——
EIGHTH CRUSADE.
A.D. 1255-1270.
Louis IX., during his sojourn in Palestine, had not only employed himself in fortifying the Christian cities; he had neglected no means of establishing that union and harmony among the Christians themselves, which he felt would create their only security against the attacks of the Mussulmans: unhappily for this people, whom he would have preserved at the peril of his life, his counsels were not long in being forgotten, and the spirit of discord soon displaced the generous sentiments to which his example and discourses had given a momentary life.
It may have been observed in the course of this history, that several maritime nations had stores, counting-houses, and considerable commercial establishments at Ptolemaïs, which had become the capital of Palestine. Among these nations, Genoa and Venice occupied the first rank: each of these colonies inhabited a separate quarter, and had different laws, besides interests, which kept them at constant variance; the only thing they possessed in common,[1] was the Church of St. Sabbas, in which the Venetians and the Genoese assembled together to celebrate the ceremonies of their religion.
This common possession had often been a subject of quarrel between them; a short time after the departure of St. Louis, discord broke out anew, and roused all the passions that the spirit of rivalry and jealousy could give birth to between two nations which had so long contended for the empire of the sea and pre-eminence in commerce. Amidst this struggle, in which the very object of the contest ought to have recalled sentiments of peace and charity to their hearts, the Genoese and Venetians often came to blows in the city of Ptolemaïs, and more than once, the sanctuary, which the two parties had fortified like a place of war, resounded with the din of their sacrilegious battles.
Discord very soon crossed the seas, and carried fresh troubles into the West. Genoa interested the Pisans in her cause, and sought allies and auxiliaries even among the Greeks, at that time impatient to repossess Constantinople. Venice, in order to avenge her injuries, courted the alliance of Manfroi, who had been excommunicated by the head of the Church. Troops were raised, fleets were armed, and the parties attacked each other both by land and sea; and this war, which the sovereign pontiff was unable to quell, lasted more than twenty years, sometimes to the advantage of the Venetians, as frequently to that of the Genoese; but always fatal to the Christian colonies of the East.
This spirit of discord likewise extended its baneful influence to the rival orders of St. John and the Temple; and the blood of these courageous defenders of the Holy Land flowed in torrents in cities of which they had undertaken the defence; the Hospitallers and Templars pursued and attacked each other with a fury that nothing could appease or turn aside, both orders invoking the aid of the knights that remained in the West. Thus the noblest families of Christendom were dragged into these sanguinary quarrels, and it was no longer asked in Europe whether the Franks had conquered the Saracens, but if victory had been favourable to the knights of the Temple or to those of the Hospital.
The brave Sergines, whom Louis IX. had at his departure left at Ptolemaïs, and the wisest of the other defenders of the Holy Land, had neither authority enough to reëstablish tranquillity, nor troops enough to resist the attacks of the Mussulmans. The only hope of safety which appeared to be left to the Christians of Palestine, arose from the divisions which also troubled the empire of the Saracens; every day new revolutions broke out among the Mamelukes; but, by a singular contrast, feuds, that weakened the power of the Franks, often seemed only to increase that of their enemies. If, from the feeble kingdom of Jerusalem, we pass into Egypt, we there behold the strange spectacle of a government founded by revolt, and strengthening itself amidst political tempests. The Christian colonies, since the taking of Jerusalem, by Saladin, had no longer a common centre or a common tie; the kings of Jerusalem, in losing their capital, lost an authority which served at least as a war-cry, by which to rally ardent spirits around them. Nothing was preserved of royalty but the name, nothing was gained from republicanism but its license. As to the Mamelukes, they were less a nation than an army, in which they at first quarrelled for a leader, and in which they afterwards obeyed him blindly. From the bosom of each of their revolutions sprang a military despotism, armed with all the passions that had given birth to it, and, what must have redoubled the alarm of the Christians, this despotism breathed nothing but war and conquest.
We have said, in the preceding book, that Aibek, after having espoused the sultana Chegger-Eddour, had mounted the throne of Saladin; but it was not long before his reign was disturbed by the rivalries of the emirs. The death of Phares-Eddin Octhaï, one of the leaders opposed to the new sultan, disconcerted the projects of the faction, but the jealousy of a woman did that which neither faction nor license had been able to effect. Chegger-Eddour could not pardon Aibek for having asked the hand of a daughter of the prince of Mossoul, and the faithless husband was assassinated in the bath by slaves. The sultana, after having gratified her woman’s vengeance, called in the ambition of the emirs and the crimes of policy to her aid.[2] She sent for the emir Saif-Eddin, to ask his advice, and to offer him her hand and empire. Upon being introduced into the palace, Saif-Eddin found the Sultana seated, with the bleeding body of her husband at her feet: at this spectacle, the emir was seized with horror, and the calmness which the sultana displayed, together with the sight of the bloody throne, upon which she proposed to him to take his seat with her, added to his fright; Chegger-Eddour summoned two other emirs, who could not endure her presence, but fled away, terrified at what they saw and heard. This scene passed during the night. At break of day, the news of it was spread throughout Cairo, and the indignation of the people and the army was general and active: the mother of Aibek amply revenged the death of her son. Chegger-Eddour, in her turn, perished by the hands of slaves, and her body, which was cast into the castle ditch, might teach all the ambitious who were contending for the empire, that revolutions, likewise, sometimes have their justice.
Amidst the tumult, a son of Aibek, fifteen years of age, was raised to the throne; but the approach of a war soon caused a new revolution to break out, and precipitated the youth from his giddy eminence: great events were ripening in Asia, and a storm was brewing in Persia, which was soon to burst over both Syria and Egypt.[3]
The Moguls, under the command of Oulagon, had laid siege to Bagdad, at a moment when the city was divided into several sects, all more earnest in their conflicts with each other than in their preparations to repulse a formidable enemy. The caliph, as well as his people, was sunk deep in voluptuous effeminacy, and the pride created by the vain adulation of the Mussulmans, made him neglect true and available means of defence. The Tartars took the city by storm, and gave it up to all the horrors of war. The last and thirty-seventh of the successors of Abbas, dragged away like the vilest captive, lost his life in the midst of such tumult and disorder, that history[4] is unable to say whether he died of despair, or whether he fell beneath the sword of his enemies.
This violence, committed upon the head of the Mussulman religion, with the march of the Moguls towards Syria, threw the Mamelukes into the greatest consternation. They then deemed it necessary to displace the son of Aibek, and elect a leader able to guide them amidst the perils that threatened them, and their choice fell upon Koutouz, the bravest and most able of the emirs.
Whilst Egypt was earnestly engaged in preparations to resist the Moguls, the Christians appeared to expect their deliverance from this war against the Mussulmans; the khan of Tartary had promised the king of Armenia to carry his conquests as far as the banks of the Nile; and oriental chronicles relate that the Armenian troops were united with those of the Moguls.[5] The latter, after having crossed the Euphrates, took possession of Aleppo, Damascus, and the principal cities of Syria. On all sides, the Mussulmans fled before the Tartars, and the disciples of Christ were protected by the victorious hordes; from that time the Christians only beheld liberators in these redoubtable conquerors. In the churches, and even upon the tomb of Christ, prayers were put up for the triumph of the Moguls, and in the excess of their joy, the Christians of Palestine abandoned their general practice of imploring aid from the powers of Europe.
