Holy Warriors (46 page)
Authors: Jonathan Phillips
You came to Egypt, thirsting to conquer it and reckoning the drumbeat but a gust of wind;
And so Time has carried you to a disaster which has made narrow what was broad in your eyes;
While through your fine strategy you have brought all your men to the inside of the tomb;
Of fifty thousand not one is to be seen who is not dead or a wounded prisoner.
God grant you [more] triumphs of this ilk, that Jesus may perhaps find relief from you.
If the pope was satisfied with this, perchance fraud has emanated from the counsellor!
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Turanshah and Louis agreed on a ransom of 800,000 Saracen bezants and the release of all Christian prisoners, including the wounded, as well as the surrender of Damietta. Before the terms of the treaty could be implemented, however, the young sultan was murdered. It seems that he made the outsider’s classic mistake—on his arrival in Egypt he had replaced many of his father’s trusted advisers with his own men from the Jazira. This removed
any sense of continuity and created a deep well of resentment among a powerful local hierarchy. It was rumored he planned to eradicate the Bahri Mamluks, the stalwarts of Ayyub’s regime. He was also criticized for being a drunkard; one writer claimed that when inebriated he would gather candles and slash at their heads with his sword, shouting “thus I shall do with the Bahri.” Unsurprisingly, the Bahri decided to preempt any such action and kill the sultan. After dinner on April 30, 1250, one of them—possibly Baibars himself—attacked him; the blow was parried but the blade wounded his hand. “Having wounded the snake there is no alternative to killing it,” one of the Bahri shouted. Turanshah fled to his compound and its wooden tower. The Bahri set fire to it; the young man staggered to the door, desperate and begging for his life; he implored them, in God’s name, to stop, but to no avail. He managed to flee to the river where, up to his neck in the water, he was finally dispatched; some writers claim that Baibars dealt him the fatal blow, others that it was Aqtay, the leader of the Bahri. His body was thrown into a pit on the riverbank, but after three days the water uncovered him and the corpse was taken over to the other bank where it was buried more securely; a truly ignominious end to the glorious Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt.
Ayyub’s widow, Shajar al-Durr, became the head of government and coins were struck in her name. For a woman to rule a Muslim land was incredibly rare; she needed the close support of Aybek, another former slave who had once been Ayyub’s chief food-taster (testing for poison), but who was now head of the army. Her position was unacceptable to the caliph of Baghdad (among others) and she soon married Aybek and formally handed over power to him.
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For the crusaders, of course, such instability was a cause of great concern; their treaty was with Turanshah and it needed to be reconfirmed by the new regime. For a time things looked very bad indeed. Louis was threatened with the barnacle, a fiendish torture device that crushed a man’s bones between two wooden levers. The king was, on the surface at least, unperturbed; he said that he was a prisoner and the Mamluks could do with him as they wished.
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Here Joinville shows a serenity about Louis’s bearing, almost as if he was a martyr-in-waiting. This was probably reflected in the later canonization process, an issue toward which Joinville’s writings contributed. Some, including Joinville himself, felt the king should have been rewarded with the elevated status of martyr-saint because he died during a
crusade, but the fact that he perished from dysentery in 1270, rather than in battle, meant that he was not honored in this way.
Fortunately for the crusaders the Mamluks reconfirmed the treaty and the crusaders handed over Damietta, along with the first half of the ransom. Queen Margaret, who had traveled to the East with Louis and had become pregnant, maintained command of the city. The crusade collapsed just after the birth of her son, known as John-Tristram, and such was her fear that the Muslims might arrive during her confinement that she had instructed a faithful old household knight to kill her if the city fell. “Rest assured that I will do it readily, for I had already decided that I would kill you before they took us,” was his reassuring response.
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By mid-May 1250 the king and most of his nobles were back at Acre. They had to decide whether to return home or to remain in the Levant. At this point, we see Joinville at his most self-important and perhaps introducing more poetic license than usual into his story. He claimed that the entire nobility favored leaving for France; they were ill, exhausted, and penniless, yet only Joinville himself spoke up in favor of staying and it was this personal appeal, his lone voice, that carried the day with the king.
