widow, Shajar al-Durr, engineered the effective transfer of power to the military commander-in-chief, Fakhr al-Din, while al-Salih Ayyub’s son and heir, al-Mu ‘azzam Turan Shah, was summoned from Hisn Kayfa, his base in the upper Tigris valley in northern Iraq. It took him three months to reach Mansourah, during which time authority inevitably devolved increasingly on the sultana, on Fakhr al-Din and on the late sultan’s Bahriyya Mamluks. The urgency in managing a smooth transition of power was evident in the gathering crisis on the Nile. While the Muslim camp flanking the river shore outside Mansourah was strengthened and a battery of throwing machines prepared, Egyptian skirmishers harried the Christians, a sharp encounter with the Templarled vanguard on 7 December failing to halt the advance. A fortnight later, Louis’s army and flotilla of support ships reached the bank opposite the Egyptian camp, separated only by the Bahr al-Saghir branch of the Nile. There they dug in, against attacks from the land, and constructed eighteen wooden ballista, throwing machines, which they used to pepper their enemies on the far shore, who returned fire in kind.
DEFEAT, FEBRUARY – MARCH 1250
For the next six weeks, under an unrelenting mutual barrage across the Nile and Bahr al-Saghir, the Christians attempted to construct some sort of causeway across the Bahr al-Saghir, presumably to allow for passage of their war engines as well as cavalry.60 The efforts failed. So too did Egyptian attacks by land on the Christian camp and by water, using fireships to try to disrupt or destroy the Christian fleet. Stalemate beckoned until Egyptian defectors informed the crusaders of a deep ford downstream across the Bahr al-Saghir. This offered Louis a risky but excellent chance to outflank and surprise the enemy. He had little choice. The longer he remained stuck opposite Mansourah, the nearer the new sultan, the shorter his supplies and the fewer his tactical options. His perimeter defences could not hold indefinitely, nor could his fleet hope to remain unscathed. Louis presumably had planned on a war of movement, punctuated by battles in open terrain, not frittering away weeks and provisions in futile, if skilful, engineering works. Unless he could engage and destroy the enemy, his campaign was doomed. Unlike Richard I in Palestine in 1191–2, Pelagius and John of Brienne in Egypt in 1221 or even the crusaders of 1228–9 and 1239–41, Louis had no alternative strategy. He held no jurisdiction over the actual or hoped-for kingdom of Jerusalem, and so could hardly negotiate for it, although powerful Frankish lords, such as John of Jaffa, were in his army. His dispositions at Damietta had made it clear he regarded Damietta definitively as his, not part of Jerusalem, and so hardly negotiable for territory there. Louis was an intensely pious man. He seems to have believed that God would reward that conspicuous piety, even where temporal preparation proved insufficient to guarantee victory. Otherwise, his strategy in Egypt made little sense, a quixotic gesture of optimism rather than a sober exercise of Christian generalship.
The attack across the ford, so deep that only the cavalry could cross with their horses having to swim, began at dawn on 8 February. The infantry and engineers were left in the camp under the duke of Burgundy and the Outremer barons to wait for a chance to cross once the opposite bank had been secured by the knights’ bold outflanking move. The choice of only the French regiments indicated an understanding of the need for discipline. The tricky manoeuvre worked and almost paid off. The advance guard under Robert of Artois, stiffened by Templars and Hospitallers and afforced by the English squadron under William Longspee, successfully crossed the river. But instead of staying at the bridgehead to wait for the king and the rest of the cavalry, the count’s force immediately charged the enemy camp outside Mansourah, catching the defenders completely off guard. The Muslim commander and effective ruler of Egypt, Fakhr al-Din, was killed in the attack; unarmed, he had been interrupted during his morning ablutions.61 The terrified Egyptians fled towards the refuge of the town. Flushed with sudden victory, Robert and his division flouted clear previous orders. Instead of pausing while the whole army could gather, they pressed on in pursuit of the fleeing enemy into Mansourah itself. A fortified town where the bulk of the Egyptian forces were billeted, Mansourah’s narrow streets rendered the Christian cavalry ineffective. Count Robert’s triumphant foray turned into a massacre, as his knights became separated, hemmed in and trapped. The morale of the Muslims held, buoyed by the leadership of the Bahriyya Mamluks stationed in the town. The crusader advance- guard was soon wiped out. Louis and the main cavalry force, now safely across the Bahr al-Saghir, were left with their backs to the Nile to face the brunt of a newly confident Egyptian counter-attack.