In the mean time Europe itself entertained a very different idea of this war; the progress of the Moguls created the greatest terror in all the nations of the West; they not only dreaded the Mogul arms on account of the Christian colonies of the East; they trembled for themselves;[6] for whilst the hordes of Oulagon were ravaging Syria, other armies of the same nation were desolating the banks of the Dniester and the Danube. Pope Alexander, addressing the princes, prelates, and all the faithful, exhorted them to unite against the barbarians. Councils were assembled in France, England, Italy, and Germany, to deliberate upon the dangers of Christendom; the head of the Church ordered prayers to be offered up and processions to be made, blasphemies to be punished, and luxury to be suppressed at the table and in dress,—measures which might be conceived proper to mitigate the anger of Heaven, but very insufficient to stop the invasion of the Moguls.
The hordes, however, which ravaged Hungary and Poland were dispersed, and terror again took possession of the Christians of the East, whose hopes had been so sanguine. Oulagon, recalled into Persia by civil wars, left his lieutenant, Ketboga, in Syria, with directions to follow up his conquests. The Christians were still applauding the victories of the Moguls, when a quarrel, provoked by some German Crusaders, all at once changed the state of things, and made enemies of those who had been considered as auxiliaries. Some Mussulman villages which paid tribute to the Tartars, having been pillaged, Ketboga sent to demand a reparation of the Christians, which they refused. In the course of the dispute raised on this subject, the nephew of the Mogul commander was killed. From that time the Tartar leader declared open war against the Christians, ravaged the territory of Sidon, and menaced that of Ptolemaïs. At the aspect of their desolated plains, all the hopes of the Christians vanished; they had had no bounds to their hopes and their joy, they had now none to their grief or their fears. The alarm created in them by a barbarous people, made them forget that most of their misfortunes came from Egypt, and as they had given over all idea of succours from the West, many of them now placed all their confidence in the arms of the Mamelukes.
A great portion of Palestine had already been invaded by the Moguls, when the sultan of Cairo set out on his march to meet them at the head of his army; he remained three days in the neighbourhood of Ptolemaïs, where he renewed a truce with the Christians. Soon after, a battle was fought in the plain of Tiberias; Ketboga lost his life in the middle of the conflict, and the army of the Tartars, beaten and scattered, abandoned Syria.
To whichever side victory might have inclined, the Christians had nothing to hope from the conqueror; the Mussulmans could not pardon them for having sought the support of the victorious Moguls, and having taken advantage of the desolation of Syria, to insult the disciples of Mahomet. The churches were demolished at Damascus; the Christians were persecuted in all the Mussulman cities, and these persecutions were the presage of a war in which fanaticism exercised all its furies. On all sides complaints and menaces arose against the Franks of Palestine; the cry of war with the Christians resounded through all the provinces in the power of the Mamelukes; the animosity was so great, that the sultan of Cairo, who had just triumphed over the Tartars, was the victim to his fidelity in observing the last truce concluded with the Franks. Bibars, who had killed the last sultan of the family of Saladin, took advantage of this effervescence of the public mind to endeavour to raise a party against Koutouz, by affecting great hatred for the Christians, and by reproaching the sultan with a criminal moderation towards the enemies of Islamism.
When the fermentation had been worked up to the highest point, Bibars, having assembled his accomplices, surprised the sultan whilst hunting, struck him several mortal blows, then, all stained as he was with the blood of his master, he hastened to the Mameluke army, at that time collected at Sallhie; he presented himself to the atabek or lieutenant of the prince, announcing the death of Koutouz. Upon being asked who killed the sultan. “It was I,” answered he. “In that case,” said the atabek, “reign in his place.”[7] Strange words, which characterize at a single stroke the spirit of the Mamelukes, as well as of the government they had founded! The army proclaimed Bibars sultan of Egypt, and the ceremonies prepared at Cairo for the reception of the conqueror of the Tartars, served to celebrate the coronation of his murderer.
This revolution gave the Mussulmans the sovereign most to be dreaded by the Christians. Bibars was named the pillar of the Mussulman religion and the father of victories; and he was destined to merit these titles by completing the ruin of the Franks. He had scarcely mounted the throne before he gave the signal for war.
The Christians of Palestine being totally without means of resisting the Mameluke forces, sent deputies to the West to solicit prompt and efficient succour. The sovereign pontiff appeared affected by the account of the perils of the Holy Land, and exhorted the faithful to take the cross; but the tone of his exhortations, and the motives that he named in his circulars, only too plainly evinced his desire to see Europe take up arms against other enemies than the Mussulmans. “The Saracens,” said he, “know that it will be impossible for any Christian prince to make a long abode in the East,[8] and that the Holy Land will never have any but transient succour from distant countries.”
Alexander IV. was much more sincere and far more eloquent in his manifestoes against the house of Swabia; the interest he took in the contest he was carrying on in the kingdom of Naples could not be diverted by the undertaking of a holy war. Clement IV., who succeeded him, made some few demonstrations of zeal to engage the European nations to take arms against the Mussulmans; but the policy of his predecessors had left too many germs of discord and trouble in Italy, to allow him to give much attention to the East. On one side, Germany, still without an emperor, though with three pretenders to the empire, could spare no warriors for the Holy Land. England was a prey to a civil war, in which the barons wore a white cross as their badge of union against the king, and in which priests exhorted them to the fight, pointing to heaven as the reward of their bravery and their rebellion. This strange crusade precluded all thoughts of one beyond the seas. France was the only kingdom from which the prayers of the Christians of Palestine were not repulsed; some French knights took the cross, and chose Eudes, count of Nevers, son of the duke of Burgundy, as their leader; and these were all the succours Europe could afford to send to the East.
At the same time that the afflicting news arrived from the Holy Land, an event was announced which would have plunged the whole West in mourning, if the conquests of the Crusaders had then excited anything like the interest to which they had given birth in former ages. We have frequently had occasion to deplore the rapid decline of the Latin empire of Constantinople; for a length of time, Baldwin had had no means for supporting the imperial dignity, or paying his scanty troop of soldiers, but the alms of Christendom, and some loans obtained from Venice, for which he was obliged to give his own son as a hostage, or, more properly, a pledge. In pressing moments of want, he sold the relics, he tore the lead from the roofs of the churches, and the timber of public edifices was used for heating the fires of the imperial kitchens. Towers half-demolished, ramparts without defences, palaces smoky and deserted, houses and whole streets abandoned, such was the spectacle presented by the queen of eastern cities.
