God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Christianity, Louis despatched William of Rubruck on another embassy to the new Great Khan, Mongke.⁸³ Although primarily a missionary expedition, and despite Louis’s care in not giving William accreditation to negotiate, the mission was regarded by some on all sides as another attempt to capture the chimera of a Franco-Mongol anti-Islamic alliance. This pursuit, as of the Christianization of the Mongols, proved an entirely false hope for Outremer as for the rest of Christendom. When Louis departed for home in 1254, he left a small garrison and committed himself to continued financial and military aid for the Holy Land. However, his vast expenditure of life and treasure had failed in almost every respect except, as contemporaries tried to see it, spiritual. Souls had been saved, but in death and defeat not triumph. Louis IX’s crusade had proved the most spectacular of failures.

Both immediate and structural causes could be advanced to explain the disaster. Repeated tactical decisions reached during 1248–50 proved wrong. While there were good reasons for the delays in Cyprus in the winter of 1248–9 and again at Damietta between July and November 1249, they resulted in a lethal combination when tested by the campaign in the Nile Delta. While it is too simple to blame the unsatisfactory outcome of the battle of Mansourah on Robert of Artois, his actions point to a fatal mix of indiscipline and high morale. The subsequent stalemate from February to April 1250 exposed the weakness of Louis’s strategic grasp as much as the torpor of his field tactics. He appeared to have no solution to the problem of his inability to dislodge the Muslims from Mansourah and lacked the flexibility to stage a tactical withdrawal. The shadow of 1221 lay heavy across his actions. Yet the failure to secure his rear defences and supply route to Damietta proved the most damaging omission of all, leading directly to the collapse of the expedition. Here, ignorance of local conditions and bad planning may have contributed to defeat. The Egyptians, in outmanoeuvring the crusader ships, relied on galleys, while the crusaders seemed to have depended more on larger transport vessels, including cumbersome cogs, excellent for transporting heavy cargoes at sea but vulnerable in the shallow narrows of the Delta. The Christians’ lack of mastery in the waterways of the lower Nile sealed their fate. Despite the shipbuilding programme at Cyprus in 1249–50, the landings at Damietta indicated only a modest proportion of the fleet of the shallow-bottomed galley or landing craft variety. The numbers were inadequate for the task.⁸⁴

However, plans and preparations should be seen not just in relation to execution but also purpose. Here the scale of Louis’s defeat and responsibility for it was matched only by the size of his ambition. Louis saw Egypt as more than a gateway to Jerusalem. He intended it as a new Christian Frankish colony in Outremer. His concept of the political and colonial needs of the crusade were consequently precise and radical. During the Fifth Crusade, there had been much debilitating debate as to whether to exchange conquests in Egypt for territory in Palestine. Something of this resurfaced in the discussions at Damietta in 1249 on whether to capture Alexandria or advance on Cairo. However, Louis was not interested in using Damietta as a bargaining pawn. Within days of the crusaders’ occupation he had converted the mosques into churches. Before leaving in November 1249, he had established an archbishop and a permanent chapter of cathedral canons. Throughout, Louis treated Damietta as his and administered it as part of his domain. In the end he exchanged it for his own release from captivity. Louis saw himself as ruler of Damietta by right of conquest, the beginning of the far greater conquest of Egypt itself. Arabic sources refer to Louis’s formal defiance to the Sultan in 1249: God will decide whether you or I ought to be master of Egypt.⁸⁵

Understanding, if disapproval, of Louis’s intentions may be reflected in Matthew Paris’s implied criticism of the whole Egyptian strategy, which he characterized as a magnates’ plot to subvert the proper concentration of the crusade on the recovery of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.⁸⁶ The English commentator was not unbiased, being hostile to the taxation necessary to fund such expeditions and suspicious of the motives of some crucesignati, not least Henry III, who took the cross in 1250 but tried his best to prevent many Englishmen from actually joining the expedition. However, Paris appears to have picked up Louis’s desire to complement his conquest of Egypt with the conversion of the Egyptians.⁸⁷ In a good position to reflect attitudes as well as gossip at the French and English courts, Paris also repeated a claim of a monk of Pontigny, where the pope spent some time during these years, that Louis took with him to Egypt hoes, harrows, ploughs, ploughshares and other agricultural equipment, adding that Louis was distressed ‘that he had not enough people to guard and inhabit the territory in Egypt which he had already occupied and was about to seize’.⁸⁸ Conquest, conversion and settlement appeared to be Louis’s ultimate aims: the creation of a new Frankish state in Outremer, under Capetian rule, perhaps one of his brothers. Such a startling policy would fit the widely observed financial arrangements that supplied Louis with regular funds from the west. Such a scheme would explain the rejection of any compromise or the plan to take Alexandria rather than attack Cairo. The responsibility for the conduct and tactics of the Nile campaign were not the fault of Robert of Artois but the policy of Louis IX.

