On the Road with Francis of Assisi (23 page)

It also almost ended with the death of Francis. The majority of the Crusader forces had panicked and fled from the surprise onslaught of the Muslim forces, many to be run down and hacked to death. Only the Spanish knights held their ground and tried to stem al-Kamil’s counterattack, but most were slaughtered. The Muslim troops came very close to overrunning the Christian camp and killing all who were in it. Only the last-minute stand by the seventy-year-old King John with his small contingent of knights managed to turn back the Muslims and save the camp.

Francis’s prophecy that the battle would not go “well” for the Christians turned out to be a stunning understatement: Six thousand Crusaders were either killed or captured in the carnage. Francis mourned “especially over the Spaniards when he saw that their greater impetuosity in the battle had left but a few remaining,” writes Celano. The Muslims compounded their victory by beheading fifty knights from each of the military orders and displaying the heads on wooden stakes along the way to Fariskur, leading the British biographer Adrian House to wonder wryly whether Pelagius realized the date of his impetuous battle orders coincided with the beheading of John the Baptist centuries earlier.

The extraordinary loss of life moved Francis to act on his conviction that the only way to end this bloody clash between faiths was for him to go see the sultan. Francis was convinced that once he showed al-Kamil the light, the Muslim sultan would embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ, his soul would be saved, and the hostilities would cease. (Francis had held the same conviction the year before in his failed attempt to reach Morocco to convert the
miramamolin,
as the commander of the believers or sultan there was known.) This time, soon after the massacre and with Pelagius’s grudging approval, Francis set out with Illuminato for the sultan’s camp.

We are sitting in the office of the governor of Damietta, Dr. Abdel Azir, who is a friend of Ambassador el-Reedy. The governor is not familiar with the details of the Fifth Crusade and has never heard of Francis of Assisi. It is the Seventh Crusade or Franj War that he and everyone else in Damietta is familiar with, the Crusade that ended in an overwhelming Muslim victory in 1250. Once again the Crusaders had besieged Damietta, leading the then sultan to raze the fortress city at the end of the thirteenth century and move it four miles inland to a new, less vulnerable position, where we’re presently sitting, sipping coffee.

The defeat of the Seventh Crusade is a source of great pride to the people in the province of Damietta. The Muslims not only took prisoner King Louis IX of France but slaughtered many of his army of ten thousand. The Muslim victory is commemorated in a museum in the nearby city of El-Mansura, where the house in which King Louis was imprisoned along with two of his brothers has been proudly restored and all the paintings show either Crusaders bleeding to death or King Louis in chains. Sitting in the governor’s office, I notice an elaborately carved wood bas-relief depicting the king of France on his knees in front of scimitar-wielding Muslim warriors, which is a little nervous-making, but the governor is charming. And, it turns out, very helpful.

He has assembled a group of local experts in an adjoining conference room to tell us what they know about the Fifth Crusade. Seated around the table are two men from the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, a local author and Crusade historian named Mahmoud Al Zalaky, and a Coptic priest, Bishoy Abdel Masih. (The Egyptian Coptic Church, founded by St. Mark around
A.D.
61, is a still-flourishing Christian Orthodox religion with its own Pope.) There are also local newspaper reporters and photographers to record the meeting as well as a television crew.

Bishoy Abdel Masih offers a disquieting fact. During the Fifth Crusade, he says, the Roman Catholic Crusaders killed twenty thousand Egyptian Orthodox Coptic Christians on the western bank of the Nile because they were scared they would join the Muslims. He has much more positive feelings toward the Franciscans, however, who were allowed by the sultan to establish a convent in Damietta in 1250, the same year as the bloody end to the Seventh Crusade. It is now a Christian school run by a French nun for twelve hundred girls and boys. Would we like to see it? We would, and we feel heartened during our visit to see a bust of Francis in the school’s church.

And would we like to go to Fariskur? Mahmoud Al Zalaky, the local historian, says he thinks he has identified the site of al-Kamil’s camp to which Francis went. And so, after more coffee, gift exchanges, and many press photographs, we set out in a convoy of cars with the ambassador, the historian, the bishop, and a detail of armed guards to stop briefly at the Christian school and, from there, to pick up the trail of Francis.

