thirteen
Louis of France
Who now could save the Holy Land? In western Europe, the bitter rivalry between the Papacy and the Emperor Frederick excluded the lay leader of Christendom from resuming the role. In any case, Frederick felt that his enemies in Palestine, in particular the Templars, had brought their fate upon themselves by breaking his carefully constructed truce with the Ayyubids in Egypt.
Only one European monarch was in a position to lead a new crusade, and that was King Louis IX of France. Providentially, or coincidentally, in the same year as the catastrophic defeat at La Forbie, Louis, having fallen ill with a fever, probably malaria, felt close enough to death and judgement to resolve, if he recovered, to take the Cross.
The son of a formidable mother, Blanche of Castile, and married to Margaret of Provence, both from families with a long tradition of service in the war against Islam, Louis had inherited the throne of France in his infancy and held it thanks to the vigorous regency of his mother. At the age of fifteen, Louis had commanded an army campaigning against the King of England, Henry III. Handsome, good-humoured, boisterous, occasionally ill-tempered, Louis, in contrast to Frederick II, was also profoundly pious and untroubled by doubts about the Catholic faith. Early in his reign, under the Treaty of Paris, he established French rule over Languedoc and finally brought the Cathar heresy to an end. He had no qualms about using force to defend the Christian religion: a knight, he told his friend John of Joinville, ‘whenever he hears the Christian religion abused, should not attempt to defend its tenets, except with his sword, and that he should thrust into the scoundrel’s belly, as far as it will enter’.294 Even if Louis’s words may not have been as brutal as Joinville remembered them in his old age, they are in marked contrast to the sceptical views of the Emperor, Frederick II.
Unlike Frederick, Louis was happily married to a single wife. His affection for Margaret of Provence provoked the jealousy of his mother: when they were newly married they had separate quarters and only dared meet on the stairs, returning to their rooms when alerted by their servants of the approach of the Queen Mother. During the crusade, Joinville reproached Louis for waiting for Mass to end before rising to greet Margaret who had just arrived with their newlyborn child: but this was probably a sign of his piety, not of his indifference to his wife. There is no evidence of any estrangement: Margaret bore the King eleven children.
Louis IX had a passion for relics. He bought the Crown of Thorns from Baldwin, the Latin Emperor of Byzantium, and carried it barefoot through the streets of Paris to the exquisite chapel he built to house it, the Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité. He also endowed a number of religious foundations, among them the Abbey of Royaumont, but he would not allow himself to be brow-beaten by the French bishops and mediated in the conflict between the Emperor and the Pope. Louis’s zeal for justice, and his scrupulous attention to the needs of the poor, established his saintly reputation and an unparalleled prestige, but it was taking the Cross that set the seal on his kingship: ‘crusading still held its place as the highest expression of the chivalrous ideas of the aristocracy in the west’.295
Once the vow had been made, Louis prepared for the crusade with the same efficiency that he had shown in subduing his rebellious vassals and reorganising the administration of France. His first objective was to raise the money to fund his expedition overseas. This he did with a twentieth tax on the resources of the Church and subventions from the cities. Because the port of Marseilles at that time came under the sovereignty of the Emperor, Louis built a new outlet to the Mediterranean on his own territory, the port of Aigues Mortes. It was from here that he embarked for the Holy Land on 25 August 1248. Reluctantly, his brothers and many of his vassals went with him. So too did his wife Queen Margaret and their children: France was left in the charge of his mother, Blanche of Castile.
Louis was joined by crusaders from outside France such as John of Joinville, the Seneschal of Champagne. The point of assembly for the crusading army was Cyprus where, as a result of careful planning, supplies had been assembled for Louis’s army of around 25,000 men, among them 5,000 crossbowmen and 2,500 knights. King Louis remained there throughout the winter. In January 1249, he sent two Dominican preachers as envoys to the Mongol Khan, hoping that this rising power in Asia, rumoured to be sympathetic to Christianity, might join forces against Islam.
