The French crusaders sailed from Marseilles on the autumn passage of 1239. Once in the Levant they had to decide whether to attack Egypt or Damascus. In the meantime they raided enemy territory in Palestine. In one such episode the count of Brittany gathered rich booty but his success was to have a fatal coda. The sense of competitiveness so indelibly ingrained in the chivalric mentality of western European knights dictated that if one noble achieved great feats in battle, his colleagues should emulate, or exceed, him. A large group of nobles led by the count of Bar and the duke of Burgundy crossed into Egyptian territory near Gaza. They rode through the night and then paused to rest, planning to wait until dawn when the locals brought out their livestock. Foolishly the crusaders had camped in a narrow, sandy valley, factors that would ruin their horses’ ability to maneuver. They settled down to what seems like a picnic: “rich men had cloths spread and sat down to eat, for they had brought plenty of bread, poultry and capons, cooked meat, cheese and fruit, as well as wine in casks and barrels.” This showed fatal disrespect for their enemies. A Christian writer noted in a rather ominous tone: “Then they learned that Our Lord will not be served in this way.”41 Muslim scouts had observed their presence and the Egyptian commander used watch fires to assemble his troops. By first light on November 13 he had placed a large force of crossbowmen, archers, and slingers on the hills around the valley while he stationed cavalry at the exit. A huge crash of drums and a blast of horns announced his intention to attack. The crusaders tried to resist but soon exhausted their supplies of arrows and crossbow bolts; the enemy closed in and in spite of fierce resistance the Christians succumbed to fatigue and their opponents’ sheer weight of numbers. Many of the knights were taken captive and sent to the major cities of Egypt where they were paraded through the streets and pelted with animal excrement. A victory mosque at Beit-Hanun still marks this Ayyubid triumph. A few months later the garrison of the Tower of David in Jerusalem was ejected too.42
In the spring of 1240, fearful of the strength of his coreligionists in Egypt, the ruler of Damascus sought an alliance with the Franks. Thibaud decided to turn to diplomacy and made a treaty whereby he recovered control of the castles of Beaufort and Sidon and secured recognition of Christian rights to the lands west of the River Jordan, although in reality this territory was still in the hands of the Muslim ruler of Transjordan. Many crusaders were angered by this policy—they could not understand why such a powerful group of knights did not fight. Papal legate Friar William of Cordelle concluded a sermon with the words: “For God’s sake, good people, pray to our Lord, beg him to give the commanders of this host their hearts back, for you can be sure they have lost them through their sins! Such a huge force of Christians ought to be able to attack the unbelievers in any place at all if they had God on their side.”43 Some fighting took place when Thibaud’s men seized Jerusalem to enable the count to make a pilgrimage to the holy city. Another positive development was the recognition of Christian claims to Transjordan by its governor. The count’s moves toward the Damascene axis had, potentially, one flaw: the fate of the prisoners from the Battle of Gaza who remained in Egyptian hands. Thibaud tried to secure their release through a truce with Sultan Ayyub of Egypt, but this was angrily opposed by the Military Orders, who disliked dealing with him. Other western crusaders wanted revenge on the Muslims, regardless of the danger to their captive colleagues. Thibaud realized that he had lost the support of the majority of the army and even, it was said, feared that he would be physically attacked. In September 1240 he slipped away back to France.44
Within weeks the prisoners were freed; in the meantime Richard of Cornwall’s force reached the Holy Land. Perhaps six hundred knights strong, this contingent could have formed the basis for a more aggressive action, but like Thibaud he took a diplomatic approach. Thibaud’s truce was confirmed and Richard also refortified the strategically important castle of Ascalon before he returned to the West in May 1241.45
Even though the Barons’ Crusade saw little in the way of military success, it had managed to exploit the endemic divisions within the Muslim Near East to build upon Frederick II’s achievements and push the kingdom of Jerusalem to its greatest extent since before the Battle of Hattin, over fifty years earlier. Its leaders were frustrated further by factional disunity among the Christians themselves. The poor discipline at Gaza and the issue of the prisoners severely restricted the crusaders’ ability to launch a major assault on Egypt. In any case, the Military Orders were bickering with one another and ongoing troubles between representatives of the Italian city-states, imperial officers, and the local nobility also drained the Christians’ ability to strike against their enemies. This rather weary poem conveys the sense of wasted potential:
How great and glorious a throng
Set off from France, the flower
Or so it seemed, of chivalry,
Best in the world, all said.46