Baldwin had concluded a truce with Michael Palæologus. The facility with which this truce was made ought to have inspired the Latins with some suspicion; but the deplorable state of the Franks did not prevent them from despising their enemies or dreaming of fresh conquests. In hopes of pillage, and forgetful of the perfidious character of the Greeks, a Venetian fleet bore such as remained of the defenders of Byzantium in an expedition against Daphnusia, situated at the embouchure of the Black Sea. The Greeks of Nice, informed by some peasants from the shores of the Bosphorus, did not hesitate to take advantage of the opportunity fortune thus presented. These peasants pointed out to the general of Michael Palæologus, who was about to make war in Epirus, an opening that had been made under the ramparts of Constantinople, close to the Golden Gate, by which more troops might be introduced than would be necessary for the conquest of the city. Baldwin had none with him but children, old men, women, and traders; among the latter of whom were the Genoese newly allied to the Greeks. When the soldiers of Michael had penetrated into the city, they were surprised to find no enemy to contend with; whilst they preserved their ranks, and advanced with precaution, a troop of Comans, whom the Greek emperor had in his pay, traversed the city, sword and fire in hand. The small, terrified crowd of the Latins fled towards the port; whilst the Greek inhabitants hastened to meet the conqueror, shouting, “Long life to Michael Palæologus, emperor of the Romans!” Baldwin, awakened by these cries and the tumult that drew near to his palace, hastened to quit a city that no longer was his. The Venetian fleet, returning from the expedition to Daphnusia, arrived in time to receive the fugitive emperor and all that remained of the empire of the Franks upon the Bosphorus. Thus the Latins were deprived of that city that it had cost them such prodigies of valour to obtain; the Greeks reëntered it without striking a blow, seconded only by the treachery of a few peasants and the darkness of night. Baldwin II., after having reigned in Byzantium during thirty-seven years, resumed the mendicant course he had practised in his youth, and wandered from one court to another, imploring the assistance of Christians. Pope Urban received him with a mixture of compassion and contempt. In a letter addressed to Louis IX., the pontiff deplored the loss of Constantinople, and groaned bitterly over the obscured glory of the Latin Church. Urban expressed a desire that a crusade should be undertaken for the recovery of Byzantium; but he found men’s minds but very little disposed to undertake such an enterprise: the clergy of both England and France refused subsidies for an expedition which they pronounced useless. The pope was obliged to content himself with the submission and presents of Michael Palæologus, who, still in dread in the bosom of his new conquest, promised, in order to appease the Holy See, to recognise the Church of Rome, and to succour the holy places.
In the mean time the situation of the Christians of Palestine became every day more alarming, and more worthy of the compassion of the nations and princes of the West. The new sultan of Cairo, after having ravaged the country of the Franks, returned a second time, with a more formidable army than the former. The Franks, alarmed at his progress, sent to him to sue for peace; his only reply was to give up the church of Nazareth to the flames; the Mussulmans ravaged all the country situated between Naïn and Mount Thabor, and then encamped within sight of Ptolemaïs.
The most distinguished of the Christian warriors had attempted an expedition towards Tiberias; but this gallant troop, the last resource of the Franks, had just been defeated and dispersed by the infidels; fifty knights had arrived in Palestine with the duke of Nevers; but what could such a feeble reinforcement do to arrest the progress of a victorious army.
The country was laid waste, and the inhabitants of the cities kept themselves closely shut up behind their ramparts, in the constant apprehension of beholding the enemy under their walls. After threatening Ptolemaïs, Bibars threw himself upon the city of Cæsarea; the Christians, after a spirited resistance, abandoned the place, and retired into the castle, which was surrounded by the waters of the sea. This fortress, which appeared inaccessible, was only able to resist the attacks of the Mussulmans a few days.[9] The city of Arsouf was the next object of the Mussulman leader. The inhabitants defended themselves with almost unexampled bravery; several times the machines of the besiegers and the heaps of wood which they raised to the level of the walls, were consigned to the flames. After having fought at the foot of the ramparts, the besieged and the besiegers dug out the earth beneath the walls of the city, and sought each other, to fight in the mines and subterranean passages; nothing could relax the ardour of the Christians or the impatient activity of Bibars. Religious fanaticism animated the courage of the Mamelukes; the imauns and doctors of the law flocked to the siege of Arsouf, to be present at the triumph of Islamism: at length the sultan planted the standard of the prophet upon the towers of the city, and the Mussulmans were called to prayers in the churches at once converted into mosques. The Mamelukes massacred a great part of the inhabitants; the remainder were condemned to slavery. Bibars distributed the captives among the leaders of his army; he then ordered the destruction of the city, and the Christian prisoners were compelled to demolish their own dwellings. The conquered territory was divided and shared among the principal emirs, according to an order of the sultan, which the Arabian chronicles have preserved as an historical monument. This liberality towards the conquerors of the Christians, appeared to the Mussulmans worthy of the greatest praise, and one of the historians of Bibars exclaims, in his enthusiasm, “That so noble an action was written in the book of God, before being inscribed upon the book of the life of the sultan.”
Such encouragements bestowed upon the emirs, announced that Bibars still stood in need of their valour to accomplish other designs. The sultan returned into Egypt, to make fresh preparations and recruit his army. During his sojourn at Cairo, he received ambassadors from several kings of the Franks, from Alphonso, king of Arragon, the king of Armenia, and some other princes of Palestine. All these ambassadors demanded peace for the Christians; but their pressing solicitations only strengthened the sultan in his project of continuing the war; the more earnest their entreaties, the greater reason he had to believe they had nothing else to oppose to him. He answered the envoys of the count of Jaffa: “The time is come in which we will endure no more injuries; when a cottage shall be taken from us, we will take a castle; when you shall seize one of our labourers, we will consign a thousand of your warriors to chains.”
Bibars did not delay putting his threats into execution; he returned to Palestine, and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to implore the protection of Mahomet for his arms. His army immediately received the signal for war, and ravaged the territory of Tripoli. If some Oriental chronicles may be believed, the project of Bibars then was to attack Ptolemaïs; and in so great an enterprise, he did not disdain the assistance of treachery. The prince of Tyre, says Ibn-Ferat, united with the Genoese, was to attack Ptolemaïs with a numerous fleet on the sea side, whilst the Mamelukes attacked it by land. Bibars in fact presented himself before Ptolemaïs, but his new auxiliaries no doubt repented of the promises they had made him; and did not second his designs. The sultan retired filled with fury, and threatened to avenge himself upon all the Christians whom war should place in his power.
He first went to discharge his anger upon the fortress of Sefed, which was situated in lower Galilee, fifteen leagues from Ptolemaïs. This fortress had to defend itself against all the forces that the sultan had gathered together for his great enterprise. When the siege had begun, Bibars neglected no means of forcing the garrison to surrender; he was constantly at the head of his troops, and in one conflict, his whole army burst into a loud cry to warn him of a danger that threatened him. To inflame the ardour of the Mamelukes, he caused robes of honour and purses of money to be distributed on the field of battle; the great cadi of Damascus had come to the siege to animate the combatants by his presence; and the promises he addressed, in the name of the prophet, to all the Mussulman soldiers, added greatly to their warlike enthusiasm.
