In fact, Louis’ circumstances were markedly improved by Turanshah’s own increasingly uncertain position at this time. Since his arrival at Mansourah, the Ayyubid heir had favoured his own soldiers and officials, thereby alienating many within the existing Egyptian army hierarchy–including the mamluk commander Aqtay and the Bahriyya. Keen to secure a deal that would consolidate his hold over the Nile region, Turanshah agreed to negotiate and, in mid-to late April, terms were settled. A ten-year truce was declared. The French king would be released in return for Damietta’s immediate surrender. A massive ransom of 800,000 gold bezants (or 400,000 livres tournois) was set for the 12,000 other Christians in Ayyubid custody.

In early May, however, it suddenly seemed that even the fulfilment of these punitive conditions might not bring the Christians to liberty, because the Ayyubid coup–so long awaited by Louis at Mansourah–finally took place. On 2 May Turanshah was murdered by Aqtay and a vicious young mamluk in the Bahriyya regiment, named Baybars. The ensuing power struggle initially saw Shajar al-Durr appointed as figurehead of Ayyubid Egypt. In reality, though, a seismic shift was now under way–one that would lead to the gradual but inexorable rise of the mamluks.

In spite of these dynastic upheavals, the Muslim repossession of Damietta went ahead as planned and Louis was released on 6 May 1250. He then set about collecting the funds with which to make an initial payment of half the ransom–200,000 livres tournois–177,000 of which was raised from the king’s war chest and the remainder taken from the Templars. This massive sum took two days to be weighed and counted. On 8 May Louis took ship to Palestine with his leading nobles, among them his two surviving brothers, Alphonse of Poitiers and Charles of Anjou, and John of Joinville. As yet, the vast majority of the crusaders remained in captivity.

In adversity’s wake

All Louis IX’s hopes of subjugating Egypt and winning the war for the Holy Land had ended in failure. But in many ways the true and remarkable depth of the French king’s crusading idealism only became apparent after this humiliating defeat. In similar circumstances, shamed by such an unmitigated debacle, many a Christian monarch would have sloped off back to Europe, turning his back on the Near East. Louis did the opposite. Realising that his men would likely remain rotting in Muslim captivity unless he continued to pressure the Egyptian regime for their release, the king chose to remain in Palestine for the next four years.

In this time, Louis served as overlord of Outremer and, by 1252, had secured the liberation of his troops. Working tirelessly, he set about the unglamorous task of bolstering the kingdom of Jerusalem’s coastal defences–overseeing the extensive refortification of Acre, Jaffa, Caesarea and Sidon. He also established a permanent garrison of one hundred Frankish knights in Acre, paid for by the French crown at an annual cost of around 4,000 livres tournois.

Given the ardent self-promotion typical of other crusade leaders–from Richard the Lionheart to Frederick II of Germany–Louis also showed an extraordinary willingness to accept responsibility for the dreadful setbacks experienced in Egypt. The king’s supporters tried their best to transfer the blame to Robert of Artois, emphasising that it had been his advice that led to the march on Mansourah in autumn 1249 and criticising the count’s reckless behaviour on 8 February 1250. But in a letter written in August 1250, Louis himself praised Robert’s bravery, describing him as ‘our very dear and illustrious brother of honoured memory’, and expressing the hope and belief that he had been ‘crowned as a martyr’. In the same document, the king explained the crusade’s failure and his own incarceration as divine punishments, meted out ‘as our sins required’.51

Eventually, in April 1254, Louis travelled home to France. His mother Blanche had died two years earlier, and the Capetian realm had become increasingly unstable. The king returned from the Holy Land a changed man, and his later life was marked by extreme piety and austerity–wearing a hair shirt, he ate only meagre rations of the blandest food and engaged in seemingly constant prayer. At one point Louis even considered renouncing his crown and entering a monastery. He also harboured a heartfelt, lingering desire to launch another crusade, thereby, perhaps, to win redemption.

The Egyptian expedition reshaped King Louis’ life, but the events on the Nile also had a wider effect upon Latin Europe. The crusade of 1250 had been carefully planned, financed and supplied; its armies led by a paragon of Christian kingship. And still it had been subjected to an excoriating defeat. After one and a half centuries of almost unbroken failure in the war for the Holy Land, this latest reversal prompted an outpouring of doubt and despair in the West. Some even turned their backs on the Christian faith. In the second half of the thirteenth century–as Outremer’s strength continued to fade and new, seemingly invincible, enemies emerged on to the Levantine stage–the chances of mounting another crusade to the East seemed bleak indeed.

VICTORY IN THE EAST

22

LION OF EGYPT

For more than half a century after Saladin’s death in 1193, members of his Ayyubid dynasty dominated Near Eastern Islam. Saladin had brought doom and defeat to the Christian Franks living in the Levant, reconquering Jerusalem and holding back Richard the Lionheart’s Third Crusade. But wrapped up in their own petty rivalries, later Ayyubids proved willing to live in relative peace alongside the remaining crusader states. And with Muslims and Christians both keen to maintain mutually profitable trade links, negotiation, accommodation and truce became the order of the day. The Islamic rulers of Damascus, Cairo and Aleppo still claimed to be champions of jihad, but their struggle turned inwards, to be expressed in works of spiritual purification and religious patronage. Rather than embrace the external militaristic form of jihad by waging holy war, the Ayyubids sought, in the main, to limit conflict–ever conscious that aggression might provoke a dangerous and disruptive western European crusade.

This delicately balanced modus vivendi was to be dramatically overturned when two new oriental superpowers–the Mamluks and the Mongols–rose to prominence in the Levant. Each was imbued with fearsome military strength, unlike anything yet witnessed in the age of the crusades, and their monumental clash reshaped the fate of the Holy Land and the history of the crusades. Overshadowed by these two behemoths, Latin Outremer became the third, sometimes almost incidental, challenger in the struggle for mastery of the East.

NEW POWERS IN THE NEAR EAST

A new Islamic dynasty–the Mamluk sultanate, governed by members of the mamluk (slave soldier) military elite–seized power in Egypt in the wake of King Louis IX of France’s failed crusade. A convoluted and brutal power struggle raged throughout the 1250s, as various mamluk leaders sought to overthrow the last vestiges of Ayyubid authority in the Nile region. The elite Bahriyya mamluk regiment was forced to flee Egypt in 1254, when their commander Aqtay was murdered by the ruthless warlord Qutuz, spearhead of a rival mamluk faction. Three years later, Shajar al-Durr–widow of the last great Ayyubid Sultan al-Salih–was executed, and Qutuz gradually assumed control of Egypt, while still governing in the name of a young puppet-sultan, al-Mansur Ali.