God's War: A New History of the Crusades

In the middle of May 1249, the allied Christian fleet began to set out for Cyprus. It carried perhaps upwards of 15,000 troops, impressive for battle, rather modest for a conquest.⁴⁸ Louis’s French army had been joined by recruits and allies from Frankish Outremer and Greece. More were yet to reach eastern waters, including Alphonse of Poitiers’s large force, perhaps of some thousands, and a select English regiment of perhaps as many as 200 knights, including a number retained for pay by its leader, Henry III’s cousin William Longspee.⁴⁹ These only joined the main army in Egypt in the late autumn. According to the royal chamberlain, John Sarasin, one of Louis’s finance ministers who accompanied the crusade, apart from 2,500 knights and the heavy cavalry, backed by mounted sergeants and infantry, a striking feature of the forces Louis led towards Egypt lay in the 5,000 crossbowmen.⁵⁰ They played a crucial role throughout the campaign in the Nile Delta, laying down devastating barrages of bolts in support of attacks or to cover retreats. The acquisition of crossbow bolts had been of especial concern during the crusade preparations, contracts to supply them being given to the Genoese admirals employed to command the royal fleet. The necessary landing craft had been assembled, some built or hired in Cyprus, others, such as John of Jaffa’s galley, which could be driven up the beach, belonging to the Outremer barons.⁵¹

As with most military enterprises, despite meticulous preparation, things went wrong. A storm dispersed the fleet, many ships seeking refuge in the Syrian ports, only later joining the crusade after the landings in Egypt. Those remaining arrived off Damietta on 4 June 1249 only to discover their plan had been anticipated. Sultan al-Salih Ayyub had left a strong garrison in Damietta under the veteran commander Fakhr al-Din, Frederick II’s old sparring partner who, according to Joinville’s memory, still displayed the emperor’s arms on his war banner in honour of their friendship.⁵² However, a bold massed attack on the shore opposite Damietta on the morning of 5 June managed to secure a bridgehead on the beach, even though some of the troops, including Louis himself, had to wade ashore with water up to their armpits. The superior firepower of the crossbowmen probably clinched success for this ambitious amphibious operation. By nightfall, while the crusaders were establishing a camp, the Muslim defenders panicked. Many of those routed on the beach fled southwards. There the sultan waited with his main army upstream from Damietta, mindful of the need not to repeat the events of 1218–19 by becoming engaged in a sterile and costly conflict around the port itself. This left the garrison in the city badly exposed. Rather than risk death by assault or starvation, the defenders evacuated the city without a fight, leaving the stockpiles of food and war materials intact behind them. To the astonishment, incredulity and delight of the invaders, Damietta had fallen in hours instead of the seventeen months it had taken in 1218–19. It was symbolic, as Sarasin recorded, that the victors found fifty-three Christian captives in the city who claimed they had had been incarcerated there since the Fifth Crusade.⁵³ As welcome, the fleeing garrison had left the well-stocked city intact. News of the abandonment of Damietta brought widespread opprobrium on Fakhr al-Din and panic to Cairo.⁵⁴

Unfortunately for Louis, the fall of Damietta after only a day’s fighting marked the high point of his whole campaign. It has been argued that if he had seized the moment, a great triumph was there to be won. Cairo was in a turmoil of fear. In his new forward camp, established as his father’s had been in 1219–21 at Mansourah, the sultan was dying, probably from tuberculosis; his heir was out of the country; and jealous rival factions within the Egyptian high command and the sultan’s own military entourage were greedily or anxiously circling the throne. Yet the problems that delayed the embarkation from Cyprus had left the crusaders little time to organize a march south before the Nile flooded. The precedents of the Fifth Crusade were vivid on both sides. To the surprise and horror of Louis when they met after the king’s capture, at least one veteran of John of Brienne’s army, from Provins in France, had stayed behind, converted to Islam and married an Egyptian, rising to a position of some importance at court.⁵⁵ Staying safe in Damietta must have appealed to many in the army, including the clergy who busied themselves with reclaiming mosques as churches, and Italian merchants securing quays and quarters. Louis may also have reckoned that, before attempting any hostile action, he needed to wait for the arrival of his brother Alphonse’s army, other contingents from the west, such as the English, and those scattered by the storm off Cyprus. Alphonse only reached Damietta on 24 October.

