the king. Louis himself declined to condemn Robert and characteristically blamed himself for defeat. While commended for his bravery, and praised in memorial sermons devised and delivered at Louis’s court in the Holy Land over the next few years, Robert’s reputation fared far worse than some of his colleagues whom he led to slaughter.66 Robert may have been placed among the martyrs, but no heroic secular cult of crusading sainthood attached itself to him as it did to the ‘manifest martyr’, William Longspee, in England.67 Within a few years, an elaborate Anglo-French vernacular romance was circulating alongside legends of how he died. The uneasiness about Robert of Artois was to a degree mitigated, at least in official circles, by regarding his sacrifice as another demonstration of how the French had become the new tribe of Judah, leading the faith and providing examples of Christian behaviour, agents of divine providence.

  No amount of subsequent interpretation of events could alter the problem confronting Louis’s army. As the days passed, the tactical balance tipped increasingly against the crusaders. By the end of February, the new sultan, Turan Shah, had arrived at Mansourah. Although unable to dislodge the Christians from their entrenched position on the site of Fakhr al-Din’s camp on the right bank of the Nile, the Egyptians’ strength grew. Reinforcements and war materials, especially shipping, joined the Muslim army while the crusaders had to rely on what they already had with them. Louis lacked adequate physical resources to batter his way past the enemy ranged against him, even though reports of his victory incited renewed panic in Cairo.68 His only realistic hope lay in the internecine rivalries that were emerging between the military households of the former and new sultan breaking out into open civil war. Yet Louis’s very presence acted to postpone any Muslim bloodletting until after his defeat. As the weeks of stalemate dragged by, the Christians were hit by food shortages and disease, including scurvy and dysentery. The traumatic details were etched on Joinville’s memory. When surgeon-barbers cut away putrefying flesh around the gums of the sick, ‘it was pitiful to hear the screams: it was just like the cry of a woman in labour’.69

  No less serious, the Egyptians had managed to drag overland on carts a number of boats, some sources say fifty galleys, and launch them on the Nile downstream of the crusader camp.70 This established an effective blockade between the crusaders at Mansourah and their supply base at Damietta. Twice large convoys from Damietta carrying bread, wine, salt meat and other provisions were intercepted and failed to get through. Towards the end of March, worsening conditions, and concerted Muslim attacks throughout Holy Week (20–27 March) forced Louis to abandon his position before Mansourah and return to the old camp across the Bahr al-Saghir. By then, morale had sunk as low as food reserves. It was reported that some openly voiced doubts about the whole enterprise as ‘they could see God did not approve of it’.71 Desultory negotiations over a possible exchange of Damietta for Jerusalem led nowhere as the sultan, seeing his growing advantage, offered unacceptable conditions to a deal. In any case, Louis had little tangible with which to bargain. Finally, on the evening of 5 April, Louis ordered the retreat. The logic of remaining for so long in such an exposed position remains obscure unless Louis recognized his strategy had failed yet still hoped for the implosion of Egyptian unity – or a miracle.

