God's War: A New History of the Crusades

how, as he conducted these pilgrimages, ‘I never once let my eyes turn back towards Joinville, for fear my heart might be filled with longing at the thought of my lovely castle and the two children I had left behind’,³⁹ one of them only a few weeks old. Reunited with his luggage at Auxonne on the Saoene, Joinville travelled south by river, with his war-horses being led along the riverbank. Once at Marseilles, with men, horses and baggage stored on board, the ship weighed anchor and set sail with the whole ship’s company, led by priests, singing Veni Creator Spiritus as the vessel began its journey. Joinville, like many reluctant medieval mariners, was frightened of drowning and fearfully seasick on the three-week voyage to Cyprus.

Joinville’s experience, even if tidied by six decades of retelling, displayed the characteristic crusading mixture of pragmatism and ritual. Few understood the importance of this more than Louis IX himself. His carefully orchestrated departure displayed striking parallels with Joinville’s. He had invited his subjects to demand redress of grievances through his enqueteurs. As preparations neared completion, Louis stagemanaged his progress towards Aigues Mortes to resemble a religious procession as much as a royal progress. The climax of the ceremonies marking his departure from his capital saw him participate in April 1248 at the dedication of the new Sainte Chapelle in the royal palace on the Ile de la Cite in Paris. This had been built as a giant reliquary to house the relic of the Crown of Thorns which Louis had redeemed in 1239 from the Venetians, to whom it had been pawned by Baldwin II of Constantinople. With the Crown of Thorns were other major relics of the Passion acquired, at great expense, from the Latins in Constantinople, including a piece of the True Cross. Louis was signalling that France was now the heir of Israel, the protector of the holiest relics in Christendom, almost a second Jerusalem, a new Holy Land. The ‘Most Christian’ king of France (an honorific title dating from the twelfth century) was assuming the leadership of Christendom vacated by the excommunicated emperor. Before leaving Paris for the south in June, Louis received the insignia of a pilgrim and, following ancestral precedent, the oriflamme at St Denis. Louis was conducting his crusade as a penitent but also as a king of France; the two were inseparable in propaganda and policy. From St Denis, Louis, dressed as a penitent, walked to Notre Dame to hear mass before continuing to the abbey of St Antoine, still just like Joinville on his local pilgrimages, barefoot. On his slow journey south, Louis was careful to be seen in the garb of a pilgrim in a series of civic festivals and public appearances. After meeting Innocent IV at Lyons, he travelled towards the Mediterranean, dispensing justice as he went, the first French king to visit the region since his father in 1226. On 25 August, Louis sailed from Aigues Mortes, reaching Limassol in Cyprus on 17 September.⁴⁰

THE ATTACK ON EGYPT 1249–50

Later Louis allegedly claimed he would have been happy to sail directly to Egypt.⁴¹ With hindsight this may have appeared an attractive option. In 1248 Sultan al-Salih Ayyub was out of the country, fully engaged in Syria trying to conquer Homs during another round of Ayyubid feuding. By June 1249, when the crusaders finally landed, he and his army were back home. There was little doubt that Egypt was the destination; otherwise there would have been no need to stockpile supplies in Cyprus. Long before Louis’s attack began, the sultan had strengthened Damietta, as if he knew where to expect the Christian assault, which, given the prevalence of espionage, he probably did. The delay in Cyprus from September 1248 to May 1249 devoured supplies, sapped morale and gave the Egyptians time to prepare their defences. However, Louis was not to know that Damietta, once again the chosen target, would fall such easy prey as it did. Wintering in Cyprus allowed Louis to wait for the stragglers, such as Alphonse of Poitiers who had yet to leave France, or the duke of Burgundy, who spent the winter in Sparta, the guest of William of Villehardouin, the Frankish ruler of that part of the Peloponnese. Contingents who had found harbour at Acre, Tripoli or Antioch were also given time to rejoin the main armada. Holding court at Nicosia, Louis managed to attract gifts and reinforcements from Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, including William of Villehardouin with a fleet of twenty-four ships, and large sections of the local Jerusalem-Cypriot baronage, led by John of Jaffa. Louis appears to have played on his status as king of the local Franks’ ancestral lands; the king of Cyprus declared he would take Louis ‘as his friend and lord’. Although prolonged by a characteristically messy and violent dispute between the Genoese and Pisans, Louis’s stay in Cyprus allowed him to consolidate his control over his followers by bailing out many of them as their private funds ran out, plan his Egyptian strategy and construct the necessary landing craft and subsidiary vessels required for warfare in the Nile Delta.⁴²