However, if the annual Nile flood precluded immediate action, plans could be laid. A seemingly sensible scheme to attack Alexandria rather than risk the Delta streams in marching on Cairo was discussed, provoking, according to Joinville, the impetuous Robert of Artois to exclaim, ‘If you wish to kill the serpent, you must first crush its head.’⁵⁶ Robert urged an advance on Cairo, as did the king. Hindsight blamed Count Robert for the decision to attack Cairo taken, Joinville alleged, against the near-unanimous opposition of the rest of the French barons. It seems that Louis’s support was sufficient to win the day for Robert’s minority view. This may say much for Louis’s personal authority, or for his deep pockets, which were now supporting many, perhaps most of the crusade leaders. The ultimate defeat of the Cairo strategy as well as the death of Robert of Artois has clouded later perspectives. Robert became the scapegoat for the defeat of the crusade, his strategic advice at Damietta compounded by his reckless and suicidal behaviour at Mansourah in February 1250. Yet staying cooped up in Damietta or acquiring another Nile port only made sense if the plan had been to use any conquests as bargaining chips for the return of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. However, if, as is possible, Louis planned to conquer Egypt, even to convert the local Muslims, there were excellent tactical and strategic reasons for pressing home the Christian advantage in an attack on Cairo, especially in the light of deepening Ayyubid disarray.

Al-Salih Ayyub, alarmed at how the invasion was developing and now in the final stages of his fatal illness, remained at Mansourah. Protected by the Nile and its side channels, the site afforded level dry ground for his camp outside a defensible town. It barred the direct route to Cairo but was close enough to Damietta to maintain some pressure on the Christians. The sultan’s immediate problems were the internal tensions in his high command produced by his failing health and exacerbated by the French invasion. Although he had executed members of the spineless Damietta garrison, pour encourager les autres, he felt unable to dismiss Fakhr al-Din. Any sudden interregnum would need the support of such veteran loyalists to hold the line against both the crusaders and internal challenges to the Ayyubid succession. Yet the sultan’s impending demise disturbed his increasingly powerful and assertive mamluks, the Bahriyya, who feared a loss in status or worse under his heir, al- Mu ‘azzam Turan Shah. Rivalries were further complicated by the ambitions of al-Salih Ayyub’s Turkish wife, Shajar al-Durr, who as eagerly embraced the prospect of being a power broker as, according to legend and some fact, she did the bodies of some of the powerful.⁵⁷ Politically, therefore, the crusaders’ delay at Damietta from June to November did not obviously improve the unity of their opponents, who, militarily, were as hampered as the invaders by the annual flood.

On 20 November 1249, with his army now at its strongest, Louis IX led his troops out of Damietta, leaving behind his wife, five months pregnant, and a well-equipped garrison, supported by Genoese and Pisans. The months since June had been employed in strengthening Damietta’s defences, some thought excessively.⁵⁸ But Louis’s meticulous planning, which extended to his allocation of palaces and churches in the city, was a feature of his whole enterprise. It also confirmed his general intention to conquer, not bargain. His chief problem lay in whether, even with his careful organization and massive reserves of treasure, he possessed adequate forces and the right equipment to force a path through the Delta and mount a successful assault on Cairo. He may have been relying on the implosion of Egyptian resistance following the death of the sultan, the seriousness of whose illness was likely to have been reported to the Christians. Not only was he disappointed in this, he underestimated the stake the sultan’s mamluks held in the survival of some version of the existing Egyptian regime.

More immediately damaging, the crusaders’ march south proved painfully slow, covering an average of less than two miles a day. While the bulk of the army marched along the river banks, it was shadowed by a large fleet mainly, it seems, of heavy transport vessels, as well as some lighter, shallow draft galleys, more appropriate for Nile warfare. Progress was hindered by a strong southerly wind, slowing the preponderant sailing ships, which lacked manoeuvrability. Yet in spite of the measured pace, Louis appears not to have placed a series of supply dumps or protective garrisons along his route, the same mistake as 1221. Unlike his predecessors, Louis had not even secured Tinnis or other local strongholds. Perhaps he recognized he lacked sufficient manpower and preferred to confront the enemy in a decisive engagement with the maximum force at his disposal. It took the army thirty-two days to arrive at the same point between the Nile and the Bahr al-Saghir opposite Mansourah as the Fifth Crusade had reached in only seven in July 1221. One difference lay in the large amount of food supplies and war materials, especially timber, that Louis carried with him. These allowed him to establish a camp opposite Mansourah without fear of starvation and to build protective vehicles for his engineers and large throwing machines.⁵⁹ The Fifth Crusade had travelled lighter, with fatal results.

As the crusader army and navy gingerly picked their way southwards through the canals and streams of the Delta, in late November al-Salih Ayyub finally died in the camp at Mansourah. His death was hushed up while his