  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. Charles of Anjou later claimed, perhaps with some exaggeration, that the army had already lost 80 per cent of its knights.72 A handful of ships managed to break through to Damietta by river. Louis himself, his dysentery so acute that his trousers had to be cut off, refused escape despite the seriousness of his condition, which brought him close to death. He had entered a fatalistic mood of acceptance of God’s will that clung to him for the rest of his life. Others were less impressed by such pietist passivity. One of Joinville’s cellarers (whose presence suggests the style in which aristocratic crusaders customarily campaigned) disagreed with the decision to surrender, preferring that they ‘shou
ld all let ourselves be slain, for thus we shall go to paradise’. His advice was ignored.73 On crusade as elsewhere, religious enthusiasm did not dispel pragmatic self-preservation. As the Christian forces struggled northwards, unsurprisingly at a considerably faster rate than they had marched south four and a half months earlier, the Egyptians took no chances. Fearful lest some of the Christians reach the safety of Damietta, the sultan saturated the landscape with troops, who skirmished, looted and killed more or less at will. Within two days the crusade army ceased to exist. Even if he had not been so physically helpless, Louis would have been unable to assert even the sort of discipline John of Brienne maintained in 1221. The enemy forces proved irresistible, led by the Bahriyya Mamluks, described by one Egyptian observer, in a telling backhanded compliment, as ‘Islam’s Templars’.74 The cohesion of the Christian army disappeared as it struggled north. By the time the king surrendered on 6 April, he had barely reached Sharamsah, less than half way back to Damietta, while the advance guard managed to make it to Fariskur, perhaps only a couple of days’ march from safety, before they were overwhelmed by the Egyptian forces. Left to his own devices on his galley and witnessing repeated atrocities suffered by the crusaders on shore, Joinville consulted his knights and the rest of his entourage on the only decision left to them, whether to surrender to the sultan’s fleet or his killers on shore. In a collective decision typical of how crusade armies operated, Joinville’s company opted for the galley commanders, as those on land, they thought, would sell them as slaves, as indeed many crusaders were. Everywhere similar surrenders by individual companies were occurring. King Louis’s surrender on 6 April was negotiated directly with the sultan by the Outremer baron Philip of Montfort. The king and his entourage were taken in chains to Mansourah, where they were joined over the next days by other prominent captives mopped up by the exultant Egyptians. Their victory was total.75

  Across the Muslim Near East, the response to this astonishing reversal was immediate and celebratory. Turan Shah milked the occasion. King Louis’s cloak was sent to Damascus, where, on 20 April, the contemporary scholar and historian Abu Shama saw the governor put it on in public: ‘It was of red woollen material lined with ermine, and it had a gold buckle.’76 However, the negotiations between the captors and captured were not wholly one-sided, despite, as Joinville remembered, the crusaders living in constant fear of their lives from their guards’ tactics of intimidation and threats of instant death. On hearing of the king’s surrender, the Genoese, Pisans and others in Damietta were only dissuaded from leaving the city by the queen’s promise to pay for their living expenses, including food, at a cost, allegedly, of 360,000 l.t.77 This was to find an even more decisive role. With Damietta secure in Christian hands, Turan Shah was faced with the choice of his grandfather in 1221, a potentially costly siege or a profitable and peaceful agreement. Despite Egyptian attempts to include territorial concessions in the Holy Land, negotiations came down to an exchange of Damietta for the lives and freedom of the captives. This came at a high price. After lengthy bargaining, by the end of April it was agreed that the entire Christian army was to be ransomed for 800,000 bezants (400,000 l.t.), half payable before Louis left Egypt, as well as the surrender of Damietta. These stood as a form of war reparations. Christian supplies there were to be retained intact for collection later and prisoners on both sides, dating back to the Fifth Crusade, were to be returned. The territorial integrity of mainland Frankish Outremer was not questioned. Once agreement had been reached, Turan Shah moved his camp north near to Damietta to receive the city’s surrender, taking his captives with him, still hostages for the first instalment of the ransom.78