Accepting the same strategic view as Cardinal Pelagius that it was only by subduing Egypt that the Holy Land could be secured, and undeterred by the failure of the earlier crusade, Louis and his army set sail at the end of May for the Nile Delta. At dawn on 5 June, the Latin fleet anchored before Damietta. The Muslim army, commanded by the Emperor Frederick’s friend, Fakhr ad-Din, were waiting on the shore. ‘It was a sight to enchant the eye,’ Joinville remembered in his old age, ‘for the sultan’s arms 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.’ The Latin forces were equally flamboyant: the Count of Jaffa’s galley ‘was covered, both under and above the water, with painted escutcheons bearing his arms … He had at least three hundred rowers in his galley; beside each rower was a small shield with the count’s arms upon it, and to each shield was attached a pennon with the same arms worked in gold.’296
Although advised to wait for part of his fleet that had been scattered in the storm, Louis ordered a landing and, once the oriflamme was staked on the beach, led his knights against the Saracens who, unable to withstand the impact of the Frankish assault, withdrew to Damietta and then abandoned the city, burning the bazaar. It was a quick and easy victory for which King Louis gave thanks to God; but, remembering the fate of the Fifth Crusade under Cardinal Pelagius, he did not pursue the Egyptians up the Nile. Instead, he established Damietta as his temporary capital in Outremer, sending for Queen Margaret from Acre, and awaited reinforcements from France led by his brother, Alfonso, Count of Poitou, and for the waters of the Nile to subside.
On 20 November Louis felt ready to move further into Egypt. Rejecting the advice of the barons of Outremer to move against the port of Alexandria, he was persuaded by his brother Robert, Count of Artois, to march south along the east bank of the Nile towards Mansurah. In the vanguard of his army were the Knights Templar under their Grand Master, William of Sonnac, chosen after the death of Armand of Périgord in an Egyptian prison. Behind them came the Count of Artois and an English contingent under the Earl of Salisbury. Guided to a ford by a turncoat Bedouin, this force, without waiting as instructed by King Louis for the rest of the army, attacked the Saracen camp where the commander, Fakr ad-Din, was taking a bath. Without waiting to put on his armour, ad-Din rode into battle and was killed by the Templar knights.
Robert of Artois now prepared to pursue the retreating Saracens into Mansurah. The Templar Grand Master, William of Sonnac, tried to stop him. He was already angry that the King’s brother had usurped the Templars’ position in the van. Chroniclers differ as to what happened next. John of Joinville, still with the main body of the army on the south bank of the river, later wrote that William of Sonnac insisted that the Count of Artois should wait for the Templars to lead the attack but because the knight holding the Count’s bridle was deaf, he failed to pass on the message. According to the chronicler, Matthew Paris, Robert of Artois heard the Grand Master only too well, but answered him with insults, repeating the calumny of Frederick II that the Templars had no interest in an outright victory because the Order profited from the continuing war. When the Earl of Salisbury suggested that perhaps the Templar Grand Master had the benefit of experience in fighting the Saracens, Robert of Artois said that he too was a coward, dug his spurs into the flanks of his charger and galloped off at the head of his French knights.
Feeling that they had no choice, the Templars and the English knights followed the Count of Artois in pursuit of the retreating Saracens right into the city of Mansurah. Here all was not as chaotic as it seemed. Although Fakr ad-Din was now dead, the commanding officer of the elite Mameluk guard, Rukn ad-Din Baybars Bundukdari, had taken charge. Putting up little initial resistance to the Latin knights, he waited until they had penetrated into the city and reached the gates of the citadel before ordering his men, waiting in the side streets, to attack the crusaders. Unable to manoeuvre in the narrow streets, and trapped by beams thrown from the roofs, the knights were slaughtered. Three hundred knights died, among them the Earl of Salisbury and the Count of Artois. The Templars lost 280; only two returned alive, one of them the Grand Master, William of Sonnac, who had withdrawn from the mêlée after losing an eye.
Although this setback had been caused by the vainglory and impetuosity of Robert of Artois, it was a foretaste of what was to come. Once the main army had crossed the branch of the Nile, it joined battle with the Muslim forces. Joinville, already wounded, saw King Louis on a raised causeway at the head of his host, the very image of chivalry and honour. ‘Never have I seen a finer or more handsome knight! He seemed to tower head and shoulders above all his people; on his head was a gilded helmet, and a sword of German steel was in his hand.’297 After a day of fierce fighting, the Egyptians were forced back into Mansurah. When the Provost of the Hospitallers told Louis that his brother Robert of Artois ‘was now in paradise … big tears began to fall from his eyes’.
