The Road to Damietta (26 page)

The battle for Damietta began at dawn. First, the great iron chain, which stretched from bank to bank across the Nile, guarding the city from attack by sea and river, was cut. Floats were brought up and fastened against the massive river wall. Ladders were raised and six crusaders from Pisa scaled the wall and reached the walkway. But there they were attacked by a band of Saracens, who killed them and tossed their severed heads down upon us.

Toward evening, clouds raced in from the sea. Lightning
flashed and a deluge of hot rain swept our ranks. Fighting ceased until the next morning, when, under a cloudless sky and stifling heat, the catapults whirred and stones thudded against the tower. Two men were sent up with jugs of Greek fire—a lethal mixture of oil and secret flammables.

They lost their lives in the conflagration, but at noontime seven Florentines, carrying the commune's red and white banner, reached the highest ramparts and found the loopholes deserted. They were much disturbed, however, by an ominous wave of silence that came up from the city, as if the infidels were about to make an attack upon us from a different place.

It was then that Cardinal Pelagius decided to use his most powerful weapon, the floating fortress. To the sounds of trumpets it was moved by oar and sail to the river gate and secured there by grapple hooks. From its loftiest decks, reaching to the high walkway that encircled the gate, a horde of warriors poured forth.

They met only small resistance. In a short time the massive gate that stood between the sea and the city was breached. Cardinal Pelagius, sensing victory, sent heralds to the thousands who were waiting on the riverbank, all armed for a general assault, among them Raul with a knife he had stolen and I with a club.

Heralds repeated the orders the cardinal had already drawn up—the severe penalties for cowardice and treachery—and
added to the list his instructions for the occupation of the city once the enemy had been defeated.

Certain places in Damietta were parceled out to various knights and noblemen, to churchmen and to churches. For instance, the Church of Rome was given the strongest of the many fortresses, the beautiful Tower of Babel, so high and majestic it was visible from far out to sea. The northern part of the city was promised to Archbishop Gabrieli, the southern part to the king of Jerusalem, Jean de Brienne. Even the wives of the warriors were assigned generous shares of the booty.

Two of the city's twenty gates were broken down by midafternoon and the Christians, Raul and I among them, entered Damietta. There was no one in the winding street we came to except a stray dog, dragging a shriveled pup clamped to one of its teats, that slunk away as we approached.

The street wound into a square strewn with starving people too weak to raise their heads. They followed us with their eyes but said nothing. On the far side of the square, in front of a mosque, naked children lay about, their arms and legs contorted, their shriveled bodies gnawed by dogs.

Beyond the mosque a great field stretched away between rows of palm trees. It was furrowed as if ready to sow with wheat, but as we passed, following the glittering army, I saw that it was not a wheat field but a cemetery. The heavy rain during the night had uncovered the shallow graves and the dead were emerging by the
thousands. The only defender of the city was the awful stench that drifted down upon us.

In the central square and mosque of Damietta, at the far end of the field, Cardinal Pelagius assembled his warriors, congratulated them upon their brilliant victory, and reminded them of the strict rules he had set down for the division of property.

Yet no sooner had he gathered his retinue and set off for the mosque to pray than the soldiers broke rank and began to plunder those parts of the city that had not been assigned to the nobles, the prelates, and the Church.

Raul and I were following after the cardinal and were about to enter the mosque when a rabble of warriors blocked our way. They had rifled the houses around the mosque and were piling up their booty, shouting a ditty at Francis, who was coming toward us:

"
Look what all of us have found!
It was Bernardone who preached defeat!
Miserable clown from that doghole, Assisi!
Let us build a fire and roast the hound!
"

Francis turned and, facing his tormentors, made the sign of the cross, made it slowly, twice over.

He was shaken and breathless when he reached us. I had never seen his eyes dull before. They were deep in their sockets, lost, as though hiding from the awful sights that lay around us.

The rabble had returned to their loot, but I feared that when they were through parceling it out they would again turn their spite upon the man who had tried to deprive them of these riches.

