It was not as if Louis or his advisors were ignorant of the Mongol threat or their past history. Papal correspondence and appeals from rulers of eastern and central Europe had been full of both for much of the previous decade. Possibly only the death in 1249 of Khan Guyuk prevented immediate exploitation of the chaos that engulfed the Ayyubid empire during Louis’s invasion of Egypt. Andrew of Longjumeau’s mission achieved nothing except confirmation that the Mongols refused to regard others as equals and that they were not about to become a new Christian power. This diplomatic interlude says as much for Mongol skill in exploiting the mentality of their opponents as it does for the myopia of a future saint. It also added to the awareness of the world beyond the customary horizons of western thought witnessed by the popularity of news, or, rather, stories of the exotic new power that had intruded into western consciousness.47 While crusading interest in the Near East may have accelerated contacts between western Europe and Asia before the Mongols appeared on Christendom’s frontiers in the 1240s, in this context, as in many others, it is hard to see Louis’s adventure as much more than a sideshow.
In the middle of May 1249, the allied Christian fleet began to set out for Cyprus. It carried perhaps upwards of 15,000 troops, impressive for battle, rather modest for a conquest.48 Louis’s French army had been joined by recruits and allies from Frankish Outremer and Greece. More were yet to reach eastern waters, including Alphonse of Poitiers’s large force, perhaps of some thousands, and a select English regiment of perhaps as many as 200 knights, including a number retained for pay by its leader, Henry III’s cousin William Longspee.49 These only joined the main army in Egypt in the late autumn. According to the royal chamberlain, John Sarasin, one of Louis’s finance ministers who accompanied the crusade, apart from 2,500 knights and the heavy cavalry, backed by mounted sergeants and infantry, a striking feature of the forces Louis led towards Egypt lay in the 5,000 crossbowmen.50 They played a crucial role throughout the campaign in the Nile Delta, laying down devastating barrages of bolts in support of attacks or to cover retreats. The acquisition of crossbow bolts had been of especial concern during the crusade preparations, contracts to supply them being given to the Genoese admirals employed to command the royal fleet. The necessary landing craft had been assembled, some built or hired in Cyprus, others, such as John of Jaffa’s galley, which could be driven up the beach, belonging to the Outremer barons.51
As with most military enterprises, despite meticulous preparation, things went wrong. A storm dispersed the fleet, many ships seeking refuge in the Syrian ports, only later joining the crusade after the landings in Egypt. Those remaining arrived off Damietta on 4 June 1249 only to discover their plan had been anticipated. Sultan al-Salih Ayyub had left a strong garrison in Damietta under the veteran commander Fakhr al-Din, Frederick II’s old sparring partner who, according to Joinville’s memory, still displayed the emperor’s arms on his war banner in honour of their friendship.52 However, a bold massed attack on the shore opposite Damietta on the morning of 5 June managed to secure a bridgehead on the beach, even though some of the troops, including Louis himself, had to wade ashore with water up to their armpits. The superior firepower of the crossbowmen probably clinched success for this ambitious amphibious operation. By nightfall, while the crusaders were establishing a camp, the Muslim defenders panicked. Many of those routed on the beach fled southwards. There the sultan waited with his main army upstream from Damietta, mindful of the need not to repeat the events of 1218–19 by becoming engaged in a sterile and costly conflict around the port itself. This left the garrison in the city badly exposed. Rather than risk death by assault or starvation, the defenders evacuated the city without a fight, leaving the stockpiles of food and war materials intact behind them. To the astonishment, incredulity and delight of the invaders, Damietta had fallen in hours instead of the seventeen months it had taken in 1218–19. It was symbolic, as Sarasin recorded, that the victors found fifty-three Christian captives in the city who claimed they had had been incarcerated there since the Fifth Crusade.53 As welcome, the fleeing garrison had left the well-stocked city intact. News of the abandonment of Damietta brought widespread opprobrium on Fakhr al-Din and panic to Cairo.54
Unfortunately for Louis, the fall of Damietta after only a day’s fighting marked the high point of his whole campaign. It has been argued that if he had seized the moment, a great triumph was there to be won. Cairo was in a turmoil of fear. In his new forward camp, established as his father’s had been in 1219–21 at Mansourah, the sultan was dying, probably from tuberculosis; his heir was out of the country; and jealous rival factions within the Egyptian high command and the sultan’s own military entourage were greedily or anxiously circling the throne. Yet the problems that delayed the embarkation from Cyprus had left the crusaders little time to organize a march south before the Nile flooded. The precedents of the Fifth Crusade were vivid on both sides. To the surprise and horror of Louis when they met after the king’s capture, at least one veteran of John of Brienne’s army, from Provins in France, had stayed behind, converted to Islam and married an Egyptian, rising to a position of some importance at court.55 Staying safe in Damietta must have appealed to many in the army, including the clergy who busied themselves with reclaiming mosques as churches, and Italian merchants securing quays and quarters. Louis may also have reckoned that, before attempting any hostile action, he needed to wait for the arrival of his brother Alphonse’s army, other contingents from the west, such as the English, and those scattered by the storm off Cyprus. Alphonse only reached Damietta on 24 October.
