God's War: A New History of the Crusades (130 page)

However, plans and preparations should be seen not just in relation to execution but also purpose. Here the scale of Louis’s defeat and responsibility for it was matched only by the size of his ambition. Louis saw Egypt as more than a gateway to Jerusalem. He intended it as a new
Christian Frankish colony in Outremer. His concept of the political and colonial needs of the crusade were consequently precise and radical. During the Fifth Crusade, there had been much debilitating debate as to whether to exchange conquests in Egypt for territory in Palestine. Something of this resurfaced in the discussions at Damietta in 1249 on whether to capture Alexandria or advance on Cairo. However, Louis was not interested in using Damietta as a bargaining pawn. Within days of the crusaders’ occupation he had converted the mosques into churches. Before leaving in November 1249, he had established an archbishop and a permanent chapter of cathedral canons. Throughout, Louis treated Damietta as his and administered it as part of his domain. In the end he exchanged it for his own release from captivity. Louis saw himself as ruler of Damietta by right of conquest, the beginning of the far greater conquest of Egypt itself. Arabic sources refer to Louis’s formal defiance to the Sultan in 1249: God will decide whether you or I ought to be master of Egypt.
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Understanding, if disapproval, of Louis’s intentions may be reflected in Matthew Paris’s implied criticism of the whole Egyptian strategy, which he characterized as a magnates’ plot to subvert the proper concentration of the crusade on the recovery of Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
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The English commentator was not unbiased, being hostile to the taxation necessary to fund such expeditions and suspicious of the motives of some
crucesignati
, not least Henry III, who took the cross in 1250 but tried his best to prevent many Englishmen from actually joining the expedition. However, Paris appears to have picked up Louis’s desire to complement his conquest of Egypt with the conversion of the Egyptians.
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In a good position to reflect attitudes as well as gossip at the French and English courts, Paris also repeated a claim of a monk of Pontigny, where the pope spent some time during these years, that Louis took with him to Egypt hoes, harrows, ploughs, ploughshares and other agricultural equipment, adding that Louis was distressed ‘that he had not enough people to guard and inhabit the territory in Egypt which he had already occupied and was about to seize’.
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Conquest, conversion and settlement appeared to be Louis’s ultimate aims: the creation of a new Frankish state in Outremer, under Capetian rule, perhaps one of his brothers. Such a startling policy would fit the widely observed financial arrangements that supplied Louis with regular funds from the west. Such a scheme would explain the rejection of any compromise or the
plan to take Alexandria rather than attack Cairo. The responsibility for the conduct and tactics of the Nile campaign were not the fault of Robert of Artois but the policy of Louis IX.

Here lay the fatal paradox. Louis’s crusade was possibly the most clearly planned, best organized and most coherently mounted of all the larger expeditions to the east. This is not simply an impression created by the greater bulk of surviving archival evidence due to more efficient bureaucratic systems of written record keeping. Although their power should not be exaggerated, thirteenth-century governments possessed stronger tools of fiscal, political and administrative organization and control than their immediate predecessors. Louis himself possessed all the administrative vigour, personal bravery and studied piety associated with the ideal crusader. Yet he failed as dismally as the most unsuccessful of his predecessors. His crusade lacked adequate appropriate shipping or enough manpower to cope with Nile Delta warfare, still less lengthy sieges or lasting conquest and occupation. Less tangible but no less damaging, the ideology and conduct of the enterprise elevated precisely the barriers of culture and religion that directly militated against dissident political elements in Egypt (or elsewhere in the region) making any lasting common cause with the invaders. Joinville’s later story of how some elements in the Egyptian elite after the murder of Tutan Shah wished to make Louis sultan represented the overheated imagination of an old warrior and storyteller. Yet it precisely touched a central weakness of the whole practice of thirteenth-century crusading in the Near East. Local Muslim rulers, dependent on their military, administrative, legal and religious elites, might, in certain circumstance, tolerate Franks as allies, even co-rulers, but never as masters.

