Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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Mamluks–the swords of Islam

Mamluks, or slave soldiers, had been used by Muslim rulers in the Levant for centuries, playing significant roles in Zangid and Ayyubid armies through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These fiercely loyal, highly professional warriors were the product of an elaborate system of slavery and military training. Most were Turks from the Russian Kipchak steppes far to the north, beyond the Black Sea; captured as boys (usually between the ages of eight and twelve) by well-organised slave rings, they were sold to Islamic potentates in the Near and Middle East and then indoctrinated in the Muslim faith and trained in the arts of war.

Mamluks were prized not only for their unrivalled martial skill, but also for their fidelity. Because their welfare and survival were directly linked to just one master, they tended to be remarkably faithful–an unusual quality in the conniving quagmire of medieval Islamic power politics. Commenting on their commendable reliability, an eleventh-century Seljuq ruler observed that ‘one obedient slave is better than 300 sons; for the latter desire their father’s death, the former long life for his master’. Strange as it may sound, their loyalty was also a product of relatively rosy life prospects, as many prominent mamluks went on to enjoy command roles, liberty and prosperity.

Rulers from Nur al-Din to al-Kamil employed mamluks in positions ranging from ‘royal’ bodyguards to battlefield generals, but no sultan was more reliant upon their services than al-Salih. After about 1240 he became increasingly suspicious of the trustworthiness of his other retainers and soldiers, and built up a much larger mamluk army. The elite core of this force was a one-thousand-strong regiment known as the Bahriyya (a name derived from their garrison near Cairo on an island in the Nile, which in Arabic was known as the bahr al-Nil, or ‘the sea of the Nile’). One Muslim contemporary recorded that the Bahriyya quickly ‘became a mighty force, of extreme courage and boldness, from which the Muslims derived the greatest benefit’. To an extent, al-Salih’s creation of this select band, alongside his wider use of other mamluk units, made perfect sense. The continued survival of his teetering political regime soon came to depend upon the Bahriyya’s enduring support. But if and when al-Salih died, their loyalty to an Ayyubid successor might waver–indeed, the mamluks might begin even to question whether they should lead rather than follow.

For the time being, the balance held. Al-Salih lived on through the summer and autumn of 1249, establishing a well-protected base of operations for his army beside the fortified town of Mansourah–the same position taken up by his Ayyubid predecessors at the time of the Fifth Crusade. With the Muslim host thus entrenched, and its ranks bolstered by the presence of the Bahriyya, it was evident that King Louis’ crusade would meet far stiffer resistance than that encountered at Damietta if it dared to venture south along the Nile.³⁷

TO CONQUER EGYPT

The Frankish occupation of Damietta was followed by another period of cautious inactivity on Louis’ part. The Capetian sovereign had no interest in using Damietta as a bargaining chip to achieve territorial concessions in Palestine–he aspired instead to conquer all Ayyubid Egypt and then, with Muslim resistance shattered, turn east towards Jerusalem. This strategy meant that, at some point, the crusade would have to march inland. The king seems to have been aware of some of the problems faced in Egypt by Cardinal Pelagius and John of Brienne twenty-eight years earlier, and a number of Christian eyewitnesses present at Damietta in 1249 refer explicitly to the reversals experienced by the Fifth Crusaders. Certainly, with the Nile flood pending, Louis made no immediate attempt to march south. Instead, the expedition waited out the summer.

Through these months, Louis and his advisers debated the next step in the campaign. The port of Alexandria was mooted as a possible target, but one of the king’s brothers, Robert of Artois, apparently recommended a direct southward invasion, arguing that ‘to kill the serpent, you must first of all crush its head’. With al-Salih’s Ayyubid army now barracked at Mansourah, Louis’ crusade, therefore, would face a similar strategic challenge to that confronted by Pelagius. But the experience of the Damietta landings pointed to Muslim weakness, and if success could be achieved on the Nile, the gains might be spectacular. A Muslim chronicler recognised the danger, noting that ‘if the [Ayyubid] army at Mansourah were to be driven back just one stage to the rear, the whole of Egypt would be conquered in the shortest time’.³⁸

Around 20 November 1249, with the floodwaters receding, Louis’ army began its advance along the east bank of the Nile. In comparison to Pelagius, the king had a better–albeit not perfect–understanding of the delta’s topography and a fuller appreciation of the challenge ahead. He set out to trace the route of the river south, marching in parallel with a fleet of ‘many great and small boats loaded with foodstuffs, weapons, engines, armour and everything else needed in warfare’. Progress was slow, partly because a wind blowing from the south made it difficult to advance against the Nile’s current, but a few early probing assaults by the Ayyubids were beaten back easily, and the Christians closed inexorably on Mansourah.