The Christians, however, defended themselves valiantly. This resistance at first astonished their enemies, and soon produced discouragement; in vain the sultan endeavoured to reanimate his soldiers, in vain he ordered that all who fled should be beaten back with clubs, and placed several emirs in chains for deserting their posts; neither the dread of chastisements, nor the hopes of reward, could revive the courage of the Mussulmans. Bibars would have been obliged to raise the siege, if discord had not come to his assistance. He himself took great pains to give birth to it among the Christians; in the frequent messages sent to the garrison, perfidious promises and well-directed threats sowed the seeds of suspicion and mistrust. At length the divisions burst forth; some were anxious that they should surrender, others that they should hold out to death: from that moment the Mussulmans met with a less obstinate resistance, and renewed their own attacks with greater ardour; whilst the Christians accused each other of treacherous proceedings or intentions, the war-machines made the walls totter, and the Mamelukes, after several assaults, were upon the point of opening themselves a road into the place. At length, one Friday (we quote an Arabian chronicle), the cadi of Damascus was praying for the combatants, when the Franks were heard to cry from the top of their half-dismantled towers, “O Mussulmans, spare us, spare us!” The besieged had laid down their arms, and fought no longer—the gates were immediately opened, and the standard of the Mussulmans floated over the walls of Sefed.
A capitulation granted the Christians permission to retire wherever they wished, upon condition that they should take away with them nothing but their clothes. Bibars, when seeing them defile before him, sought for a pretext to detain them in his power. Some were, by his orders, arrested and accused of carrying away treasures and arms; and the command was instantly issued to stop all. They were reproached with having violated the treaty, and were threatened with death if they did not embrace Islamism. They were loaded with chains and crowded together in a mass upon a hill, where they expected nothing but death. A commander of the Temple and two Cordeliers exhorted their companions in misfortune to die like Christian heroes. All those warriors, whom discord had divided, now reunited in one common evil, had only one feeling and one thought;[10] they wept as they embraced each other, they encouraged each other to die becomingly; they passed the night in confessing their sins towards God, and in deploring their errors and their differences. On the morrow, two only of these captives were set at liberty; one was a brother Hospitaller, whom Bibars sent to Ptolemaïs, to announce to the Christians the taking of Sefed; the other was a Templar, who abandoned the faith of Christ, and attached himself to the fortunes of the sultan; all the others, to the number of six hundred, fell beneath the sword of the Mamelukes. This barbarity, committed in the name of the Mussulman religion, appears the more revolting, from the Franks never having given an example for it, and that amidst the furies of war, they were never known to require the conversion of infidels, sword in hand.[11]
It is impossible to describe the despair and consternation of the Christians of Palestine, when they learnt the tragical end of the defenders of Sefed. Their superstitious grief invented or blindly received the most marvellous accounts, which the Western chroniclers have not disdained to repeat; it was said that a celestial light shone every night over the bodies of the Christian warriors that remained unburied.[12] It was added that the sultan, annoyed by this prodigy, which was every day renewed before his eyes, gave orders that the martyrs of the Christian faith should be buried, and that around their place of sepulture high walls should be built, in order that nobody might witness the miracles operated in favour of the victims he had immolated to his vengeance.
After the taking of Sefed, Bibars returned into Egypt, and the Franks hoped for a few days of repose and safety; but the indefatigable sultan never gave his enemies much time to rejoice at his absence. He only remained in Egypt till he had recruited his army with fresh troops, and soon brought back additional desolation to the states of the Christians. In this campaign, Armenia was the point to which his anger and the power of his arms were directed; he reproached the Armenian monarch with forbidding Egyptian merchants to enter his dominions, and could not pardon him for preventing his own subjects from obtaining merchandise from Egypt. These differences were quickly settled on the field of battle; one of the sons of the king of Armenia lost his liberty, and the other his life: the army of Bibars returned loaded with booty, and followed by an innumerable multitude of captives.
As, after each of his victories, the sultan presented himself before Ptolemaïs, the capital of the Christian states, he did not fail on his return from this last expedition, to exhibit before the walls of this city the spoils of the people of Armenia, together with his own machines of war; but the moment was not yet arrived in which such a great undertaking as the capture of Ptolemaïs could be attempted. After terrifying the inhabitants by his appearance, he suddenly departed, for the purpose of surprising Jaffa. This city, the fortifications of which had cost Louis IX. a considerable sum,[13] after a very slight resistance, fell into the hands of Bibars, who caused all the walls to be levelled with the ground. During this excursion, the sultan of Cairo obtained possession of the castle of Carac and several other forts, and then marched towards Tripoli. Bohemond having sent to demand of him what the purpose of his coming was: “I am come,” replied he, “to gather in your harvests; in my next campaign I will besiege your capital.” Nevertheless, he concluded a truce with Tripoli, in the midst of these hostilities; foreseeing that a treaty of peace would serve as a veil for the project of another war, and that he should soon find an opportunity of violating the truce with advantage.
The author of the life of Bibars, who was sent to Bohemond, count of Tripoli and prince of Antioch, says that the sultan was in the train of the ambassador, in the character of a herald-at-arms. His project was to examine the fortifications and the means of defence of the city of Tripoli. In drawing up the treaty, the Mussulman deputies only gave Bohemond the title of count, whilst he claimed that of prince; the discussion becoming warm, the envoys of Bibars naturally turned their eyes towards their master, who made them a sign to yield.[14] On his return to his army, the sultan laughed heartily with his emirs at this adventure, saying, “The time is come in which God will curse the prince and the count.”
By this, Bibars alluded to his project of conquering and ruining the principality of Antioch. The Egyptian army received orders to march towards the banks of the Orontes; and but very few days had passed away before this same army was encamped under the walls of Antioch, badly defended by its patriarch, and abandoned by most of its inhabitants. Historians say very little of this siege, in which the Christians made but a feeble resistance, and appeared more frequently as suppliants than as warriors: their submission, their tears, their prayers, however, made no impression upon a conqueror whose sole policy was the destruction of the Christian cities.
As the Mussulmans entered Antioch without a capitulation, they gave themselves up to all the excesses of license and victory. In a letter which Bibars addressed to the count of Tripoli, the barbarous conqueror takes a pleasure in describing the desolation of the subdued city, and all the evils which his fury had caused the Christians to undergo.[15] “Death,” says he, “came among the besieged from all sides and by all roads: we killed all that thou hadst appointed to guard the city or defend its approaches. If thou hadst seen thy knights trampled under the feet of the horses, thy provinces given up to pillage, thy riches distributed by measures-full, the wives of thy subjects put to public sale; if thou hadst seen the pulpits and crosses overturned, the leaves of the Gospel torn and cast to the winds, and the sepulchres of thy patriarchs profaned; if thou hadst seen thy enemies, the Mussulmans, trampling upon the tabernacle, and immolating in the sanctuary, monk, priest, and deacon; in short, if thou hadst seen thy palaces given up to the flames, the dead devoured by the fire of this world, the Church of St. Paul and that of St. Peter completely and entirely destroyed, certes, thou wouldst have cried out: Would to Heaven that I were become dust!”
