De Courtenay found little difficulty in settling the terms of a ten years’ truce with the formidable Mameluke; for the Sultan had far greater reason to fear his Moslem than his Christian foes.
There was no occasion for the farther sojourn of the English in Palestine; and Edward, having accomplished nothing more than his great-uncle, and leaving a reputation scarcely inferior to Cœur de Lion, departed with his retinue for Europe.
Notwithstanding the peaceful termination of the expedition, this crusade, the last of the chivalrous offspring of Feudalism and Enthusiasm, like its elder brethren, found a premature grave in darkness and gloom.
The son of St. Louis, Philip the Hardy, returning from Tunis, deposited five coffins in the crypts of St. Denis. They contained the remains of his sainted father, Louis IX., of his brother Tristan, of his brother-in-law, Thibaut, descendant of Adela, of his beloved queen and their infant son. Weak and dying himself, he was almost the only heir of his royal family. The ambitious Charles d’Anjou, the rival and the murderer of Corradino, grandson of Frederic and Violante, plundered the stranded vessels of the returning crusaders, and thus enriched his kingdom of Sicily, by the great shipwreck of the empire and the church.
Death, too, had been busy in the palace of Windsor. The two beautiful children of Edward and Eleanora had been laid in the tomb, and their grandfather, Henry III., with their aunt Margaret, Queen of Scotland, soon followed them to the great charnel-house of England, Westminster Abbey. The melancholy tidings of these repeated bereavements met the royal pair in Sicily, and cast a pall over the land to which they had anticipated a triumphant return.
The great problem of the conquest of Palestine was not yet solved to the mind of Edward, but the progress of the age trammelled his powers and limited his ambitious aspirations. The orders of knighthood, exhausted by the repeated drafts made upon their forces, by these eastern expeditions, began to decline in the scale of power; and the lower ranks, finding new avenues to wealth in productive labor and commerce, began the great battle with military organizations and hereditary aristocracy, which has been going on with increased advantage to the working classes from the middle ages to the present glorious era.
Gregory X. made some feeble attempts to rouse Europe once more for the redemption of the Holy Sepulchre, but his earnest appeal received no response from the sovereigns of Christendom, and within three years the last strain of the great anthem “Hierosolyma liberati” that began with the swelling tones of mustering warriors and sounded on through two centuries in the soul-stirring harmonies of jubilante peans, alternating with the mournful measures of funeral dirges, ended in a last sad refrain over the diminished remnants of the military orders, who, in a vain defence of Acre, dyed the sands of Syria with their blood.
From Sicily the royal crusaders proceeded to Rome, where they were cordially welcomed and splendidly entertained by Pope Gregory X., who, having long filled the office of confessor in their household, had been recalled from the Holy Land, to occupy the chair of St. Peter.
In the train of the King of England was his cousin, Henry, son of Richard of Cornwall, a gallant young noble who had led the detachment that opposed the band of Leicester, and, by his warlike prowess, greatly contributed to the successful issue of the sanguinary conflict at Evesham. His zeal and loyalty during this doubtful period, commended him to the confidence of Edward, and he had still more endeared himself to his royal patron, by his ardor in battling against the Infidels, and his brilliant achievements at the siege of Nazareth.
The young Henry was the affianced husband of the Princess Mary, in consequence of which, Eleanora had admitted him to an intimacy, and evinced for him an affection almost equal to that enjoyed by the royal children themselves.