The beach assault

As the sun rose on Saturday 5 June 1249, thousands of Latins huddled in their ships reciting prayers. All had been instructed to make confessions during the night. On Montjoie, Louis attended mass, as he did each morning. Then, across the fleet, the difficult work began of switching from large transport ships to shallower-draughted landing craft. John of Joinville and his men jumped into a longboat, which became so overloaded that it almost sank. Later he watched as one unfortunate knight mistimed his leap to a boat just as ‘it drew away, so that he fell into the sea and drowned’.

Joinville described the scene on the delta coast with vivid clarity: ‘The full array of the sultan’s forces [were] drawn up along the shore. It was a sight to enchant the eye, for the sultan’s [standards] were all of gold, and where the sun caught them they shone resplendent. The din this army made with its kettledrums and Saracen horns was terrifying to hear.’ All around him, hundreds of craft were bearing down upon the beach, many of them brightly painted with coats of arms, streaming with pennons, their oarsmen straining to drive forward.

John of Joinville’s longboat was among the first to reach land, pulling up directly in front of a pack of Muslim horsemen, who immediately charged forward. He described how, leaping into the shallow water, ‘we stuck the sharp end of our shields into the sand and fixed our lances firmly in the ground with the points towards the enemy’. This bristling metal ring of protection saved Joinville and his men, for ‘the moment [the charging enemy] saw the lances about to pierce their bellies, they wheeled around and fled’. Having survived their first encounter, John’s party held their ground even as thousands more Latins reached the shoreline.34

Up and down the coast fierce fighting broke out, as the Muslims launched withering volleys of arrows and spears on to the landing craft. It soon became clear that not every Frankish boat was shallow enough to reach the sands. At this terrible moment there was a very real possibility that the attack might stall, but urgent orders went out to disembark and wade ashore. Some jumped too soon ‘in their fervent eagerness’ and drowned; others found themselves up to their waists or even armpits, but immediately began striding forward. Many knights struggled to disembark their horses so that they could fight astride a mount, while Christian crossbowmen sought to provide cover, unleashing a scouring rain of missiles that according to one crusader came ‘so thick and so fast that it was a wonder to see’. Ferocious skirmishes broke out all along the shore, but the heavily armoured Frankish knights soon formed well-ordered units, and, once these beachheads were established on land, the Muslims’ attacks became increasingly ineffective.

As the assault turned in the Latins’ favour, Louis IX was watching from his own landing craft, beside Odo of Châteauroux. The plan was for the king to stay on board in safety, but when the Capetian sovereign saw his royal standard, the Oriflame, planted in the sands of Egypt, his patience broke. Against the papal legate’s heated objections, Louis leapt overboard into chest-high water and forged his way forward, ‘with his shield hung from his neck, his helmet on his head, and lance in hand, till he joined his people on the shore’. There, with his blood up, the king had to be held back from charging into combat.

Pockets of fighting continued until midday, but the Ayyubid defence was badly orchestrated and lacked determination. Fakhr al-Din eventually retreated inland towards Damietta. The Muslims were said to have lost 500 men, including three emirs and many horses, while the Franks suffered only limited losses. The entire landing had been a startling success. Many crusaders clearly felt that they had been lifted to victory by God’s grace, one writing in a letter that the Latins fought ‘like strong athletes of the Lord’.35

Even better fortune was to follow. King Louis must have expected and prepared for a hard-fought siege of Damietta, only too aware of the gruelling eighteen-month investment undertaken by the Fifth Crusade. As the day drew to a close, he began to ferry supplies ashore, preparing to fortify his position and, if necessary, to repel a counter-attack. But the very next day the Franks were astounded to discover that Damietta had been abandoned. Trails of smoke were seen rising above the city, and scouts returned to report that its garrison had fled, some by land, others down the Nile. In a single stroke, Louis had achieved the first goal of his campaign, establishing a foothold on the Nile and opening the doorway to Egypt. It was the most stunning opening foray of any crusade. In the sweltering heat of the North African summer, the image of the Ayyubids fleeing from the beaches and then forsaking Damietta seems to have burned into the minds of Louis and his compatriots. For them, it was an image to relish–one that seemed to speak of a Muslim world on the brink of collapse and to foreshadow ultimate Christian victory.

AYYUBID DECLINE

The crusaders assumed that their success in early June 1249 was born of their own martial superiority and the enfeebled state of Islam. But while these notions contained more than a grain of truth, they also concealed the underlying reality of the situation. Fakhr al-Din’s decision to quit the field on 5 June does not appear primarily to have been a response to Latin ferocity. In fact, he conceded the beaches and then promptly marched the Egyptian field army south, straight past Damietta, because his real ambitions lay elsewhere. The city had been garrisoned by a regiment known as the Kinaniyya, renowned for their bravery; but horrified to find themselves deserted, they too absconded during the night. Pouring south, all of these forces regrouped at the main Ayyubid encampment, where Sultan al-Salih’s grip on power was in terminal decline.

After the Muslim triumph at La Forbie in 1244, al-Salih had turned his back on the Khwarizmians. Judging this horde of untamed mercenaries to be too dangerous and uncontrollable to be trusted, he barred his former allies from entering Egypt. Left to ravage Palestine and Syria with little coherent purpose, the rampaging savagery that had driven the Khwarizmians eventually burned itself out, and in 1246 they were roundly defeated by a coalition of Syrian Muslims. In the years that followed, al-Salih moved to assume control of Damascus and to occupy further sections of Palestine.

Around this time, however, the sultan fell gravely ill with consumption. By 1249 his health was deteriorating rapidly and he was able to travel only when borne upon a litter. In one respect, therefore, King Louis IX’s crusade was propitiously timed, because it coincided with a period of severe debility for the Ayyubid high command. Yet, even though al-Salih was dying, there were others eager to take his place, among them Fakhr al-Din. So it was that the emir readily abandoned his post at Damietta in early summer 1249, worried that if enmeshed in a prolonged engagement on the coast he might miss his opportunity to seize power when the sultan died. The outcome of events at the mouth of the Nile Delta enraged the ailing al-Salih. He seems to have suspected the real reason behind Fakhr al-Din’s retreat, but lacked the confidence openly to punish such a prominent emir. The Kinaniyya were less fortunate, and the sultan had the entire regiment hanged.36

This brutalised atmosphere of mistrust, betrayal and rivalry was just one expression of a wider malaise affecting the Ayyubid realm across the Levant. After long decades of domination, the dynasty established by Saladin and his brother al-Adil was inching towards disintegration–bedevilled by ineffectual leadership and paralysed by internecine intrigue. But this did not mean that the Frankish conquest of Egypt or the Holy Land would proceed unopposed. In fact, even beyond Fakhr al-Din’s dreams of glory, another extraordinarily potent force was rising to prominence in Egypt: the mamluks.