"It was Count Amalric's treachery that caused the calamity." It seemed to Simon that Nicolette, his mother, and her husband, Roland, had told him the story hundreds of times. They wanted him to know it by heart.
"He believed that the Cathars had murdered his father, Count Stephen de Gobignon, my grandfather," Simon went on. "King Louis advocated mercy toward heretics. Count Amalric had a brother, Hugues, a Dominican inquisitor, who was killed before his very eyes by an assassin's arrow in Béziers while he was presiding over the burning of Cathars."
"Ah, those heresy-hunting Dominicans." Friar Mathieu shook his head.
"When Hugues was killed, Count Amalric blamed the king's leniency toward heretics. After that, it seems, a madness possessed the count. He came to believe he could overthrow the king and take his throne."
"He must have been mad," said Friar Mathieu. "Never has a King of France been so loved as this Louis."
"Count Amalric went on crusade with King Louis, taking my mother, Countess Nicolette, along with him, even as King Louis took Queen Marguerite. I was a very young child then. They left me in the keeping of my mother's sisters. The crusaders captured Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile, left the noncombatants there and marched southward toward Cairo."
Simon hesitated, feeling himself choke up again. These were the crimes of the man everyone believed was his father. It was agony to give voice to them.
But he plunged on. "At a city called Mansura, Count Amalric led part of his own army into a trap, and most were killed. He tricked the rest of the army, including the king, into surrendering to the Mamelukes. He alone escaped. He went to Damietta, supposedly to take charge of the defense. He made a secret promise to the Sultan of Cairo to deliver Damietta, together with the ransom money, if the sultan would slay the king and all the other captive crusaders."
Friar Mathieu gasped. "Why in God's name would a French nobleman do such dreadful things?"
"With the king and his brothers dead, he would be the most powerful man in France," said Simon. "He might have succeeded, but for two things. First, the Mameluke emirs, led by the same Baibars who now rules Egypt, rose in revolt and killed the sultan with whom Count Amalric was bargaining. Baibars and the Mamelukes preferred to deal honorably with their prisoners."