The age of the crusades

by James M. Ludlow

Instead of taking advantage of this providence, the Christians seemed to emulate the divisions of their enemies. Many grew weary of the task they had vowed to Heaven, and returned to Europe. The priests pronounced a curse upon the deserters. This malediction was regarded as inspired when it was learned that six thousand of the crusaders from Brittany had been wrecked off the coast of Italy, and that the returning Frieslanders reached their homes only to witness the wrath of the North Sea, which broke the Holland dikes, submerged their richest provinces and cities, and drowned one hundred thousand of the inhabitants.

But new warriors were excited to redeem the opportunity. France and England sent much of their best blood and many of their most famous names. Among the multitude of celebrities was one who was destined to bring the entire crusade to a fatal ending. Cardinal Pelagius was delegated as papal legate. He was a man of arrogance, and asserted his right to supersede even John of Brienne, the King of Jerusalem, in the military command. This position was refused him by the soldiery. He at length accomplished his ambition by threatening all who opposed him with excommunication.

The coming of these auxiliaries spurred the Christians to take advantage of contentions among the Moslems and make a forward movement. They crossed from the west bank of the Nile and invested Damietta. The menace reunited the Infidels. Battles were of daily occurrence, in which whole battalions, now of Christians, now of Moslems, were driven into the Nile, and perished.

One beautiful episode redeemed these hellish scenes. St. Francis of Assisi visited the camps; he went among his brethren with consolations for the sick and wounded, his presence redolent with heavenly charity. No labors could weary this man, who already seemed divested largely of his physical nature, and to be sustained only by the power of his inward spirit. His zeal for God led him to visit even the camp of the Moslems. He preached his doctrines before Malek-Kamel, the Sultan of Cairo; he alternately threatened the sultan’s infidelity with the pains of hell, and sought to win his better faith by promises of heaven. Francis proposed to test the truth of either religion by passing with the holiest Moslems through an ordeal of fire. This being declined, he offered himself to the flame, provided that the sultan’s conversion should follow the refusal of fire to burn the representative of the faith of Christ. With courteous words the test was declined. Moslems reverenced insane persons as in some way under a divine influence; Malek-Kamel treated his uninvited guest as one of this sort. The Moslem doctors of the law commanded Malek-Kamel to take off the head of the intruder, but the warrior was either too much amused with the simplicity, or too much amazed at the sincerity, of his visitor to harm him, and dismissed him with presents, which, however, Francis’ vow of poverty would not allow him to accept.

Whether persuaded by the holy eloquence of the saint, or by the rumor that Frederick of Germany was approaching with fresh armies, the sultan proposed peace. He offered the flattering condition of giving up Jerusalem to the Christians. The warriors would have assented thus to secure as the reward of their valor that which had been the object of the entire crusade; but Cardinal Pelagius forbade, in the name of the Holy Father, the cessation of arms at any less price than the entire subjugation of the Moslem power.

Damietta was therefore more closely invested; its garrison was reduced to starvation. To prevent possible defection among his miserable soldiers, the commander of Damietta walled up the gates of the city. The Christians made an assault in full force; the rams battered the trembling towers; ladders swarmed with assailants; no one opposed them. Sweeping over the ramparts with naked swords, they found the streets and houses filled with the dead. Of seventy thousand scarcely three thousand of the inhabitants had remained alive. The air was fraught with poisonous stench from the decaying corpses; as the chronicler says, “the dead had killed the living.” The crusaders could abide only long enough to gather the booty, and left the city to be cleansed by carrion-birds and the air of heaven.

This temporary success of his policy inflamed the conceit of Cardinal Pelagius. According to his own people, the “King of kings and Lord of lords” had given him the city; “under the guidance of Christ” the soldiers had scaled the walls. The victors took as their reward the rich plunder of the place, and gratefully “baptized all the children who were found alive in the city, thereby giving to God the first-fruit of souls.”

The Moslems, afflicted by these reverses, enlarged their conditions of peace to the yielding up, not only of Jerusalem, but all the Holy Land. The cardinal refused even these terms, and proposed to march to the capture of Cairo, the capital of Egypt. In vain did the military leaders protest against that which they esteemed impracticable in itself, and which, in the event of its success, would leave on their hands a land which they could not hope to defend against the myriads who were swarming from all parts of the Moslem world. The cardinal accused the warriors of timidity and irreligion. This was too much for John of Brienne, who would have dared to sheathe his good sword in the bowels of Lucifer himself. Orders for the ascent of the Nile were given. At the junction of its two branches, the southern extreme of the Delta, the Moslems made their fortified camp, and built what has since been known as the city of Mansourah. The enemy approached; once more the sultan offered peace, including now the gift of the Delta, together with the previously offered conditions.

The refusal of this exhausted the patience, not only of the sultan, but seemingly of Heaven also. With the rising of the Nile the Moslems opened the sluices, flooded all the canals of Lower Egypt, and inundated the Christians’ camp. Simultaneously the Moslem ships made their way up through the canals and destroyed the vessels of their foes. The Infidels occupied every rising knoll; “while,” says a letter from the camp, “we were thus caught in the midst of the waters like fish in a net.” In vain did the Christians endeavor to force a battle. Shrewdly retreating from the arbitrament of the sword, the Moslems left the invaders to the destruction which they proclaimed Allah had prepared for His insolent adversaries.

Cardinal Pelagius now begged for the peace he had despised; nor did he stop with the old conditions. He would yield all he had taken or claimed, if only he might be permitted to lead the armies of Europe safely into the walls of distant Acre. This capitulation was reluctantly accepted by the Sultan of Cairo. The haughty cardinal, the brave King John of Brienne, the Duke of Bavaria, and many of the nobles meditated their disgrace as hostages in the hostile camp, while the Christian soldiers were still waiting the will of their conqueror in the marshes. King John of Brienne one day sat down at the feet of the sultan and burst into tears. The Moslem respected his courage and was grieved at the distress which seemingly had shaken it. “Why do you weep?” he asked. “To see my brave people perishing with hunger amid the waters.” The sultan immediately provisioned the Christian camp, and sent his own son to conduct the host in safety out of the land they had come to conquer (autumn, 1221).