News of the fall had been greeted in the west with grief, and with calls for another crusade to retrieve the city. Now, recovering from his illness, Louis IX was ready to answer.
It took him three years to make the proper arrangements. He collected a special crusade tax from his subjects to pay for the expedition, and recruited French barons and their knights to join him. From the city of Genoa, he bought scores of ships; over thirty two- and three-decked sailing ships, transport galleys, war galleys. He sent provisions to Cyprus, where he intended to rendezvous with other Crusader knights; “great stacks of barrels of wine,” says Joinville, who arrived at Cyprus to find the king’s provisions waiting there, “wheat and barley . . . laid in heaps on the fields . . . the rain which had long fallen upon the corn had made it sprout on the outside.” Under the green crust, though, the grain was still fresh.6
Well-prepared, well-victualed, and well-supplied with money, Louis IX began the Seventh Crusade by setting sail from Aigues-Mortes on August 25, 1248. His royal galley sailed at the head of thirty-eight ships and a score of flat-bottomed transports. His queen, Margaret of Provence, sailed with him; so did his younger brothers Charles and Robert. They arrived at Cyprus in early September, ready to embark on what seemed like an inevitable success.7
48.1 The Seventh Crusade
It was a fiasco.
The Crusader army was led by Louis, his brothers, the Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jean de Joinville, the English Earl of Salisbury, and Henry III’s unfortunate stepfather, the disgraced Count of Marche. As was now traditional in any crusade, they all disagreed over strategy. Louis wanted to attack Egypt, which now controlled the city; the Grand Master of the Templars thought that the Crusaders should start off by making a play for some of the disputed Syrian lands; and several of the French barons suggested that fall was a bad time to set off by ship, since foul weather was almost a certainty. In the end, the Crusaders delayed on Cyprus until the following May, by which point a good deal of the fervor had faded, and most of the food had been eaten.8
This gave Ayyub plenty of time to prepare for an attack on Egypt. By the time the Crusader ships reached the coast near Damietta, in early June, Ayyub had fortified the city and established a second line of defense at the town of Mansurah, just east of the Nile and seventy-five miles northeast of Cairo.
The first Crusader attack began on the morning of June 5. A swarm of small boats brought the Crusaders to the shore, where they fought so fiercely that by midafternoon, the Turkish defenders had retreated back into Damietta. That night, under cover of dark, the Damietta garrison decided to evacuate the city. The following morning, the Crusaders found it nearly empty and marched triumphantly in.
Ayyub, furious over the easy victory, executed the generals who were responsible for the surrender. He was ill, suffering from what seems to have been progressive gangrene, and his temper was short.
He was expecting an immediate Crusader advance, but the Nile floods were due to begin, and Louis had learned his lesson from tales of the disastrous Fifth Crusade. “We felt sure that we would not leave Damietta until the feast of All Saints [November 1], because of the rise of the river . . . ,” his chamberlain John Sarrasin wrote back to France. “No one can go to Alexandria or Babylon or to Cairo when it has flooded across the land of Egypt.” Instead, they lingered in the city, transforming its mosque into a cathedral, digging additional fortifications, and waiting for the Nile to recede.9
On November 20, Louis led a Crusader army—reinforced by the arrival of a third royal brother with fresh men—out of Damietta, towards the Sultan’s encampment at Mansurah. By the time they arrived, Ayyub was dead.
His son and heir Turan-shah was fighting in Syria, but the elderly general Fakhr-ad-Din had taken charge of the Egyptian defense. The Crusaders camped across the river from Mansurah and prepared to attack. On February 7, Louis’s brother Robert forded the river to lead part of the Crusader army in a surprise attack on the Muslim encampment outside the town. It was brilliantly successful, but then Robert—instead of returning for reinforcements as planned—decided to lead his knights into Mansurah itself. There, the advance party came face-to-face with most of Egypt’s army, and was slaughtered.
The loss of Robert and his army had weakened the Crusader force too much for it to take Mansurah itself. They camped in front of its walls. Meanwhile, Turan-shah arrived unexpectedly and cut the Crusaders off from behind, blocking their line of supply from Damietta.
