by Dan Jones
The Templars were also responsible for ensuring that the French king would have ready money available when he arrived in the Holy Land.11 When Louis commissioned ships to transport his armies out of his new custom-built port of Aigues-Mortes, just west of Marseilles, he turned for help to Reynald of Vichiers, preceptor of France, who had invaluable experience in war provisioning, having served for a time as preceptor of the Templar house in Acre. In 1246 Reynald was sent with Prior Andrew Polin, the most senior French Hospitaller, to Genoa and Marseilles, where the two men chartered ships for the royal army and reported directly back to the king.12 When Louis finally set sail, landing at Limassol on Cyprus in mid-September 1248, one of the first eastern dignitaries to greet him was the master of the Temple, William of Sonnac: a veteran crusader who had recently moved to Acre to take command of the order but had spent most of his career in Aquitaine, a region largely governed by the English, but under the ultimate lordship of the French crown.
Cyprus became the forward base for Louis’ crusade: a supply depot heaving with reserves of grain, wine and munitions. Soon after he landed there the destination of the new crusade was confirmed: the target was once again to be Damietta, the scene of the grinding amphibious battles, brief triumph and dismal retreat of the Fifth Crusade. It was an ignoble precedent to follow, but a quarter of a century’s distance, the ascent of a new generation of crusade leaders and Louis’ billowing confidence counted for more than the example of recent history. The sultan of Egypt presented a vulnerable target. Despite his crushing triumph at La Forbie, in 1246 he had broken with the Khwarizmian allies, driving them out of the city of Jerusalem the following year. His relatives continued to scheme against him and his power in Cairo was threatened by restive emirs, whom he had tried to counteract by building up a large private army of highly disciplined but increasingly uncontrollable slave soldiers known as Mamluks. On top of this, al-Salih was seriously ill. He had consumption (now known as tuberculosis) and it severely reduced his physical stamina and grip on power.
Louis and his army set out for Egypt in excellent cheer on Saturday 13 May 1249, with 1,800 vessels carrying them, ‘as if the whole sea, as far as the sight could reach, was covered with cloth, from the great quantity of sails that were spread to the wind’.13 A substantial Templar contingent sailed to Damietta with the fleet, led by Master William of Sonnac and Reynald of Vichiers, who had been appointed marshal. They did not have an easy crossing. The aristocratic French chronicler John of Joinville, whose biography of Louis was designed to gild the French king’s reputation, described terrible weather during the journey south to the Egyptian coast, which blew nearly a third of the king’s ships far off course. Yet this was not enough to discomfit Louis, who was spoiling for a fight. His plan to take Damietta was no secret, and when the crusader ships anchored off the coast on 5 June 1249, Joinville and his companions saw a shoreline heaving with al-Salih’s soldiers blowing horns and trumpets. Among them was the sultan himself, dressed head to toe in burnished gold armour that shone like the sun.14
The crusaders were not intimidated. They had planned a mass beach assault, and followed through with their intention. Ignoring the cacophony on the shore, the king and his men leapt from shallow-bottomed boats, dragging whinnying horses into the sea and wading through chest-deep water towards the enemy. The veteran Walter of Brienne (who had been ransomed following his capture at La Forbie) arrived on a galley painted inside and out with a flared red cross on a golden background. Odo of Châteauroux, the cardinal bishop of Tusculum, held an obligatory fragment of the True Cross. The French banner known as the Oriflamme was planted in the sand and the Templars, as they landed, would have rallied around their piebald standard. They too provided an intimidating sight.
For a few hours the beach was the scene of a fierce battle. The crusaders swarmed onto the sands in disciplined units, killing around 500 Muslims including four emirs.15 Louis IX meant business. Preferring caution to confrontation, the sultan’s field commander, Fakhr al-Din, pulled his men back and allowed the French king to complete his landing unopposed. Even more astonishingly, he ordered an evacuation of Damietta. During the Fifth Crusade the city had held out for over a year; in 1249 it was abandoned in a single day as the garrison handed it over to Christian occupation, burning what they could before fleeing upriver to defend Cairo. To the crusaders this seemed like divine providence. Yet there was military sense behind the withdrawal. History hung over both sides and the challenge to Louis was simple: did he dare to send his armies up the Nile?