Towards the closing stages of the journey, Louis–like Pelagius before him–must have marched past the point where the Mahalla Canal joined the Nile, but this critical waterway was not mentioned in any of the Christian accounts of the advance and it appears that the Franks made no attempt to block or guard its course. At first glance this seems like sheer neglectful folly, given the decisive role the canal played in 1221. But in all probability neither Louis and his contemporaries, nor the Fifth Crusaders themselves, ever understood fully how al-Kamil managed to get a fleet on to the northern reaches of the Nile. And even if the French king did take the time to reconnoitre the canal in 1249, outside the main summer spate of the flood its low waters were probably deemed to be unnavigable.

In any case, the Franks completed their march on 21 December, taking up a position identical to that occupied by the Fifth Crusade, north of the fork between the Nile and the Tanis River. The Ayyubids had erected a tented camp on the opposite, southern banks of the Tanis, while billeting the bulk of their forces a little further to the south. The Bahriyya mamluks, meanwhile, had been quartered within Mansourah (which, since 1221, had grown from an encampment into a more permanent fortified settlement). In the course of Louis’ march from Damietta, events within the Ayyubid court had moved on apace. After a long, crippling battle with illness, al-Salih died on 22 November. At this point, Fakhr al-Din forged an alliance with one of the late sultan’s widows, Shajar al-Durr. According to Muslim sources, the pair made every effort to conceal al-Salih’s demise: having his body carefully wrapped in a shroud and then spirited away in a coffin; forging his signature on documents that transferred overall command of the army to Fakhr al-Din; even continuing to set the dinner table each evening and claiming that the sultan was too ill to attend.

As far as Shajar al-Durr was concerned, this deception was designed to preserve the veneer of Ayyubid unity in the face of the crusader advance, and to allow the succession to the sultanate to be settled. To this end, Aqtay–commander of the elite Bahriyya mamluks–was sent to Mesopotamia to invite al-Salih’s son and heir, al-Mu‘azzam Turanshah, to assume control of Egypt. Fakhr al-Din agreed to this plan, both to avoid suspicion and because the scheme removed Aqtay (a potential rival) from the field. In private, though, Fakhr al-Din seems to have hoped that, given the distances involved and the enemy lands to be crossed, either the message would not get through or Turanshah would fail in any attempt to reach North Africa. In the words of one Muslim chronicler, Fakhr al-Din ‘was aiming at sole and arbitrary rule’.

Despite all this convoluted intrigue, news of al-Salih’s death eventually leaked out, causing alarm and unrest in Cairo. Before long, Louis IX also discovered that, as he later put it, ‘the sultan of Egypt had just ended his wretched life’–tidings that only increased the king’s hopes for victory.³⁹

The main challenge now confronting the crusaders was somehow to breach the physical barrier of the fast-flowing Tanis River. Louis’ stratagem, seemingly formulated in Damietta, was to build a causeway ‘constructed of timber and earth’ across the river. To achieve this goal, the king instructed his chief engineer Joscelin of Cornaut to oversee a two-stage plan. A pair of ‘cat-houses’–movable towers with extending ‘cats’, or protective screens–were raised, under which labourers would be able to work on the causeway. At the same time, some eighteen stone-throwing engines brought from the coast were erected to provide covering fire. Once all these contraptions had been assembled and manoeuvred into position, the second, more perilous, phase of actual causeway construction began.

Unfortunately for the Franks, the Egyptian army had its own battery of sixteen ballistic engines on the south bank of the Tanis. As soon as the crusaders came into range, Fakhr al-Din initiated an incessant bombardment, ‘using relays of men day and night’ to sustain a constant barrage of ‘stones, javelins, arrows [and] crossbow bolts [that] flew as thick as rain’. Like so many Muslim armies before them, the Ayyubids stationed at Mansourah also held a deadly technological advantage over their Christian foes: a ready supply of highly combustible Greek fire (or, as one Frank aptly named it, ‘Hellfire’). Fakhr al-Din targeted the Latins’ wooden ‘cat-houses’ with volleys of Greek fire to devastating effect. John of Joinville was ordered to man one of these vulnerable towers over a series of nights, and later frankly described the utter terror he and his men experienced, watching flasks of Greek fire hurtling through the darkened sky like ‘dragon[s] flying through the air’, with long ‘tail[s] of fire stream[ing] behind’ them. One day in early 1250 when John was not on duty, the Ayyubid barrage finally told, and the towers went down in flames. Thankful that this had not occurred on his watch, Joinville wrote, ‘I and my knights praised God for such an accident.’⁴⁰

