In the month of June, A. D. 1249, the galleys of the Templars left Acre with all their disposable forces on board, under the command of the Grand Master William de Sonnac, and joined the great French expedition of Louis king of France which had been directed against the infidels in Egypt. After the capture of Damietta, the following letter was forwarded by Brother William de Sonnac to the Master of the Temple at London:—“Brother William de Sonnac, by the grace of God Master of the poor chivalry of the Temple, to his beloved brother in Christ, Robert de Sanford, Preceptor of England, salvation through the Lord. We hasten to unfold to you by these presents, agreeable and happy intelligence.... (He details the landing of the French, the defeat of the infidels with the loss of one christian soldier, and the subsequent capture of the city.) Damietta, therefore, has been taken, not by our deserts, nor by the might of our armed bands, but through the divine power and assistance. Moreover, be it known to you that king Louis, with God’s favour, proposes to march upon Alexandria or Cairo for the purpose of delivering our brethren there detained in captivity, and of reducing, with God’s help, the whole land to the christian worship. Farewell.”[125]
The Lord de Joinville, the friend of king Louis, and one of the bravest of the French captains, gives a lively and most interesting account of the campaign, and of the exploits of the Templars. During the march towards Cairo, they led the van of the christian army, and on one occasion, when the king of France had given strict orders that no attack should be made upon the infidels, and that an engagement should be avoided, a body of Turkish cavalry advanced against them. “One of these Turks,” says Joinville, “gave a Knight Templar in the first rank so heavy a blow with his battle-axe, that it felled him under the feet of the Lord Reginald de Vichier’s horse, who was Marshal of the Temple; the Marshal, seeing his man fall, cried out to his brethren, ‘At them in the name of God, for I cannot longer stand this.’ He instantly stuck spurs into his horse, followed by all his brethren, and as their horses were fresh, not a Saracen escaped.” After marching for some days, the Templars arrived on the banks of the Tanitic branch of the Nile, (the ancient Pelusiac mouth of the river,) and found the sultan encamped with his entire force on the opposite side, to prevent and oppose their passage. King Louis attempted to construct a bridge to enable him to cross the stream, and long and earnestly did the Templars labour at the task, “but,” says Joinville, “as fast as we advanced our bridge the Saracens destroyed it; they dug, on their side of the river, wide and deep holes in the earth, and as the water recoiled from our bridge it filled these holes with water, and tore away the bank, so that what we had been employed on for three weeks or a month they ruined in one or two days.” To protect the soldiers employed upon the construction of the bridge large wooden towers were erected, and chas chateils or covered galleries, and the infidels exerted all their energies to destroy them with the terrible Greek fire. “At night,” says Joinville, “they brought forward an engine called by them La Perriere, a dreadful engine to do mischief, and they flung from it such quantities of Greek fire that it was the most horrible sight ever witnessed.... This Greek fire was like a large tun, and its tail was of the length of a long spear; the noise which it made was like to thunder, and it seemed a great dragon of fire flying through the air, giving so great a light with its flame, that we saw in our camp as clearly as in broad day.”
The military engines and machines were all burnt, and the Christians were about to yield themselves up to despair, when a Bedouin Arab offered, for a bribe of five hundred golden bezants, to show a safe ford. At dawn of day, on Shrove Tuesday, the French knights mounted on horseback to make trial of the ford of the Bedouin. “Before we set out,” says Joinville, “the king had ordered that the Templars should form the van, and the Count d’Artois, his brother, should command the second division after the Templars; but the moment the Count d’Artois had passed the ford, he and all his people fell on the Saracens, and putting them to flight, galloped after them. The Templars sent to call the Count d’Artois back, and to tell him that it was his duty to march behind and not before them; but it happened that the Count d’Artois could not make any answer by reason of my Lord Foucquault du Melle, who held the bridle of his horse, and my Lord Foucquault, who was a right good knight, being deaf, heard nothing the Templars were saying to the Count d’Artois, but kept bawling out, ‘Forward! forward!’ (‘Or a eulz! or a eulz!’) When the Templars perceived this, they thought they should be dishonoured if they allowed the Count d’Artois thus to take the lead; so they spurred their horses more and more, and faster and faster, and chased the Turks, who fled before them, through the town of Mansourah, as far as the plains towards Babylon.”[126]
The Arabian writers, in their account of the entry of the Templars into Mansourah, tell us that 2,000 horsemen galloped into the place sword in hand and surprised Fakho’ddin Othman, commonly called Ibn Saif, the Moslem general, and one of the principal Mamlook emirs, in the bath, and barbarously cut him to pieces as he was painting his beard before a glass.[127] But the impetuous courage of the Count d’Artois and the Templars had led them far away from the support of the main body of the army, and their horsemen became embarrassed in the narrow streets of Mansourah, where there was no room to charge or manœuvre with effect. The infidels rallied; they returned to the attack with vast reinforcements; the inhabitants of the town mounted to their house-tops, and discharged stones and brickbats upon the heads of the christian knights, and the Templars were defeated and driven out of the city with dreadful carnage. “The Count d’Artois and the Earl of Leicester were there slain, and as many as three hundred other knights. The Templars lost, as their chief informed me, full fourteen score men-at-arms, and all their horsemen.” The Grand Master of the Temple also lost an eye, and cut his way through the infidels to the main body of the christian army, accompanied only by two Knights Templars. There he again mixed in the affray, took the command of a vanguard, and is to be found fighting by the side of the lord de Joinville at sunset.