While he thought this through, al-Salih’s men mustered at al-Mansurah, where the Damietta branch of the Nile broke course with the Tanis: the exact spot where Cardinal Pelagius and John of Brienne had foundered on the Fifth Crusade. Meanwhile, units downriver launched raids on the Latin army billeted in and around Damietta. The sultan offered 10 bezants for each Christian head that was cut off and brought back to him. The crusaders’ camp was harried in this way for months, but to no conclusive effect. The summer passed and the Nile rose, and all the while Louis sat firm at Damietta, converting the mosques into churches and resisting the bait.
In November the stalemate broke. The Nile floods had receded and the summer’s fierce heat had dimmed. If Louis was ever going to pursue his plan to conquer Egypt now was the time; the only question was where to strike. A war council assembled and debated moving west along the coast and attacking Alexandria, but this plan was rejected on the advice of Louis’ belligerent thirty-three-year-old brother Robert, count of Artois. That could only mean one thing: risking the march up the Nile and storming Cairo. ‘Whoever wished to kill a snake should begin with the head,’ Robert argued, and he won the day.16
The decision to move out of Damietta had probably been taken when, on 23 November, the sultan died. The news of his death was kept a secret for some time: long enough for Fakhr al-Din to seize control and begin organizing the Egyptian response to Louis’ planned advance. A highly competent general, Fakhr al-Din had every reason to think that he could resist a march on Cairo, not least because he had at his disposal a large army including the late sultan’s thousand-strong elite Mamluk slave-soldier regiment known as the Bahriyya. Like the Templars, the Bahriyya (‘of the river’) were named after their original base of operations: an island in the Nile in the middle of Cairo. Also like the Templars, they were uncompromising warriors who could bounce back repeatedly from major losses in battle. They were about to show just how effective those qualities made them.
The Templars rode in the vanguard as the Christians started a slow march south along the eastern bank of the Nile. Quite what the brothers thought of their mission is hard to say. William of Sonnac had been chastised early in the campaign for opening back-channel peace negotiations with the Egyptians: an episode that suggests the Templars were more inclined to caution than the enthusiastic French crusaders whom they accompanied. A letter William sent to the English high command reporting on the fall of Damietta referred only in the plainest terms to Louis’ deliberations over which part of Egypt to attack, without passing comment on the merits of the plan.17 If the master had doubts, he was keeping them to himself. But tensions were steadily building between the instinctively cautious William and the king’s hawkish brother, the count of Artois. As the campaign progressed, clashes between the two men would have fatal consequences.
The crusaders moved slowly down the Nile over the course of December and it was not until Christmas that Louis’ army drew up before al-Mansurah, on the opposite bank of the river Tanis. At the time of the Fifth Crusade this had been a military encampment, but over the thirty intervening years it had become a town, which now stood directly between the crusading army and the approach to Cairo. It would have to be taken or destroyed.
With the full might of the Egyptian army gathered on the opposite side of the river, this was no easy task. A fierce battle for the Tanis began, lasting until February. Louis’ leading engineers worked on a pontoon bridge, while Fakhr al-Din’s men resp
onded with a massive catapult bombardment, sending stones and Greek fire in the Christians’ direction, causing panic and terrible destruction. John of Joinville wrote in awe at the sight of the Muslims’ nightly incendiary bombardments. ‘The noise was like thunder and it seemed like a great dragon of fire flying through the air,’ he wrote, ‘giving so great a light with its flame that we saw our camp as clearly as in broad daylight.’18 Each time Greek fire was discharged Louis would fall to the ground weeping profusely and calling on Jesus Christ to preserve his people. This was a splendidly pious spectacle – but the river remained uncrossed.