Yet again, a crusade had shown itself ineffective against even the most limited of strategic targets. The impact of Louis’s expedition on the wider conflicts of the Near East was marginal. The Ayyubid regime in Egypt had long relied on fractious mercenary groups. Louis’s diplomacy, war or stay in Palestine exerted no influence on the Mongol advance or the prospects for Muslim resistance, still less Frankish survival. Yet, in contrast with the disillusion after the equally ignominious fate of the Second Crusade, Louis’s expedition did not lead to an abandonment of enthusiasm for his cause. With crusading incorporated more into the devotional mentality of western Christendom than a century earlier, the reaction was shock at God’s apparent disfavour and a desire to redeem
sin, not apportion blame. As after 1221, instead of arguing that an Egyptian strategy was impossible, the legacy of Louis’s campaign stirred planners, strategists and propagandists to examine how exactly Egypt could be conquered. The detailed advice composed over the following seventy-five years ostensibly tried to learn the lessons of 1248–50. This was most clearly seen in the work of Marino Sanudo Torsello, who based his plan (devised
c.
1306–21) on a long historical study of the eastern campaigns, including Louis IX’s. His solution was a maritime trade blockade to weaken Egypt’s economy; a small expeditionary force to secure Nile strongpoints followed by a professional army, fully equipped with appropriate shipping, to conquer the country. Only then would a large, mass army of
crucesignati
be launched to reshape the religious and political map of the Near East.
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Sanudo, like Louis IX, identified the problems. But neither he nor the French king nor the long succession of other politicians and self-appointed experts could escape the reality that the freakish legend and myth of 1099 and its subsequent vigorous promotion had bequeathed an unwarranted optimism for an ideal that, pointless or not, was increasingly unattainable.

THE SHEPHERDS’ CRUSADE 1251

Louis’s crusade was the last great western campaign to reach the shores of the eastern Mediterranean until the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt in 1798. Its failure caused a sensation in the west, as it had in the Near East. Bad news travels fast. On 1 August 1250, Richard of Cornwall was sitting in the Exchequer at Westminster when he was brought the story of the death of William Longspee at Mansourah.
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When the full extent of the disaster reached the west, unrest in Venice and other Italian cities was reported. France plunged into a sort of public mourning. For many, the grief was immediate and personal; for lost sons, brothers, husbands and fathers–and some mothers and daughters too. As he lay awaiting captivity in a hut near Sharamsah on 6 April 1250, Louis’s head was cradled by a woman from Paris.
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But in France reactions took a more aggressive turn, which revealed the extent of popular engagement in public affairs, the fragility of social and political control by the authorities and the existence of a wider civil society whose voice was usually drowned out by the deeds of their social, educational and economic superiors.

In the spring of 1251 a popular movement began to be organized in Brabant, Flanders, Hainault and Picardy, all areas of active, if in places confused, crusade preaching and fundraising. Rural bands of what clerical observers slightingly referred to as ‘shepherds and simple people’ gathered with the declared purpose of joining Louis in the Holy Land.
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Critical of the failure of the nobility to achieve success in the crusade and hostile to those who had not even gone east, these ‘pastoureaux’ (literally shepherds) adopted the guise of religious processions, reminiscent of 1212. Marching on Paris, they carried holy banners, proclaimed their direct inspiration from the Virgin Mary and offered crosses and absolution of sins as they went. The influence of crusade preaching and Louis’s religious propaganda that surrounded the raising of men, money and provisions were obvious from the symbols of the passion they carried on their flags, the cross and the lamb. The latter may even have helped provide them with their name.
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The marchers were not inarticulate rabbles. Their mission spoke of ordered response to the crisis of Louis’s defeat. Coming from liminal regions of France may have heightened their desire to occupy the centre of the political debate without the traditional networks of contact and exchange with that central authority. Their social critique matched the official line on collective sin, their increasing anti-clericalism a reflection on the prominent part in crusade preparations played by the clergy, especially the friars, for financial and administrative purposes.

