Captains of adventure

by Roger Pocock

“Wherein,” he says, “God showed us great courtesy, for neither I nor my knights had our hawberks (chain shirts) and shields, because we had all been wounded.”

You see De Joinville had the sweet faith that his God was a gentleman.

After that the sorrowful army lay nine days in camp till the bodies of the dead floated to the surface of the canal, and eight days more while a hundred hired vagabonds cleared the stream. But the army lived on eels and water from that canal, while all of them sickened of scurvy, and hundreds died. Under the hands of the surgeons the men of that dying army cried like women. Then came an attempt to retreat in ships to the coast, but the way was blocked, the little galleys were captured one by one, the king was taken, and what then remained of the host were prisoners, the sick put to death, the rich held for ransom, the poor sold away into slavery.

Saint Louis appeared to be dying of dysentery and scurvy, he was threatened with torture, but day after day found strength and courage to bargain with the soldan of Babylon for the ransom of his people. Once the negotiations broke down because the soldan was murdered by his own emirs, but the king went on bargaining now with the murderers. For his own ransom he gave the city of Damietta, for that of his knights he paid the royal treasure that was on board a galley in the port, and for the deliverance of the common men, he had to raise money in France.

So came the release, and the emirs would have been ashamed to let their captive knights leave the prison fasting. So De Joinville’s party had “fritters of cheese roasted in the sun so that worms should not come therein, and hard boiled eggs cooked four or five days before, and these, in our honor, had been painted with divers colors.”

After that came the counting of the ransom on board the royal galley, with the dreadful conclusion that they were short of the sum by thirty thousand livres. De Joinville went off to the galley of the marshal of the Knights Templars, where he tried to borrow the money.

“Many were the hard and angry words which passed between him and me.”

For one thing the borrower, newly released from prison, looked like a ragged beggar, and for the rest, the treasure of the Templars was a trust fund not to be lent to any one. They stood in the hold in front of the chest of treasure, De Joinville demanding the key, then threatening with an ax to make of it the king’s key.

“We see right well,” said the treasurer, “that you are using force against us.” And on that excuse yielded the key to the ragged beggar, tottering with weakness, a very specter of disease and famine.

“I threw out the silver I found therein and went, and sat on the prow of our little vessel that had brought me. And I took the marshal of France and left him with the silver in the Templars’ galley and on the galley I put the minister of the Trinity. On the galley the marshal handed the silver to the minister, and the minister gave it over to me on the little vessel where I sat. When we had ended and came towards the king’s galley, I began to shout to the king.