God's Battalions (27 page)

By the end of September substantial reinforcements did arrive. Unfortunately, so did Cardinal Pelagius of Albano, sent by the pope to unify the crusader command. Pelagius was a Spaniard, “a man of great industry and administrative experience, but singularly lacking in tact.”
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He proceeded to threaten excommunication of all who disagreed with him and, mistaking stubbornness for determination, brought about the failure of the Fifth Crusade. It happened this way.

While the crusaders dallied after taking the great tower, the Muslims gathered their forces, and in October they attacked the crusader camp. Although greatly outnumbered, the crusaders not only repelled the attack but killed nearly all of the attackers. Again, though, they were content to enjoy their victory rather than go on the offensive. However, the sultan of Egypt was so convinced that it would be necessary to surrender Jerusalem to the Christians that he ordered that the Holy City be ruined. Demolition of the walls began late in March, and (Greek) Christian homes were sacked.
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Meanwhile, in February 1219 the crusaders finally were ready to attack Damietta again. At this same moment a succession conspiracy so frightened Al-K
mil, sultan of Egypt, that he mounted his horse and deserted his army during the night. At dawn, when the troops discovered they had been abandoned by their leader, they panicked and fled, many abandoning their weapons. But rather than storm Damietta, which could have had only a very small garrison by this time, the crusaders merely encircled the city, setting up a new camp there.

Now the Muslims wanted a settlement. They proposed to surrender all portions of the kingdom of Jerusalem, including the city itself, and sign a thirty-year truce if the crusaders would leave Egypt. The military leaders wanted to accept the offer. Count Pelagius said no. The Muslims then offered to pay thirty thousand bezants in addition to the previous terms. Again Pelagius turned them down. In doing so, he ignored two essential facts: his army was shrinking as various crusader contingents left for home, and the Egyptian army was being reinforced from Syria and other Islamic powers. In May 1219 the Muslims attacked the crusader encampment. An unmovable crusader infantry inflicted huge losses on them. Two weeks later the Muslims attacked again, and once again their corpses littered the field of battle.

Not content to keep on smashing Muslim attacks, Pelagius now turned tactician and ordered an attempt to storm Damietta. But the attack made no headway. Nor did a second, two days later. Another attack on July 13 and yet another on July 31 also failed. These defeats weakened the crusader forces and undermined their resolve while at the same time restoring some confidence to the Muslims. At the end of August the crusader army fell into an ambush and suffered a bloody defeat—losing perhaps as many as forty-three hundred men.
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Even so, they remained a large and dangerous opponent.

At this point the Egyptians once again sought a treaty. Unfortunately for them, as the new treaty offer was being discussed among the Crusade leaders who might have accepted it despite Pelagius’s opposition, some Christian sentries facing Damietta noticed a lack of activity in the nearest tower, got a long ladder, climbed up, and discovered that the tower and a whole section of wall had been abandoned. More troops were quickly summoned, and Damietta was taken without opposition. Although the various Arab chroniclers claim that the crusaders then proceeded to massacre all the inhabitants, far more consistent with the abandonment of the walls is the crusader claim that they found a city nearly deserted except for many dead and dying, presumably victims of some dread disease.
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Now in possession of Damietta, Pelagius took such complete control that King John of Palestine boarded his ships and sailed back to Acre. And in the spring (1220) many other crusaders did so, too. However, the defectors were replaced by many contingents of Italian troops led by various archbishops and bishops. Not only did these churchmen prove to be inept military leaders; they couldn’t even impose discipline at Damietta: the contemporary documents report widespread drunkenness and disorder. Nor could the clergy convince the army to march against the Egyptians.

A year passed, during which the Muslims constructed strong fortifications at El Mansûra to replace Damietta as a barrier to crusader penetration farther south. Then, with the arrival of more Germans and the return of King John of Jerusalem, Pelagius was able to mount a new campaign. While the troops marched south, a huge fleet of perhaps six hundred ships, galleys, and boats followed on the Nile. When they reached El Mansûra it was clear that a long siege would be required to take it. But rather than bypass the Muslim encampment, Pelagius began to construct a fortified camp facing El Mansûra. It was a dangerously vulnerable position. Worse yet, it did not isolate El Mansûra, and thousands of fresh Muslim troops flowed into their encampment. Pelagius and the clergy were warned repeatedly by the experienced military men as well as by Alice, the dowager queen of Cypress. Unfortunately, as Oliver of Paderborn, who was present, noted in his superb history of the Fifth Crusade, “[N]ow, for our sins, all sound judgment departed from our leaders.”
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At this point the Muslims placed substantial forces to the north, where they began to attack and sink supply boats coming from Damietta. Soon the Muslim forces were positioned not only to block supplies from coming south but to endanger any crusader retreat. Finally recognizing the danger, Pelagius led a withdrawal of his now disorganized forces, whereupon the Muslims destroyed some dikes and allowed the Nile to flood over the only land route north from the crusader encampment.

Trapped and lacking supplies, even Pelagius realized it was time for a peace settlement; the Muslims were unwilling to press too hard because the crusaders were still a lethal battle force, and both sides knew that substantial new German crusader contingents were expected at Damietta any moment. So, on August 30, 1221, an eight-year armistice was accepted, the crusaders agreed to the complete evacuation of Egypt, and both sides released their prisoners. Missing was the Muslim evacuation of the Holy Land that had been offered in their previous efforts to achieve peace.

As it turned out, the expected German reinforcements did not arrive until eight years later, when Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, after twice being excommunicated for failure to keep his vow to crusade, finally led a small force to Acre in 1229. Lacking the forces needed to accomplish much, Frederick nevertheless managed to negotiate a treaty with Al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt, that returned Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth to Christian rule. As a reward, Pope Gregory IX withdrew Frederick’s excommunication.