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Regardless of the accuracy of Joinville’s report, the basic principles he expressed are echoed in a contemporary letter written by the king himself, an altogether more reliable source. This was a difficult piece for Louis to write—he had to explain the failure of the expedition and the losses he had suffered. He admitted to “the folly” of the attack on Mansourah, but he also had to justify remaining away from France, and to call for reinforcements. The chief reason for staying in the East was to ensure the return of the Christian prisoners, probably around twelve thousand in number. Louis felt deeply culpable for the fact that many had already been killed by the Muslims, or else forced to convert to Islam. He wrote that the emirs were “openly violating the truce” and he also realized that the condition of the kingdom of Jerusalem had been drastically weakened by events on the Nile:
our departure would simply leave it [the kingdom] exposed to the Saracens, particularly since at this time it was, alas, in such a weakened and wretched condition. In the wake of our departure the Christian prisoners . . . could be regarded as dead men, since all hope of release would have been removed. . . . But if we stayed, some good, it was hoped, may come of our presence . . . although many urged us not to remain overseas,
nevertheless in our pity on the miseries and adversities of the Holy Land, to whose aid we had come, and in our sympathy for the incarceration and sufferings of our prisoners, we have chosen to postpone our passage . . . rather than leave the Business of Christ in a state of such utter hopelessness.
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The tone of Louis’s appeal for help was striking, a truly incendiary piece of polemic against the Muslims (the “children of perdition” as he called them). A reading of even the most desperate of papal appeals yields nothing that transmits such real anger: “For in addition to the blasphemies they uttered in the sight of Christian people, that most wicked race has offended the Creator by whipping the Cross, spitting upon it, and finally trampling it vilely underfoot, to the dishonour of the Christian faith. Come then, knights of Christ . . . make ready and prove yourselves mighty men in avenging these injuries and insults.”
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The venom of his language is extreme; clearly the loss of so many Christian soldiers had struck the king hard.
While his surviving brothers and most of the nobility sailed home, Louis settled down to his work in the Levant; Joinville too had resolved to stay. The king would remain in the East for four years; in late 1252, his mother Blanche, died, but he still refused to leave. Louis continued to use the money sent by the French Church to finance a series of major building projects in the Holy Land. He spent over 100,000 livres on strengthening the castles at Caesarea, Jaffa, and Sidon, and some of this work remains visible today. At Acre he fortified the suburb of Montmusard to indicate that Christian presence there had a future. Louis also set up an institution that had been needed for many decades: a permanent regiment of French soldiers, financed by the crown and paid to help defend the Holy Land.
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Finally, in April 1254 he set sail from Acre.
Overall his crusade was, of course, a failure. Given the superlative level of planning and resources, the feeble condition of the Muslim world, and the scarcely believable victory at Damietta, it should have achieved so much more. The combination of Robert of Artois’s foolishness, coupled with clever Muslim resistance, unpicked the king’s best efforts. For Louis this represented God’s judgment on the sins of the Christians and himself. To rectify this apparent moral failing he issued legislation that banned swearing, he renounced luxurious clothes and wore only a gray woolen cloak.
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He discarded his feather bed in favor of a thin cotton mattress and a board, and simplified his diet; he even considered abdicating and becoming a monk. Queen Margaret had no wish to become a nun and managed to convince him that their son was too young to succeed; the king eventually concurred. Most pronounced of all was an obsessive performance of penitential acts. Louis was frequently flagellated (his flagellum is on display in Notre Dame, Paris) and he repeatedly touched the diseased and the dirty, beginning with burying the rotting corpses of crusaders in the Levant with his own hands.
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In short, a profound moral crisis had overcome the king: he felt that “the whole of Christendom has been covered in confusion through me.”
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It would take another crusade to begin to assuage such feelings.