The battle lasted all day, with desperate fighting along the whole front. The king’s tactics were to force a path towards a position directly opposite the Christian camp from where he could expect reinforcements, especially of infantry and crossbowmen. In places, the line broke into splintered skirmishes. Elsewhere, the cavalry were sorely harried by enemy arrows. Joinville claimed to have been hit by five, his horse by fifteen.62 Protected by armour and padded quilts, they must have resembled monstrous pin cushions. The weight of constantly reinforced enemy troops prevented the deployment of the usual Frankish cavalry charge, much of the fighting reduced to hand-to-hand combat, ‘maces against swords’ in Joinville’s phrase, adding, rather sententiously, ‘it was a truly noble passage of arms, for no one there drew either bow or crossbow’, weapons regarded by knights like Joinville as plebeian.63 However gilded by memory, composition and the subsequent need to explain, justify and glorify his saintly hero, Joinville’s account of the battle of Mansourah provides one of the most vivid pictures of the experience of medieval fighting, the chaos, cameraderie, improvisation, horror and sheer bravery of the battlefield. In the heat and stress of combat, even the chivalric patina cracked. In a rather Wellingtonian moment, Count Peter of Brittany, veteran crusader and political intriguer, wounded and fearful of the press of his own men as they scrambled to the safety of the main formation around the king, spitting blood from his mouth, swore at them, ‘Good Lord, did you ever see such scum!’64 As the day ended, the Christians held the field. Reinforcements had arrived from their camp opposite, giving them covering fire and access to supplies. The Egyptians withdrew into Mansourah. But their army had not been destroyed. The road to Cairo remained blocked.
The bitter-sweet victory outside Mansourah was the prelude to catastrophe. Apart from showing Louis’s personal courage, in his gilded helmet and sword of German steel,65 the battle exposed the weakness of his strategy. He had driven his army into a cul-de-sac that could easily become a trap. The consequences of the failure to annihilate the Egyptian army were so dire that blame needed to be directed away from the future saint. Robert of Artois’s rashness supplied the ideal excuse for chroniclers attempting to deflect responsibility from the king. Louis himself declined to condemn Robert and characteristically blamed himself for defeat. While commended for his bravery, and praised in memorial sermons devised and delivered at Louis’s court in the Holy Land over the next few years, Robert’s reputation fared far worse than some of his colleagues whom he led to slaughter.66 Robert may have been placed among the martyrs, but no heroic secular cult of crusading sainthood attached itself to him as it did to the ‘manifest martyr’, William Longspee, in England.67 Within a few years, an elaborate Anglo-French vernacular romance was circulating alongside legends of how he died. The uneasiness about Robert of Artois was to a degree mitigated, at least in official circles, by regarding his sacrifice as another demonstration of how the French had become the new tribe of Judah, leading the faith and providing examples of Christian behaviour, agents of divine providence.
No amount of subsequent interpretation of events could alter the problem confronting Louis’s army. As the days passed, the tactical balance tipped increasingly against the crusaders. By the end of February, the new sultan, Turan Shah, had arrived at Mansourah. Although unable to dislodge the Christians from their entrenched position on the site of Fakhr al-Din’s camp on the right bank of the Nile, the Egyptians’ strength grew. Reinforcements and war materials, especially shipping, joined the Muslim army while the crusaders had to rely on what they already had with them. Louis lacked adequate physical resources to batter his way past the enemy ranged against him, even though reports of his victory incited renewed panic in Cairo.68 His only realistic hope lay in the internecine rivalries that were emerging between the military households of the former and new sultan breaking out into open civil war. Yet Louis’s very presence acted to postpone any Muslim bloodletting until after his defeat. As the weeks of stalemate dragged by, the Christians were hit by food shortages and disease, including scurvy and dysentery. The traumatic details were etched on Joinville’s memory. When surgeon-barbers cut away putrefying flesh around the gums of the sick, ‘it was pitiful to hear the screams: it was just like the cry of a woman in labour’.69
No less serious, the Egyptians had managed to drag overland on carts a number of boats, some sources say fifty galleys, and launch them on the Nile downstream of the crusader camp.70 This established an effective blockade between the crusaders at Mansourah and their supply base at Damietta. Twice large convoys from Damietta carrying bread, wine, salt meat and other provisions were intercepted and failed to get through. Towards the end of March, worsening conditions, and concerted Muslim attacks throughout Holy Week (20–27 March) forced Louis to abandon his position before Mansourah and return to the old camp across the Bahr al-Saghir.