At the close of the long and bloody day, the Christians regained their camp in safety. King Louis, Joinville, and the Grand Master of the Temple had been fighting side by side during a great part of the afternoon; Joinville had his horse killed under him, and performed prodigies of valour. He was severely wounded, and on retiring to his quarters he found that a magnificent tent had been sent to him by the Grand Master of the Temple, as a testimony of regard and esteem. On the first Friday in Lent, Bendocdar, the great Mamlook general and lieutenant of the sultan of Egypt, advanced at the head of a vast army of horse and foot to attack the Crusaders in their intrenchments. King Louis drew out his army in battle array, and posted them in eight divisions in front of the camp. The Templars, under their venerable Grand Master, formed the fourth division, and the fate of their gallant chieftain is thus described by the lord de Joinville. “The next battalion was under the command of Brother William de Sonnac, Master of the Temple, who had with him the small remnant of the brethren of his order who survived the battle of Shrove Tuesday. The Master of the Temple made of the engines which he had taken from the Saracens a sort of rampart in his front, but when the Saracens marched up to the assault, they threw Greek fire upon it, and as the Templars had piled up many planks of fir-wood amongst these engines, they caught fire immediately; and the Saracens, perceiving that the brethren of the Temple were few in number, dashed through the burning timbers, and vigorously attacked them. In the preceding battle of Shrove Tuesday, Brother William, the Master of the Temple, lost one of his eyes, and in this battle the said lord lost his other eye, and was slain. God have mercy on his soul! And know that immediately behind the place where the battalion of the Templars stood, there was a good acre of ground, so covered with darts, arrows, and missiles, that you could not see the earth beneath them, such showers of these had been discharged against the Templars by the Saracens.”[128]
The command over the surviving brethren of the order now devolved upon the Marshal, Brother Reginald de Vichier, who, collecting together the small surviving remnant of the Templars, retreated to the camp to participate in the subsequent horrors and misfortunes of the campaign. “At the end of eight or ten days,” says Joinville, “the bodies of those who had been slain and thrown into the Nile rose to the top of the water. These bodies floated down the river until they came to the small bridge that communicated with each part of our army; the arch was so low that it prevented the bodies from passing underneath, and the river was consequently covered with them from bank to bank, so that the water could not be seen.... God knows how great was the stench. I never heard that any who were exposed to this infectious smell ever recovered their health. The whole army was seized with a shocking disorder, which dried up the flesh on our legs to the bone; and our skins became tanned as the ground, or like an old boot that has long lain behind a coffer.... The barbers were forced to cut away very large pieces of flesh from the gums to enable their patients to eat; it was pitiful to hear the cries and groans, they were like the cries of women in labour.”
The army attempted to retreat when retreat was almost impossible; the soldiers became dispersed and scattered; thousands died by the way-side, and thousands fell alive into the hands of the enemy, among which last were the king and Joinville. They were both attacked by the disease, and king Louis laid himself down to die in an Arab hut, where he was found and kindly treated by the Saracens. Reginald de Vichier, the Marshal of the Templars, and a few of his brethren, reached Damietta in safety, and took measures for the defence of the place. All those of the prisoners who were unable to redeem their lives by services as slaves to the conquerors, or by ransom, were inhumanly massacred, and a grim circle of christian heads decorated the walls and battlements of Cairo. The Egyptians required as the price of the liberty of the French monarch the surrender of all the fortresses of the order of the Temple in Palestine; but the king told them that the Templars were not subject to his command, nor had he any means of compelling them to give effect to such an agreement. Louis and his friend Joinville at last obtained their deliverance from captivity by the surrender of Damietta, and by the payment of two hundred thousand pieces of gold; and the liberation of the king’s brother, and of the other captive nobles and knights was to be purchased by the payment of a similar sum. The king immediately went on board the French fleet which was at anchor before Damietta, and exerted himself to raise the residue of the ransom; and all Saturday and Sunday were employed in collecting it together.