That night, the Egyptians made a sortie from Mansurah and again were beaten back. On 11 February they attacked again and in this engagement William of Sonnac, at the head of the few remaining Templars, lost his second eye and subsequently died. Louis’s army was almost broken but the centre held and eventually the Egyptians withdrew once again into Mansurah. Now it was clear that, while the crusaders could not be beaten, neither could the city be taken. Louis’s best hope lay in the outcome of the political upheaval in Cairo that had followed the death of the Sultan Ayyub and his commander, Fakr ad-Din. For eight weeks he waited, encamped before the walls of Mansurah. But chaos in the Ayyubid court had been averted by the widowed Sultana and at the end of February Ayyub’s son Turanshah returned from Syria to take command.
Transporting a fleet of light vessels on the backs of camels to the Nile down-river from the crusading army, the Muslims severed its link with Damietta and stopped the supply of fresh food. Disease spread in their camp. Louis himself suffered from chronic dysentery: his servants, Joinville tells us, because he was ‘continually obliged to visit the privy, had to cut away the lower part of his drawers’. He ordered a retreat to Damietta but despite his sickness refused to abandon his men and escape on a galley. Pursued by the Egyptians, Louis was finally made captive and obliged to surrender. Joinville was saved from death when it was discovered that his wife was a cousin of the Emperor Frederick. Prisoners of any standing were held for ransom; the less eminent were killed. In the city of Damietta, the Pisan and Genoese garrison was dissuaded from desertion by Queen Margaret: the city was a valuable counter in the bargaining which followed and, together with a ransom of a million besants or half-a-million livres tournois, bought liberty for the King and his army.
Raising this ransom gave rise to an incident that reveals the scrupulosity, or obduracy, of the Templars. In the course of counting out the money to pay the agreed deposit, it was found that the King was thirty thousand livres short: on it depended the release of his brother, the Count of Poitiers. John of Joinville suggested that the sum should be borrowed from the Templars and with the King’s authority went to ask for the loan. The request was refused by the Commander of the Temple, Stephen of Otricourt, on the grounds that he had sworn on oath never to release money except to those who put it in his charge.
This led to a bitter altercation between Joinville and Otricourt until the Marshal of the Temple, Reginald of Vichiers, proposed a solution. The Templars could not break their vow but there was nothing to stop the King taking their funds by force, particularly since the Temple held his deposits in Acre and could recoup this forced loan when he returned. Therefore Joinville went to the Templar galley, broke open a strongbox with an axe, and returned to King Louis with the money.
With his brother’s release secured, King Louis and his entourage sailed for Acre. Here he found letters from his mother, Blanche of Castile, urging him to return to France. The same advice was given by his brothers and his barons, but it was not just a French army that had been defeated on the Nile: the forces of the Christians of Outremer had been seriously weakened by the disaster. Louis was reluctant to leave the Holy Land in such a perilous condition or abandon the Frankish prisoners still held in Egypt; and so, while most of his French vassals, among them his brothers, now returned to France with his blessing, he himself remained in Acre with his wife and children. The legitimate King of Jerusalem may have been Conrad, the son of Frederick II by the Queen Yolanda, but Louis was accepted as de facto ruler and he now attempted to achieve through diplomacy what he had failed to gain by force.
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In Cairo, power had been seized by the elite regiment of slave warriors, the Mameluks. Captured as boys from the nomadic tribes of Kipchak Turks living on the steppes of southern Russia, they were sold by slave-traders to the Ayyubid Sultans who raised them as a military force with no links and therefore no loyalties to any class or faction. Described by the Arabic chronicler, Ibn Wasil, as ‘the Templars of Islam’,298 they had gained an ascendancy under the Ayyubid sultans that seemed to be threatened when Ayyub’s son, Turanshah, came to power. On 2 May 1250, in the midst of the negotiations with King Louis, the Mameluks murdered Turanshah and brought the rule of Saladin’s descendants in Egypt to an end. However, the Ayyubids remained in power in Syria and, on hearing the news of the Mameluk coup, Saladin’s grandson, an-Nasir Yusuf, the Sultan of Aleppo, occupied Damascus and at once dispatched an embassy to King Louis to ask for his help.
King Louis used this approach to put pressure on the Mameluks to come to terms, sending an emissary, John of Valenciennes, to Cairo. Unknown to the King, the Templars were pursuing a diplomatic initiative of their own. The former Marshal of the Order, Reginald of Vichiers, had been elected Grand Master in succession to William of Sonnac. Reginald had undoubtedly been the favoured candidate of King Louis: he had been the Templar Preceptor in France while Louis had been preparing his crusade, had arranged transport for his troops from Marseilles, had been Louis’s Marshal in Cyprus, his comrade-in-arms on the Nile, and was godfather to the son born to Queen Margaret at Castle Pilgrim, the Count of Alençon.
Once Grand Master, however, the pretensions of the post seem to have gone to his head. Without consulting King Louis, he had sent the Templar Marshal, Hugh of Jouey, to Damascus to negotiate with the Sultan over a disputed tract of land. Having reached an agreement, Hugh returned with a Damascene emir to have it ratified at Acre. Upon discovering what had been going on behind his back, King Louis flew into a rage and insisted not only that the treaty be annulled, but that the Templar Grand Master and all his knights should humble themselves before the whole army, walking barefoot through the camp and kneeling in submission before the King. The scapegoat was Hugh of Jouey whom Louis banished from the Kingdom of Jerusalem – a sentence he would not rescind despite the pleas of the Grand Master and the Queen. No doubt, this gesture was not so much to establish his authority among the Latins as to impress upon the Mameluks that he was in command. His policy paid off. In March 1252, all Christian prisoners still held by the Mameluks were set free.
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There were two others powers in the region with whom Louis treated while in Acre. The first was the Old Man of the Mountain, the leader of the Assassins, who sent envoys soon after Louis’s return from Damietta to demand the tribute, or protection money, that they claimed had been paid by the Emperor Frederick, the King of Hungary and the Sultan of Cairo. As an alternative to tribute the Emir suggested that the King exempt the Assassins from the tribute that they paid to the Temple and the Hospital. As Joinville observed in describing this parley, the Assassins knew that there was no point in killing either of the Grand Masters because another knight, ‘equally good, would be put in their place’.299
The Grand Masters, whom the King invited to this parley, were outraged at the Assassins’ insolence: they sent the envoys back to the Old Man of the Mountain with the advice that he approach King Louis in a different vein. Within a fortnight they had returned to Acre with lavish gifts. King Louis reciprocated, returning equally valuable trinkets and an Arabic-speaking friar, Yves le Breton, to preach the Christian faith.
The second set of envoys came from the Mongols, the power that within twenty years was to defeat the Old Man of the Mountain, taking the hitherto impregnable Assassin fortress of Almut in 1256. Their ambassadors reached Acre with the two Dominican friars that Louis had sent to the Mongol Khan suggesting an alliance against Islam. The Khan’s answer was a demand that the French King become his vassal, and send ‘a sufficient amount of money in yearly contributions for us to remain your friends. If you refuse to do this we will destroy you…’ It was not the response that the King had hoped for and, according to Joinville, Louis ‘bitterly regretted that he had ever sent envoys to the great King of the Tartars’.300
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The defeat of King Louis’s army in the Nile Delta saw the end of the Latins’ ambition to retake Jerusalem by attacking the source of Muslim power. Now the imperative was to gain maximum advantage by exploiting the rivalries of the Islamic powers and improving the defences of the territory they still held. Louis therefore ordered the refortification of the coastal cities of Acre, Caesarea, Jaffa and Sidon whose garrisons were strengthened with permanent contingents of French troops.
The inland fortresses were now too costly to be held by the feudal barons of Outremer and were therefore sustained by the military orders: the Teutonic Knights held Montfort, the Hospitallers Belvoir and the Templars Chastel Blanc and Saphet. Saphet had been rebuilt in the 1240s at enormous expense and was now the largest castle in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, dominating Galilee and the route between Damascus and Acre. It had a peacetime garrison of 1,700 men to which a further 500 were added in time of war. Of these, 50 were Templar knights and 30 Templar sergeants, 50 turcopoles and 300 crossbowmen. The cost of its construction was put at 1,100,000 Saracen besants, and 400 slaves were employed to assist the skilled masons. Twelve thousand mule loads of barley and grain were required to provision the castle every year, some of it now imported from the Templar preceptories in Europe.301
After completing the refortification of Sidon, King Louis decided to return to France. His presence was urgently required in his kingdom and he was told by the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the local barons that he had done what he could and should now go home. On 24 April 1254, Louis set sail from Acre on a Templar ship. He had fulfilled his vow as best he could; he had risked his life, come near to death, and remained for four years in the Holy Land after his brothers and barons had departed. He had spent a phenomenal amount of money, estimated by his royal treasury at 1.3 million livres tournois, eleven or twelve times the annual income of his kingdom.302 There was peace in Outremer at the time of his departure but the position of the Christians in the Holy Land was precarious and he was leaving Jerusalem in infidel hands.
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Remaining in Acre to represent King Louis was Geoffrey of Sargines who became Seneschal of the Kingdom. However, following the death of the Emperor Frederick II in 1250, and of his son Conrad in 1254, the legitimate King of Jerusalem was now Conrad’s son Conradin, not Louis IX; and though there was a French garrison at Geoffrey’s command, it was insufficient to impose order on the rival factions, particularly the Italian maritime cities. In early 1256, a dispute between the Venetians and Genoese over the monastery of Saint Sabas in Acre led to armed conflict: the Templars and Teutonic Knights supported the Venetians, the Hospitallers the Genoese. The same year saw the death of the Templar Grand Master, Reginald of Vichiers, who was succeeded by Thomas Bérard.
In 1258 the Mongols captured Baghdad, murdered the Caliph and massacred the population. The approach of this Asiatic horde created panic among the Latins in Syria and Palestine. Realising the folly of internal dissension at such a time, Thomas Bérard made a pact to keep the peace with the other Grand Masters – Hugh of Revel of the Hospital, and Anno of Sangerhausen of the Teutonic Knights. Aleppo fell in January 1260, and Damascus capitulated in March. Thomas Bérard wrote to the officials of the Temple in Europe, telling of the devastation brought about by the Mongols and asking for help: such was the urgency that the Templar courier, Brother Amadeus, reached London in only thirteen weeks, travelling from Dover to London in a single day. He described how the Mongols used Christian captives, including women, as a human shield against their enemies. Unless help was given, ‘a horrible annihilation will swiftly be visited upon the world’.303
The Mongols’ intentions towards the Christians were as yet unclear: in Baghdad, while the Muslims had been massacred, the Christians had been spared. It was therefore the Mameluks in Egypt who prepared to oppose them, requesting both unimpeded passage for their army and assistance from the Franks. The first was agreed by the Council of the Kingdom but an actual alliance was vetoed by the Master of the Teutonic Knights, Anno of Sangerhausen. The Mameluk army marched into Palestine and, on 3 September 1260, under their sultan Kutuz, defeated the Mongol army led by Kitbogha south of Nazareth at Ain Jalut. Kitbogha was killed and a month later Kutuz himself was assassinated by the hero of Mansurah, Baybars.
Al-Malik az-Zahir Rukn ad-Din Baybars was a Kipchak Turk from the north shore of the Black Sea who had been sold as a slave by the Mongols to the Ayyubid Sultan in Cairo. Trained as a member of the Sultan’s bodyguard on an island in the Nile, Baybars had risen to become its commander and one of the ablest officers in the Egyptian army. It was Baybars who had commanded the Egyptian cavalry at the Battle of La Forbie in 1244. It was Baybars who, as commander in Mansurah during King Louis’s crusade, had trapped and slaughtered Count Robert of Artois and his force of French, English and Templar knights. It was Baybars who, together with other Mameluk officers, had murdered the Ayyubid Sultan, Saladin’s nephew, Turanshah. It was Baybars who had led the vanguard of the Egyptian army against the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut.
Angry at the refusal of the Sultan Kutuz to reward him with the city of Aleppo, Baybars murdered his master and seized the throne. He immediately proved himself to be as able a ruler as he was a soldier, refortifying the citadels destroyed by the Mongols, rebuilding the Egyptian fleet and, in time, expelling the Assassins from their strongholds and the last of Saladin’s successors from their principalities in Syria, uniting, as had Saladin, Syria and Egypt under his rule.
At first the Latins in Outremer failed to appreciate the significance of the Mameluk victory at Ain Jalut on the region’s balance of power. In February 1261, John of Ibelin and John of Giubelet, Marshal of the Kingdom, led 900 knights, 1,500 turcopoles and 3,000 foot-soldiers, among them strong contingents of Templars from Acre, Safed, Beaufort and Castle Pilgrim, against a marauding army of Turcoman tribesmen. The Latin army was defeated; the Templar Marshal, Stephen of Sissey, was one of the few to escape alive. Subsequent negotiations with Baybars for the release of the Christian prisoners were scuppered by the Templars’ and Hospitallers’ refusal to surrender some of their Muslim captives because they valued their skills.
