Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

Fig. 107.—Disembarkation of the Crusaders at Damietta.—Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Grand Voyage de Hiérusalem,” printed in Paris in 1522 by François Regnault, in the Library of M. Ambr. Firmin-Didot.

Thenceforward the Christian cause proceeded from bad to worse. After several engagements in which they were worsted, after several battles, the effect of which was merely to sacrifice life—particularly after the battle of Mansourah, in which Robert of Artois, the king’s brother, was killed, with the flower of the nobility—the Crusaders found themselves surrounded in their camp, a prey to a pestilential epidemic produced by want, which daily made considerable ravages in their ranks. French valour, however, was not to be daunted, and over and over again the soldiers, though exhausted by fatigue and disease and dying of hunger, put forth fresh efforts, and defeated the Saracens; at a cost to themselves, however, that each victory made them less able to endure. At last they were forced to retreat on Damietta, where the Queen with some reserve troops was awaiting them, and where they hoped to reorganize themselves.

After they had been three or four days on the march, during which this weary host of sick and wounded had been ceaselessly harassed by the enemy, the king—who was seriously ill himself, but who always rode and fought in the rear to protect the remnant of his ost, whose safety, he said, he valued far more than his own life—was forced to halt in a village, which the Saracens surrounded and attacked on all sides, while the bravest and most devoted of Louis’s knights allowed themselves to be cut to pieces to prevent their good sire from falling into the hands of the infidels.

Louis was lying on the field in a dying condition, quite incapable of giving any command, when some traitor cried out in the midst of the fight, “Yield, sir knights, yield all of you, the king orders it; do not cause him to be slain.” The fight immediately ceased, the knights threw down their arms and asked for quarter. The Saracens pitilessly massacred not only the sick, from whom they feared the effects of contagion, but every Christian beneath the rank of knight. The king was taken prisoner, together with his two brothers (Fig. 108), his principal barons, and the officers of his household. This occurred on the 6th of April, 1250.

History records the most touching incidents of the captivity of the pious monarch. Never was Louis IX. so noble, so heroic, as during these thirty days of trial, of suffering, and of danger. Though a captive in the hands of the unbelievers, subjected to the grossest outrages, loaded with chains, and threatened with death, he still displayed in the gentleness of his disposition and the serenity of his soul the high virtues of the Christian faith and the nobility pertaining to his kingly dignity. The Saracens greatly admired this magnanimity in misfortune, and their principal leader, the terrible Sultan of Damascus, entered into negotiations with his august prisoner, who was prepared to die rather than submit to some of the demands of his conquerors. A million of golden besants (about half a million of French livres) for the ransom of the Franks, the restitution of Damietta for that of their king, and ten years’ truce between the Christians and the Mussulmans of Egypt and of Syria, were the conditions that Louis was obliged to accept. Joinville tells us that the emirs of the sultan were content to accept, as their only guarantee, the bare word of this Frankish prince, the noblest Christian, they said, they had ever seen in the East. Some of the Saracens, indeed, according to the same chronicler, had conceived the intention of offering the throne of Egypt to King Louis (Fig. 109), so much respect and esteem had he inspired them with.

Fig. 108.—St. Louis and his two brothers, Alphonse, Count of Poitiers, and Charles, Count of Anjou, made prisoners by the Saracens.—Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the “Grand Voyage de Hiérusalem,” printed in Paris by François Regnault in 1522; folio. Library of M. Ambr. Firmin-Didot.

Louis having recovered his liberty, would not return to France without having tried every means in his power to alleviate the miseries of Palestine, or at least to deliver the Christian prisoners whom the infidels still detained. He went, with seven hundred knights who still remained under his orders, to the Holy Land, and then, rather by conciliation than by force, and by the exercise of a marvellous sagacity, he was enabled to a certain extent to re-establish the prestige of the defenders of the cross. He devoted four years to this good work, and only consented to return to France on hearing of the death of his beloved mother. He re-entered Paris, after an absence of six years (1254), with a wounded and broken spirit, “because,” says the English chronicler, Matthew Paris, “through him disorder had overspread Christendom.”

Fig. 109.—The Messengers of the Sultan, having at their head a little old man walking with crutches, come to discuss terms of ransom with the Christian prisoners.—From a miniature in the “Credo de Joinville,” Manuscript of the end of the Thirteenth Century, formerly in the National Library of Paris, but now in England.