The Crusaders slowly began to starve. William of Tyre’s chronicle says that the men first ate horses, donkeys, and mules; and then “much worse things. Anyone who could find a dog or a cat would eat it as a great delicacy.” Disease followed: “The bodies of our men whom [the Egyptian defenders] had killed came to the surface of the water,” Joinville writes, “. . . all the stream was full of dead men from one bank to the other. . . . And for the unwholesomeness of the country . . . the sickness of the host came upon us . . . the flesh of our legs altogether dried up, and the skin of our legs became blotched with black and earth-colour, like to an old boot; and on us that had this sickness there grew rotten flesh upon our gums.”10
By Easter, it had become clear even to Louis that it was time to flee. He led the army north, but the men were hungry, weak, and constantly bombarded by Muslim attackers. Three weeks into the march, with men dying around him, Louis sent an envoy to Turan-shah, offering to surrender.11
Turan-shah accepted the surrender and put the king and his noblemen under guard. In an unexpected act of callousness, he ordered all of the sick and wounded slaughtered; Joinville, shocked by the executions, says that his guard told him that it was done for fear that the plague would spread.12
Damietta too was forced to open its gates. Louis’s wife Margaret had given birth to a son in his absence; with no midwife in the city, she had been forced to ask one of the old knights, a man of eighty, to help her deliver the baby. Before the surrender, she was bundled out of the city with her new baby and taken back to Acre, where she waited for news of her husband.
In exchange for 800,000 “Saracen bezants” (nearly 400,000 pounds of gold), half of it to be paid on the spot, and the freedom of all Muslim prisoners, Turan-shah agreed to free his captives. But the deal almost went sour when Turan-shah was suddenly killed in an uprising of the Turkish soldiers who made up a good part of his armed force.
Like the Muslim Ghurids in India, the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt had long relied on mamluks, Turkish slave warriors, to beef up their armies; perhaps half of Fakhr-ad-Din’s army was mamluk. And the most elite fighting force in the Egyptian army was a thousand-strong mamluk regiment known as the Bahri Regiment, originally formed as the personal bodyguard of the sultan Ayyub himself. (“He bought more Turkish mamluks than had any other member of his family,” notes Ibn Wasil, “until they became the major part of his army.”) When Turan-shah had arrived in Egypt, though, he had high-handedly promoted his own favorites into key positions instead of advancing the senior mamluks of the Bahri Regiment. He had also, incautiously, announced at a drunken dinner party that he intended to chop down his father’s mamluks, as easily as he might sweep his sword through a row of lighted candles. Angry over the slight, one of the Bahri Regiment’s commanders, a Turk named Baibars, plotted Turan-shah’s assassination.13
The murder left Egypt without a sultan. But Turan-shah had not been in Egypt long enough to be popular—in fact, his butchered body, swelling with decay, lay on the ground outside his camp for three days before anyone bothered to bury it—and no reprisals followed. Baibars and his confederates, setting themselves up as a military government in Cairo, decided to honor Ayyub’s widow as the titular ruler of Cairo, while they ran the government to suit themselves.
After threatening to void the deal, they also—eventually—agreed to honor Turan-shah’s arrangements. On May 5, Louis handed over his half ransom and was set free, along with his two surviving brothers and most of his barons. He set sail immediately for Acre, arrivi
ng on May 14. “All Acre came in procession down to the sea to receive him at his coming, with passing great joy,” Joinville writes.14
The king had survived, but there was little else to rejoice in. Hundreds of Crusader soldiers remained prisoners in Egypt. Louis had spent every penny and owed still more for the balance of his ransom. And the Crusade itself had failed: Jerusalem was still in Muslim hands.
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Splintering Khanate
Between 1246 and 1264,
the Mongols spread their conquests from east to west,
but then watch the empire divide into four
IN 1246, the Mongol clan leaders assembled at Sira-ordu, a few miles away from Karakorum, and finally hailed Guyuk as Great Khan.
It had taken Guyuk, the oldest son of Ogodei, four years to reach this peak. After Ogodei’s death in 1242, his widow Toregene had insisted on Guyuk’s election. But a healthy segment of the Mongol chiefs preferred another grandson of Genghis Khan: Mongke, the oldest son of Genghis’s youngest son Tolui.
By this point, all of Genghis Khan’s own sons were dead. Jochi had died before his father; Tolui had drunk himself to death in 1232; Chagatai had died just a few months before Ogodei himself. Three grandsons stood in line for the succession: Mongke, Guyuk, and Batu in the west, the oldest son of the oldest son.
Guyuk was widely unpopular, in part because his father had disliked him and had repeatedly suggested that the succession pass him by. But as regent until a new khan was elected, his mother Toregene had the force of Mongol law behind her; and the Mongols, ruthless in battle, were just as unbending when it came to their own legal codes. Toregene had delayed the election for four years in order to bribe, persuade, and bully clan chiefs into supporting her son.1
On August 24, beneath a white velvet tent, surrounded by gold-armed clan chiefs, Guyuk was seated on a gold and ivory throne, studded with pearls, and acclaimed as Great Khan. The ceremony was observed by ambassadors from Moscow, Cairo, Goryeo, the Song court, Baghdad, Georgia, Cilician Armenia, and Rome: “There were more than four thousand envoys there,” records the Roman diplomat, the Franciscan friar Giovanni de Plano Carpini. “So many gifts were bestowed by the envoys there that it was marvelous to behold—gifts of silk, samite, velvet, brocade, girdles of silk threaded with gold, choice furs . . . more than five hundred carts, which were all filled with gold and silver and silken garments.”2
The gifts were both tribute and appeasement, sent by nations that had fallen under Mongol control—or were desperately hoping not to. For his part, Pope Innocent IV sent not gifts but a papal letter, carried by Friar Carpini to the new Great Khan. “[We] do admonish, beg and earnestly beseech,” Innocent IV wrote, “that for the future you desist entirely from assaults . . . and that after so many and such grievous offences you conciliate by a fitting penance the wrath of Divine Majesty. . . . [A]cknowledge Jesus Christ the very Son of God, and worship His glorious name by practicing the Christian religion.”3
Guyuk’s response was curt. “You who are the great Pope,” he sent back, “together with all the Princes, come in person to serve us.”
The eternal God has slain and annihilated these [conquered] lands and peoples, because they have neither adhered to Genghis Khan, nor to the Great Khan, both of whom have been sent to make known God’s command. . . . How do you know that such words as you speak are with God’s sanction? From the rising of the sun to its setting, all the lands have been made subject to me. Who could do this contrary to the command of God? . . . [C]ome at once to serve and wait upon us! At that time I shall recognize your submission. If you do not observe God’s command, and if you ignore my command, I shall know you as my enemy.4
Guyuk could play the holy-war game as well as the next potentate; and, living outside of the Christian world, he was one of the few rulers in the world powerful enough to question the pope’s authority with absolute impunity.
Forty at the time of his election, Guyuk was prematurely aged by the traditional Mongol overindulgence in strong drink (“Then they started drinking,” Carpini wrote, of the hours just after Guyuk’s coronation, “and, as is their custom, they drank without stopping until the evening”). In April of 1248, Guyuk was traveling towards the lands of the Golden Horde, planning to meet with his cousin Batu in order to smooth out some differences between them, when he died on the road.5
In his two-year reign, though, he had set the Mongols back on the road to world domination. By 1248, Mongol forces had returned to the west and entirely subdued the Sultanate of Rum and the remaining holdout lands in Georgia; Cilician Armenia was now Guyuk’s vassal; and he had been preparing for war on the Southern Song, intending to send old Subotai at the head of the campaign, when he died.