Infuriated by what he took to be a manifestation of gross greed, Baybars sacked Nazareth and descended on Acre, wounding the Seneschal, Geoffrey of Sargines, in fighting outside the city walls. With the Mongols in northern Syria still a threat in his rear, Baybars was not in a position to besiege Acre but the Franks could put up no force to prevent his troops moving at will from Egypt into Palestine, and what concentrations they could muster were made known to the Muslims thanks to their use of homing pigeons. In 1265, Baybars suddenly appeared with a large army before Caesarea, the city so recently refortified by King Louis IX. The town capitulated on 27 February; the citadel a week later. Some days after this, it was the turn of Haifa where those inhabitants who had not fled were killed.
Baybars’ next target was the Templar fortress, Castle Pilgrim, but while the town outside the walls was taken and burned, the castle itself proved impregnable and so Baybars moved on to the Hospitaller castle of Arsuf. There, after the Egyptians’ siege-engines had made a breach in the wall and a third of the 270 Hospitaller knights had fallen, terms of surrender were agreed with the commander that guaranteed the liberty of the survivors – an agreement that Baybars then broke, making prisoners of the surviving knights.
In June of 1266, Baybars besieged the great Templar fortress of Safed. Its massive fortifications, so recently rebuilt, withstood the first assault but the very size of the castle meant that a large part of the garrison was composed of Syrian Christians whom Baybars’ emissaries promised to spare should they surrender. Knowing that they would not be relieved, and seeing that the turcopole soldiers were starting to desert, the Templar commander sent a native Syrian sergeant called Leon Cazelier to negotiate a surrender. Cazelier returned with Baybars’ assurance of safe-conduct to Acre; but the only skin to be saved was Cazelier’s. Once the Egyptians had taken control of the castle, the women and children were taken captive and sold as slaves in Cairo while the Templars were beheaded.
The loss of Safed after a siege of only sixteen days was a catastrophe for the Franks in Outremer and a humiliation for the Temple. The stronghold was refortified by Baybars, giving the Mameluks control of Galilee and the approaches to the coastal cities of Acre, Tyre and Sidon. To impress upon the Franks the fate that awaited them, the heads of the decapitated Templars were placed in a circle around the castle.
The next fortress to fall, after token resistance, was Toron. Marching unimpeded down the Mediterranean coast, Baybars’ soldiers killed every Christian that they captured. In the spring of 1268, Jaffa surrendered to a Mameluk army in less than a day. The garrison was allowed to withdraw to Acre but the city was demolished and its Christian inhabitants killed. It was then the turn of the fortress of Beaufort, recently garrisoned by the Templars; this fell, after ten days’ bombardment, on 18 April.
By 14 May, Baybars had arrived at Antioch which, despite its decline as a trading centre, remained the largest Christian city in Outremer. Its ruler, Prince Bohemond, was in Tripoli and the garrison was commanded by his constable, Simon Mansel; but it was too small to man the long walls that had thwarted for so long the soldiers of the First Crusade. On 18 May the Mameluks poured through a breach to take the city. The gates were closed and the inhabitants either massacred or enslaved. The souks and gracious houses were plundered and later abandoned. This once great metropolis of the Roman Empire which had been the first prize of the Latin crusaders was never to recover from this devastation, decaying until it was finally erased from the map of the world.
With the capture of Antioch by the Mameluks and earlier of Sis, the capital of Cilician Armenia, the Templar fortresses in the Amanus Mountains became exposed. The Templar garrison at Gaston (Baghras), the impregnable castle guarding the Syrian gates, on learning that Antioch had fallen after only a few days, decided that it would be impossible to hold out. However, surrendering a fortress in border territory without the Grand Master’s permission was a serious breach of the Order’s rules and the commander therefore determined to withstand the Mameluk army as best he could. However, while the community was eating, one of the brothers, Guis of Belin, left the fortress with the keys to the gate and took them to Baybars saying that the Templar garrison wanted to surrender.
