Even better fortune was to follow. King Louis must have expected and prepared for a hard-fought siege of Damietta, only too aware of the gruelling eighteen-month investment undertaken by the Fifth Crusade. As the day drew to a close, he began to ferry supplies ashore, preparing to fortify his position and, if necessary, to repel a counter-attack. But the very next day the Franks were astounded to discover that Damietta had been abandoned. Trails of smoke were seen rising above the city, and scouts returned to report that its garrison had fled, some by land, others down the Nile. In a single stroke, Louis had achieved the first goal of his campaign, establishing a foothold on the Nile and opening the doorway to Egypt. It was the most stunning opening foray of any crusade. In the sweltering heat of the North African summer, the image of the Ayyubids fleeing from the beaches and then forsaking Damietta seems to have burned into the minds of Louis and his compatriots. For them, it was an image to relish–one that seemed to speak of a Muslim world on the brink of collapse and to foreshadow ultimate Christian victory.
AYYUBID DECLINE
The crusaders assumed that their success in early June 1249 was born of their own martial superiority and the enfeebled state of Islam. But while these notions contained more than a grain of truth, they also concealed the underlying reality of the situation. Fakhr al-Din’s decision to quit the field on 5 June does not appear primarily to have been a response to Latin ferocity. In fact, he conceded the beaches and then promptly marched the Egyptian field army south, straight past Damietta, because his real ambitions lay elsewhere. The city had been garrisoned by a regiment known as the Kinaniyya, renowned for their bravery; but horrified to find themselves deserted, they too absconded during the night. Pouring south, all of these forces regrouped at the main Ayyubid encampment, where Sultan al-Salih’s grip on power was in terminal decline.
After the Muslim triumph at La Forbie in 1244, al-Salih had turned his back on the Khwarizmians. Judging this horde of untamed mercenaries to be too dangerous and uncontrollable to be trusted, he barred his former allies from entering Egypt. Left to ravage Palestine and Syria with little coherent purpose, the rampaging savagery that had driven the Khwarizmians eventually burned itself out, and in 1246 they were roundly defeated by a coalition of Syrian Muslims. In the years that followed, al-Salih moved to assume control of Damascus and to occupy further sections of Palestine.
Around this time, however, the sultan fell gravely ill with consumption. By 1249 his health was deteriorating rapidly and he was able to travel only when borne upon a litter. In one respect, therefore, King Louis IX’s crusade was propitiously timed, because it coincided with a period of severe debility for the Ayyubid high command. Yet, even though al-Salih was dying, there were others eager to take his place, among them Fakhr al-Din. So it was that the emir readily abandoned his post at Damietta in early summer 1249, worried that if enmeshed in a prolonged engagement on the coast he might miss his opportunity to seize power when the sultan died. The outcome of events at the mouth of the Nile Delta enraged the ailing al-Salih. He seems to have suspected the real reason behind Fakhr al-Din’s retreat, but lacked the confidence openly to punish such a prominent emir. The Kinaniyya were less fortunate, and the sultan had the entire regiment hanged.36
This brutalised atmosphere of mistrust, betrayal and rivalry was just one expression of a wider malaise affecting the Ayyubid realm across the Levant. After long decades of domination, the dynasty established by Saladin and his brother al-Adil was inching towards disintegration–bedevilled by ineffectual leadership and paralysed by internecine intrigue. But this did not mean that the Frankish conquest of Egypt or the Holy Land would proceed unopposed. In fact, even beyond Fakhr al-Din’s dreams of glory, another extraordinarily potent force was rising to prominence in Egypt: the mamluks.
Mamluks–the swords of Islam
Mamluks, or slave soldiers, had been used by Muslim rulers in the Levant for centuries, playing significant roles in Zangid and Ayyubid armies through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These fiercely loyal, highly professional warriors were the product of an elaborate system of slavery and military training. Most were Turks from the Russian Kipchak steppes far to the north, beyond the Black Sea; captured as boys (usually between the ages of eight and twelve) by well-organised slave rings, they were sold to Islamic potentates in the Near and Middle East and then indoctrinated in the Muslim faith and trained in the arts of war.