Even with the ‘cat-houses’, the attempts to fashion a causeway had been failing because the river’s fast-moving current eroded the structure. In the first week of February, Louis called off the futile efforts, and morale within the camp sank as it seemed an impasse had been reached. Around this same time, however, a Muslim traitor–variously described as a Bedouin or as a deserter from the Egyptian army–told the Latins about a ford some distance down the course of the Tanis that would give them access to the southern banks of the river. Offered this unexpected glimpse of hope, the French king immediately decided to use this ford to mount a direct attack on the Ayyubid camp.

Aware of the terrible risks involved in this operation, and of the lethal consequences of being caught and surrounded on the far side of the Tanis, Louis formulated his tactics with care. To avoid detection, the crossing would begin before daybreak. The depth of the ford and the need for swift engagement precluded the involvement of infantry, so only mounted knights and sergeants were selected. And with an eye to maintaining strict discipline, these men were drawn from the king’s trusted French contingents and the Templar and Hospitaller Orders. The Franks of Outremer and the Teutonic Knights were to remain in place, defending the northern camp. Above all, it was imperative that the entire strike force reach the south bank and regroup before any attack was mounted. With this in mind, Louis ‘commanded them all–great men and small–that no one should dare to break ranks’.⁴¹

The Battle of Mansourah

Before first light on Tuesday 8 February 1250, the king’s plan was put into action. The Templars led the way, closely followed by a party of knights commanded by Louis’ brother Count Robert of Artois, which included the Englishman William Longsword, earl of Salisbury. It soon became clear that the ford was deeper than expected, requiring horses to swim midstream, and the steep, muddy banks on either side caused some crusaders to fall from their mounts and drown. Nonetheless, hundreds of Franks began to emerge on the far shore.

Then, just as the sun was rising, Robert of Artois made a sudden and unexpected decision to launch an assault, charging at the head of his men towards the Ayyubids’ riverside base. In the confusion, the Templars followed close behind, leaving Louis and the bulk of the strike force stranded in the ford. In this one instant, all hope of an ordered offensive evaporated. It is impossible to know what caused Robert to act so precipitously: perhaps he saw the chance for a surprise attack slipping away; or the promise of glory and renown may have spurred him on. As he rode off, those left behind–the king included–must have felt a mixture of shock, puzzlement and anger.

Even so, at first it looked as though Robert’s audacity might win the day. Ploughing into the unsuspecting Muslim camp, where many were still asleep, the count’s combined force of around 600 crusaders and Templars encountered only token resistance. Racing in among the enemy tents, they began the work of butchery. Fakhr al-Din, who was carrying out his morning ablutions, quickly threw on some clothes, mounted a horse and rode out, unarmed, into the tumult. Set upon by a party of Templars, he was cut down and slain by two mighty sword blows. Elsewhere the slaughter was indiscriminate. One Frankish account described how the Latins were ‘killing all and sparing none’, observing that ‘it was sad indeed to see so many dead bodies and so much blood spilt, except that they were enemies of the Christian faith’.⁴²

This brutal riot overran the Ayyubid encampment and, had Robert now elected to hold the field, reorder his forces and await Louis’ arrival, a stunning victory might well have been at hand. But this was not to be. With Muslim stragglers streaming towards Mansourah, the count of Artois made a woefully hot-headed decision to pursue them. As he moved to initiate a second charge, the Templar commander urged caution, but Robert chided him for his cowardice. According to one Christian account, the Templar replied: ‘Neither I nor my brothers are afraid…but let me tell you that none of us expect to come back, neither you, nor ourselves.’