The commander and the Templar knights were ready to repudiate this unauthorised surrender but the Templar sergeants were less resolute. Faced with the prospect of their desertion, and realising that by now Baybars would have been told of their weak position by Guis of Belin, the commander ordered the evacuation of Gaston. In this he anticipated, correctly, the orders of the Grand Master who had dispatched a Brother Pelestort to tell the garrison of Gaston to fall back on La Roche Guillaume, but none the less, on reaching Acre, the knights from Gaston were charged with the unauthorised surrender of the castle. Given the circumstances, the prescribed punishment of expulsion from the Temple was reduced to the loss of their habits for a year; and might have been lighter still had they destroyed the arms and supplies held in Gaston before they left.304
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On learning of the fall of Safed in 1267, King Louis IX once again took the Cross. However, the purity of the King’s intentions was now contaminated by the ambitions of his brother, Charles, Count of Anjou, who had wrested the crown of Sicily from the Hohenstaufens with the blessing of the Pope. In 1268, the young grandson of Frederick II, Conradin, attempting to recover his patrimony, was defeated at the Battle of Tagliacozzo and subsequently executed. Charles, with ambitions to establish an empire in the eastern Mediterranean, persuaded his brother Louis that he should take Tunis as a prelude to an invasion of Egypt. As in the Nile Delta twenty years before, Louis met with some initial success, capturing Carthage, but once again fell ill and this time he did not recover. He died on 25 August 1270. His body was brought back to France by way of Lyons and the Abbey of Cluny with crowds gathering along the route to pay their last respects to the saintly monarch, and in Paris his body was interred in Suger’s Abbey of Saint-Denis, now the mausoleum of the Capetian kings.
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Louis’s crusade disintegrated on his death and Baybars, who had withdrawn to Egypt to prepare for a possible invasion by the French, could now continue his inexorable reduction of the Latin fortresses in the East. In February 1271, the Templar castle of Chastel Blanc surrendered on the advice of the Grand Master, its garrison being then permitted to withdraw to Tortosa. In March it was the turn of Krak des Chevaliers, the magnificent fortress of the Hospitallers. It was fiercely defended but eventually surrendered on 8 April. Another Hospitaller castle, Akkar, fell on 1 May after a two-week siege. Baybars then marched on to Montfort, held by the Teutonic Knights, which surrendered on 12 June after a siege of seven days. It had been the last inland fortress to be held by the Franks.
The coastal cities that remained in the hands of the Franks were reinforced by contingents of crusaders from Europe led by Theobald Visconti, the Archdeacon of Liège who, serving as the Papal Legate in London, had taken the Cross at Saint Paul’s; and, most significantly, by Prince Edward of England, the nephew of Richard of Cornwall, and son and heir of King Henry III. Aged in his early thirties, able and energetic, Edward had been encouraged by his father to fulfil the vows that Henry had frequently taken but had never felt able to fulfil. Sailing first to Tunis to join King Louis, he had arrived to find that he was dead. He had therefore sailed on to Sicily to stay with his uncle, Charles of Anjou, then to Cyprus and finally to Acre which he reached in May of 1271, shortly after the fall of Krak des Chevaliers.
Edward was appalled by the state of affairs that he found in Outremer – not simply the inability of the indigenous forces to hold the inland fortresses, but the zeal with which the Italian maritime republics traded with the enemy: the Venetians supplied Baybars with the metal and timber that he required for his arms and siege-engines, and the Genoese the slaves for his Mameluk regiments, both under licence from the High Court at Acre. He found that the knights of Cyprus were unwilling to fight on the Syrian mainland, and that the Mongols, to whom he sent an embassy of three Englishmen, were in no position to give him substantive help. Having been unable to persuade the English barons to join him on crusade, Edward’s own forces were limited to around a thousand men – sufficient for a few raids into Muslim territory but wholly inadequate to affect the underlying balance of power.
Baybars knew this but, with the Mongols still able to threaten his rear, was in no position to move on the Christians’ coastal domains. The arrival of Edward in May 1271 had prompted him to offer a truce to Bohemond of Tripoli which Bohemond had accepted with relief. Now, a year later, a similar agreement was reached with the Kingdom of Acre: the integrity of its territory was to be guaranteed for the next ten years and ten months. Neither side regarded this as a permanent settlement: Edward built a tower at Acre which he put in the charge of the chivalrous Order of Saint Edward that he founded. He then embarked for England, meaning to return with more substantial forces, but found when he reached home that his father had died and he was now king, ascending the throne as Edward I.