Mamluks were prized not only for their unrivalled martial skill, but also for their fidelity. Because their welfare and survival were directly linked to just one master, they tended to be remarkably faithful–an unusual quality in the conniving quagmire of medieval Islamic power politics. Commenting on their commendable reliability, an eleventh-century Seljuq ruler observed that ‘one obedient slave is better than 300 sons; for the latter desire their father’s death, the former long life for his master’. Strange as it may sound, their loyalty was also a product of relatively rosy life prospects, as many prominent mamluks went on to enjoy command roles, liberty and prosperity.
Rulers from Nur al-Din to al-Kamil employed mamluks in positions ranging from ‘royal’ bodyguards to battlefield generals, but no sultan was more reliant upon their services than al-Salih. After about 1240 he became increasingly suspicious of the trustworthiness of his other retainers and soldiers, and built up a much larger mamluk army. The elite core of this force was a one-thousand-strong regiment known as the Bahriyya (a name derived from their garrison near Cairo on an island in the Nile, which in Arabic was known as the bahr al-Nil, or ‘the sea of the Nile’). One Muslim contemporary recorded that the Bahriyya quickly ‘became a mighty force, of extreme courage and boldness, from which the Muslims derived the greatest benefit’. To an extent, al-Salih’s creation of this select band, alongside his wider use of other mamluk units, made perfect sense. The continued survival of his teetering political regime soon came to depend upon the Bahriyya’s enduring support. But if and when al-Salih died, their loyalty to an Ayyubid successor might waver–indeed, the mamluks might begin even to question whether they should lead rather than follow.
For the time being, the balance held. Al-Salih lived on through the summer and autumn of 1249, establishing a well-protected base of operations for his army beside the fortified town of Mansourah–the same position taken up by his Ayyubid predecessors at the time of the Fifth Crusade. With the Muslim host thus entrenched, and its ranks bolstered by the presence of the Bahriyya, it was evident that King Louis’ crusade would meet far stiffer resistance than that encountered at Damietta if it dared to venture south along the Nile.37
TO CONQUER EGYPT
The Frankish occupation of Damietta was followed by another period of cautious inactivity on Louis’ part. The Capetian sovereign had no interest in using Damietta as a bargaining chip to achieve territorial concessions in Palestine–he aspired instead to conquer all Ayyubid Egypt and then, with Muslim resistance shattered, turn east towards Jerusalem. This strategy meant that, at some point, the crusade would have to march inland. The king seems to have been aware of some of the problems faced in Egypt by Cardinal Pelagius and John of Brienne twenty-eight years earlier, and a number of Christian eyewitnesses present at Damietta in 1249 refer explicitly to the reversals experienced by the Fifth Crusaders. Certainly, with the Nile flood pending, Louis made no immediate attempt to march south. Instead, the expedition waited out the summer.
Through these months, Louis and his advisers debated the next step in the campaign. The port of Alexandria was mooted as a possible target, but one of the king’s brothers, Robert of Artois, apparently recommended a direct southward invasion, arguing that ‘to kill the serpent, you must first of all crush its head’. With al-Salih’s Ayyubid army now barracked at Mansourah, Louis’ crusade, therefore, would face a similar strategic challenge to that confronted by Pelagius. But the experience of the Damietta landings pointed to Muslim weakness, and if success could be achieved on the Nile, the gains might be spectacular. A Muslim chron
icler recognised the danger, noting that ‘if the [Ayyubid] army at Mansourah were to be driven back just one stage to the rear, the whole of Egypt would be conquered in the shortest time’.38
Around 20 November 1249, with the floodwaters receding, Louis’ army began its advance along the east bank of the Nile. In comparison to Pelagius, the king had a better–albeit not perfect–understanding of the delta’s topography and a fuller appreciation of the challenge ahead. He set out to trace the route of the river south, marching in parallel with a fleet of ‘many great and small boats loaded with foodstuffs, weapons, engines, armour and everything else needed in warfare’. Progress was slow, partly because a wind blowing from the south made it difficult to advance against the Nile’s current, but a few early probing assaults by the Ayyubids were beaten back easily, and the Christians closed inexorably on Mansourah.
Towards the closing stages of the journey, Louis–like Pelagius before him–must have marched past the point where the Mahalla Canal joined the Nile, but this critical waterway was not mentioned in any of the Christian accounts of the advance and it appears that the Franks made no attempt to block or guard its course. At first glance this seems like sheer neglectful folly, given the decisive role the canal played in 1221. But in all probability neither Louis and his contemporaries, nor the Fifth Crusaders themselves, ever understood fully how al-Kamil managed to get a fleet on to the northern reaches of the Nile. And even if the French king did take the time to reconnoitre the canal in 1249, outside the main summer spate of the flood its low waters were probably deemed to be unnavigable.