Together they and their men rode the short distance south to Mansourah and raced into the town. There the folly of their courageous but suicidal decision immediately became apparent. On the open plain, even in the Ayyubid camp, the Christians had been afforded the freedom to manoeuvre and fight in close-knit groups. But once in among the town’s cramped streets and alleyways, that style of warfare proved impossible. Worse still, upon entering Mansourah, the Franks came face to face with the elite Bahriyya regiment quartered in the town. This was to be the Latins’ first deadly encounter with these ‘lions of battle’. A Muslim chronicler described how the mamluks fought with utter ruthlessness and resolve. Surrounding the crusaders ‘on every side’, attacking with spear, sword and bow, they ‘turned their crosses upside down’. Of the 600 or so who rode into Mansourah barely a handful escaped, and both Robert of Artois and William Longsword were killed.⁴³

Back on the banks of the Tanis, as yet unaware of the dreadful slaughter then just beginning in Mansourah, Louis was making a valiant attempt to retain control of his remaining troops, even as squadrons of mounted mamluks began racing forward to counter-attack. One crusader described how ‘a tremendous noise of horns, bugles and drums broke out’ as they drew near; ‘men shouted, horses neighed; it was horrible to see or hear’. But in the thick of the throng, the king held his nerve and slowly fought his way forward to establish a position on the southern edge of the river, opposite the crusader camp. Here the Franks rallied to the Oriflame and made a desperate attempt to hold their ground, while the mamluks loosed ‘dense clouds of bolts and arrows’ and rushed in to engage in hand-to-hand combat. The damage sustained on that day was appalling. One of Joinville’s knights took ‘a lance-thrust between his shoulders, which made so large a wound that the blood poured from his body as if from a bung-hole in a barrel’. Another received a blow from a Muslim sword in the middle of his face that cut ‘through his nose so that it was left dangling over his lips’. He carried on fighting, only to die later of his injuries. As for himself, John wrote: ‘I was only wounded by the enemy’s arrows in five places, though my horse was wounded in fifteen.’

The crusaders came close to routing–some tried to swim across the Tanis, and one eyewitness ‘saw the river strewn with lances and shields, and full of men and horses drowning in the water’. For those fighting alongside the king it seemed as if there was an endless stream of enemies to face, and ‘for every [Muslim] killed, another at once appeared, fresh and vigorous’. But through it all, Louis remained steadfast, refusing to be broken. Inspired by his resilience, the Christians endured wave upon wave of attack, until at last, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, the Muslim offensive slackened. As night fell, the battered Franks retained possession of the field.⁴⁴

Latin sources described this, the Battle of Mansourah, as a great crusader victory, and in one sense it was a triumph. Holding out against horrendous odds, the Franks had established a bridgehead south of the Tanis. But the cost of this achievement was immense. The deaths of Robert of Artois and his contingent, alongside a large proportion of the Templar host, deprived the expedition of many of its fiercest warriors. In any battles still to come, their loss would be keenly felt. And though the crusaders had crossed the river, the town of Mansourah stood before them still, barring their advance.

BETWEEN VICTORY AND DEFEAT

In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Mansourah, Louis IX was confronted by a pressing strategic dilemma. In theory the king had two options: to cut his losses and fall back across the Tanis; or to dig in on the south bank, in the hope of somehow overcoming the Ayyubid enemy. Choosing the former would have been tantamount to conceding defeat, for though this cautious tactic might have permitted the crusade to regroup, the chances of mounting a second cross-river offensive, with a now weakened army, were limited. Louis must also have recognised that the shame and frustration of forsaking a bridgehead won through the sacrifice of so many Christian lives would crush Frankish spirits, probably beyond repair. That night, or at dawn the following morning, the king could have ordered a withdrawal, but this act would have signalled the failure of his Egyptian strategy, effectively marking the crusade’s end.

Given Louis’ earnest belief that his endeavour enjoyed divine sanction and support, and the constant pressure placed upon him to uphold the tenets of chivalry and honour the achievements of his crusading ancestors, it is hardly surprising that he rejected any thought of retreat. Instead, he immediately began to consolidate his position south of the river, scavenging materials from the overrun Muslim camp–including wood from the fourteen remaining engines–to improvise a stockade, while also digging a shallow defensive trench. At the same time, a number of small boats were lashed together to create a makeshift bridge across the Tanis, linking the old northern camp and the crusaders’ new outpost. By these measures, the Franks sought to prepare themselves for the storm of war that would surely come. And for now, Louis seems to have clung to the memory of the sudden victory at Damietta, convinced that Ayyubid resistance was about to collapse.

