The Glory of the Crusades

by Steve Weidenkopf

  The king of Jerusalem was Conrad II (IV of Germany), the son of Frederick II, but he lived in Europe and so the kingdom suffered from an absent monarch. Louis filled the vacuum by taking command of the Christian areas in the kingdom. Although he had no legal authority to act as the king, he had a gravitas that was recognized and welcomed by the Christians of Outrémer.

  The saintly king spent his time building up the kingdom’s coastal city defenses, feeling duty-bound to provide as best he could for the needs of the local Christians. During his stay Louis received a letter from the sultan in Damascus offering him safe conduct to visit the Holy City as a pilgrim. Louis wanted to go but knew he could not. Instead he followed Richard the Lion-Hearted’s lead and refused to set foot in Jerusalem while it was still occupied. He understood that “he must renounce seeing Jerusalem in order to sustain the will and the hope of holding it and possessing it.”533

  Louis’s presence in the Holy Land for six years had been a pivotal time in the history of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, during which he “restored … cohesion, unity, and the idea of a state” to the Christian inhabitants of Christ’s patrimony. However, the time was at hand to return to his beloved France.534

  The Return to France

  In the spring of 1253, Louis received news that his mother, Blanche, had died on November 27, 1252. The news prompted Louis to make arrangements to leave Outrémer and return home. Despite the king’s preparations and best intentions, his first Crusade had been a catastrophe, resulting in his brother’s death and his own imprisonment. He repeated the mistakes of the Fifth Crusade by failing to secure his rear areas and supply lines, made poor tactical decisions, and commanded an ill-disciplined army that collapsed when his brother foolishly charged into the town of Mansourah unsupported. Louis’s Crusading career was not over but it would take another fifteen years for the king to ride once more unto the breach.

  Baybars the Merciless

  In the fall of 1260, a large Mongol army under the command of Kitbogha left Damascus on a campaign to conquer Egypt. The Egyptians responded with an army commanded by a general named Baybars. The forces met at Ain Jalut in Galilee on September 3, where the Mongols were decimated in a decisive victory for Baybars and the Egyptians. The battle marked the first time the Mongols were overwhelmingly defeated on the battlefield.

  Baybars, a blue-eyed Russian Turk, was a “savage and treacherous wild beast but a soldier of genius and an incomparable administrator.”535 After his victory the Mamluk warrior installed himself as sultan of Egypt and Damascus and effectively reestablished Saladin’s empire. He was a great warrior, better than Saladin, and the scourge of Christians in Outrémer, primarily because he was a man with “a complete absence of scruples.”536 Baybars began a campaign of jihad to eradicate the Christians in the Holy Land, providing a “means to consolidate his power as well as establish his credentials as a worthy Islamic ruler.”537

  Baybars engaged in a scorched-earth policy to compel the elimination of the Christian presence from Outrémer. He ordered the destruction of all captured Christian cities in order to prevent their liberation and resettlement. His preferred methods in dealing with Christian populations were massacre and enslavement. The campaign was swift and deadly, and the prospect that the entire Kingdom of Jerusalem could fall into the Mamluk’s hands looked promising.

  Urgent appeals were sent to Europe for another major Crusade. Meanwhile, Baybars sacked Jaffa in 1268 and, in the spring of 1271, captured the previously impregnable fortress of Krak des Chevaliers, the Hospitaller stronghold that not even Saladin had been able to conquer. Panic reached a heightened state after the merciless Baybars sacked the city of Antioch after a four-day siege. His troops killed every Christian in the city, including all the women and children. It was the single greatest massacre in Crusading history. Baybars ensured the remembrance of the massacre by sending a description of it to the absent ruler of Antioch, Bohemond VI:

  You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the patriarch’s tombs overturned. You would have seen your Muslim enemy trampling on the place where you celebrate the Mass, cutting the throats of monks, priests and deacons upon the altars … You would have seen fire running through your palaces, your dead burned in this world before going down to the fires of the next.538

  The ancient Christian city would never be recovered. The Principality of Antioch, established after the First Crusade, 170 years previously, was no more. The scourge of Baybars the Merciless demanded a response, and once more the saintly Crusader of France took up the cross.

  The Second Crusade of King St. Louis IX

  News of Baybars’s raids and destruction of Christian territory in Outrémer and the unfinished business of his first Crusade prompted Louis to take the cross on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1267. The decision was somewhat of a surprise, as Louis was now in his fifties. He left Aigues Mortes on July 2, 1270 with a similar sized army as in his first Crusade: 325 knights and between 10,000 to 15,000 infantry.539 After his departure Louis announced that his initial objective was Tunis on the African coast opposite Sicily.

  Through the centuries historians have tried to answer why Louis chose Tunis as the object of the Crusade. Some authors have argued that he was motivated by political reasons, since conquest of Tunis would help his brother Charles I, king of Sicily. Others have written that Louis believed Tunis was an ally of Egypt and would provide a secure base of operations for the Crusaders to attack Egypt, a long-time objective of Crusade armies.

  These speculations derive from those living centuries after the king and are inadequate. The contemporary confessor of Louis, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, provides a better explanation and one in keeping with the saintly Crusader’s spiritual emphasis. He indicated that Louis desired to convert the Muslim ruler of Tunis, who had said he would embrace the gospel if a strong Christian army came to his realm.540 A Tunisian embassy who visited Louis’s court in 1269 before the king’s departure may have influenced his decision. There was also a very good logistical reason for choosing Tunis, as every Crusader fleet needed a muster port before sailing on to the Holy Land. Embarkation to Outrémer usually occurred in late summer or early fall and every Crusade army since the Second Crusade wintered over somewhere. Louis had previously used Cyprus as his staging area before sailing on to Damietta but “Tunis was within easier and safer sailing distance than Cyprus.”541 A combination of evangelization and logistics, therefore, motivated Louis’s decision to attack Tunis in the summer of 1270.

  The Death of the King

  Louis spent two weeks at Tunis before advancing to Carthage in order to await the army of his brother, Charles I, en route from Sicily. Unfortunately, the wait at Carthage proved fatal. The “high summer, poor diet, and water contaminated by the immobile army soon stoked the outbreak of virulent disease, probably typhus or dysentery.”542 The Crusaders began to die. Louis’s son, Jean Tristan, born at Damietta in 1250 during Louis’s first Crusade, died, followed soon thereafter by the papal legate. Then the saintly Crusader became sick and bedridden. After a month of sickness, the king finally succumbed and died on August 25, 1270 at the age of fifty-six. He died at the hour of mercy while lying on a bed of ashes mouthing the words, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem.”543 St. Louis was the last monarch of Europe to go on Crusade to the Holy Land and even with his dying breath his last thought was the liberation of the Holy City; he was truly the “perfect Crusader.”

  A few hours after Louis’s death, his brother Charles of Anjou arrived at Carthage with his army. The next few months witnessed minor skirmishing between the Crusader and Muslim forces that ended when Charles negotiated a peace with the emir of Tunis in November that included an allowance for Christian evangelization and worship in lands controlled by the emir.

  Charles’s return trip to France was marked by disaster and death. On November 15–16, the French fleet struck a storm that destroyed forty ships, including eighteen large transports. Tho
usands of souls were lost.544 The survivors reached land and began the march home but by then “it was not an army but a funeral procession which returned to France” as Crusaders continued to die, including Isabelle of Aragon, the wife of Louis’s son Philip III.545 The pregnant Isabelle fell off her horse while crossing a river, which induced premature labor and resulted in a stillbirth.546 Saint Louis’s brother, Alfonso of Poitiers and his wife, Jeanne, also died in Italy on the way home from the Crusade.

  Louis’s second Crusade was a costly endeavor with little temporal gain. Pope Boniface VIII, whose relationship with Louis IX’s grandson Philip IV “the Fair” was notoriously bad, canonized the saintly Crusader on August 11, 1297, twenty-seven years after his death on his second Crusade in the desert of North Africa.

  The End of the Crusader States

  As the thirteenth century came to a close, Christian territory in Outrémer occupied only a very narrow coastal strip. The area was, however, extremely fertile and rich. The annual revenue of Acre, the major Christian port in the Holy Land, was more than that of the English king. The material wealth of the kingdom and its role in the Holy Land economy gave the Christians there a false sense of security, as they believed their economic importance provided a defense against Muslim attack. There was not much else the Christians could depend on, as their own military forces were woefully inadequate. Their military strategy centered on diplomacy with their Muslim neighbors and Western assistance in times of crisis. After the fall of Tripoli in 1289, King Henry II of Jerusalem entered into a ten year truce with the Mamluk sultan of Egypt, al-Mansur Qalawun. Henry hoped the truce would safeguard the remaining Christian cities and avoid the fate of Tripoli. His hope proved futile.

  In the summer of 1290, Muslim merchants from Damascus arrived in Acre and were attacked by Christians. No one is exactly certain why the merchants were attacked. Some believe drunken revelers from a party lost control and set upon the Muslims. Others said a local Christian discovered his wife in bed with one of the Muslim merchants and killed him.547 Regardless of the reason, the killings gave Qalawun an excuse to break the treaty and launch an attack on the major Christian city.

  In early November the Mamluk army left Egypt bent on the conquest of Acre. Six days into the march, Sultan Qalawun died. He was replaced by al-Ashraf Khalil, who also ordered Syrian forces to mobilize and join the Egyptians at Acre. The Christians were soon to be descended upon by a large, united Muslim force.

  Khalil set a muster date of March of 1291 for the combined army and initiated a campaign aimed at raising enthusiasm for the jihad against the Christians. A week before the main army set out, the Qur’an was recited publicly in Cairo and a call went out for general volunteers, who would be used as cannon fodder, to join the army.548 Baybars al-Mansuri, the emir of Karak, best expressed the mood within the Muslim community when he wrote, “My soul had a strong desire for jihad, a desire for it like the earth thirsts for delivering rain.”549

  In order to stem an attack on the city, Acre sent the ambassadors Philip Mainboeuf, an Arabic scholar, Bartholomew Pizan, a Templar knight, and George, a Hospitaller secretary, to Khalil. He refused to see them. Instead, he had them arrested and put in prison, where they later died.550

  Nothing could convince Khalil to change his mind. He was determined to wrestle control of Acre away from the Christians. It was a holy city in the eyes of Islam and the time had come for its conquest through jihad.551

  Amalric, the brother of King Henry II, was deeply concerned. In charge of the defenses of Acre, he knew there were not enough men to combat the massive Muslim army bearing down on the city. There was some comfort in the fact that the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights augmented his forces, and each order had sent summons to Europe for all available men to make haste to Acre. All three grand masters of the military religious orders were already present.

  Those who could afford it began to leave the city for Cyprus. As the calendar turned to 1291, Christian forces from other towns were pulled to defend Acre. Despite this extreme measure the Christians were vastly outnumbered. The combined Muslim forces included 160,000 infantry and 60,000 cavalry; a force that quadrupled the population of Acre.552 Christian forces numbered only 15,000 with 1,000 knights, 14,000 foot soldiers and a contingent of crossbowmen first provided to the city by King Louis during his sojourn in Outrémer.

  The disparity in numbers influenced Christian strategy. “Their only realistic chance of survival lay in disrupting the Muslims by inflicting unexpected or unacceptable casualties.”553

  The Last Stand

  Khalil’s army arrived at Acre in early April 1291. The sultan knew he had superior numbers but he also knew that fact alone would not ensure victory. Acre was a well-fortified city, with double walls that would need to be breached. Situated with its back to the sea, the city afforded a limited landward position for maneuver. Khalil had no fleet and could not command the sea, so he was forced to concentrate all his forces on a smaller area, which limited the numbers of troops he could commit to battle at any one time. Access to the sea kept the defenders supplied and provided a gateway for reinforcements as well as an escape plan for those who could get on ships. Khalil knew success demanded the destruction of the walls, or at least a part of them, so he planned a massive artillery bombardment of the city. The siege of Acre was to “be a contest of throwing machines.”554