However, if the annual Nile flood precluded immediate action, plans could be laid. A seemingly sensible scheme to attack Alexandria rather than risk the Delta streams in marching on Cairo was discussed, provoking, according to Joinville, the impetuous Robert of Artois to exclaim, ‘If you wish to kill the serpent, you must first crush its head.’56 Robert urged an advance on Cairo, as did the king. Hindsight blamed Count Robert for the decision to attack Cairo taken, Joinville alleged, against the near-unanimous opposition of the rest of the French barons. It seems that Louis’s support was sufficient to win the day for Robert’s minority view. This may say much for Louis’s personal authority, or for his deep pockets, which were now supporting many, perhaps most of the crusade leaders. The ultimate defeat of the Cairo strategy as well as the death of Robert of Artois has clouded later perspectives. Robert became the scapegoat for the defeat of the crusade, his strategic advice at Damietta compounded by his reckless and suicidal behaviour at Mansourah in February 1250. Yet staying cooped up in Damietta or acquiring another Nile port only made sense if the plan had been to use any conquests as bargaining chips for the return of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. However, if, as is possible, Louis planned to conquer Egypt, even to convert the local Muslims, there were excellent tactical and strategic reasons for pressing home the Christian advantage in an attack on Cairo, especially in the light of deepening Ayyubid disarray.
Al-Salih Ayyub, alarmed at how the invasion was developing and now in the final stages of his fatal illness, remained at Mansourah. Protected by the Nile and its side channels, the site afforded level dry ground for his camp outside a defensible town. It barred the direct route to Cairo but was close enough to Damietta to maintain some pressure on the Christians. The sultan’s immediate problems were the internal tensions in his high command produced by his failing health and exacerbated by the French invasion. Although he had executed members of the spineless Damietta garrison, pour encourager les autres, he felt unable to dismiss Fakhr al-Din. Any sudden interregnum would need the support of such veteran loyalists to hold the line against both the crusaders and internal challenges to the Ayyubid succession. Yet the sultan’s impending demise disturbed his increasingly powerful and assertive mamluks, the Bahriyya, who feared a loss in status or worse under his heir, al-Mu ‘azzam Turan Shah. Rivalries were further complicated by the ambitions of al-Salih Ayyub’s Turkish wife, Shajar al-Durr, who as eagerly embrace
d the prospect of being a power broker as, according to legend and some fact, she did the bodies of some of the powerful.57 Politically, therefore, the crusaders’ delay at Damietta from June to November did not obviously improve the unity of their opponents, who, militarily, were as hampered as the invaders by the annual flood.
On 20 November 1249, with his army now at its strongest, Louis IX led his troops out of Damietta, leaving behind his wife, five months pregnant, and a well-equipped garrison, supported by Genoese and Pisans. The months since June had been employed in strengthening Damietta’s defences, some thought excessively.58 But Louis’s meticulous planning, which extended to his allocation of palaces and churches in the city, was a feature of his whole enterprise. It also confirmed his general intention to conquer, not bargain. His chief problem lay in whether, even with his careful organization and massive reserves of treasure, he possessed adequate forces and the right equipment to force a path through the Delta and mount a successful assault on Cairo. He may have been relying on the implosion of Egyptian resistance following the death of the sultan, the seriousness of whose illness was likely to have been reported to the Christians. Not only was he disappointed in this, he underestimated the stake the sultan’s mamluks held in the survival of some version of the existing Egyptian regime.