Initially, the ‘pastoureaux’ appeared a credible force of active support for the beleaguered French king. The regency government under his mother, Blanche of Castile, welcomed them in Paris and provided them with supplies. Some, at least, apparently found the means to join the king in the Holy Land.
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However, the implied social radicalism of their message soon drove elements of the movement beyond the pale of political respectability. Although characterized by observers as a single large army of protestors, it is likely that, as well as the main contingents from the north-east of the kingdom, there were separate and simultaneous outbreaks of popular enthusiasm across northern France, from Normandy to the Loire and into Berry. After the government decided to reject their call, some of these groups turned to violence and crime. There was trouble at Rouen in June. At Orléans, scholars were attacked. Everywhere, priests and friars were threatened. The ‘pastoureaux’ now appeared as armed criminal gangs, living off the land and terrorizing
the population. At Bourges, a large body ran riot under a leader called ‘the Master of Hungary’, allegedly fluent in French, German and Latin, possibly a renegade monk, a characterization that served the purposes of disapproving observers by locating authority in traditional but perverted hands. This band assaulted Jews and looted the local synagogue before the city authorities and townspeople turned on them. ‘The Master’ himself was hacked to death and his followers dispersed, although some managed to continue their rampage as far south as Bordeaux.

Many aspects of these uprisings showed a clear and precise understanding and knowledge of the public policy of the French crown, witnessed by the symbols of the Passion, the request for validation and support from Blanche of Castile, the hostility to the venality of the clergy, the criticism of the nobility, and the appropriation of the mechanics of giving the cross and remitting sins. The attacks on Jews was entirely in keeping with Louis IX’s own persecution, as was the general call to press political action into the service of God, who was presented as the chief instigator of policy. Although disapproving clerical commentators branded them as sexually hedonistic and criminal, out of social order and so out of moral control, the marchers seemed to possess discipline. The Master of Hungary claimed education. His targets could have been convincingly characterized to a far wider audience than the rioters as privileged spongers: Jews, scholars and clergy who appeared in cahoots with a political system whose venality ostentatiously conflicted with its stated goals. Yet this was no random proletarian revolt or social rebellion. The ‘pastoureaux’ declared their devotion to their king and his cause, claiming that they, instead of the traditional elites, were expressing and pursuing the best interests of royal policy. The uprisings’ organization, cohesion and behaviour suggests the involvement of the politically rather than the economically marginalized, but not of the politically ignorant or innocent. The disturbances in 1251 revealed further evidence of the penetration of crusading practice into the mentalities of an increasingly diverse and sophisticated civil society, one educated by evangelism and taxation, energized by the circulation of detailed news of atrocities and disasters that, in the perspective of collective religious imagination, seemed not distant, but immediate and urgent. Just as such emotions underpinned and explained Louis IX’s preparations from 1244 to 1248, so they produced the unrest and violence of 1251.

THE FAILED COUNTER-ATTACK OF LOUIS IX’S SECOND CRUSADE

Louis IX’s unofficial protectorate over Frankish Palestine survived his departure in April 1254, embodied in the resident French garrison and the annual material and financial subsidies channelled east, some years thousands of livres, mainly derived from church funds and loans, although underwritten by the French government. Despite Joinville’s prediction on the day they sailed away from Acre, that Louis ‘had that day been reborn’, entering a ‘new life when he escaped from that perilous land’, the king never forgot Jerusalem.
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Instead, he cultivated the impression of a monarch whose gaze rested on the world of the spirit, a focus given physical expression in his and his court’s continued declarations of devotion to the plight of the Holy Land. Added to his material power, this stance lent Louis enormous prestige and effectiveness as an international arbiter, especially as successive popes between 1254 and 1268 became locked into the destruction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, a cause not seen by all Christians as of transcendent importance. Louis established a moral authority rare for a medieval layman. He became in some respects,
mutatis mutandis
, the Nelson Mandela of his day, a man of suffering, acquainted with grief, of seemingly unimpeachable integrity yet active in the temporal affairs of nations. Like many politicians, Louis fashioned his life to suit his public needs in a creation of art and piety.
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This image acted as more than a pose; it framed practical politics, not least in a willingness to return to the east to reverse the decision of 1250.