Francis’s journey along the three miles to Fariskur was far more dangerous than ours. The Saracen and Christian camps were so close to each other, St. Bonaventure reports, that “there was no way of passing from one to the other without danger of death.” The peril was heightened, he continues, by the sultan’s “cruel edict” that whoever brought back “the head of a Christian would receive as a reward a gold piece.” To buoy their spirits as they trod the perilous path, Francis and Brother Illuminato recited the twenty-third psalm, which in the medieval texts translates, “Even if I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I shall not fear evil because you are with me.”

The August heat must have been insufferable and the intense light painful to Francis’s eyes, but on they trudged, these two men dressed in brown rags. Until al-Kamil’s sentries pounced on them “like wolves,” and beat them and insulted them and tied them up with chains. Why they weren’t killed is a mystery. “Sultan, Sultan,” Francis and Illuminato kept saying, which may have saved their lives. Al-Kamil was continually sending peace feelers to the Crusader camp, and the sentries might have thought that the two were bringing him back an answer.

The Fariskur to which the sentries brought Francis and Illuminato in chains was very different from the sprawling town to which the local historian takes us. What Francis saw was a sea of earth-colored tents in al-Kamil’s almost one-mile-square camp. What we see is a shrine thought to be the location of al-Kamil’s tent in the peaceful center of the busy town, dominated by a huge mosque with a green and white tiled dome. We are greeted by a crowd of curious schoolchildren who keep repeating “good morning,” presumably their one phrase in English. Francis and Illuminato were greeted by the sultan’s soldiers, today represented by the graceful equestrian statues of Muslim warriors flanking the town’s entrance.

It is hard to imagine the actual meeting between Francis and the sultan. What preconceived notions did Francis have of the Muslim ruler? Did he consider him a barbarian? A “beast”? An ignorant Arab? And what did the sultan make of the small, tattered man brought before him? Was he a beggar? A spy? A deserter? The unlikely-looking emissary of peace he was hoping for from the Christian camp?

Francis’s medieval biographers reflect the sultan’s understandable curiosity. “When that ruler inquired by whom, why and how they had been sent and how they got there, Christ’s servant, Francis, answered with an intrepid heart that he had been sent not by man but by the Most High God in order to point out to him and his people the way of salvation and to announce the Gospel of truth,” St. Bonaventure writes.

The sultan was evidently intrigued by Francis. Hardly a barbarian or an ignorant Arab, al-Kamil was a former medical student and intellectual who delighted in reciting poetry and debating the logic of Aristotle and the origin of the universe. Like most Muslims, he was tolerant of other monotheistic religions and counted Coptic Christians among his closest advisers. Francis, whose persuasive sermons had moved so many, was obviously articulate and intelligent, regardless of his lack of education.

An empathy quickly developed between the two. Despite the ferocity of his troops, al-Kamil was a man of peace who had been thrust into defending his country from the Christian invaders. He had good relations with the Christian communities long established in Egypt as well as with European traders, and he wanted nothing more than for the Crusaders to pack up and leave. Francis, too, was a man of peace, but he clung to his conviction that converting the sultan was the way to achieve it. His zealous proselytizing nearly cost him his life.

The sultan sent for a retinue of theologians to hear Francis’s arguments for Christianity. Al-Kamil certainly did not intend to convert—that would have been political suicide—but he had an intellectual interest in his guest’s thesis. The sultan also needed a cover to enter into any sort of dialogue with such an unabashed proselytizer as Francis, proselytizing being forbidden by Islam. During the several days it took for the theologians to gather, Francis and Illuminato remained in the camp as the sultan’s guests.

The meeting with the theologians, re-created by virtually every artist recording Francis’s life, including Giotto, took place under the sultan’s open-air canopy. To test his sincerity, the sultan’s advisers had prepared by laying a carpet leading to the sultan’s throne with gold crosses woven into it. Were Francis to step on the crosses, their reasoning went, he would be exposed as a sham for dishonoring Christ; if, however, he refused to walk over the carpet to greet al-Kamil, he would be dishonoring the sultan. But Francis neatly circumvented the lose-lose situation.

Entering the canopy and oblivious to the trap, he walked straight across the carpet to greet the sultan. When derided by the assembled theologians, Francis replied that Christians carried Christ’s cross in their hearts, and that the crosses in the carpet he had stepped on were those of the thieves who died that day in Jerusalem with Jesus. Round one for Francis.