With his death, war was once again put on hold, while the clans argued—for three years—over his successor. When Batu and the Golden Horde threw their favor behind Mongke, the son of Tolui finally gained his long-delayed title of Great Khan. He was acclaimed on July 1, 1251, in a ceremony that lacked the over-the-top magnificence of Guyuk’s; Batu had called the assembly himself, and when Mongke’s detractors refused to attend, Batu insisted on the appointment of Mongke by the clan chiefs who were present.6
It was the first time that a Great Khan had been elected by only a partial assembly. Mongke remained in full control of the entire empire for nine years (helped in part by his ruthless execution of both his opponents and their sons), but the partial victory cracked the foundation of the Mongol house, and the fissures were already spreading.7
Mongke was forty-three years old, the veteran of wars against the Jin, the Rus’, the Bulgars, and more, raised by his strict mother—a convert to Christianity—to avoid alcohol. Under his direction, Mongol conquest began again. He directed his armies towards two points of the compass simultaneously: according to the contemporary chronicler Rashid al-Din, he put his younger brother Kublai in charge of the eastern force, tasked with bringing down the Southern Song; his youngest brother Hulagu was given the task of renewing war in the west. “Each of them,” al-Din explains, “with the armies that they would have, would be his right and left wings.”8
From this moment on, the complicated and detailed story of country after country, from east to west, flattened itself into a single narrative arc: Mongol conquest.
Kublai planned to invade the Song from the west. He led his Mongol horde south, to the borders of the small southwest Asian kingdom of Nanzhao.* Nanzhao, circling Lake Erhai, had fought off the Tang in the eighth century and had remained independent through three changes of dynasty. But Kublai, approaching in 1253 from an unexpected direction, drove the Nanzhao defenders back to their capital city of Dali and besieged it. When Dali surrendered, the only captives executed were the king himself, and two of his officials who had murdered a Mongol ambassador.
Kublai, later accounts tell us, had been studying Chinese philosophy, and took as his motto an ancient tenet of the Confucian teacher Mencius: He who takes no pleasure in killing people can unite them behind him. It took another two years for Nanzhao to be entirely united under Mongol control, but once the kingdom had reached stability under a Mongol governor, Kublai used it as a base to begin attacks against the Song border.9
In Goryeo, the state of half war, half peace observed by the court on the island of Kanghwa and the Mongol occupiers in the north broke down. Repeated Mongol attacks on the independent south had killed an untold number: “As many as 206,800 men and women became prisoners of the Mongol troops this year (1254),” the Koryeo-san mourns, “and the number of people massacred cannot be accounted for. The provinces and districts we pass have all been reduced to ashes.” Finally, King Gojong arranged the assassination of Choe-U, the military dictator responsible for the ongoing resistance, and as soon as Choe-U was dead sent his own son, the Crown Prince, to Mongke’s court to offer Goryeo’s surrender. In 1259, the surrender was made official.10
Kublai sent another branch of his force into the kingdom of the Dai Viet. In
1257, the Mongols captured the capital city Thang Long, although they then retreated for a time, leaving the Dai Viet king Tran Canh on his throne. Immediately Tran Canh—still only a vigorous forty years old, with thirty-three of those years spent on the throne—abdicated and crowned his eighteen-year-old son Tran Hoang in his place. Officially, the change in power was intended to keep quarrels over succession from breaking out in the middle of a new invasion. But Tran Canh, despite dreading the Mongol return, had finally gained the chance he had been waiting for: to abandon the throne in favor of the monastery, battle in favor of reflection.11
Meanwhile Hulagu, with reinforcements sent by Batu from the Golden Horde lands to the north of his target, took a different direction from that of previous Mongol invasions to the west. He planned to push towards the Mediterranean and then turn south, towards Egypt.
In 1256, he crossed the Oxus river and laid siege to his first targets: the fortresses of the “Assassins,” the mountainous state of the Nizari. The Nizari were led by their chief, Rukn al-Din, who had been their ruler for a single year when Hulagu arrived at his walls. The thirteenth-century Muslim scholar Abu’l-Faraj records Rukn al-Din’s panic; he wanted to surrender, but the other Nizaris held him back. While his men were distracted by the sight of siege engines being erected outside their fortress, al-Din sneaked out and surrendered to Hulagu, on condition that he be allowed to travel east and appeal to the Great Khan himself. Hulagu duly sent his captive east, but when he arrived at Mongke’s camp, the Great Khan ordered him killed without an audience.12
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