The Accursed Tower

by Roger Crowley

  Over and beyond the attacks, constructing the causeway was proving tricky. The speed of the river kept washing it away, and their opponents dug back the bank on the far side, so as to continuously widen the channel. No matter how fast the crusaders dumped earth and stones, it made no difference. Louis was compelled to realize the futility of the strategy. Morale sank. If they were unable to cross the Tanis, the crusade was over. At this point, a Bedouin arrived in the camp with the offer to show the crusaders a ford where they could cross in return for suitable reward. A new plan was hatched: to ford the river, draw up in good order on the other side, and then attack the enemy camp. The bridgehead would be established solely by horsemen, as it was harder to get infantry across in the first phase.

  On Shrove Tuesday, February 8, 1250, “with daybreak we prepared ourselves in every way,” Joinville recounted. The ford was deeper than the Bedouin had promised. “When we were ready we went down into the river and our horses had to swim.… Once we reached the middle, we found the bottom where the horses could set their hooves.” Some of them lost their footing and drowned their riders. They were watched by three hundred mounted Saracens, “and as soon as we made it over the Turks fled.”17 The aim was for the Templars in the vanguard to hold the ring on the south bank while the king and the main force crossed over and regrouped.

  At this juncture, discipline broke down; the king’s brother Robert d’Artois decided to lead a reckless charge against the Muslim camp. The Templar commander, Brother Giles, was unable to restrain him. Robert and his men bore down on an unsuspecting foe. “They attacked the Saracen forces encamped there, who were expecting no such attack. Some were still fast asleep, others lying in bed. The Saracens on sentry duty were defeated first and almost all put to the sword. Our men charged in through the Turks’ quarters killing all and sparing none; men, women and children, old and young, great and small, rich and poor, they slew and slashed and killed them all.… It was sad indeed to see so many dead bodies and so much blood spilt, except that they were enemies of the Christian faith.”18 Among those cut down in the slaughter was the emir Fakhr al-Din himself, taken by surprise at his morning ablutions. Carrier pigeons hurried news of a great battle at Mansurah back to Cairo. “This information alarmed us, as it alarmed all Muslims,” wrote one chronicler, aware of its critical importance. “Everyone imagined the ruin of Islam.”19

  If the advance guard had stopped with the destruction of the camp, all would have been well. Brother Giles tried again to restrain Robert from further pursuit, but in vain. Tempted by the lure of total victory, and perhaps remembering the ease with which Damietta had fallen, Robert accused the Templars of cowardice. “My Lord,” Brother Giles answered, “neither I nor my brothers are afraid. We shall not stay behind, we will ride with you. But let me tell you that none of us expect to come back, neither you nor ourselves.” Even explicit orders from the king failed to restrain his brother from charging into the town. Waiting for them in Mansurah were the formidable Mamluks of the Bahriyyah regiment.

  Robert’s rash attack was the disaster the Templars had foreseen. Within the narrow streets of the town, the intruders quickly became separated. Bitter at the massacre in their camp, the Mamluks “slashed and cut and took and bound them and dragged them into captivity. Some fled towards the river to escape death, but the Saracens were on their heels, bringing them down with Danish axes, with maces and swords, and if they reached the river, great, fast and deep, and flung themselves into it, they drowned.”20 From the Muslim perspective, a single charge against the Franks “shook their foundations, shattered their entire edifice and turned their crosses upside down. The swords and maces of the Turks set about them, inflicted on them death and wounds, and strewed them in the narrow streets of Mansurah.”21 There was great rejoicing at God’s benevolence when the news reached Cairo.

  There was a significance in this episode well beyond the scale of the disaster. It was the first time that Christian crusaders had experienced the tougher fighting qualities of the Turkish Mamluks. Looking back, the Arab chroniclers acknowledged a landmark moment in “the first battle in which the Turkish lions were victorious over the polytheistic dogs.”22 This encounter was destined to unleash unintended consequences for the whole future of the crusades. The victory at Mansurah had secured the survival of Ayyubid Egypt, but more broadly, it started to clarify where true power lay. Among those who chopped down the trapped crusaders was a young Mamluk called Rukn al-Din Baybars.