Round two was trickier. After listening to Francis continue to expound on Christianity and repeat his desire to save the sultan’s soul through conversion, the sultan’s advisers pronounced him guilty of proselytizing and urged the sultan to have Francis and Illuminato beheaded. But al-Kamil refused, citing the friars’ good intentions.

Mercifully, round three never took place. According to different legends, either Francis or the sultan devised an ordeal by fire to test each other’s faith. It is doubtful that this challenge ever existed, but it, too, is recorded by St. Bonaventure and many artists. According to St. Bonaventure, it was Francis who suggested to the sultan that he, Francis, and the sultan’s priests walk into an “enormous fire”; if he came out unharmed, Francis said, and the Muslims did not, then the sultan would know the power of Jesus Christ and convert to Christianity.

The sultan demurred on his priests’ behalf, having seen one of them “slipping away from his view when he heard Francis’s words.” So Francis made another offer. He would enter the fire alone, and if he came out unharmed, the sultan and his retinue would convert. But again the sultan turned him down. He told Francis that if, in fact, he emerged unscathed, the sultan still would not convert because he “feared a revolt among his people.” A more generous explanation for the sultan’s rejection of Francis’s offer was that he had no desire to risk seeing his new friend burned alive.

And he did consider Francis his friend. The sultan called him Brother Francis and admired him for his bravery and the depth of his religious conviction. Francis, in turn, admired the sultan for his reason and humanity. More important, Francis’s hard stand on Christianity being the only way to salvation softened. “When, during his stay among the Muslims, he experienced how God had graciously accepted them in the otherness of their religion and culture and blessed them with good gifts, he knew that he too had to accept the Muslims in their otherness and approach them with respect for God’s sake,” writes Dr. J. Hoeberichts in
Francis and Islam.

When it came time for Francis to return to the Christian camp, the sultan tried to give him “many precious gifts,” which St. Bonaventure claims Francis “spurned as if they were dirt.” It is doubtful that Francis was so rude, and even questionable whether he did, indeed, turn down all gifts. Among the relics in his basilica in Assisi is a silver-and-ivory horn that he is said to have brought back from this visit. Al-Kamil also presented Francis with a far more precious gift: a pass guaranteeing him safe conduct to all the holy places. It is not known whether Francis ever availed himself of the pass to visit Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but it is known that when Francis and Illuminato left, the sultan had an honor guard escort them to the path leading to the Crusader camp. He also asked Francis to include him in his prayers.

If Francis was a changed man, Cardinal Pelagius was not. The sultan felt increasingly unable to continue his defense of Damietta: He was distracted by an attempted coup d’état in Cairo, famine spreading across Egypt, and a new threat from the advancing Mongol armies of Genghis Khan. An epidemic was also raging through Damietta, and he worried about the residents’ defensive strength were the Crusaders to attack. In October 1219, while Francis lay ill in the camp, the sultan sent two captive knights to Pelagius with an extraordinary offer: He promised to give the Crusaders Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galilee, and Nazareth if they would abandon their quest for Damietta and just leave Egypt.

King John of Jerusalem, who had barely saved the camp from being overrun because of Pelagius, advised the cardinal to accept the offer, as did many other European nobles. But Pelagius refused to negotiate with the infidels. (He was supported by the avaricious Venetians, who wanted to secure Damietta as a trading center.) In short order, Pelagius turned down the sultan’s offer.

There is no indication that Francis was involved in the sultan’s peace overtures, but he surely would have supported the bloodless return of Jerusalem. The carnage and pillaging he had already witnessed in the name of Christ must have shaken him to his core. And, just as the sultan feared, it got worse.

Shortly after Pelagius turned down the peace offer, he sent a scouting party toward Damietta; they reported that the outer wall was unmanned. On November 5, 1219, three months after Francis arrived at the siege of Damietta, the Crusaders swept into the city and took it with barely any opposition. Pelagius may have been vindicated, but Damietta proved to be a scene from hell. The streets were deserted, most of the inhabitants having either fled or died. Bodies were rotting in makeshift graves attended by vultures. The city’s population had shrunk from eighty thousand when the Crusaders arrived to barely three thousand.