Bibars distributed the booty among his soldiers, the Mamelukes reserving as their portion, the women, girls, and children. At that time, says an Arabian chronicle, “there was not the slave of a slave that was not the master of a slave.” A little boy was worth twelve dirhems, a little girl, five dirhems. In a single day the city of Antioch lost all its inhabitants, and a conflagration, lighted by order of Bibars, completed the work of the barbarians. Most historians agree in saying that seventeen thousand Christians were slaughtered, and a hundred thousand dragged away into slavery.
When we recall to our minds the first siege of this city by the Crusaders, and the labours and the exploits of Bohemond, Godfrey, and Tancred, who founded the principality of Antioch, we are afflicted at beholding the end of all that which the glory of conquerors had produced. When, on the other side, we see a numerous population, inclosed within ramparts, making but a feeble defence against an enemy, and allowing themselves to be slaughtered without resistance, we cannot help asking what can have become of the posterity of so many brave warriors as had defended Antioch, during almost two centuries, against all the Mussulman powers.
Complaints were made among the Christians against William, the patriarch, whom they accused of having at least favoured the invasion and conquest of the Mussulmans, by a weak pusillanimity. Without offering an opinion upon the accusation, we content ourselves with saying, that the timid prelate did not long enjoy the fruit of his base conduct; for the Mamelukes, after having permitted him to retire to Cosseïr, with all his treasures, dragged him from his retreat by violence; and the faithless pastor, despoiled of his wealth, and plunged in ignominy, underwent at last a much more cruel death than he might have expected amidst his flock, and upon the ramparts of a Christian city.
After the taking of Antioch, the Christians had nothing left to arrest the progress of the Mussulmans, but the cities of Tripoli and Ptolemaïs. Bibars was impatient to attack these last bulwarks of the Franks; but he did not dare to put trust in his fortune, and aim the last fatal blow at that power before which the Mussulman nations so lately trembled. The sultan of Cairo could not forget that the dangers of the Christians had often roused the whole West, and this thought alone was sufficient to keep him in inaction and dread. Thus the sad remains of the Christian colonies of the East, were still protected by the warlike reputation of the nations of Europe, and by the remembrance of the wonders of the early crusades.
Fame had not failed to carry the news of so many disasters across the seas. The archbishop of Tyre, the grand masters of the Temple and the Hospital, passed over into the West, to repeat the groans of the Christian cities of Syria; but on their arrival, Europe seemed but little disposed to give ear to their complaints. In vain a crusade was preached in Germany, Poland, and the more remote countries of the North; the inhabitants of northern Europe evinced nothing but indifference for events that were passing at such a distance from them. The king of Bohemia, the marquis of Brandenburg, and some other lords that had taken the cross, seemed in no hurry to perform their oath. No army set forward on its march; everything was reduced to preachings and vain preparations.
The misfortunes of the Holy Land were deeply deplored in the kingdom of France; in a sirvente,[16] composed on this subject, a contemporary troubadour appears to reproach Providence with the defeats of the Christians of Palestine, and in his poetical delirium, abandons himself to an impious despair:—“Sadness and grief,” cried he, “have taken possession of my soul to such a degree, that little is wanting to bring me to instant death; for the cross is disgraced,—that cross which we have taken in honour of him who died upon the cross. Neither cross nor faith protects us longer, or guides us against the cruel Turks,—whom God curse! But it appears, as far as man can judge, that it is God’s will to support them for our destruction. And never believe that the enemy will stop in his career after such success; on the contrary, he has sworn and publicly announced that not a single man who believes in Jesus Christ shall be left alive in Syria; that the temple even of the holy Mary will be converted into a mosque. Since the son of Mary, whom this affront ought to afflict, wills it to be so, since this pleases him, does it follow that it should please us likewise?
“He is then mad who seeks a quarrel with the Saracens, when Jesus Christ opposes them in nothing, as they have obtained victories, and are gaining them still (which grieves me) over the Franks, the Armenians, and the Persians. Every day we are conquered; for he sleeps,—that God that was accustomed to be so watchful:[17] Mahomet acts with all his power, and the fierce Bibars seconds him.”
We cannot believe that these exceedingly remarkable words expressed the feelings of the faithful; but at a time when poets ventured to speak in this manner, we may well suppose that men’s minds were not favourable to a crusade. The troubadour we have quoted does not advise the making of any war against the Saracens, and inveighs bitterly against the pope, who sold God and indulgences to arm the French against the house of Swabia. In fact, the dissensions raised by the disputed succession of the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, then occupied the entire attention of the Holy See, and France was not quite free from party spirit on the occasion.
Not satisfied with launching excommunications and ecclesiastical thunders against Frederick and his family, the sovereign pontiffs wished to add the force of arms to the authority conferred upon them by the Church, and the right of conquest to that which they thought they possessed over a kingdom so near to their own capital. As they had no experience in war, and their lieutenants were equally deficient in capacity and courage, their armies were defeated. The court of Rome, thus conquered in the field of battle, was compelled to acknowledge the ascendancy of victory, and in this profane struggle lost some of that spiritual power which alone rendered it formidable.
With the exception of Mainfroy, a natural son of Frederick, and Conradin, his grandson, the family of Swabia was extinct. Mainfroy, who possessed both the abilities and courage of his father, had recently elevated the German cause in Italy, and braved both the arms and the power of the pontiffs. The court of Rome, upon finding it could not retain the kingdom of Sicily for itself, offered it to any one who would undertake the conquest of it. The crown to which Mainfroy pretended was first offered to Richard of Cornwall, and upon his prudent refusal, to Edmund, younger son of the king of England; but the English parliament would not grant the subsidies necessary for so great an undertaking. It was then offered to Louis IX. for his brother, the count of Anjou; and although the scruples of the pious monarch for a moment checked the projects of Pope Urban, Clement IV., on his accession, used fresh persuasions, and Louis at length suffered himself to be overcome by the prayers of Charles; at the same time entertaining a secret hope that the conquest of Sicily would some day prove instrumental to the defence of the Holy Land.
Charles, after being crowned by the pope in the church of St. John of the Lateran, entered the kingdom of Naples at the head of a considerable force, preceded by the fulminations of the court of Rome. The soldiers of Charles wore a cross, and fought in the name of the Church; priests exhorted the combatants, and promised them the protection of Heaven. Mainfroy succumbed in this, miscalled, holy war, and lost both his life and his crown at the battle of Cosenza.
The pope being delivered from the cares of this political crusade, turned his attention to the holy one beyond the seas; his legates solicited various princes, some to take the cross, others to accomplish their vows. Clement did not neglect to press Michael Palæologus to prove the sincerity of his promises. Charles, who was the acknowledged vassal of the pope, and who owed his kingdom to him, received many messages, representing the dangers of the Holy Land, and reminding him of what he owed to Jesus Christ, who was outraged by the victories of the Mussulmans. The new king of Sicily contented himself with sending an embassy to the sultan of Cairo, and with commending the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine to the mercy of Bibars. The sultan replied to Charles, that he did not reject his intercessions; but the Christians were destroying themselves with their own hands; that no one among them had the power to enforce the observance of treaties, and that the most contemptible of them were constantly undoing that which the greatest had done. Bibars, in his turn, sent ambassadors to Charles, less for the purpose of following up any negotiations, than to obtain information upon the state and views of Christendom.[18]
Young Conradin, who was preparing to dispute the crown of Sicily with Charles of Anjou, in order to avail himself of every means of supporting his claim, sent deputies to the sultan of Cairo, in the character of king of Jerusalem, conjuring him to protect his rights against his rival. Bibars, in his reply, pretended to endeavour to console Conradin, but, doubtless, received with joy these proofs of the divisions that existed among the princes of Europe.