  FOR LOUIS, THE immediate consequences were serious. Six hundred had ridden in; just a few made it back alive. Both Robert and Giles went down in the slaughter. The crusaders had lost valuable fighting men and put heart into the enemy. The king’s troops had barely established themselves on the south bank before they, too, came under massive pressure from counterattacks, with armed horsemen bearing down and volleys of arrows and crossbow bolts whistling through the air. As the chroniclers recounted,

  A tremendous noise of horns, bugles and drums broke out, men shouted, horses neighed… they completely surrounded our forces and shot dense clouds of bolts and arrows at them; no rain or hail could have caused such darkness.… The king and our men had no crossbowmen with them; all who had crossed the river with the king had been killed in the vanguard, for the Saracens killed without mercy every crossbowman they took. When the king and our men saw that they and their horses were being destroyed, the spurred forward in one massed charge to escape the Turks’ arrows.23

  Joinville, finding himself in the thick of the fight, gave perhaps the most visceral eyewitness account of pitched battle of any of the crusades—though not, perhaps, without a tendency to talk up his own bravery and the deeds of the king. A mounted Muslim, he recalled, “struck me with his lance between my two shoulders, pinning me to my horse’s neck and held me there so pinioned that I could not draw the sword at my belt.”24 Somehow surviving this blow, he went to rescue another knight thrown to the ground. Returning, he was attacked again by mounted warriors with lances. “My horse collapsed to its knees under the weight it was bearing. I was thrown forward over its ears. I got up as fast as I could, with my shield at my neck and my sword in my hand.” As he scrambled to his feet, a second wave of horsemen “hurled me to the ground, galloped over me and sent the shield flying from my neck.” Stunned and disoriented, he was led by some other knights to make a stand at a ruined house. “There the Turks attacked us from all sides; one group of them got into the ruined house and stabbed at us with their lances from above.”25 He watched as one man was wounded by three lance blows in the face, another by a lance thrust between the shoulders with a wound so large “that blood streamed from his body as if from the bunghole of a barrel.”26 Meanwhile, “my Lord Érard de Siverey was struck in the face by a sword blow, so that his nose dangled over his lip.” While the apparently indestructible Joinville addressed an urgent prayer to St. James, Siverey, still able to speak (though he died later), suggested coolly that they might seek help from others nearby but only, “Sire, if you thought that neither I nor my heirs would be reproached for this.”27 The knights’ honor code and fear of accusations of cowardice persisted even to the edge of death.

  All day Louis struggled to maintain his foothold on the southern bank of the Tanis and to prevent his men from fleeing. It was with a measure of disbelief that the Muslims had witnessed the stupidity of Artois in being drawn into the trap at Mansurah. Now they launched wave after wave of attacks in tight formation with shouts and yells and “a great noise of trumpets, kettledrums and Saracen horns.”28 Trapped by the Tanis, Joinville watched the situation deteriorate: “We saw, as we were coming downstream, the river covered with lances and shields and with the bodies of horses and men who were drowning and dying.”29 Six horsemen had Louis’s horse by the bridle but the king “singlehandedly freed himself by the great blows that he landed on them with his sword.”30 Torrents of arrows whipped through the air, and Greek fire shot from crossbows. One man “caught a pot of Greek fire on his round shiel
d, for if any of the fire had landed on him he would have been burned to death.” Joinville, now without his own shield, picked up a Muslim’s padded tunic as a makeshift replacement, “which helped me greatly, since I was only wounded by their arrows in five places and my horse in fifteen.”31 Somehow, Louis managed to hold the line, encouraging the men and fighting with great bravery. By late afternoon, a fresh contingent of crossbowmen was ranged in the front line, and the Muslims withdrew. At the day’s end, the Bedouins, scavengers of battlefields and cutters of throats, emerged to loot the abandoned Muslim camp, stripping it bare.