It was not until the start of Lent that the crusaders found a way to reach the far bank. In early February 1250 a Bedouin came to the Christian camp offering to show them a point where the Tanis could be forded on horseback in exchange for a fat fee of 500 bezants. He was suggesting an inherently dangerous operation, for knights wearing armour were especially vulnerable when wading through rivers (Mamluk warriors trained specifically so that they could shed their mail coats by swimming upside down if they were unhorsed in water – not an easy manoeuvre to pull off). But there were few better options, save for retreat, which Louis would not countenance. So on 8 February, Shrove Tuesday, Louis selected the best knights from his army – around a third of his total cavalry – and set out with them before dawn to the Bedouin’s crossing point.
Fording the river in the semi-darkness and emerging ready to attack an enemy camp required supreme horsemanship and bravery. Louis asked his brother the count of Artois to lead one group of knights through the water. He was not the first, though: for ahead of him, piebald banner aloft, went the Templars.
Just as the Egyptians had known about Louis’ arrival at Damietta the previous summer, so they had also learned of his plan to ford the Tanis. As the crusaders emerged from the water, a reconnaissance party of around 300 Muslim cavalry spotted them. This was a large enough band to have seriously disrupted the crossing if they had launched an immediate assault, but they did not; instead they watched the crusaders wading across the river, then wheeled their horses around and galloped away towards al-Mansurah.
Once again, faced with Christian knights emerging from the water, an Egyptian defending force had scattered. The prudent thing for Louis’ men to do was to wait, assemble and attack en masse. Unfortunately, the tension of the moment got the better of the count of Artois: instead of sticking to the plan, he called an immediate charge on the town. Abandoning discipline and caution he sent his men flying off to lay into the retreating Muslim reconnaissance party. All of a sudden, and much too soon, the battle of al-Mansurah was underway.
William of Sonnac and his Templar marshal, Reynald of Vichiers, were screaming for restraint. According to John of Joinville, their cries were ignored by the count and simply not heard by the man who held his bridle, Sir Foucqualt of Melle, who was either stone deaf or pretending to be so. Artois had given the order and Sir Foucqualt’s job was to relay the command. The Templars watched in horror as he ‘kept bawling out “Forward, forward!”’19 But forward they all went.
According to the English chronicler Matthew Paris, the count’s purpose in advancing ahead of the rest of the army was pure vainglory. ‘His intention [was] to triumph alone, instead of allowing all to share it... for he was proud and arrogant.’20 The chronicler was biased, but he had a good source: his information came from front-line dispatches sent directly to the English royal court. According to Paris, there was a lengthy exchange of views outside al-Mansurah between William of Sonnac and Robert of Artois, in which the Templar master did his best to impress some sanity on the count, who bullheadedly refused to listen. Describing William as ‘a prudent and circumspect man, well skilled and experienced in warlike matters’, Paris gave the master a long speech in which he politely congratulated Robert of Artois on his superlative bravery, but warned that they had entirely lost the element of surprise. If they attacked al-Mansurah without waiting for the king and full reinforcements, William said, they would be charging headlong into ‘our destruction and ruin’.21
In Paris’ account, Robert responded to this entreaty with bald fury. He cursed ‘the ancient treachery’ of the Templars, accused the military orders of deliberately sabotaging their fellow crusaders to profit from the continuation of war, and declared that ‘the ruin of all paganism is imminent, as well as the lasting exaltation of the Christian faith, all of which this Templar... endeavours to impede by his fictitious and fallacious arguments’.22 Most damningly of all, he invoked the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Hohenstaufen’s struggle with the Templars as a prime example of their mendacity.