More immediately damaging, the crusaders’ march south proved painfully slow, covering an average of less than two miles a day. While the bulk of the army marched along the river banks, it was shadowed by a large fleet mainly, it seems, of heavy transport vessels, as well as some lighter, shallow draft galleys, more appropriate for Nile warfare. Progress was hindered by a strong southerly wind, slowing the preponderant sailing ships, which lacked manoeuvrability. Yet in spite of the measured pace, Louis appears not to have placed a series of supply dumps or protective garrisons along his route, the same mistake as 1221. Unlike his predecessors, Louis had not even secured Tinnis or other local strongholds. Perhaps he recognized he lacked sufficient manpower and preferred to confront the enemy in a decisive engagement with the maximum force at his disposal. It took the army thirty-two days to arrive at the same point between the Nile and the Bahr al-Saghir opposite Mansourah as the Fifth Crusade had reached in only seven in July 1221. One difference lay in the large amount of food supplies and war materials, especially timber, that Louis carried with him. These allowed him to establish a camp opposite Mansourah without fear of starvation and to build protective vehicles for his engineers and large throwing machines.59 The Fifth Crusade had travelled lighter, with fatal results.
As the crusader army and navy gingerly picked their way southwards through the canals and streams of the Delta, in late November al-Salih Ayyub finally died in the camp at Mansourah. His death was hushed up while his widow, Shajar al-Durr, engineered the effective transfer of power to the military commander-in-chief, Fakhr al-Din, while al-Salih Ayyub’s son and heir, al-Mu ‘azzam Turan Shah, was summoned from Hisn Kayfa, his base in the upper Tigris valley in northern Iraq. It took him three months to reach Mansourah, during which time authority inevitably devolved increasingly on the sultana, on Fakhr al-Din and on the late sultan’s Bahriyya Mamluks. The urgency in managing a smooth transition of power was evident in the gathering crisis on the Nile. While the Muslim camp flanking the river shore outside Mansourah was strengthened and a battery of throwing machines prepared, Egyptian skirmishers harried the Christians, a sharp encounter with the Templarled vanguard on 7 December failing to halt the advance. A fortnight later, Louis’s army and flotilla of support ships reached the bank opposite the Egyptian camp, separated only by the Bahr al-Saghir branch of the Nile. There they dug in, against attacks from the land, and constructed eighteen wooden ballista, throwing machines, which they used to pepper their enemies on the far shore, who returned fire in kind.
DEFEAT, FEBRUARY – MARCH 1250
For the next six weeks, under an unrelenting mutual barrage across the Nile and Bahr al-Saghir, the Christians attempted to construct some sort of causeway across the Bahr al-Saghir, presumably to allow for passage of their war engines as well as cavalry.60 The efforts failed. So too did Egyptian attacks by land on the Christian camp and by water, using fireships to try to disrupt or destroy the Christian fleet. Stalemate beckoned until Egyptian defectors informed the crusaders of a deep ford downstream across the Bahr al-Saghir. This offered Louis a risky but excellent chance to outflank and surprise the enemy. He had little choice. The longer he remained stuck opposite Mansourah, the nearer the new sultan, the shorter his supplies and the fewer his tactical options. His perimeter defences could not hold indefinitely, nor could his fleet hope to remain unscathed. Louis presumably had planned on a war of movement, punctuated by battles in open terrain, not frittering away weeks and provisions in futile, if skilful, engineering works. Unless he could engage and destroy the enemy, his campaign was doomed. Unlike Richard I in Palestine in 1191–2, Pelagius and John of Brienne in Egypt in 1221 or even the crusaders of 1228–9 and 1239–41, Louis had no alternative strategy. He held no jurisdiction over the actual or hoped-for kingdom of Jerusalem, and so could hardly negotiate for it, although powerful Frankish lords, such as John of Jaffa, were in his army. His dispositions at Damietta had made it clear he regarded Damietta definitively as his, not part of Jerusalem, and so hardly negotiable for territory there. Louis was an intensely pious man. He seems to have believed that God would reward that conspicuous piety, even where temporal preparation proved insufficient to guarantee victory. Otherwise, his strategy in Egypt made little sense, a quixotic gesture of optimism rather than a sober exercise of Christian generalship.
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.
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