"This is not a safe place," I said. "The mosque is open."

Francis agreed. "Let's go and pray to God and ask His pardon for this unpardonable sin. I had visions of a Christian defeat and what it would mean, but never a vision of a Christian victory. I have looked into the depths of hell. Doors open on empty houses, women and children dead on the doorsteps. The men gone. The women and children dead, without a drop of blood in their bodies."

"I have wondered about the crusades," Raul said. "About this fifth one especially. Because the other four mostly served to feed ambitious prelates, to enrich the already wealthy, to enable the nobles to display their skills, to titillate the bored and absolve the sinners."

"Horror!" Francis said, looking beyond us at the furrowed cemetery. "In the name of Christ, His Son, the Christians have preached love and I have preached love. And this is the answer."

He brushed his eyes. For a moment he seemed blinded and I thought that he would fall on the stones. I took him by the arm and led him, like a child, into the mosque. Raul and I left him there on his knees.

It was cool under the soaring dome, among pillars of black and white marble. It smelled of cedar and sandalwood, a relief
from the sweet, awful smell of putrefaction that engulfed the city.

"This mosque is famous for its library," Raul said. "Next to those in Cairo and Alexandria, it's the most famous in Egypt. It has, I have heard, the original manuscript of Maimonides's medical essays on Hippocrates and Galen. What treasures!"

The mosque was filled with Christians, some praying, most of them gawking at the magnificence and planning how best to dismantle it. There were no infidels around to ask about the library, but we found it behind a door banded with gold and marked in Arabic.

There were three large rooms stacked halfway to the ceilings with scrolls, connected by long corridors, which were also stacked with scrolls. The place had the musty smell of forgotten times. Since there was no one in any of the three rooms to aid us, it took a long time to locate the works of Maimonides.

Raul handed me his essay on Hippocrates. It was a small scroll, not illuminated, written on glossy vellum in the twists and turns and fishhooks of Arabic script.

"I have always wanted to handle this," Raul said. "I have coveted it. We'll take Maimonides, the most brilliant man of his time, back to Assisi with us and make an illuminated copy on the finest of vellum."

Raul held the book like a casket of jewels. He had forgotten where he was. That in the city, starved to submission by hunger
and disease, there might still be one or two living men who were willing to die to protect this treasure.

"We can return the book when the crusade is over," I said, struck by a twinge of conscience.

"By that time there'll be no library here, nothing except a pile of ashes."

"There were fires burning behind the mosque as we came in," I said.

"Christian armies always burn what they cannot carry away. Fires burned in Constantinople and Jerusalem and Beirut. They have burned everywhere armies have set foot, in all of the past crusades. And they'll burn here in the name of Jesus Christ, though this is one of the great libraries of the world. For the crusaders are not heedless. They set their fires with deliberation, knowing that the scrolls collected through the ages are the works of infidels. Not knowing—and worse, not caring—that they hold the most brilliant thoughts of our day."

"There are thousands of scrolls," I said. "What can we take?"

"All of Maimonides." He picked out one of his scrolls and began to paraphrase the Spanish Jew who lived and wrote in Egypt, professing to be a Moslem in order to save his life. "Maimonides asks, did God create the world in time, or is the universe of matter, as the Greeks thought, eternal? Maimonides says here that reason is baffled. We can prove neither the eternity nor the creation of the world. Therefore, let us cling to our fathers' traditional belief in its creation."

Through the dome above us, set with yellow glass, was the reflection of the flaming sky. And I suddenly detected the smell of Greek fire.

Raul went on. "Adam, Maimonides says, is pure spirit. Eve is pure, passive matter, the cause of all evil."

"I have heard enough about Adam and Eve and evil," I said. "And I smell smoke. We could burn up at any moment."

"But evil is the mere negation of good," Raul continued. "God allows man the freedom of will. Man often chooses evil. God permits him to do so, even foresees the choice, but does not try to determine it."

"There's a fire," I said, gathering up a bundle of manuscripts.