With the Barons’ Crusade over, other sources of help would need to take their turn. The chances of Frederick II visiting the Holy Land again seemed remote. His conflict with Rome, in essence over papal claims of superiority in the secular, as well as the religious, sphere continued to ferment during the 1230s. At the end of the decade he was excommunicated again, and in 1245 Pope Innocent IV declared him deposed from the imperial throne.47 Frederick ignored both the decree and an attempt to launch a crusade against him. The emperor seemed to be in a strong position when, in December 1250, he died, just short of his fifty-sixth birthday. Frederick had continued to enjoy, and to advertise, his good relations with Muslim powers. The elephant given to him by al-Kamil carried a wooden tower that flew the imperial standard in European campaigns (the beast lived until 1248), while in 1232 he entertained embassies from Damascus, Cairo, and the Assassins at his court. The Egyptians sent him a marvelous jeweled astronomical tent in which images of the sun and moon were moved by clockwork to tell the time both by day and by night; so valuable was the machine that it had to be kept in the royal treasury. Diplomacy continued at formal banquets where Sicilian bishops shared tables with Egyptian emirs and envoys from the Assassins—a truly remarkable guest list and, again, a testament to Frederick’s open-minded approach.48 Truces and trade deals with Egypt showed his continued good relationship with al-Kamil, although such arrangements provided easy ammunition for papal attacks on him. Some in the West believed the emperor a man of immorality. One writer placed him in a most rarefied category of villain: “worse than Herod, Judas and Nero,” yet none of the major secular rulers were ever persuaded to oppose him openly. His vilification by the Church helps to explain why, unlike his contemporaries Louis IX of France and Fernando III of Castile and León, he was never canonized. Undeniably, however, he had experienced one of the most tumultuous reigns of the medieval period and his crusade, however unconventional in form, offered a glimpse of a different, and potentially more fruitful, way forward for the Holy Land. As his officials prepared to lay their master to rest they wrapped Frederick in a silk garment embroidered with Arabic texts. He was buried in Palermo Cathedral in a fine porphyry tomb, still to be seen today. His epitaph, secular in tone, reads: “If honesty, intelligence, the grace of manly virtues, wealth and noble birth, could death resist, Frederick who lies within, would not be dead.”49
“TO KILL THE SERPENT, FIRST YOU MUST CRUSH THE HEAD”
The Crusade of Louis IX and the Rise of the Sultan Baibars
Saladin’s triumph at the Battle of Hattin is the most famous Muslim victory over the Franks, yet it was not—by a considerable margin—the most crushing. Fifty-seven years after Hattin, on October 17, 1244, the devastation inflicted upon the Christian army at the Battle of La Forbie marked a far heavier blow to the Frankish cause. In its bloody aftermath came the expedition of King (later Saint) Louis IX of France, the most zealous crusader king in history. His opponents included Baibars, a young Mamluk warrior who, in later decades, pushed the Christian presence in the Holy Land to the brink of extinction.
Events outside the Levant created the circumstances of La Forbie. The Khwarazmians were a group of nomadic Turkish tribesmen driven westward by the Mongol invasion of Persia.1 These Muslim warriors made contact with the sultan of Cairo, who, in the early 1240s, promised them support for an invasion of the Holy Land. In the summer of 1244 the Khwarazmians tore through the Frankish Levant and slaughtered thousands of Christians; as one observer wrote: “these people took no prisoners, all they wanted to do was kill.”2 As they closed in on Jerusalem most of the inhabitants fled in the face of such a terrible danger; no one anticipated that this panic-stricken exodus signaled the end of Christian control over the holy city for more than six centuries. The priests of the Holy Sepulchre refused to abandon their church, a brave decision but one that would precipitate their martyrdom. As the clergy celebrated Mass the Khwarazmians broke into the building and began to butcher them; some were disemboweled while others were beheaded at the altars. Next, the invaders ripped open the tombs of the kings of Jerusalem and cast out the bones of crusading heroes such as Godfrey of Bouillon and King Baldwin I in their search for treasure. A northern French writer grimly summarized their deeds: “they committed far more acts of shame, filth and destruction against Jesus Christ and the holy places and Christendom than all the unbelievers who had been in the land had ever done in peace or war.”3
The Khwarazmians’ power prompted the Muslims of Damascus and Homs to join forces with the remaining Franks. The Levantine coalition met their enemy, who were reinforced by Egyptian troops, at La Forbie near Gaza. Faced by far superior forces, the Christians’ allies were soon driven from the field and in spite of fighting bravely the Franks were doomed. The level of slaughter was stupefying: the Military Orders fared especially badly—of 348 Templars, 36 escaped; from 351 Hospitallers, 21 survived; and of 400 Teutonic Knights, only 3 lived. Thousands of crossbowmen and foot soldiers perished and many of the Frankish nobility died too; the fighting strength of the kingdom of Jerusalem was all but erased.
Faced by this unprecedented crisis, Patriarch Robert of Jerusalem dispatched an embassy to Europe to plead for help. So grave was the situation that envoys risked a midwinter sea voyage to convey their calamitous news and to urge a response. The interminable tension between the papacy and Frederick II ruled out German involvement, Henry III of England was too fearful of the French to cooperate, and the Spanish were preoccupied with their own reconquest. Fortunately for the settlers, one monarch was prepared to act—Louis IX of France declared himself ready to lead the greatest crusade of the century as he tried to preserve and strengthen the Christian hold on the Holy Land.