Over the next few decades—the final period of Frankish rule in the Levant—the settlers faced two particular threats: the Mongols and the Mamluks. The first of these dangers remained largely theoretical, although the Mongol presence undoubtedly influenced Christian policies. The Mamluks, however, emerged as an unrelentingly powerful military force that eventually pulverized the Franks into submission and defeat. The years immediately after the murder of Turanshah were, inevitably, a period of turbulence. Aybek and Shajar al-Durr remained in the center of affairs but when, in April 1257, rumors reached the sultana that her husband was looking for a new chief wife, she had him slain by the bathhouse slaves. She appealed to the Bahri for support but they saw a chance to assert their own position and, in turn, had Shajar murdered. Later writers give graphic accounts of her demise: under threat, Shajar had fled to the citadel of Cairo and immured herself in the Red Tower where she spent several days grinding her jewels into dust so no other woman could wear them. Finally, on the verge of starving to death, she was forced to leave the tower but Aybek’s concubines pounced on her, beat her to death with their clogs, and left her body to be eaten by the dogs. Further political turmoil followed, but within a couple of years a Mamluk named Qutuz became the dominant man in the land and it was he who confronted the Mongols as they continued to push toward the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
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By the late 1250s these nomadic tribesmen had constructed the largest land empire the world has ever known, stretching from China to the borders of Hungary. With a military operation of unprecedented efficiency they had ripped into the heartlands of Islam. Their rationale was simple: they had a divine mandate to rule the world; if people surrendered, they were spared, they paid tribute and were incorporated into the Mongol dominions. If someone resisted then, as an opponent of the word of God, they deserved annihilation. In February 1258 the Mongol armies entered Baghdad and in a sack of the most gargantuan proportions they obliterated centuries of culture and learning; the Mongols claimed 200,000 died, some Persian historians put the figure at 800,000. The caliph was trampled to death in a carpet, a fate that was regarded as an honorable end because it avoided the shedding of noble blood. This marked the end of five centuries of the caliphate in Baghdad—a severe blow to the Sunni community, although, as we will see, it presented an opportunity for others.
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In the face of the Mongol advance, the Seljuk Turks submitted, as did the Christian kingdoms of Armenia and Georgia. A Mongol army of 120,000 crossed the Euphrates in September 1259 and moved toward the Levant. Prince Bohemond VI of Antioch and Tripoli offered terms, the first of the crusader states to become a client of the invaders. The pope excommunicated him but, from Bohemond’s perspective, he had no option. In January 1260, Aleppo fell to the Mongols and was heavily damaged; two months later, the horsemen took Damascus. As a point of comparison, neither of these cities—the most powerful in Muslim Syria—had ever been taken by the Franks in over 150 years.
The cumulative effect of their victories at Baghdad, Aleppo, and Damascus meant that the Mongols appeared unstoppable. News of their brutal progress provoked panic in the kingdom of Jerusalem. Desperate appeals for help were dispatched to the West; the bishop of Bethlehem wrote that terrified Muslims had rushed to the Frankish coastal cities and surrendered to the Christians “like birds fleeing a hawk.”
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Yet the expected onslaught did not come. In August 1259 the Great Khan Mongke died and Mongol custom demanded the ruling clan return to their homelands in central Asia to choose a new leader. Thus, when Hulegu, Mongke’s brother, learned of these events in March 1260 he departed eastward, accompanied by large numbers of troops, intent upon the preservation of his own position in Persia and the Caucasus during the inevitable succession conflict. Another reason
why he took so many men away with him may have been a lack of pasturage—the colossal size of his army had simply stripped the lands bare of grass and the Levant could not, unlike central Asia, sustain such a force. His general, Kitbuqa, was left with twenty thousand men to hold on to the Mongol conquests.
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For this reason alone, the Mamluks may have felt they had a chance of victory. Unlike many other peoples or nations, Qutuz decided to respond aggressively to the Mongol threat. Given the latter’s track record this may have seemed foolish, but Qutuz wanted to hold on to power and to justify his seizure of the throne. There was also a religious dimension to the conflict—a wish to defend the remaining independent Muslim lands in the Near East. In the summer of 1260 a Mongol embassy reached Cairo. It mocked the Mamluks for their origins as slaves and demanded immediate submission; the text shows the nomads’ chilling self-belief, based upon their divine mandate:
