The Fifth Crusade:
1218-1221
The fate of the children sent a new shock through the courts
of Europe, and a new attempt was made to rally political support for a military
campaign to rescue Jerusalem. Pope Innocent III called officially for a new
crusade in 1215, but the forces gathered were too weak for a direct assault.
The leaders, none of whom were prominent, chose instead to put pressure on the
Sultan of Egypt by laying siege to the Egyptian coastal city of Damietta.
Although Damietta fell to the crusaders in 1219, this minor victory had no
impact on the situation in the Holy Land. Two years later the crusaders
withdrew.
The Sixth Crusade: 1228-1229
The Sixth Crusade was led by Emperor Friedrich II of Germany, however, the Emperor’s motives were largely secular. He laid claim to the
title of King of Jerusalem by right of his wife, and wanted to establish his
control over the Kingdom (such as it was) and furthermore exert his claim to overlordship
of the Kingdom of Cyprus. He was, furthermore, under a ban of excommunication at
the time he undertook the crusade, which made it difficult for the Knights
Templar or the Knights Hospitaller to support him. In the end, he negotiated a
treaty that returned Jerusalem and Bethlehem to the Christians for 10 years,
but denied the Christians the right to fortify the city. This outraged the
local nobility and the militant orders, who recognized that the Saracens would
be able to retake Jerusalem at whim – and that they would be
expected to bleed and die in the attempt to save it long after Friedrich had departed for Germany.
The Seventh Crusade:
1248-1254
As had been foreseen, Jerusalem was soon seized and sacked by
Saracen forces (in 1244). That same year, King Louis IX of France was on his
deathbed in Paris. With his family and barons gathered around to hear his last
wishes, he had a vision of Jerusalem, and when he recovered seemingly
miraculously from his illness, he was convinced that God had restored his
health so that he could lead a new crusade to free Jerusalem. Not since the
Third Crusade had there been a ruling monarch who took the cross out of religious
fervor. Louis IX overcame the reluctance of his nobles and assembled a
considerable force, said to have numbered 2,000 knights. He sailed for Outremer
in 1248 from Aigues-Mortes in southern France, accompanied by his three younger
brothers – the Counts of Artois, Poitiers, and Anjou – and by his queen.
After staging in Cyprus over the winter, Louis’ army embarked
for Egypt and captured Damietta after a battle before the gates (but without a
siege) in June 1249. The crusaders collected their forces in Damietta, and then
in early 1250 started up the Nile with the objective of capturing Cairo. In
February 1250 their advance was halted by a large Muslim force holding the
fortified city of Mansourah. A rash attack by the vanguard, led by the Count of
Artois, resulted in heavy losses, including the Count of Artois and nearly all
the Knights Templar on the expedition. Meanwhile the Sultan’s forces had
succeeded in cutting off the crusaders’ supplies from Cyprus and the Holy Land,
and the French were soon suffering from hunger, dysentery, and scurvy.
In April, King Louis, along with all his surviving knights and men,
was taken captive. The wounded were slaughtered, as were most of the priests
and any of the captives considered too weak to make good slaves. The commoners
were given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Only the wealthy knights
and noblemen were held for ransom.
Louis’ queen and consort, nine months pregnant and in
Damietta with only a weak guard, rejected the advice to flee for her safety,
wisely recognizing that Damietta was her husband’s most valuable bargaining
chip. Within only a few weeks, a deal had been struck, by which Damietta was
returned to the Sultan of Egypt in exchange for King Louis’ release, and a huge
ransom in gold was paid by the King of France for all the rest of the surviving
crusaders in Egyptian hands.
The Sultan with whom this deal was made, however, was
murdered before Louis’ eyes before the deal could be implemented. The murderers
of the Sultan were rebellious Mamlukes, technically slaves, who formed the
backbone of the Sultan’s military leadership and his bodyguard. The Mamlukes
cut the Sultan’s heart out of his chest in full view of the French king, then
came aboard King Louis’ galley and held it out to him, demanding to know what
he would give them for the heart of his “enemy.” Louis was (to his credit!) speechless.
The Mamlukes next threatened the Christians with execution, and most of them
confessed their sins to one another (because the priests had already been slaughtered
by their captors), and prepared to die. In the morning, however, the Mamlukes
consented to the agreed ransom. After Damietta was turned over and the first
installment of the ransom paid, King Louis, his surviving brothers, and the
most important noble captives – but not all the knights nor any of the
commoners – were released.
King Louis – against the advice of his nobles – remained in
the Holy Land for another four years, and engaged in sophisticated diplomatic
maneuvering with the Sultan of Damascus (a descendant of Saladin, appalled by
the Mamlukes’ murder of his cousin), the Mongols, and the Assassins. When his
mother, left in France as his regent, died in 1254, however, he returned to
France. By that time he had secured the release of at least 3,000 prisoners and
had signed treaties that stabilized the fragile status quo in the Christian
territories.
The Eighth Crusade:
1270
Although the Mongols captured Baghdad in 1258 and took Aleppo
and Damascus in 1260, by 1265 the new Sultan of Egypt, the Mamluke general
Baibars, had put them on the defensive, and he soon felt strong enough to focus
his attention on eliminating the remaining Christian strongholds in the Holy Land. In 1265 he
captured Caesarea and Arsuf. In 1266 he took Safed and Galilee. In 1268,
Baibars took Jaffa, Antioch, and Sidon.
King Louis IX, although now 66 years old and very ill, “took
the cross” again. He gathered an army and sailed for North Africa, where he
laid siege to Tunis, but his army was soon decimated by sickness and
demoralized by the death of King Louis himself on August 25, 1270. This was the
ignominious end of the last official crusade.
Edward of England in
the Holy Land: 1271-1272
Prince Edward of England, later Edward I, was in the Holy
Land in 1271-1272, but despite tactical successes he had insufficient military
strength to make a lasting impact on the imbalance of forces.
The End of Christian
Palestine
Baibars’ successor, Kala’un, another Mamluke emir who
murdered his way to power, was determined to eliminate the remaining Christian
strongholds on the coast. Breaking a truce he had made with the Christians, he
captured the Hospitaller fortress of Marquab in 1285. In 1289 he took the
Christian city of Tripoli, slaughtering all the males and flooding the slave
markets with the women and children. In 1291, the last Christian outpost, the
city of Acre, was besieged and captured. The military orders withdrew from
their remaining fortresses without a fight and re-established their
headquarters on Cyprus. The Christian kingdoms established in the Holy Land by
the First Crusade had been extinguished and there wound never again be an armed
pilgrimage by Christians to recapture the sites of Christ’s passion.
No comments:
Post a Comment