In the state in which Europe then was, one monarch alone took serious interest in the fate of the Christian colonies of Asia. The remembrance of a land in which he had so long dwelt, and the hope of avenging the honour of the French arms in Egypt,[19] once more directed the thoughts of Louis IX. to a new crusade. He however concealed his purpose, and this great project, says one of his historians,[20] was formed, so to say, between God and himself. Louis consulted the pope, who hesitated to answer him, reflecting upon the dangers that his absence might bring upon France, and even upon Europe. The first letter of Clement[21] aimed at diverting the French monarch from so perilous an enterprise; but, upon being consulted again, the sovereign pontiff showed none of the same scruples, and declared it to be his duty to encourage Louis in his design, as he was persuaded, he said, that this design came from God.
The purpose, however, of this negotiation remained still buried in profound mystery. Louis, no doubt, was fearful of prematurely announcing his designs, lest reflection might weaken the enthusiasm of which he must stand in so much need, or that a powerful opposition to the undertaking of a crusade might be formed in both his court and his kingdom; he thought that, by announcing his project unexpectedly, at the moment of its being ripe for execution, he should affect men’s minds more forcibly, and induce them more easily to follow his example. An assembly of the barons, nobles, and prelates of the kingdom was solemnly convoked at Paris towards the middle of Lent. The faithful Joinville was not forgotten in this convocation; the seneschal foresaw, he says in his Memoirs, that Louis was about to take the cross, and the cause of his having this presentiment was, that in a dream he had seen the king of France clothed in a chasuble of a bright red colour, made of Rheims serge, which signified the cross. His almoner, when explaining this dream to him, added, that the chasuble being of Rheims serge, denoted that the crusade would be but a trifling or small exploit.
On the twenty-third day of March, the great parliament of the kingdom being assembled in a hall of the Louvre, the king entered, bearing in his hand the crown of thorns of Christ. At sight of this, the whole assembly became aware of the monarch’s intentions. Louis, in a speech delivered with great animation, described the misfortunes of the Holy Land, and proclaimed that he was resolved to go and succour it; he then exhorted all who heard him to take the cross. When he ceased to speak, a sad but a profound silence expressed at once the surprise and grief of the barons and prelates, with the respect that all entertained for the will of the holy monarch.
Cardinal de St. Cecilia, the pope’s legate, spoke after him, and in a pathetic exhortation, called upon the French warriors to take arms. Louis received the cross from the hands of the cardinal, and his example was followed by three of his sons. Among these princes, the assembly was affected at beholding John, count of Nevers, who was born at Damietta amidst the calamities of the preceding crusade. At the same time the legate received the oath of John, count of Brittany, of Alphonso de Brienne, count of Eu, of Marguerite, the ancient countess of Flanders, and of a great number of prelates, nobles, and knights.
The determination of St. Louis, of which a sad presentiment had been entertained, spread deep regret throughout his kingdom; his people could not behold without sorrow the departure of a prince whose presence alone preserved peace, and maintained order and justice everywhere. The health of the king was very much weakened, and there was great reason to fear that he would not be able to support the dangers and fatigues of a crusade; he took his sons with him; which circumstance added greatly to the public grief. The disasters of the first crusade were still fresh in the memory of his subjects, and whilst they thought of the captivity of the whole of the royal family, they dreaded greater misfortunes in the future. Joinville does not fear to say, “that they who had advised the king to undertake this voyage beyond the seas, had sinned mortally.”
Notwithstanding the general regret, there were neither complaints nor murmurs against the king; the spirit of resignation, which was one of the virtues of the monarch, appeared to have passed into the minds of all his subjects, and, to employ the very expressions of the pope’s bull, “the French people saw in the devotion of their king nothing but a noble and painful sacrifice to the cause of the Christians, to that cause for which God had not spared his only Son.”
The greater that was the affection for the king, the greater was the general grief; but the zeal to partake his perils more than kept pace with these.[22] Louis alone thought of delivering the tomb of Christ and the Christian colonies; the warlike nobility of the kingdom only thought of following their king in an expedition which was already looked upon as unfortunate.
Among those who took the cross after the assembly of the Louvre, history names Thibault, king of Navarre; Henry, count of Champagne, and his brother, the count d’Artois, son of Robert, killed at Mansourah; the counts of Flanders, de la Marche, St. Pol, and Soissons; the seigneurs de Montmorency, de Nemours, de Pienne, &c. The sieur de Joinville was warmly pressed to take the cross, but he resisted all the persuasions that could be made to him, alleging the vast injuries sustained by his vassals during the last expedition. The good seneschal also was not forgetful of the predictions of his almoner; he earnestly wished to accompany the king, whom he loved sincerely; but he was not yet recovered from the terrors he had experienced in Egypt, and no earthly motive could induce him to revisit the land of the Saracens.
The determination of the king of France created a lively sensation throughout Europe, and revived in men’s minds the little that remained of the old enthusiasm for the crusades. As he was the chief of the enterprise, most of the warriors were ambitious of fighting under his immediate banners; the confidence entertained for his wisdom and virtues, in some sort fortified minds that dreaded distant expeditions, and restored hopes to the Christian nations, that they appeared to have forgotten. The remembrance, even, of the misfortunes of the first voyage added to the security of the future, and created a belief in many that the triumph of the Christian armies would at length be the reward of past labours and calamities, and the fruit of a salutary experience.
Clement IV. wrote to the king of Armenia to console him for the evils he had suffered by the invasion of the Mamelukes, and to announce to him that the Christians of the East were about to receive powerful succours. Abaga, khan of the Tartars, who was then prosecuting a war against the Turks of Asia Minor, sent ambassadors to the court of Rome, and to several princes of the West, proposing to attack the Mamelukes in concert with the Franks, and drive them from Syria and Egypt. The pope received the Mogul ambassadors with great solemnity; he told them that an army, led by a powerful monarch, was about to embark for the East, that the hour fatal to the Mussulmans was come, and that God would bless his nation, and all the allies of his nation.
Louis, constantly occupied by his expedition, fixed the period of his departure for 1270; so that three long years must pass away before the assistance promised by the sovereign pontiff could arrive in the East. Vessels to transport the Crusaders were demanded of the republics of Genoa and Venice: the Venetians at first refused; but upon learning that applications were being made to the Genoese, they sent ambassadors to offer a fleet. After protracted negotiations, in which Venice evinced more jealousy of the Genoese than zeal for the crusade, she again refused to concur in the embarkation of the Christian army, being in less dread of the anger of Louis IX. than of that of the sultan of Cairo, who had it in his power to ruin her mercantile establishments in the East. At length the Genoese engaged to furnish vessels for the expedition.