Three days later, the king’s hopes suffered a first blow. On Friday 11 February, the mamluks initiated a massive onslaught, spearheaded by the Bahriyya, which lasted from dawn till dusk. Thousands of Muslims surrounded the crusader camp, intent upon dislodging the Franks through aerial bombardment and bloody close-quarter combat. Christians later declared that they attacked ‘so persistently, horribly and dreadfully’ that many Latins from Outremer ‘said that they had never seen such a bold and violent assault’. The mamluks’ unbridled ferocity terrified the crusaders, one of whom wrote that they ‘hardly seemed human, but like wild beasts, frantic with rage’, adding that ‘they clearly thought nothing of dying’. Many Franks were carrying injuries from the Battle of Mansourah–Joinville, for example, was no longer able to don armour because of his wounds–but, nonetheless, they fought back manfully, aided by raking showers of crossbow bolts unleashed from the old camp across the river. Once again Louis kept his nerve and the Christians held their ground, but only through the sacrifice of hundreds more dead and injured, among them the master of the Templars, who had lost one eye on 8 February and now lost another and soon died from his wounds.

The Latins demonstrated immense fortitude in the two dreadful mêlèes endured that week. They also claimed to have killed some 4,000 Muslims in this second encounter. There are no figures in Arabic chronicles with which to confirm this count, but, even if accurate, these losses seem to have done little to dent the Ayyubids’ overwhelming numerical superiority. The crusader army had survived, albeit in a terribly weakened state. From this point onwards, it must have been obvious that they were in no position to mount an offensive of their own. At absolute best, they could hope to retain their precarious foothold on the south bank. And if Mansourah was not to be attacked, then how could the war be won?

In the days and weeks that followed, this question became ever more imperative. The Egyptians carried out regular probing attacks, but otherwise were content to confine the Christians within their stockade. By late February, with no possible hint of progress in the campaign, the atmosphere in the camp began to darken, and the crusaders’ predicament was only exacerbated by the outbreak of illness. This was partly linked to the enormous number of dead piled upon the plain and floating in the water. Joinville described seeing scores of bodies dragged down the Tanis by the current, until they piled up against the Franks’ bridge of boats, so that ‘all the river was full of corpses, from one bank to another, and as far upstream as one could cast a small stone’. Food shortages were also starting to take hold, and this led to scurvy.⁴⁵

In this situation, the supply chain down the Nile to Damietta became an essential lifeline. So far, the Christian fleet had been free to ferry goods to the camps at Mansourah, but this was about to change. On 25 February 1250, after long months of travel from Iraq, the Ayyubid heir to Egypt, al-Mu‘azzam Turanshah, arrived at the Nile Delta. He immediately brought new impetus to the Muslim cause. With the Nile flood long abated, the Mahalla Canal contained too little water to be entered to the south, but Turanshah had some fifty ships portaged across land to the canal’s northern reaches. From there, these vessels were able to sail down to the Nile, bypassing the Frankish fleet at Mansourah. Joinville admitted that this dramatic move ‘came as a great shock to our people’. Turanshah’s ploy was virtually identical to the trap sprung against the Fifth Crusade, and for Louis’ expedition it spelled disaster.

Over the next few weeks Ayyubid ships intercepted two Christian supply convoys heading south from Damietta. Cut off by this blockade, the crusaders soon found themselves in a hopeless position. A Latin contemporary described the awful sense of desperation that now gripped the army: ‘Everyone expected to die, no one supposed he could escape. It would have been hard to find one man in all that great host who was not mourning a dead friend, or a single tent or shelter without its sick or dead.’ By this stage, Joinville’s wounds had become infected. He later recalled lying in his tent in a feverish state; outside, ‘barber-surgeons’ were cutting away the rotting gums of those afflicted with scurvy, so they might eat. Joinville could hear the cries of those enduring this gruesome surgery resounding through the camp, and likened them to those ‘of a woman in labour’. Starvation also began to take a heavy toll among men and horses. Many Franks happily consumed carrion from dead horses, donkeys and mules, and later resorted to eating cats and dogs.⁴⁶

The price of indecision

By early March 1250, conditions in the main Christian camp on the south bank of the Tanis were unbearable. One eyewitness admitted that ‘men said openly that all was lost’. Louis was largely responsible for this ruinous state of affairs. In mid-February, he had failed to make a realistic strategic assessment of the risks and possible rewards involved in maintaining the crusaders’ southern camp, holding on to the forlorn hope of Ayyubid disintegration. He also grossly underestimated the vulnerability of his Nile supply line and the number of troops needed to overcome the Egyptian army at Mansourah.

