'I will never make a knight of an infidel,' said Louis. 'Let the Emir become a Christian, then I will take him back to France with me, and enrich him, and make him a knight.' At this the Mameluke withdrew in silence.
It has been said that the Mussulman conspirators, being puzzled in the choice of a new sovereign, and filled with admiration for the piety and resolution of Louis, which were equally indomitable, entertained the notion of making him their sultan. 'Do you think that I ought to have accepted the kingdom of Babylon [Footnote 27] if it had been offered me?' he once asked of Joinville. '"I answered," says Joinville, "that if he had he would have done a very foolish thing, seeing that they had just murdered their lord." Nevertheless, he said that he would not have refused it. And you must know that the project only failed because they said that the King was the haughtiest Christian ever known.'
[Footnote 27: See page 66, line 6: "Babylon, that suburb of Cairo now known as 'Old Cairo,'…">[
After three days of excitement and uncertainty in both camps, during which the Christians were at one moment threatened with a general massacre and the next treated with the greatest consideration, the negotiations were resumed and concluded, the terms being almost the same as those agreed upon by the King and the late Sultan. On the 5th of May, Louis with his nobles and the Mameluke chiefs had arrived before the walls of Damietta. There fresh dangers awaited them: some of the Saracens wanted to take possession of the town by force, and made an unsuccessful attempt to scale the walls; the Crusaders whom Louis had left to defend it, and at their head Queen Margaret, who had only just given birth to a son, hesitated to give the town back into the hands of the infidels. At every new difficulty and delay the Emir Faress-Eddin-Octaï, he whom Louis had refused to make a knight, said to the messengers who passed between, them, 'Tell the King from me that, so long as he is in our hands, he must not show in any way that this annoys him, or he is a dead man.' At length all the difficulties were removed, and the conditions agreed upon for the payment of the ransom and setting the Christian prisoners at liberty were fulfilled.
[Footnote 28 (unknown location on this page): Guillaume de Chartres; Bouquet's 'Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France,' vol. xx. p. 31; Joinville, chap. lxxii.]
On the morning of the 7th of May, 1250, Geoffrey of Sargines restored the keys to the Emirs; the Saracens rushed into the town in great disorder, and committed all kinds of acts of violence.
While the King was waiting on board his ship for the completion of the payment of the ransom for his brother the Count of Poitiers, a Saracen came up to him very well clad and a goodly man as to his person, and presented him with some jars of curdled milk and flowers of divers kinds, telling him that they were from the children of the Nazar [Footnote 29] of the former Sultan of Babylon. He spoke in French, and the King asked him where he had learnt it; upon which he answered that he had formerly been a Christian. Then the King said, 'Depart from me, for I will not speak another word to you.'
At length Louis saw a galley approaching in which he recognised his brother: 'Light up! light up!' he shouted to his sailors. It was the signal agreed upon for their departure, and leaving the shores of Egypt the whole Christian fleet set sail for the Holy Land.