  It had been, in its way, a triumph of courage and endurance, but it was only the briefest respite. The Muslims were certain they could wipe out the camp on the south bank of the Tanis. Before dawn the next day, Joinville was again roused by the call to arms. Too wounded to put on mail, he threw the padded tunic over his back and prepared to fight on. In the days that followed, Louis’s men withstood repeated attacks. They managed to salvage wood from the enemy siege engines and create a stockade and trench around their encampment; a bridge of boats was built across the Tanis to link the two camps, but the death toll continued to rise.

  DESPITE THE SPIRITED resistance, the situation was desperate. Louis clung on stubbornly, still blinded by the belief that the Ayyubid kingdom was on the point of collapse, that God would grant victory. Yet the evidence was otherwise. He dared not retreat over the Tanis without admitting that the crusade was lost, but the situation in the camp started to deteriorate. Nine days after the first battle, the corpses of the slain bobbed gaseously to the surface of the river and clogged the bridge joining Louis’s two camps. “There was such a mass of bodies that the whole river was jammed with corpses from one bank to the other, and for as far as a small stone might be thrown.”32 Laborers were employed to dump the bodies of the circumcised Muslims on the other side of the bridge to float off downstream, while the Christians were buried in a long trench. It being Lent, the survivors ate only fish from the river, which were burbot, “and the burbot were eating the dead men, because these fish are gluttonous,” Joinville recalled with his gorge rising.33 He attributed to this the spread of “camp fever” (in all likelihood scurvy), which started to riddle the army. “There was so much dead flesh on the gums of our people that the barbers had to cut away the dead flesh to allow them to chew and swallow their food.” The camp was filled with the sound of screaming as the dead flesh was cut away “because they howled like women in labour.”34 Joinville’s priest collapsed in the middle of saying Mass. Joinville caught him in his arms and revived him. The priest somehow finished the service, “and he never sang again.”35 Survival now depended on supplies making it down the river from Damietta, but their plight was about to take a dramatic turn for the worse.

  On February 25, the sultan’s surviving son, Turanshah, arrived from Hisn Kayfa to take charge. From the start, he misread the situation. A change of sultan often meant a change of administration, but a wise ruler carried out this transition gradually. Turanshah did not. He alienated the leading emirs and army commanders. Possibly, he was unable to financially reward those who had fought at Mansurah; he appears to have failed to accord Aqtay, leader of the Mamluk regiment, the tax revenues of Alexandria that he had been promised, and he replaced the leading emirs with his own people. The new emirs were unknown to those on the ground, and they lacked support. Lurid tales were spread of Turanshah’s depravity and that “when he was drunk, he gathered candles and would slash off the heads [of the candles] with his swords and would lop them off, saying, ‘Thus shall I do to the Bahriyyah’ and he would mention his father’s Mamluks by name. The base-born were exalted and those of quality removed. He treated his father’s chief Mamluks with contempt.”36 He failed to understand that the Ayyubid dynasty was now riding the tiger of its own Turkish slaves.

  Despite these undercurrents, the Islamic campaign took on a new impetus, and the significance of the Mahallah canal, which the crusaders had missed on their descent of the Nile, became clear. The crusaders had ships at their camps at Mansurah and at Damietta near the coast, but Turanshah now cut the connection between the two. He had fifty galleys carried across land with the aid of camels and launched into the upper reaches of the Mahallah canal, stagnant but with enough water in its upper reaches to sail back into the Nile above the crusader camp. When the Christian supply ships came down from Damietta, they were ambushed, their supplies captured, and their crews killed or marched off into captivity. The Muslims had sprung a similar trap against the Fifth Crusade, thirty years earlier, but the ability to blockade the Nile came to Louis and his men as a complete surprise. They knew nothing about this until a small crusader ship managed to shoot past the blockade and into their encampment. “The Turks set about starving us out, to the amazement of many people,” recorded Joinville.37 They saw food prices rise to extraordinary heights. Despair gripped the camp. The sick multiplied. Everyone expected to die.