Jerusalem remained in Christian hands for fifteen years. Then, on August 23, 1244, the Khwarazmians—Turkish nomads newly arrived from Asia and allied with the sultan of Egypt—swept over the “feeble defences” of Jerusalem, “killing any Franks they found and desecrating the Christian Holy Places.”
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Next the Khwarazmians rode south to join up with an Egyptian army, and the combined force set out to drive the Christians into the sea. The kingdoms and the knightly orders quickly assembled all their forces and met the Muslim host at Gaza, where the Christian army was annihilated. The only reason crusaders were able to hang on to their port cities was because civil war broke out between the Turks and the Egyptians.

SAINT LOUIS’S MAGNIFICENT FAILURE

Within several weeks of the disaster, the bishop of Beirut sailed from Acre “to tell the princes of the West…that reinforcements must be sent if the whole kingdom were not to perish.”
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Fortunately for the kingdom, this appeal coincided with the king of France’s having taken the cross subsequent to having made an unexpected recovery from a severe illness. He may well have taken the cross before word of the latest disaster in the kingdoms reached the West; in any event, Louis IX was long revered for his crusading expeditions as well as his holiness: he was canonized as Saint Louis in 1297, only twenty-seven years after his death.

The Crusade led by Saint Louis probably was the best organized, best financed, and best planned of all the Crusades, and this was mainly due to the ability and rectitude of its leader.
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Louis began by convening a group of nobles in Paris in October 1245. At his urging, most took the cross. At the same time he imposed a very substantial tax to pay for a Crusade.

Once again the plan was to attack Egypt—landing at Damietta and marching to Cairo. This time the campaign would avoid the flooding season of the Nile that had led to the catastrophe of 1221. As he made his preparations, Louis attempted to enlist other European kings but could not do so. He was especially disappointed to have been unable to recruit King Haakon of Norway, since he could have supplied the needed fleet. Consequently, Louis arranged for ships from many different places including England and Scotland, but mostly from Genoa.

By 1248, after many delays, Louis finally set sail for Cyprus, arriving on September 17. The crusaders spent the winter there. Meanwhile, a request came from Bohemond V, Prince of Antioch, for aid in repelling attacks by Khwarazmian Turks, and Louis sent him five hundred knights.
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At the end of May 1249 the crusaders reboarded their ships and set sail for the Egyptian coast. They probably numbered “2,500 to 2,800 knights, 5,000 crossbowmen and about 15,000 other combatants.”
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They landed on the beach at Damietta and were immediately attacked by Egyptian cavalry. But the Muslim charges were unavailing against a solid wall of infantry spears (even the Christian knights fought on foot), and, after suffering heavy losses, the Muslims withdrew. Not just from the beach, but from the city—and the civilian population fled behind them. Damietta had fallen in only a few hours.
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Unfortunately, this quick victory upset the entire timetable. Louis had expected to spend the summer taking Damietta and to move on up the Nile in the fall, after the level of the river had fallen back to normal. To head south now would be to campaign during the flood stages of the Nile, an action that had brought the Fifth Crusade to grief. So Louis had his forces settle down and wait. This was never an easy undertaking. Camps were always disorderly and prone to high death rates from disease and disputes. As the summer passed, Louis’s forces slowly dwindled; some contingents even went home.

Finally, on November 20, Louis led his crusaders against the fortress of El Mansûra, which had been built to oppose Pelagius’s forces in 1220. It had been greatly strengthened during the interim. To reach El Mansûra, the crusaders had to cross the Nile. They were unable to build an adequate bridge, but they bribed a local Copt to show them a fordable spot.
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It was a difficult crossing, and some knights drowned. Worse yet, despite firm orders to form up on the opposite bank, the advance guard attacked Egyptian troops camped outside the walls without waiting for the rest of the army. When the Egyptians fled, the hotheaded advance guard chased after them despite furious efforts by the Grand Master of the Templars to halt them, and soon the crusaders were engaged in street fighting within El Mansûra. Here the Muslims rallied, and the greatly outnumbered advance guard was slaughtered. However, the rest of the army arrived and drove the Egyptians from the fortress. El Mansûra was theirs.

At that point the crusaders probably should have withdrawn back to Damietta. But victory gave them confidence to begin negotiations to trade Damietta for the Holy Land. As the talks dragged on, the Muslims began successfully to interfere with the passage of crusader supply boats up the Nile, and the army began to succumb to its very unhealthy location on a swampy shore. Soon, of about 2,700 knights who had marched south, only about 450 remained in fighting condition.
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Finally, Louis ordered his troops back to Damietta—but along the way all discipline fell apart, and through a misunderstanding the crusaders surrendered. The Muslims quickly killed all stragglers and all of the sick and wounded aboard crusader boats on the Nile. Many others were given the choice of death or conversion to Islam—and many chose death. Although he, too, was a prisoner, Louis was not faced with that dire alternative. Instead, an enormous ransom was negotiated (it was brought by the Templars), and Louis and his principal barons were freed.

Louis did not return to France for another four years. Instead, he went to the Holy Land and spent large sums strengthening and rebuilding the defenses at Acre and Jaffa. When he finally went back to France in 1254, he left a garrison of one hundred French knights and a substantial number of infantry to defend Acre; it cost Louis about ten thousand pounds a year to pay their wages and expenses, which amounted to about 4 percent of the crown’s annual income.
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The failure of Louis to lead a successful Crusade disillusioned many Europeans and contributed greatly to their growing opposition to crusading. Indirectly, it had even more dire effects in Egypt: the sultan was murdered by his father’s Mamluk slaves (see below), thus ending the reign of Saladin’s dynasty. The Mamluks ruled Egypt for the next 267 years.