THE CRUSADE OF LOUIS IX: PRAYERS AND PREPARATIONS
Louis was an intriguing character, a man of immense piety for whom the crusade was the defining event of his reign; he would feel the most profound sense of personal responsibility for the failure of the 1248–54 campaign and died in a second attempt to capture Jerusalem in 1270.4 Unlike men such as Richard the Lionheart or Frederick II, his desire to advance the Christian cause above all other considerations was conspicuously the dominant aspect of his life. Louis took the cross in late 1244, in part as a reaction to the news from the Levant, and in part to fulfill a vow made during his recovery from a near-fatal illness. Family honor also influenced him: Louis was from a long line of crusaders—his father, Louis VIII, had died returning from the Albigensian Crusade in 1226; his grandfather, Philip, had fought on the Third Crusade; his great-grandfather, Louis VII, took part in the Second Crusade; and his great-great-uncle, Hugh of Vermandois, was a senior figure on the First Crusade. It was inevitable that Louis responded to the weight of this immense crusading tradition.
Louis knew that it would cost a fortune to recover Jerusalem, and to gather the requisite funding he drew upon his kingdom’s increasingly advanced administration. For the first time in crusading history we have a reasonably full set of accounts for an expedition, and we learn that it cost a total of 1.5 million livres.5 The crown had an income of 250,000 livres per annum, with most of that taken up by ongoing expenses such as warfare, building projects, and subsistence; some economies could be made but clearly extra funding would be needed. Louis turned to the towns and cities of his realm to raise 250,000 livres; the sums extracted varied: Paris gave 10,000 livres, the tiny settlement of Bonnevaux four livres, yet the point is clear—everyone, no matter how great or small, contributed. The king also pressured the French Church into providing a tenth of the revenue from its benefices, although the monastic orders claimed exemption. In spite of their grumbling the clergy eventually yielded 1 million livres over the course of the expedition, two-thirds of the total cost.
Louis was concerned to gain God’s favor and he endeavored to create an appropriate moral climate for his crusade; thus he sent out enquêteurs to resolve complaints against baillis (royal officials). The results were startling: between 1247 and 1249 the eighteen bailliages changed hands twenty times to mark a thorough purge of the corrupt. Aside from ending possible causes of disquiet, such a process demonstrated the king’s interest in his people’s welfare and also increased the efficiency of his administration.
Louis and his advisers tried to learn from the failure of previous crusading expeditions and noted that a breakdown in food provision had been a recurrent problem. While there were practical limits as to what was possible, some useful measures were feasible. With the capture of Cyprus in 1191 a safe forward base was available for westerners who planned to campaign in the East. The French sent huge supplies of grain and wine ahead: “along the shore his people had laid out large stacks of wine barrels that had been bought two years before his [Louis’s] arrival. They had been placed one on top of another so that when they were seen from the front they had the appearance of barns. The wheat and grain had been heaped in piles . . . rain that had fallen on the grain . . . made the outermost layer sprout so that all that could be seen was green grass . . . [but underneath] the wheat and barley were as fresh as if they had just been threshed.”6
The French monarch had to set his affairs in order; most importantly, he made peace with Henry III of England to prevent an invasion during his absence. Louis’s choice of regent was easy; the natural candidate was his formidable mother, Blanche of Castile. Blanche had already managed to overcome the perceived handicaps of being both foreign and female to govern on Louis’s behalf during his minority. So controlling was Blanche that she conceded little authority to her son until he was twenty-one, even though the age of majority was more usually fifteen. She is said to have disapproved of the king’s affection for his young wife, Queen Margaret. At the royal castle of Pontoise the couple’s bedrooms were in a tower, one above the other, but connected by a narrow staircase as well as the main flight of steps. If Blanche appeared unannounced, servants were to knock on the door and the couple could separate quickly and use the back staircase to avoid a scene. Once the coast was clear they might rejoin one another with ease.7 The arrival of eleven royal offspring indicates that their strategy succeeded. It has been suggested, perhaps a touch mischievously, that Louis went on crusade to escape from his mother. When, many years later, Blanche died, the news was broken to the queen thus: “The woman who hated you most is dead.”8
As usual with the launch of a crusade, special spiritual preparations took place as well. Probably the most tangible manifestation of Louis’s piety was (and remains) the beautiful, if restored, Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Constructed between 1242 and 1247, it displays a dazzling combination of architectural brilliance and religious devotion.9 It was built on two levels, the lower floor for servants, the upper, a nonpareil reliquary for the religious and political hierarchy of France. In 1238 Louis had acquired the Crown of Thorns, worn by Christ during the crucifixion, pieces of the True Cross, the holy sponge and fragments of the Holy Lance, all purchased from the penniless Latin emperor of Constantinople. Given the momentous significance of such items Louis deemed it proper to create a monument of appropriate splendor to house them, and he commi
ssioned a building that blended beautiful colored glass, dizzying vertical lines, frescoes, sculpture, and metalwork. Sainte-Chapelle also emphasized Louis’s role as a king in the biblical tradition, the legitimate heir to David and Solomon in the Holy Land. The relics themselves were placed within a structure of precious metals and gems. A fourteenth-century poet wrote:
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