But the greatest difficulty was to find the money necessary for the preparations of the war. Up to this period, the tenths levied upon the clergy had supplied the expenses of the crusades;[23] and an opinion generally prevailed, that a holy war ought to be paid for by men attached to the Church and devoted to the altars of Jesus Christ. Urban IV., the predecessor of Clement, had already ordered throughout the West, that a levy of a hundredth should be made upon the revenues of the clergy; and, what might be considered a traffic in holy things, the court of Rome permitted the distributing of indulgences, which faculty was granted in proportion with what was given beyond the tribute required. The French clergy had addressed several petitions to the pope upon this subject; but these petitions always remained unnoticed.
When the late determination of Louis IX. became known, the Holy See had recourse to the customary means, and, without the least attention to complaints, which were not without foundation, the order was issued to levy again a tenth during three years. Upon this the clergy redoubled their opposition, and were much more earnest in the defence of their own revenues than in the defence of the Holy Land. They complained to the king, and they sent deputies to Rome, to show the depth of the misery into which the Church of France was plunged by the burdens imposed upon it;[24] these deputies represented to the sovereign pontiff that the exactions of latter times became every day more intolerable, and that the property of the clergy was no longer sufficient to support the altars and feed the poor of Jesus Christ. They added, that injustice and violence had formerly separated the Greek Church from that of Rome; giving his holiness to understand, that new rigours would not fail to produce new schisms. They further said, that if most crusades, particularly the expedition of Louis IX. into Egypt, had been unfortunate, it no doubt arose from the sanctuary having been plundered, and the churches ruined for the sake of them; as a last reason, they prognosticated much greater calamities for the future than any that had been experienced.
Such an address necessarily inflamed the anger of the sovereign pontiff. Clement, in his reply, warmly reproached the deputies, and they who had sent them, with their indifference for the cause of all Christians, and for their avarice, which made them deny their superfluous wealth for the prosecution of a war in which so many princes and illustrious warriors perilled their lives. He pointed to the excommunication ready to fall upon their heads, and, what must have much more terrified them, he threatened to deprive them of their property and their benefices. Such was then the power of Rome, that nothing could be possessed without its pleasure: the clergy were obliged to submit, and pay the tenth during four years. The pope further empowered the king to dispose of all the sums bequeathed by will for the assistance of the Holy Land; he equally abandoned to him the money that might be drawn from those who, having taken the cross, were desirous of redeeming their vows; which latter means must have produced a considerable sum, as the clergy gave the cross to everybody, and refused dispensation to nobody.
Louis IX. neglected none of the resources that his position as king of France placed in his hands; at this period no regular impost was known, and, to support the splendour of their thrones, kings had nothing to depend upon but the revenues of their domains.[25] In order to provide for all the expenses he was obliged to incur on this occasion, the king had recourse to the impost called the capitation-tax, which suzerain lords, according to feudal customs, required of each of their vassals in any extraordinary circumstances. Usage authorized him to levy this contribution on account of the crusade, but he had also the right, on the occasion of a ceremony, at that time very important, in which his eldest son Philip was to be received as a knight. Thus, the impost was demanded in the name of chivalry and in the name of religion; it was paid without a murmur, because Louis confided the gathering of it to men of acknowledged integrity.
When Philip received the sword of knighthood, the French, and particularly the Parisians, expressed their love for Louis IX. and his family by public rejoicings; all the nobility hastened from the provinces to be present at the festivities and spectacles that were celebrated in the capital on this occasion. Amidst the tournaments, the exercises of the tilt-yard, and the sports in which the skill and courage of the preux and the paladins were displayed, the crusade was not forgotten. The pope’s legate pronounced a discourse, in the isle of St. Louis, upon the misfortunes of the Holy Land; all the people appeared to be deeply moved by the exhortations of the prelate; a crowd of knights, and warriors of all classes, took the cross; thus Louis IX. found in this circumstance an opportunity of raising money for the support of his army, and of procuring recruits for the holy war.
Whilst all France was engaged in preparing for the expedition beyond the seas, the crusade was preached in the other countries of Europe. A council was held at Northampton, in England, in which Ottobon, the pope’s legate, exhorted the faithful to arm themselves to save the little that remained of the kingdom of Jerusalem; and Prince Edward took the cross, to discharge the vow that his father Henry III. had made when the news reached Europe of the captivity of Louis IX. in Egypt. After the example of Edward, his brother Prince Edmund, with the earls of Pembroke and Warwick, and many knights and barons, agreed to take arms against the infidels. The same zeal for the deliverance of the holy places was manifested in Scotland, where John Baliol and several nobles enrolled themselves under the banners of the cross.
Catalonia and Castile furnished a great number of Crusaders: the king of Portugal, and James, king of Arragon, took the cross. Dona Sancha, one of the daughters of the Arragonese prince, had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and had died in the hospital of St. John, after devoting many years to the service of pilgrims and the sick. James had several times conquered the Moors; but neither his exploits against the infidels, nor the remembrance of a daughter who had fallen a martyr to Christian charity, could sustain his piety against the attacks of his earthly passions, and his shameful connection with Berengaria scandalized Christendom.
The pope, to whom he communicated his design of going to the Holy Land, replied that Jesus Christ could not accept the services of a prince who crucified him every day by his sins. The king of Arragon, by a strange combination of opposite sentiments, would neither renounce Berengaria nor give up his project of going to fight against the infidels in the East. He renewed his oath in a great assembly at Toledo, at which the ambassadors of the khan of Tartary and of the king of Armenia were present. We read in a Spanish dissertation[26] upon the crusades, that Alphonso the Wise, who was not able to go to the East himself, furnished the king of Arragon with a hundred men and a hundred thousand marvedis in gold; the order of St. James, and other orders of knighthood, who had often accompanied the conqueror of the Moors in his battles, supplied him also with men and money. The city of Barcelona offered him eighty thousand Barcellonese sols, and Majorca fifty thousand silver sols, with two equipped vessels. The fleet, composed of thirty large ships and a great number of smaller craft, in which were embarked eight hundred men-at-arms and two thousand foot-soldiers, set out from Barcelona on the 4th of September, 1268. When they arrived off Majorca, the fleet was dispersed by a tempest; one part of the vessels gained the coasts of Asia, another took shelter in the ports of Sardinia; the vessel the king of Arragon was on board of was cast upon the coast of Languedoc.
The arrival at Ptolemaïs of the Arragonese Crusaders, commanded by a natural son of James, restored some hopes to the Franks of Palestine. An envoy from the king of Arragon, according to the Oriental chronicles, repaired to the khan of the Tartars, to announce to him that the Spanish monarch would soon arrive with his army. But whether he was detained by the charms of Berengaria, or whether the tempest that dispersed his fleet made him believe that Heaven was averse to his pilgrimage, James did not arrive. His departure, in which he appeared to despise the counsels of the Holy See, had been severely censured; and his return, which was attributed to his disgraceful passion, met with an equal share of blame. Murmurs likewise arose against the king of Portugal, who had levied the tenths, but did not leave his kingdom.