Some of these errors might have been mitigated had the king now acted with decisive resolution–recognising that his position was utterly untenable. The only logical choices remaining were immediate retreat or negotiation, but throughout the month of March Louis embraced neither. Instead, as his troops weakened and died all around him, the French monarch seems to have been paralysed by indecision–unable to face the fact that his grand Egyptian strategy had been thwarted. It was not until early April that Louis finally took action, but by this stage he was too late. Seeking to secure terms of truce with the Ayyubids, he seems to have offered to exchange Damietta for Jerusalem (raising yet another parallel with the Fifth Crusade). A deal of this sort might have been acceptable in February 1250, perhaps even in March, but by April the Muslim stranglehold was clear to all. Turanshah knew that he held a telling advantage and, sensing that victory was close at hand, rebutted Louis’ proposal. All that remained now to the Christians was to attempt a retreat north, across the forty miles of open ground to Damietta.⁴⁷

On 4 April orders were passed through the lines of the exhausted Latin host. The hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of sick and wounded were to be loaded on to boats and ferried down the Nile in the vain hope that some craft might evade the Muslim cordon. The remaining able-bodied crusaders were to march overland to the coast.

By this stage Louis himself was suffering with dysentery. Many leading Franks urged him to flee, either by ship or on horseback, so as to avoid capture. But in a valiant, if somewhat foolhardy, show of solidarity, the king refused to abandon his men. He had led them into Egypt; now he hoped to guide them back out to safety. An ill-conceived plan was hatched to escape under cover of darkness, leaving the tents standing in the southern camp so as not to warn the Muslims that an exodus was under way. Louis also ordered his engineer, Joscelin of Cornaut, to cut the ropes holding the bridge of boats in place once the Tanis had been crossed.

Unfortunately the whole scheme quickly fell apart. Most of the crusaders made it back to the north shore at dusk, but a group of Ayyubid scouts realised what was happening and raised the alarm. With enemy troops bearing down on his position, Joscelin seems to have lost his nerve and fled–certainly the bridge remained in place, and packs of Muslim soldiers crossed over to give chase. In the failing light, panic spread and a chaotic rout began. One Muslim eyewitness described how ‘we followed on their tracks in pursuit; nor did the sword cease its work among their backsides throughout the night. Shame and catastrophe were their lot.’

Earlier that same evening, John of Joinville and two of his surviving knights had boarded a boat and were waiting to push off. He now watched as wounded men, left in the confusion to fend for themselves in the old northern camp, started to crawl to the banks of the Nile, desperately trying to get on to any ship. He wrote: ‘As I was urging the sailors to let us get away, the Saracens entered the [northern] camp, and I saw by the light of the fires that they were slaughtering the poor fellows on the bank.’ Joinville’s vessel made it out into the river and, as the current took the craft downstream, he made good his escape.⁴⁸

By daybreak on 5 April 1250, the full extent of the disaster was apparent. On land, disordered groups of Franks were being keenly pursued by mamluk troops who had no interest in showing clemency. Over the next few days, many hundreds of retreating Christians were slain. One band got to within a day of Damietta, but were then surrounded and capitulated. Throughout the host, the great symbols of Frankish pride and indomitability fell: the Oriflame ‘was torn to pieces’ the Templar standard ‘trampled under foot’.

Riding north, the aged Patriarch Robert and Odo of Châteauroux somehow managed to elude capture, but, after the first twenty-four hours, shattered by their exertions, they were unable to go on. Robert later described in a letter how, by chance, they stumbled across a small boat tied up on the shore and eventually reached Damietta. Few were so fortunate. Most of the ships carrying the sick and injured were ransacked or burned in the water. John of Joinville’s boat made slow progress downstream, even as he beheld terrible scenes of carnage on the banks, but his craft was finally spotted. With four Muslim vessels bearing down on them, Joinville turned to his men, asking if they should land and try to fight their way to safety, or stay on the water and be captured. With disarming honesty, he described how one of his servants declared: ‘We should all let ourselves be slain, for thus we shall go to paradise’, but admitted that ‘none of us heeded his advice’. In fact, when his boat was boarded, Joinville lied to prevent his execution on the spot, saying that he was the king’s cousin. As a result he was taken into captivity.⁴⁹