  The comparative civility with which the negotiations were conducted and the absence of punitive clauses in the treaty may have reflected, as western sources try to suggest, Egyptian respect for King Louis. More realistically, Turan Shah needed a quick, peaceful and neat resolution to the war. Further conflict would merely serve to emphasize his military dependence on the Bahriyya Mamluks, servants of his estranged father and no friends to his new regime, at the very time he was trying to insert his own mamluks and servants into positions of authority at court and in the army. Unfortunately for him, the peace itself removed the curb on these growing tensions. The Bahriyya Mamluks had largely been responsible for the defeat of the crusaders and for holding Egyptian morale together after the death of al-Salih Ayyub and the early setbacks at the battle of Mansourah. Now they faced exclusion rather than reward, as Turan Shah promoted his own mamluks and, perhaps shocking to the racism of white mamluk regiments, black eunuchs to head the royal household and royal guard. The Bahriyya forged an alliance with the former sultana, Shajar al-Durr, who saw her power disappear and status disparaged. On 2 May, the Bahriyya struck in a counter-coup against Turan Shah and his mamluks. After a botched initial assassination attempt, Turan Shah, in full view of terrified Christian prisoners, was hacked to pieces by the Bahriyya, among whom stood an ambitious young officer, Baibars al-Bunduqdari, the future nemesis of Frankish Palestine. The Bahriyya commander, Faris al-Din Aqtay al-Jamdar, cut out the young sultan’s heart to show to King Louis while the rest of the body was dumped unceremoniously in the Nile. Authority was transferred to Shajar al-Durr, who for three months reigned as a sovereign queen, malikat al-Muslimin (queen of the Muslims), ‘an event without precedent throughout the Muslim world’.79 This proved controversial. In July 1250, she abdicated but retained influence by marrying her successor, a Turkish emir, Aybeg al-Turkumani. However, the military power of the regime and increasingly Egypt’s political direction, despite the restoration of an Ayyubid sultan fainéant (1250–52), lay in the hands of competing mamluk regiments. Although it had failed to conquer Egypt, take Cairo or restore Jerusalem, Louis IX’s crusade had played a significant part in ending the Ayyubid empire.

  The new regime confirmed Turan Shah’s treaty with the shocked and extremely nervous Frankish leaders. On 6 May Damietta was surrendered and King Louis released. Over the following two days, the ransom money was paid over, the only problem being not the king’s credit but the availability of cash, solved by expedients such as raiding the coffers of the Templars (with their tacit complicity) for 30,000 l.t.80 Both sides seemed eager to complete the business quickly and honestly, although Joinville complained that the Egyptians failed to honour their side of the bargain when they burnt the Franks’ siege machines and stores of salt pork on pyres that lasted for three days.81 With half the ransom paid and all the important prisoners released, Louis sailed directly to Acre, where he arrived on 12 or 13 May. Although most of his magnates, including his brothers, decided not to stay beyond the autumn passage, Louis, perhaps out of shame or embarrassment mingled with, or concealed by, piety and concern for the plight of the Holy Land, decided to remain in the east, intent on salvaging something from the Egyptian debacle.

  Despite the enormous cost of the ransom, and the high price of maintaining his small army in Palestine (later estimated at over one million l.t.), Louis could clearly afford it. Helped by the subsequent agreement of the Egyptian government to cancel the second instalment of the ransom, Louis’s line of credit with Italian bankers remained in excellent condition at least until 1252–3, possibly reflecting the sums still coming from France.82 In the absence of the legitimate king of Jerusalem, Conrad II (i.e. Conrad IV of Germany), Louis could behave as de facto ruler. During his four-year stay, and supported by fewer than 1,500 troops of his own, he spent large sums on refortifications at Jaffa, Caesarea, Sidon and Acre. In 1252, he even agreed an alliance with Egypt that promised the return of Jerusalem and the lands west of the Jordan once, with French help, the sultan had subdued Damascus. This projected diplomatic revolution immediately foundered on a rare moment of pan-Islamic unity partly inspired by the advance of the Mongols further east. Louis’s embassy under Andrew of Longjumeau had returned in 1251 carrying a demand from the Mongol regent, Oghul Qaimush, for annual tribute, not at all what the king had anticipated. On news of the con
version of a Mongol prince to Christianity, Louis despatched William of Rubruck on another embassy to the new Great Khan, Mongke.83 Although primarily a missionary expedition, and despite Louis’s care in not giving William accreditation to negotiate, the mission was regarded by some on all sides as another attempt to capture the chimera of a Franco-Mongol anti-Islamic alliance. This pursuit, as of the Christianization of the Mongols, proved an entirely false hope for Outremer as for the rest of Christendom. When Louis departed for home in 1254, he left a small garrison and committed himself to continued financial and military aid for the Holy Land. However, his vast expenditure of life and treasure had failed in almost every respect except, as contemporaries tried to see it, spiritual. Souls had been saved, but in death and defeat not triumph. Louis IX’s crusade had proved the most spectacular of failures.