All those who in Europe took an interest in the crusade had, at this time, their eyes directed towards the kingdom of Naples, where Charles of Anjou was making great preparations to accompany his brother into the East; but this kingdom, recently conquered, was doomed again to be the theatre of a war kindled by vengeance and ambition. There fell out in the states of Naples and Sicily, which had so often changed masters, that which almost always takes place after a revolution: deceived hopes were changed into hatreds: the excesses inseparable from a conquest, the presence of an army proud of its victories, with the too violent government of Charles, animated the people against their new king. Clement IV. thought it his duty to give a timely and salutary warning: “Your kingdom,” he wrote to him, “at first exhausted by the agents of your authority, is now torn by your enemies; thus the caterpillar destroys what has escaped the grasshopper. The kingdom of Sicily and Naples has not been wanting in men to desolate it; where now are they that will defend it?” This letter of the pope announced storms ready to break forth. Many of those who had called Charles to the throne, regretted the house of Swabia, and directed their new hopes towards Conradin, heir of Frederick and of Conrad. This young prince quitted Germany with an army, and advanced towards Italy, strengthening himself in his march with the party of the Ghibellines, and with all those whom the domination of Charles had irritated. All Italy was in flames, and the pope, Charles’s protector, retired to Viterbo, had no defence to afford him, except the thunders of the Church.
Charles of Anjou, however, assembled his troops, and marched out to meet his rival. The two armies met in the plain of St. Valentine, near Aquila; the army of Conradin was cut to pieces, and the young prince fell into the power of the conqueror. Posterity cannot pardon Charles for having abused his victory even so far as to condemn and decapitate his disarmed and vanquished enemy.[27] After this execution, Sicily and the country of Naples were given up to all the furies of a jealous, suspicious tyranny; for violence produces violence, and great political crimes never come alone. It was thus that Charles got ready for the crusade; but, on the other hand, Providence was preparing terrible catastrophes for him: “So true it is,” says an historian, “that God as often gives kingdoms to punish those he elevates, as to chastise those whom he brings low.”
Whilst these bloody scenes were passing in Italy, Louis IX. was following up the establishment of public peace and his darling object, the crusade, at the same time. The holy monarch did not forget that the surest manner of softening the evils of war, as well as of his absence, was to make good laws; he therefore issued several ordinances, and each of these ordinances was a monument of his justice. The most celebrated of all is the Pragmatic Sanction, which Bossuet called the firmest support of Gallican liberties. He also employed himself in elevating that monument of legislation which illustrated his reign, and which became a light for following ages.
The count of Poictiers, who was to accompany his brother, was in the mean time engaged in pacifying his provinces, and established many regulations for maintaining public order. He, above everything, endeavoured to abolish slavery; having for a maxim, “That men are born free, and it is always wise to bring back things to their origin.” This good prince drew upon himself the benedictions of his people; and the love of his vassals assured the duration of the laws he made.
We have said that Prince Edward, son of Henry III., had taken the oath to combat the infidels. He had recently displayed a brilliant valour in the civil war that had so long desolated England; and the deliverance of his father and the pacification of the kingdom had been the reward of his exploits. It was his esteem for the character of Louis IX., more than the spirit of devotion, that induced him to set out for the East. The king of France, who himself exhorted him to take the cross, lent him seventy thousand livres tournois for the preparations for his voyage. Edward was to follow Louis as his vassal, and to conduct under his banners the English Crusaders, united with those of Guienne. Gaston de Béarn, to whom the French monarch advanced the sum of twenty-five thousand livres, prepared to follow Prince Edward to the Holy Land.
The period fixed upon for the departure of the expedition was drawing near. By order of the legate, the curés in every parish had taken the names of the Crusaders, in order to oblige them to wear the cross publicly, and all had notice to hold themselves in readiness to embark in the month of May, 1270. Louis confided the administration of his kingdom, during his absence, to Matthew, abbot of St. Denis, and to Simon, sieur de Nesle; he wrote to all the nobles who were to follow him into the Holy Land, to recommend them to assemble their knights and men-at-arms. As religious enthusiasm was not sufficiently strong to make men forget their worldly interests, many nobles who had taken the cross entertained great fears of being ruined by the holy war, and most of them hesitated to set out. Louis undertook to pay all the expenses of their voyage, and to maintain them at his own cost during the war,—a thing that had not been done in the crusades of Louis VII. or Philip Augustus, in which the ardour of the Crusaders did not allow them to give a thought to their fortunes, or to exercise so much foresight. We have still a valuable monument of this epoch in a charter, by which the king of France stipulates how much he is to pay to a great number of barons and knights during the time the war beyond the seas should last.
Early in the month of March, Louis repaired to the church of St. Denis, where he received the symbols of pilgrimage, and placed his kingdom under the protection of the apostles of France.[28] Upon the day following this solemn ceremony, a mass for the crusade was celebrated in the church of Notre Dame, at Paris. The monarch appeared there, accompanied by his children and the principal nobles of his court; he walked from the palace barefooted, carrying his scrip and staff. The same day he went to sleep at Vincennes, and beheld, for the last time, the spot on which he had enjoyed so much happiness in administering justice to his people. And it was here too that he took leave of Queen Marguerite, whom he had never before quitted,—a separation rendered so much the more painful by the sorrowful reflection it recalled of past events, and by melancholy presentiments for the future.
Both the people and the court were affected by the deepest regret, and that which added to the public anxiety was the circumstance that every one was ignorant of the point to which the expedition was to be directed: the coast of Africa was only vaguely conjectured. The king of Sicily had taken the cross without having the least inclination to embark for Asia; and when the question was discussed in council, he gave it as his opinion that Tunis should be the object of the first attack. The kingdom of Tunis covered the seas with pirates, who infested all the routes to Palestine; it was, besides, the ally of Egypt, and might, if subdued, be made the readiest road to that country. These were the ostensible reasons put forth; the true ones were, that it was of importance to the king of Sicily that the coasts of Africa should be brought under European subjection, and that he did not wish to go too far from Italy. The true reason with St. Louis, and that which, no doubt, determined him, was, that he believed it possible to convert the king of Tunis, and thus bring a vast kingdom under the Christian banners. The Mussulman prince, whose ambassadors had been several times in France, had himself given birth to this idea, by saying, that he asked nothing better than to embrace the religion of Jesus Christ:[29] thus, that which he had said to turn aside an invasion, was precisely the cause of the war being directed against his territories. Louis IX. often repeated that he would consent to pass the whole of his life in a dungeon, without seeing the sun, if, by such a sacrifice, the conversion of the king of Tunis and his nation could be brought about; an expression of ardent proselytism that has been blamed with much bitterness, but which only showed an extreme desire to see Africa delivered from barbarism, and marching with Europe in the progress of intelligence and civilization, which are the great blessings of Christianity.