While in Cyprus, Louis received direct intimations of how his providential understanding of his mission failed to grasp the realities of Eurasian politics. For many in eastern Europe and the Near East, the most significant and alarming recent development lay not in the ownership of a Judean hill town, however numinous, but in the advance of the Mongols on a front from Russia to Iraq.⁴³ In the wake of the Mongol invasion of central Europe in 1241–2, the prospect of a crusade to the Holy Land that denuded Christendom of warriors astonished and alarmed Bela IV of Hungary, who lived in annual fear of a new attack. In the autumn of 1244, Bohemund V of Antioch-Tripoli had made a well-publicized appeal to Frederick II for help against a Mongol army menacing Syria. Innocent IV was well aware of the Mongol threat. In 1245, before the Council of Lyons had discussed the problem, the pope had sent at least three separate missions to the east with the dual purpose of contacting the various Mongol armies but at the same time building up a broad coalition of eastern Christian, even Muslim allies against them. While the response of many Orthodox and other eastern Christian rulers and communities appeared positive, or desperate, the Dominican Andrew of Longjumeau made no headway with the Ayyubids, while the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini, who penetrated all the way to Mongolia to see a new khan, Guyuk, enthroned in 1246, returned with news of the khan’s outright rejection of anything other than Christian submission to the world- conquering Mongols.⁴⁴ John’s accounts of the Mongol court and customs, while making him a minor celebrity, also conveyed the extent of Mongol power and future ambitions of seemingly limitless western conquest. Evidently, one of Friar John’s tasks had been to spy. The idea that Innocent IV and his envoys sought an alliance with the Mongols against the Muslims appears unlikely. The actions of his envoys suggested a policy of resistance and containment; their reports indicated that neither was liable to succeed.

Mongol disdain did not exclude Mongol diplomacy. In December 1248 at Nicosia, Louis received ambassadors from the Mongol general in Persia, Elijigidei.⁴⁵ Ostensibly, the Mongol embassy sought Louis’s help in alleviating the plight of eastern Christians living under Frankish rule in Outremer. Under Mongol rule they enjoyed, it was alleged, freedom from the poll tax and forced labour. There were suggestions that Elijigidei was himself a Christian and that Khan Guyuk was sympathetic, a view that had been peddled only a few months earlier in a letter from Samarkand by an Armenian prince, Sempad, which Louis had seen on arrival at Cyprus. Some witnesses even remembered talk of Mongol help in recovering Jerusalem and the rest of Holy Land. After grilling Elijigidei’s ambassadors, Nestorian Christians from the Mosul region, Louis was sufficiently impressed to send an embassy in reply, led by the old Mongol hand, Andrew of Longjumeau, who had recently arrived in Cyprus. In retrospect, Louis’s involvement appears naive. He himself was said later to have regretted it.⁴⁶ While some Mongols were converts to Christianity and the Olympian Mongol cultural superiority complex accommodated tolerance of other religions and the employment of their adherents, their policy was uncompromising. To them, Muslims and Christians came alike, potential subjects, not allies. Elijigidei’s initiative probably had more to do with countering the papal approaches to the Ayyubids and neutralizing Louis’s impact on Syrian politics where Mongol influence was already securing clients. A crusader attack on Egypt would nicely distract the Ayyubids, allowing further Mongol advances in the region. That Louis had been willing to go along with Elijigidei’s advances suggests a lack of strategic grasp, or one badly discoloured by excessively pious wishful thinking.

It was not as if Louis or his advisors were ignorant of the Mongol threat or their past history. Papal correspondence and appeals from rulers of eastern and central Europe had been full of both for much of the previous decade. Possibly only the death in 1249 of Khan Guyuk prevented immediate exploitation of the chaos that engulfed the Ayyubid empire during Louis’s invasion of Egypt. Andrew of Longjumeau’s mission achieved nothing except confirmation that the Mongols refused to regard others as equals and that they were not about to become a new Christian power. This diplomatic interlude says as much for Mongol skill in exploiting the mentality of their opponents as it does for the myopia of a future saint. It also added to the awareness of the world beyond the customary horizons of western thought witnessed by the popularity of news, or, rather, stories of the exotic new power that had intruded into western consciousness.⁴⁷ While crusading interest in the Near East may have accelerated contacts between western Europe and Asia before the Mongols appeared on Christendom’s frontiers in the 1240s, in this context, as in many others, it is hard to see Louis’s adventure as much more than a sideshow.