The age of the crusades

by James M. Ludlow

Louis put in at Acre, bringing to the meagre force there but a few more war-wasted men, wider demands upon its diminished resources, and a pestilent disease, which slew scores daily. In vain did France call for her king to return; pride or piety led him to refuse to desert his unhappy followers. There were still twelve thousand Frenchmen in the prisons of Egypt or scattered as slaves over the lands bordering the Nile. These he must endeavor to rescue. The Hospitallers, Templars, and Teutonic Knights, together with the nobles of Palestine, entreated his presence with them. For several weeks there were almost daily councils, some, among them the king’s two surviving brothers, declaring that France, threatened by England, needed the king, while his presence almost without following in Palestine could be no help to the Christian cause, if it did not excite the everywhere victorious Moslems to greater rapacity. Others among them, like Prince Joinville, advocated remaining. Louis listened to the latter. The king’s brothers, the dukes of Anjou and Poitiers, returned to France.

The Moslems of Egypt, grown quickly tired of the Sultana Chegger-Eddour, made her yield up the sceptre. She shrewdly passed it to a favorite, Aibek, by marrying him, and thus retained the substance of power.

The new Sultan of Egypt and the Sultan of Damascus and Aleppo each invoked the aid of Louis against the other. Motives of vengeance would have inclined him to side with the latter, but dread for the fate of the French still left in Egypt, and regard for his treaty, hard as its terms had been, prevented this choice, except in the event of the Egyptians not speedily fulfilling their part of the contract in liberating the captives. The threat of such alliance brought from Egypt some instalments of prisoners. One band of two hundred knights carried with them to Acre, as their best contribution to the cause, the bones of several of their comrades for burial in the Holy Land. Louis was deeply afflicted by the news that many of his soldiers refused to return to him, having renounced the faith of Christ, who no longer extended to them His succor. Some of these renegades amassed wealth and rose to power in Egypt, but never, if we are to believe the Moslem writers, reached the confidence and respect of the true followers of the Prophet. This defection is hardly to be wondered at, since that age refused to believe the words of Christ, “My kingdom is not of this world, else would My servants fight.” The Christians partook too largely of the Moslem idea that religion would triumph by the sword; but they had not the reserve faith of the Mohammedans, which led them to take up the kismet, “It is decreed,” when they were forced to retreat.

Europe sent an occasional knight to join the forlorn hope with Louis, but no organized force. The Pope exhausted his passion in pursuing with malediction the memory of Frederick II., who had just died. “Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad,” he wrote to the people of Sicily upon the death of his old enemy. Against the new emperor, Conrad, he proclaimed a crusade, offering indulgence to the German mothers and fathers who would induce their sons to become traitors to their sovereign.

The English King, Henry III., offered to take the cross for Palestine, but, having raised a large sum of money for the purpose of an expedition, found other uses for it. He forbade a large band of his people embarking for the Holy Land, guarding his ports against their departure. He even, as Matthew Paris says, “like a hurt or offended child, who runs to his mother with his complaints,” obtained a papal mandate enforcing obedience to his whim in this regard. Queen Blanche, the regent of France, did indeed send a ship laden with money to her son, but the vessel was sunk off the Syrian coast.

The chief occupation of Louis and his knights was in repairing the few remaining fortifications held by the Christians, and in making pious pilgrimages to the holy places at Nazareth, Tabor, and Cana. The Sultan of Damascus invited him to Jerusalem, but, having come to conquer it, he would not consent to enter it as a guest, having in mind the example of Richard Cœur de Lion, who sixty years before had refused to look upon the city he could not rescue. The Egyptians pressed Louis for alliance against the Sultan of Damascus. They pledged to liberate all captives remaining in Egypt, and further to send to Palestine the heads of the Christians which had been exposed on the walls of Cairo; they would also give up Jerusalem and nearly all the cities of Palestine. Under this immense lure Louis made treaty with the Egyptians for fifteen years.

The Sultan of Damascus did not let his resentment cool before he interposed an army between the Christians and their new allies. He was defeated February 3, 1251. The Egyptians were unable or unwilling to fulfil the promise to join Louis’s forces. At the expiration of a year the Moslems had made peace with each other and declared war upon Louis as their common enemy. The Turkomans also made raid upon Sidon and slaughtered two thousand of the Christian people. Louis ordered Joinville to retaliate by assaulting Baneas, or Cæsarea Philippi, where they took recompense in blood. As they returned to Sidon they saw the ground covered with putrefying corpses of their martyred kinsmen. Louis bade them bury the dead, but no one would touch spade for the disgusting task. “Come, my friends, let us bestow a little earth upon the martyrs of Jesus Christ,” said the king; and springing from his horse, he took one of the bodies in his hands and gently laid it beneath the dirt. His example was followed by his suite.

A few months later news came of the death of Queen Blanche. The pens of the historians, who are usually concerned only with great affairs of state and the issue of battles, linger over the page in which they describe the tender lamentation of the good Louis. For two days he spoke to no one; then sent for Joinville, to whom he outpoured his passionate grief.

The call for Louis’s return to France was renewed; the throne had no protector; England was threatening. There was no possibility of further service in the East, yet the king was undecided. Religious processions of prayer were organized and the altars in various holy places besieged with petitions for the divine guidance of the royal mind. At length Heaven seemed to concur in what had long been the judgment of men, and the king consented to abandon the field.

Fourteen vessels were sufficient to convey his forces. Each was fitted with an altar for hourly service during the voyage. They raised anchor in the port of Sidon, April 24, 1254. Off Cyprus the king’s ships were nearly wrecked, but the courage of the sailors was revived by his words, if the sea did not subside at his prayer, as some say it did. A frightful tempest seems to have felt the spell of Queen Marguerite’s vow of a silver ship to St. Nicholas of Lorraine. After two months and a half (July 8th) the fleet reached Hyères. The king at first refused to land, as this place was not yet a French possession; but he was persuaded to yield his patriotic prejudice on account of his disgust for the water. His piety also triumphed over his worldly chagrin, for, “See,” said he, “if God has not proved to us how vast is His power, when by means of a single one of the four winds the King of France, the queen, their children, and so many other persons have escaped drowning.” After a journey of two months more, not a long one for the best mounted in that age, the royal party reached Paris, September 7, 1254. The king at once repaired to St. Denis to recognize the protection of his patron saint. Then, with universal welcome, he entered his capital. The popular enthusiasm was not altogether of joy as the people contrasted the little band of lords and knights returning to their wasted estates with the splendid retinue that six years before had gone forth to conquer a new empire for France and Christ. But one thing comforted them as they contemplated the disaster—the piety of their monarch. This was the more marked as the age had lost much of its religious zest. This crusade was very unlike the first in that it was sustained by the new spirit of Chivalry rather than of mere sanctity. Cross-wearing was no longer thought to be necessarily the emblazoning of Heaven. The haughtiness, the worldliness, not to say the wickedness, of the popes, who should have been its spiritual leaders, but who were engrossed in the gratification of their own jealousies, almost lost the church the respect of the nations. The beauty of Louis’s devotion, its unselfishness and spirituality, somewhat redeemed the character of the movement upon which Christ Himself seemed to frown through His adverse providence.