The light that filtered through the aperture was now a deeper shade of red. We were in the third room at the far end of the three long corridors. As we left, I heard the faintest of sounds behind us. Rats had been scurrying around in the shelves while we talked, but the sound was more secretive than rats make.

I turned apprehensively to see a tall man with a white beard that came to his waist; he was dressed in a white robe and a white turban. Too thin to be human, he was a collection of bones and hair moving lightly toward us, more wraith than living being. In a shriveled hand and wrapped about his wrist was a heavy gold chain.

I spoke to him in Arabic, greeting him as a keeper of scrolls, saying that those we were taking we would return. He made no
reply. He kept on moving toward us, cautiously, as if he were on a high rope and feared to tumble.

He was speaking rapidly in a thin voice, words that I didn't understand. When he was quite near he bowed three times, and then as he rose from the last bow he raised the knotted chain. The small effort proved too much for him. With a groan he took a step and died at our feet.

Carrying torches, crusaders swept past us. They went to the last of the rooms and set it ablaze, and then moved back toward us along the corridors from room to room with their torches. The leader, a knight in armor, came out of the smoke and snatched one of the scrolls from my arms.

"Look," he said to his companions. "These Arabs never learned to write. Their scrawlings look like drunken worms dipped into ink and set loose to wander around the page."

He turned to me. "What are you doing with these Arab lies?" he asked. "You're not an infidel, are you?"

There was much in his face that I didn't like. "We've been with the cardinal. The scrolls are souvenirs we're taking home to Assisi."

"To infect people with the babblings of the devil."

"As souvenirs."

He dropped the scroll—it was one by Maimonides—and set it afire. "You can take the ashes home as a souvenir," he said.

We ran into the palm-lined square in front of the mosque. It was crowded with crusaders and piled with loot. Fights had broken out. Threats and curses and shouts of joy rose above the crackling of the flames.

Making our way through the swirling smoke, we came upon Francis. He was on his knees, his gaze upon the burning mosque. We spoke to him twice. He didn't look at us or answer. Suddenly he began striking his head against the stones.

The beautiful mosque burned all that day; then, fearing that the thousands of unburied bodies would bring on a plague, Cardinal Pelagius burned them and set fires in the streets to cleanse the polluted air.

Christian losses were only thirty-six dead, a hundred and ten wounded. Few infidels were killed because there were only a few left to kill—no more than three thousand women and children and old men out of the eighty thousand that once had lived in Damietta. The women were not molested, since they were unappealing, but the children were rounded up and sold into slavery.

For two days Pelagius feared that Kamil, who had a small army with him on the river, would send it against us. But we soon heard that the sultan was in deep mourning.

When word of Damietta's fall had reached him in the night, he ordered silently, by gesture, that the messengers of the awful news have their heads removed, which was done at once. After hours of sadness he arose, drew the sword that he carried at his side, and severed his beard and braids and the long tail of his favorite horse. Those of his court did likewise.

The day after the Christian victory, Francis disappeared from camp. Brother Illuminato thought that he might be hiding in one of the mosques that was not ablaze. He was gone for more than a week, and when he returned he had little to say. He kept passing a hand over his haunted eyes, as if to brush away a nightmare from which he had not fully awakened. And when Pelagius asked him to speak at a victory feast, seemingly in an effort to humble him further, Francis refused.

"It is not a victory you celebrate," he told the cardinal. "It is a defeat and a humiliation."

"What would you have me do—sit and wring my hands?" the cardinal asked.

"Yes, sit, but do not wring your hands. Instead, ponder, knowing that the city of Jerusalem is not worth the lives of the thousands who starved to death in Damietta, not worth the death of the least among them, the lamb in the field, the dog in the street."

The meeting between the two men took place in the dining tent during the feast of victory. At Francis's words, the crowd jeered and banged on the table with their knives. Someone shouted, "Heretic!" Buonaguisa dei Buonaguisi, the brave Florentine who had raised the red and white flag of his commune upon Damietta's tallest barbican, mumbled a threat. The cardinal glared, his face drenched with the hatred that had prompted his letter to the pope so long before.