In any case, the Franks completed their march on 21 December, taking up a position identical to that occupied by the Fifth Crusade, north of the fork between the Nile and the Tanis River. The Ayyubids had erected a tented camp on the opposite, southern banks of the Tanis, while billeting the bulk of their forces a little further to the south. The Bahriyya mamluks, meanwhile, had been quartered within Mansourah (which, since 1221, had grown from an encampment into a more permanent fortified settlement). In the course of Louis’ march from Damietta, events within the Ayyubid court had moved on apace. After a long, crippling battle with illness, al-Salih died on 22 November. At this point, Fakhr al-Din forged an alliance with one of the late sultan’s widows, Shajar al-Durr. According to Muslim sources, the pair made every effort to conceal al-Salih’s demise: having his body carefully wrapped in a shroud and then spirited away in a coffin; forging his signature on documents that transferred overall command of the army to Fakhr al-Din; even continuing to set the dinner table each evening and claiming that the sultan was too ill to attend.
As far as Shajar al-Durr was concerned, this deception was designed to preserve the veneer of Ayyubid unity in the face of the crusader advance, and to allow the succession to the sultanate to be settled. To this end, Aqtay–commander of the elite Bahriyya mamluks–was sent to Mesopotamia to invite al-Salih’s son and heir, al-Mu‘azzam Turanshah, to assume control of Egypt. Fakhr al-Din agreed to this plan, both to avoid suspicion and because the scheme removed Aqtay (a potential rival) from the field. In private, though, Fakhr al-Din seems to have hoped that, given the distances involved and the enemy lands to be crossed, either the message would not get through or Turanshah would fail in any attempt to reach North Africa. In the words of one Muslim chronicler, Fakhr al-Din ‘was aiming at sole and arbitrary rule’.
Despite all this convoluted intrigue, news of al-Salih’s death eventually leaked out, causing alarm and unrest in Cairo. Before long, Louis IX also discovered that, as he later put it, ‘the sultan of Egypt had just ended his wretched life’–tidings that only increased the king’s hopes for victory.39
The main challenge now confronting the crusaders was somehow to breach the physical barrier of the fast-flowing Tanis River. Louis’ stratagem, seemingly formulated in Damietta, was to build a causeway ‘constructed of timber and earth’ across the river. To achieve this goal, the king instructed his chief engineer Joscelin of Cornaut to oversee a two-stage plan. A pair of ‘cat-houses’–movable towers with extending ‘cats’, or protective screens–were raised, under which labourers would be able to work on the causeway. At the same time, some eighteen stone-throwing engines brought from the coast were erected to provide covering fire. Once all these contraptions had been assembled and manoeuvred into position, the second, more perilous, phase of actual causeway construction began.
Unfortunately for the Franks, the Egyptian army had its own battery of sixteen ballistic engines on the south bank of the Tanis. As soon as the crusaders came into range, Fakhr al-Din initiated an incessant bombardment, ‘using relays of men day and night’ to sustain a constant barrage of ‘stones, javelins, arrows [and] crossbow bolts [that] flew as thick as rain’. Like so many Muslim armies before them, the Ayyubids stationed at Mansourah also held a deadly technological advantage over their Christian foes: a ready supply of highly combustible Greek fire (or, as one Frank aptly named it, ‘Hellfire’). Fakhr al-Din targeted the Latins’ wooden ‘cat-houses’ with volleys of Greek fire to devastating effect. John of Joinville was ordered to man one of these vulnerable towers over a series of nights, and later frankly described the utter terror he and his men experienced, watching flasks of Greek fire hurtling through the darkened sky like ‘dragon[s] flying through the air’, with long ‘tail[s] of fire stream[ing] behind’ them. One day in early 1250 when John was not on duty, the Ayyubid barrage finally told, and the towers went down in flames. Thankful that this had not occurred on his watch, Joinville wrote, ‘I and my knights praised God for such an accident.’40
Even with the ‘cat-houses’, the attempts to fashion a causeway had been failing because the river’s fast-moving current eroded the structure. In the first week of February, Louis called off the futile efforts, and morale within the camp sank as it seemed an impasse had been reached. Around this same time, however, a Muslim traitor–variously described as a Bedouin or as a deserter from the Egyptian army–told the Latins about a ford some distance down the course of the Tanis that would give them access to the southern banks of the river. Offered this unexpected glimpse of hope, the French king immediately decided to use this ford to mount a direct attack on the Ayyubid camp.
Aware of the terrible risks involved in this operation, and of the lethal consequences of being caught and surrounded on the far side of the Tanis, Louis formulated his tactics with care. To avoid detection, the crossing would begin before daybreak. The depth of the ford and the need for swift engagement precluded the involvement of infantry, so only mounted knights and sergeants were selected. And with an eye to maintaining strict discipline, these men were drawn from the king’s trusted French contingents and the Templar and Hospitaller Orders. The Franks of Outremer and the Teutonic Knights were to remain in place, defending the northern camp. Above all, it was imperative that the entire strike force reach the south bank and regroup before any attack was mounted. With this in mind, Louis ‘commanded them all–great men and small–that no one should dare to break ranks’.41
The Battle of Mansourah
Before first light on Tuesday 8 February 1250, the king’s plan was put into action. The Templars led the way, closely followed by a party of knights commanded by Louis’ brother Count Robert of Artois, which included the Englishman William Longsword, earl of Salisbury. It soon became clear that the ford was deeper than expected, requiring horses to swim midstream, and the steep, muddy banks on either side caused some crusaders to fall from their mounts and drown. Nonetheless, hundreds of Franks began to emerge on the far shore.
Then, just as the sun was rising, Robert of Artois made a sudden and unexpected decision to launch an assault, charging at the head of his men towards the Ayyubids’ riverside base. In the confusion, the Templars followed close behind, leaving Louis and the bulk of the strike force stranded in the ford. In this one instant, all hope of an ordered offensive evaporated. It is impossible to know what caused Robert to act so precipitously: perhaps he saw the chance for a s
urprise attack slipping away; or the promise of glory and renown may have spurred him on. As he rode off, those left behind–the king included–must have felt a mixture of shock, puzzlement and anger.
Even so, at first it looked as though Robert’s audacity might win the day. Ploughing into the unsuspecting Muslim camp, where many were still asleep, the count’s combined force of around 600 crusaders and Templars encountered only token resistance. Racing in among the enemy tents, they began the work of butchery. Fakhr al-Din, who was carrying out his morning ablutions, quickly threw on some clothes, mounted a horse and rode out, unarmed, into the tumult. Set upon by a party of Templars, he was cut down and slain by two mighty sword blows. Elsewhere the slaughter was indiscriminate. One Frankish account described how the Latins were ‘killing all and sparing none’, observing that ‘it was sad indeed to see so many dead bodies and so much blood spilt, except that they were enemies of the Christian faith’.42
This brutal riot overran the Ayyubid encampment and, had Robert now elected to hold the field, reorder his forces and await Louis’ arrival, a stunning victory might well have been at hand. But this was not to be. With Muslim stragglers streaming towards Mansourah, the count of Artois made a woefully hot-headed decision to pursue them. As he moved to initiate a second charge, the Templar commander urged caution, but Robert chided him for his cowardice. According to one Christian account, the Templar replied: ‘Neither I nor my brothers are afraid…but let me tell you that none of us expect to come back, neither you, nor ourselves.’
Together they and their men rode the short distance south to Mansourah and raced into the town. There the folly of their courageous but suicidal decision immediately became apparent. On the open plain, even in the Ayyubid camp, the Christians had been afforded the freedom to manoeuvre and fight in close-knit groups. But once in among the town’s cramped streets and alleyways, that style of warfare proved impossible. Worse still, upon entering Mansourah, the Franks came face to face with the elite Bahriyya regiment quartered in the town. This was to be the Latins’ first deadly encounter with these ‘lions of battle’. A Muslim chronicler described how the mamluks fought with utter ruthlessness and resolve. Surrounding the crusaders ‘on every side’, attacking with spear, sword and bow, they ‘turned their crosses upside down’. Of the 600 or so who rode into Mansourah barely a handful escaped, and both Robert of Artois and William Longsword were killed.43
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