“On Sunday evening,” says Joinville, “the king’s servants, who were occupied in counting out the money, sent to say that there was a deficiency of thirty thousand livres. I observed to the king that we had better ask the commander and Marshal of the Temple, since the Master was dead, to give us the thirty thousand livres. Brother Stephen d’Otricourt, knight commander of the Temple, hearing the advice I gave to the king, said to me, ‘Lord de Joinville, the counsel you give the king is not right nor reasonable, for you know that we receive every farthing of our money on our oaths;’ and Brother Reginald de Vichier, who was Marshal of the Temple, said to the king, ‘Sire, it is as our commander has said, we cannot dispose of any of the money intrusted to us but for the means intended, in accordance with the rules of our institution, without being perjured. Know that the seneschal hath ill advised you to take our money by force, but in this you will act as you please; should you, however, do so, we will make ourselves amends out of the money you have in Acre.’ I then told the king that if he wished I would go and get the money, and he commanded me so to do. I instantly went on board one of the galleys of the Templars, and demanded of the treasurer the keys of a coffer which I saw before me. They refused, and I was about to break it open with a wedge in the king’s name, when the Marshal, observing I was in earnest, ordered the keys to be given to me. I opened the coffer, took out the sum wanting, and carried it to the king, who was much rejoiced at my return.” King Louis returned with the Templars to Palestine; and was received with great distinction by the order at Acre, where he remained four years!
In the year 1251 a general chapter of Knights Templars being assembled in the Pilgrim’s Castle, the Marshal, Brother Reginald de Vichier, who had commanded with great skill and prudence in Egypt after the death of Brother William de Sonnac, was chosen to fill the vacant dignity of Grand Master. Henry III., king of England, had assumed the cross shortly after intelligence had been conveyed to England of the horrors and atrocities committed by the Carizmians in the Holy City. Year after year, he had promised to fulfil his vow, and the pope issued numerous bulls, kindly providing for the tranquillity and security of his dominions during his absence, and ordered prayers to be offered up to God for the success of his arms, in all the churches of Christendom. King Henry assembled a parliament to obtain the necessary supplies, and fixed the 24th day of June, A. D. 1255, as the period of his departure. His knights and barons, however, refused him the necessary funds, and the needy monarch addressed the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital in the following very curious letter. “As you are said to possess a well-equipped fleet, we beseech you to set apart for our own use some of your strongest vessels, and have them furnished and equipped with provisions, sailors, and all things requisite for a twelvemonth’s voyage, so that we may be able, ere the period for our own departure arrives, to freight them with the soldiers, arms, horses, and munitions of war that we intend to send to the succour of the Holy Land. You will also be pleased to provide secure habitations and suitable accommodation for the said soldiers and their equipage, until the period of our own arrival. You will then be good enough to send back the same vessels to England to conduct ourselves and suite to Palestine; and by your prompt obedience to these our commands, we shall judge of your devotion to the interests of the Holy Land, and of your attachment to our person.”[129]
King Louis, in the mean time, assisted the Templars in repairing the fortifications of Jaffa and Cæsarea. The lord de Joinville who was with him tells us that the scheik of the assassins, who still continued to pay tribute to the Templars, sent ambassadors to the king to obtain a remission of the tribute. He gave them an audience, and declared that he would consider of their proposal. “When they came again before the king,” says Joinville, “it was about vespers, and they found the Master of the Temple on one side of him, and the Master of the Hospital on the other. The ambassadors refused to repeat what they had said in the morning, but the Masters of the Temple and the Hospital commanded them so to do. Then the Masters of the Temple and Hospital told them that their lord had very foolishly and impudently sent such a message to the king of France, and had they not been invested with the character of ambassadors, they would have thrown them into the filthy sea of Acre, and have drowned them in despite of their master. ‘And we command you,’ continued the Masters, ‘to return to your lord, and to come back within fifteen days with such letters from your prince, that the king shall be contented with him and with you.’” The ambassadors accordingly did as they were bid, and brought back from their scheik a shirt, the symbol of friendship, and a great variety of rich presents, “crystal elephants, pieces of amber, with borders of pure gold,” &c., &c. “You must know that when the ambassadors opened the case containing all these fine things, the whole apartment was instantly embalmed with the odour of their sweet perfumes.”