How much of this bitter exchange happened as reported, and how much sprang from the fertile mind of Matthew Paris, cannot be known. What is certain is that Robert won the argument. Common to both Paris and John of Joinville’s accounts is the sense that Robert of Artois had goaded the Templars into following him on a suicidal raid. Harsh words gave way to action, as Artois’ second division charged, and the Templars decided they had no honourable option but to spur on their horses behind them. ‘Unfurl and raise our banner!’ shouted William of Sonnac, in Matthew Paris’ version of events. ‘Let us proceed to battle, that we may this day all together try the fortune of war and the chances of death.’23
The crusaders’ descent on al-Mansurah, rashly conceived and hastily executed, was an entirely predictable bloodbath. The crusaders barrelled into the narrow streets in pursuit of the fleeing Muslims, but they ran into a trap and were soon outnumbered and surrounded. John of Joinville, who took part in the battle, witnessed the savage fighting at first hand, seeing one man with his nose sliced so badly it hung loose by his mouth; another with blood spouting from his shoulder like a freshly tapped barrel of wine. Nearly 600 knights were lost in the street fighting, 280 of whom were brothers of the Temple. William of Sonnac lived but lost an eye. His only consolation was that the count of Artois was killed: he had urged his horse to swim across the river in a desperate bid to flee, but had slipped from his saddle and was dragged to his death under the weight of his armour. When his body washed up it was picked over for spoils. His surcoat was later used a trophy to inspire the sultan’s men before they ran into battle.24
The king crossed the river behind his brother and escaped the worst, but as soon as his men had established a camp on the southern bank of the river they were forced to endure near-daily fighting to defend it. Hour by hour the death toll rose. Immediately after the battle, William of Sonnac had helped John of Joinville scatter a band of Muslims they caught trying to steal tents from the royal camp. Three days later, he was fighting again. On Friday 11 February al-Fakhr’s men advanced on the crusader positions, with the Mamluks launching their Greek fire. William of Sonnac commanded a company made up of the few Templars who had survived the battle on Shrove Tuesday, but he and his men were weakened by injury, desperately tired and poorly equipped to deal with the chaos raining down around them.
John of Joinville described the carnage that ensued. The master had built barricades for his men out of captured siege engines but these were as much of a handicap as a help. ‘The Saracens burned them with their Greek fire,’ wrote Joinville, ‘and seeing there were but few to oppose them, they did not wait until they were destroyed, but vigorously attacked the Templars, defeating them in a very short time.’ Behind the lines, Joinville saw ‘an acre of ground so covered with bolts, darts, arrows and other weapons that you could not see the earth beneath them’. Having lost one eye on 8 February, Master William now lost the other, and died of his wounds.25
The crusaders had come to al-Mansurah and been crushed, much as they had been thirty years earlier. Although Louis IX held his position for more than a month, by the beginning of April it had become obvious that to remain any longer would be a short road to total annihilation. A new sultan, Turanshah, had arrived in Cairo to succeed his father and although his court was riven by factional squabbles between various groups of Mamluks, Turanshah had no interest in negotia
ting an even-handed peace with the beleagured Christians.
The countryside around al-Mansurah told a story of desolation, starvation and disease. The Tanis was so full of bloated corpses that in places it was completely blocked. The Nile teemed with Muslim galleys, preventing resupply from, or escape to, Damietta. Malnutrition afflicted the living. As their scurvied gums rotted in their mouths barber-surgeons had to cut away the putrid flesh to allow the soldiers to eat. Louis himself had a recurrence of dysentery that was so bad he had to cut a hole in his undergarments. The only option was retreat.
The withdrawal down the Nile began in disorderly fashion at dawn on Tuesday 5 April, with men scrambling into boats or wading through mud in their desperation to abandon the wretched camp. Those who managed to leave watched behind them as the flickering light from the night’s fires illuminated Muslim soldiers swarming over the site, running through anyone who was too ill to crawl from his bed and flee.
The handful of surviving Templars raised their piebald banner in a pitiful attempt to shepherd what remained of Louis’ army back to Damietta, but it was a hopeless task. The straggling crusader army was picked off boat by boat and division by division, with no mercy shown to anyone who could not prove themselves a captive of the highest worth (John of Joinville only escaped murder when his boat ran aground on a mudbank in the Nile; he leapt overboard and claimed upon capture that he was King Louis’ cousin). By the time the last bands of fleeing crusaders were picked off, a dozen or so miles from Damietta, only three Templars remained alive.