Here lay the fatal paradox. Louis’s crusade was possibly the most clearly planned, best organized and most coherently mounted of all the larger expeditions to the east. This is not simply an impression created by the greater bulk of surviving archival evidence due to more efficient bureaucratic systems of written record keeping. Although their power should not be exaggerated, thirteenth-century governments possessed stronger tools of fiscal, political and administrative organization and control than their immediate predecessors. Louis himself possessed all the administrative vigour, personal bravery and studied piety associated with the ideal crusader. Yet he failed as dismally as the most unsuccessful of his predecessors. His crusade lacked adequate appropriate shipping or enough manpower to cope with Nile Delta warfare, still less lengthy sieges or lasting conquest and occupation. Less tangible but no less damaging, the ideology and conduct of the enterprise elevated precisely the barriers of culture and religion that directly militated against dissident political elements in Egypt (or elsewhere in the region) making any lasting common cause with the invaders. Joinville’s later story of how some elements in the Egyptian elite after the murder of Tutan Shah wished to make Louis sultan represented the overheated imagination of an old warrior and storyteller. Yet it precisely touched a central weakness of the whole practice of thirteenth-century crusading in the Near East. Local Muslim rulers, dependent on their military, administrative, legal and religious elites, might, in certain circumstance, tolerate Franks as allies, even co-rulers, but never as masters.

Yet again, a crusade had shown itself ineffective against even the most limited of strategic targets. The impact of Louis’s expedition on the wider conflicts of the Near East was marginal. The Ayyubid regime in Egypt had long relied on fractious mercenary groups. Louis’s diplomacy, war or stay in Palestine exerted no influence on the Mongol advance or the prospects for Muslim resistance, still less Frankish survival. Yet, in contrast with the disillusion after the equally ignominious fate of the Second Crusade, Louis’s expedition did not lead to an abandonment of enthusiasm for his cause. With crusading incorporated more into the devotional mentality of western Christendom than a century earlier, the reaction was shock at God’s apparent disfavour and a desire to redeem sin, not apportion blame. As after 1221, instead of arguing that an Egyptian strategy was impossible, the legacy of Louis’s campaign stirred planners, strategists and propagandists to examine how exactly Egypt could be conquered. The detailed advice composed over the following seventy-five years ostensibly tried to learn the lessons of 1248–50. This was most clearly seen in the work of Marino Sanudo Torsello, who based his plan (devised c.1306–21) on a long historical study of the eastern campaigns, including Louis IX’s. His solution was a maritime trade blockade to weaken Egypt’s economy; a small expeditionary force to secure Nile strongpoints followed by a professional army, fully equipped with appropriate shipping, to conquer the country. Only then would a large, mass army of crucesignati be launched to reshape the religious and political map of the Near East.⁸⁹ Sanudo, like Louis IX, identified the problems. But neither he nor the French king nor the long succession of other politicians and self-appointed experts could escape the reality that the freakish legend and myth of 1099 and its subsequent vigorous promotion had bequeathed an unwarranted optimism for an ideal that, pointless or not, was increasingly unattainable.

THE SHEPHERDS’ CRUSADE 1251

Louis’s crusade was the last great western campaign to reach the shores of the eastern Mediterranean until the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt in 1798. Its failure caused a sensation in the west, as it had in the Near East. Bad news travels fast. On 1 August 1250, Richard of Cornwall was sitting in the Exchequer at Westminster when he was brought the story of the death of William Longspee at Mansourah.⁹⁰ When the full extent of the disaster reached the west, unrest in Venice and other Italian cities was reported. France plunged into a sort of public mourning. For many, the grief was immediate and personal; for lost sons, brothers, husbands and fathers–and some mothers and daughters too. As he lay awaiting captivity in a hut near Sharamsah on 6 April 1250, Louis’s head was cradled by a woman from Paris.⁹¹ But in France reactions took a more aggressive