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PART VII The Saint’s Crusades, 1248–1270 Like Frederick II and other thirteenth-century crusaders, Louis IX of France came from a distinguished crusading dynasty. His great-grandfather Louis VII had been one of the leaders of the Second Crusade, his grandfather Philip II Augustus one of the leaders of the Third Crusade, and his father Louis VIII had died on the Albigensian Crusade. This family legacy and the ominous events of the 1230s and early 1240s—the Mongol threat, the destruction of Jerusalem and the slaughter at La Forbie in 1244, the papal call for a crusade against Frederick II in 1239 and again in 1244, and the optimism created by the apparent successes of the Barons’ Crusade—certainly sharpened Louis’s sense of devotion and crusading obligation. In 1238 Louis had purchased the Crown of Thorns from the Latin emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin, and began construction of the Sainte Chapelle to house it and other relics. Over the winter of 1244 Louis was overtaken by a lifethreatening illness, and on his recovery, he took the cross. Louis and his three brothers—Robert of Artois, Alphonse of Poitiers, and Charles of Anjou—and many of his subjects attended the great assembly in Paris in 1245, which was followed by the most detailed planning of any crusade. As William C. Jordan, Caroline Smith, Peter Jackson, and others have pointed out, Louis examined virtually every facet of royal governance, rights, and resources in the entire kingdom. Louis used mendicants as inquirers into every corner of the kingdom, and he appointed his mother Blanche of Castile as regent during his absence. Louis designated Cyprus as the main staging area, and for two years Cyprus was stocked with substantial amounts of every conceivable crusading need, from food (and wine) to weapons and other resources. The immense cost of the crusade—around two million livres tournois—amounted to eight times the annual royal income and was raised also through a tax of one-twentieth on all ecclesiastical incomes and for three years a tax of one-tenth on the French clergy. Louis formally took up his pilgrim’s scrip and staff as well as the oriflamme, the banner of the kings of France at war, in Paris on June 12, 1248. The army of twenty to twenty-five thousand troops sailed to Cyprus, planning , like the Fifth Crusade, an attack on Egypt. The army landed on the Egyptian coast and moved swiftly south, finding Damietta deserted, and encountered the forces of the sultan as-Salih under the command of Fakhr ad-Din at Mansura on February 8, 1250. Again, the crusader forces were defeated by the strength and skill of as-Salih’s army, greatly increased by the slave-soldiers known as Mamluks, the treacherous hydrology of Nilotic northern Egypt, and several tactical errors on the part of Christian leaders. Louis himself was captured and released in exchange Saint’s Crusades 349 for Damietta, a ten-year truce was agreed upon, and other nobles were ransomed for the sum of 800,000 gold bezants (around 400,000 livres tournois). Louis and much of the surviving army sailed to Palestine, where they spent four years refortifying the defenses and extracting their captured comrades from captivity. In April 1254, Louis returned to France. In 1266 Pope Clement IV planned a small crusade in conjunction with Abagha of Persia and the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus. But delays on the part of Clement and his allies permitted the new Mamluk sultan Baibars to retake Antioch in 1268. Clement IV died in the same year, and there was no papal election until 1271. But Louis IX once more took up the cross, and in July 1270 he sailed for North Africa again, this time to Tunis, where he became seriously ill and died in August 1270. His remains were carried back to France with great mourning. The sources for Louis’s internal reforms in France and for his first crusade are abundant. The most widely known of them is the Life of Saint Louis written by the seneschal of the county of Champagne, Jean de Joinville (below, No. 50). There also survive several letters from this crusade sent back to inform the kingdom of the early triumphs on the way to Mansura (below, No. 51), and a long letter from Louis himself to his subjects concerning the defeat (below, No. 53). There are also several Arabic accounts of Louis’s defeat and captivity (below, No. 52...

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