  From that moment, Louis’s crusade was doomed but still he hesitated, unable to relinquish the crusading dream until it was too late. Attempts to broker a reasonable truce failed. It was not until April 5, 1250, that the king finally admitted defeat and gave the order to withdraw to Damietta. Louis was insistent that the sick and wounded should be put in the boats, and that he himself would stay to the end and travel by land the forty miles back to Damietta. By this time, he was stricken with dysentery but refused to take a ship. The plan to withdraw stealthily from the south bank was botched. The man ordered to cut the ropes on the bridge panicked and failed to do so; enemy troops made it across. An orderly retreat descended into nightmare. The wounded Joinville, “struck by camp fever in my mouth and legs” and too weak to walk, was among those on a ship.38 As night fell, he could see, by the light of fires, Muslims killing the sick who had staggered or crawled to the water’s edge, hoping to be taken off. A rout took place with the Muslims pursuing and killing those traveling by land. Joinville’s ship was slowed by a headwind, got lost in a backwater, and was bombarded with crossbow bolts and volleys of Greek fire from the bank. The convoy of ships was then intercepted by the sultan’s vessels. Ahead, Joinville could see those on other ships being killed and their bodies thrown into the water. As they waited on their fate, anchored in the middle of the channel, Joinville threw his jewels and relics into the river. As a galley approached, a sailor begged Joinville that “unless you let me say that you are the king’s cousin, they will kill you all, and us sailors too.”39 He agreed. Joinville was wrestled to the ground with a knife at his throat, waiting for the end, when a man called out, “He’s the king’s cousin!”40 He instantly became a valuable commodity. Others were not. Joinville watched his priest being murdered and thrown in the river, and his clerk, who had fainted, was struck on the head with a stone bowl. “I was told that these men who were there had no value, because their illnesses had left them helpless.”41

  Louis’s capture was humiliating. His dysentery was so bad that his attendants had to cut the seat out of his breeches. He was taken half-dead in a village house. It was all over. The defeat was total: “Here the oriflamme was torn to pieces, the bauséant [the black and white standard of the Templars] trampled underfoot, a sight nobody remembers having ever beheld. Over there the standards of magnates, since ancient times an object of dread to the infidel, were bespattered with the blood of men and horses… and were most vilely destroyed and treated with contempt.”42

  For the Muslims, there was straightforward rejoicing: “God cleansed Egypt of them.”43 One chronicler recorded that “a tally was made of the number of captives, and there were more than 20,000; those who had drowned or been killed numbered 7,000. I saw the dead, and they covered the face of the earth in their profusion.… It was a day of the kind the Muslims had never seen; nor had they heard of its like.”44 Damietta was surrendered. Herded into camps, the worthless were decapitated at the rate of three hundred a day. The rest were for ransom. Despite mock executions kneeling before the axe, Joinville
survived. Louis retained his dignity to the last. He agreed to pay a massive sum—800,000 gold bezants—for the ransom of 12,000 men. He made a down payment of half and sailed off to Acre, with Joinville on board, to raise the remainder and thus liberate the army still being held.

  He left for Acre on May 7, 1250, but five days earlier he was witness to a seismic shift in dynastic power within the Islamic world, one that his crusade had unwittingly provoked. Turanshah had alienated the Mamluk corps, either by lack of preferment or by his refusal to share out the spoils of war. On May 2, Aqtay, the Mamluk commander, cornered and wounded the sultan. Turanshah, stricken but not dead, promised to return to him the profits of Alexandria, but it was too late. The sultan had failed to take notice of the power shift underway. He was said to have been finished off by Rukn al-Din Baybars. Aqtay cut out Turanshah’s heart and carried it with bloody hands to the exhausted Louis. He held out the gruesome trophy and said, “What will you give me, who has killed your enemy, who would have put you to death, had he lived.”45 Appalled, the king said nothing.