  The Muslims brought more than a hundred siege engines to the contest. This included one particularly massive engine that had been captured at Krak des Chevaliers in 1271 by Baybars. It took a hundred carts and thirty days to travel the 125 miles to Acre.555 The number of machines was astounding, and unprecedented in Muslim military history.556 The Templar of Tyre recorded that several of the siege engines were given names and he noted their dispositions during the battle:

  One of these engines was called Ghadban, that is to say Furious, and it was set up in front of the Templars’ section. Another which shot at the Pisans’ section was called al-Mansuri, that is to say Victory. Yet another, very large, whose name I do not know, shot at the Hospitallers’ section, and a fourth engine shot at the great tower called the Accursed Tower.557

  The first week of the siege saw limited skirmishing as each side tested the strengths of the other. The Master of the Templars, William of Beaujeu, led a surprise raid on April 15 with both regular and Templar knights. The raid began promisingly, catching the Muslims completely unawares, but then disaster struck, as described by the Templar of Tyre:

  [B]oth brother and secular knights went so far in amongst the tents that their horses got their legs tangled in the tent ropes and went sprawling, whereupon the Saracens slew them. In this way we lost eighteen horsemen that night … though they did capture a number of Saracen shields.558

  One unfortunate knight fell into the emir’s latrine, where he was killed.559

  The Christians launched additional raids from April 18–20 but they did not achieve any lasting success. Eventually the raids stopped as the defenders became concerned about the number of troops available for wall defense. In early May, the Christians received a huge morale boost as King Henry II arrived in forty ships with 100 knights and 2,000 infantry from Cyprus.560 He assumed command of the defense and quickly surmised the situation was militarily hopeless.

  Henry decided to seek a diplomatic solution and sent envoys to Khalil on May 7. If the envoys had hopes of striking a negotiated settlement, these were quickly dashed as Khalil greeted them with a question: “Have you brought me the keys of the city?”561 Despite the cold reception, the envoys pressed forward with the negotiation and managed to get Khalil to agree to let everyone in the city live if the king surrendered.

  The envoys needed to receive the king’s consent before they finalized the deal. As they were leaving the sultan’s tent, a huge catapult stone from the city crashed near it. Khalil was furious the Christians would continue to fire on his army with their envoys present in the camp and he threatened to kill them. He relented
and allowed them to go but he reneged on the deal. Acre would either hold or be destroyed.

  The End of Acre

  Two weeks after King Henry’s arrival, Khalil launched the final assault on the city. It began with a thunderous barrage of noise from 300 camel-mounted drummers.562 After more than a month of bombardment, the Muslims finally breached the walls and entered the city. The chronicle of the Templar of Tyre captured the scene of the Muslim army pouring in:

  In front came men carrying tall shields, and after them came men who threw Greek fire, and after them came men who hurled javelins and shot feathered arrows … At this the Saracens … took two routes, since they were between the two walls of the city … Some of them entered by a gate of that great tower called the Accursed Tower, and moved toward San Romano where the Pisans had their great engines. The others kept to the (main) road, going to St. Anthony’s Gate.563

  All remaining women and children fled to the harbor to board escape ships. Meanwhile, the Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, and Templars continued the battle within the city. The fighting was intense, and casualties, both military and civilian, were high.

  Eventually Christian resistance collapsed, and Muslim warriors rampaged through the city slaughtering everyone in their way. Jean de Villiers, the grand master of the Hospitallers, was gravely wounded from a spear that struck his back and he was carried from the scene by his confreres.564 William of Beaujeu, the master of the Templars, was mortally wounded at the hour of mercy;565 not in full battle armor at the time, he was struck by a spear.566 The master and the order’s standard-bearer left the battlefield, which prompted shouts from the nearby troops who thought he was fleeing in the face of the enemy. He shouted to them, “I am not fleeing, I am slain: You can see the stroke!”567