Chapter VII: Book XV: Eighth Crusade (3)

It was, doubtless, the last condition that decided the question: the two hundred and ten thousand ounces of gold exceeded the sum that Louis IX. had paid in Egypt for the ransom of his army; but a part of it only was received at first. Who could assure the payment of the rest when the Christian army had quitted the coast of Africa? The king of Sicily alone could derive any advantage from this treaty, so disgraceful to the French arms; he had not only found means of making a Mussulman prince pay the tribute of forty thousand gold crowns, which he owed the Pope as vassal of the Holy See; but the peace which they had concluded, in some sort, placed at his disposal an army capable of undertaking much greater conquests than that of Tunis. Thus, complaints immediately arose reproaching the king of Sicily with having, at his pleasure, changed the aim of the crusade, in order to make the Christian army subservient to his ambition.

A few days after the signing of the truce, Prince Edward arrived off the coast of Carthage, with the English and Scotch Crusaders. Having sailed from Aigues-Mortes, he directed his course towards Palestine, and came to take orders from the king of France. The French and Sicilians were prodigal in their expressions of sincere friendship for the English. Edward was received with great honours, but when he learned they had made peace, he retired into his tent, and refused to be present at any of the councils of the Christian army.

The Crusaders became impatient to quit an arid and murderous land, which recalled to them nothing but misfortunes, without the least mixture of glory. The Christian army embarked on the eighteenth of November for Sicily; and, as if Heaven had decreed that this expedition should be nothing but a series of misfortunes, a frightful tempest assailed the fleet just as it was about to enter the port of Trapani. Eighteen large ships and four thousand Crusaders were submerged, and perished in the waves. Most of the leaders and soldiers lost their arms, equipments, and horses. If one historian is to be believed, the money received from the king of Tunis was lost in this shipwreck.

After so great a misfortune, the king of Sicily neglected no means of succouring the Crusaders. We may believe in the generous sentiments which he expressed upon the occasion; but there is little doubt that, with his feelings a hope was mixed of deriving something favourable to his projects from this deplorable circumstance. When all the leaders were arrived, several councils were held to ascertain what remained to be done. As every one deplored his own losses, Charles proposed a sure means of repairing them, which was the conquest of Greece. This was the plan he had arranged; in the first place, all the Crusaders should pass the winter in Sicily; in the spring, the count of Poictiers should set out for Palestine with a part of the army, the rest was to follow Charles to Epirus, and from thence to Byzantium. This project had something adventurous and chivalric in it, very likely to seduce the French barons and nobles; but letters to the young king arrived from France, in which the regents represented in strong colours the grief and alarms of his people. Philip declared that he could not stay in Sicily, but should immediately return to his own dominions. This determination destroyed all Charles’s hopes; the French lords would not abandon their young monarch, and the princes and all the leaders of the Christian army laid aside the cross. An Italian chronicle reports that Charles, in his vexation, confiscated to his own profit all the vessels and all the effects which, after the late shipwreck, were thrown upon the coasts of Sicily. He had profited by the misfortunes of the army before Tunis, and he now enriched himself with the spoils of his companions in arms. This act of injustice and violence completed the dislike that most of the Crusaders had conceived for him; this was particularly the case with the Genoese, to whom the fleet belonged in which the Christian army had embarked.

It was, however, decided that they should resume the crusade four years later. The two kings, the princes, and the most influential leaders, engaged themselves by oath to embark for Syria with their troops in the month of July of the fourth year;—a vain promise, that not one of them was destined to keep, and which they only made then to excuse in their own eyes the inconsistency of their conduct in this war. Edward, who had announced his resolution of passing the winter in Sicily, and setting out for Palestine in the spring, was the only one that did not break his promises.

The French warriors abandoned all thoughts of the crusade; but they were yet far from seeing the closing of that abyss of miseries which it had opened beneath their feet. The king of Navarre died shortly after landing at Trapani, and his wife Isabella was so deeply affected by his death, that she immediately followed him to the tomb. Philip set out on his return to France in the month of January, and the young queen, who had accompanied him, became another victim of the crusade. In crossing Calabria, whilst fording a river near Cosenza, her horse fell, and she being pregnant, this fall caused her death. Thus Philip pursued his journey, bearing with him the bodies of his father, his brother, and his wife. He learnt on his march that the count and countess of Poictiers, returning to Languedoc, had both died in Tuscany from the effects of the contagious malady of the coast of Africa. Passing by Viterbo, Philip witnessed the tragical end of one of the most illustrious of his companions in arms; Henry d’Allemagne was attacked by the sons of the earl of Leicester, pursued into a church, and massacred at the foot of the altar. Thus, great crimes were joined with great calamities, to add to the cruel remembrances that this crusade was destined to leave behind it.

Philip, after crossing Mount Cenis, returned to Paris through Burgundy and Champagne. What days of mourning for France! At the departure of Louis IX. for the East, the whole nation had been impressed by the most melancholy presentiments; and, alas! all these presentiments were but too fully realized!

It was not the flag of victory, but a funeral pall that preceded the French warriors in their march. Funereal urns, the wreck of an army but lately so flourishing, a young sick prince, who had only escaped by a miracle the death that had swept away his family—this was all that came back from the crusade! The people came from all parts to meet the melancholy train; they surrounded the young king, they strove to approach the remains of St. Louis, and it was made evident, by their pious propriety and their religious sadness, that the sentiments which led them there were not such as generally precipitate the multitude upon the steps of the masters of the earth.

On the arrival of Philip in his capital, the bones and the heart of St. Louis were conveyed to the church of Notre Dame, where ecclesiastics sang the hymns of the service of the dead during the whole night. On the following day the funeral of the royal martyr was celebrated in the church of St. Denis. In the midst of an immense assemblage of all classes of the people, deeply affected by what they saw, the young monarch advanced, bearing on his shoulders the mortal remains of his father. He stopped several times on his way, and crosses, which were placed at every station, recalled, up to the last century, this beautiful picture of filial piety.

Louis IX. was deposited near his grandfather Philip Augustus, and his father Louis VIII. Although he had forbidden his tomb to be ornamented, it was covered with plates of silver, which were afterwards carried away by the English. At a later period a more terrible revolution broke into his tomb and scattered his ashes; but this revolution has not been able to destroy his memory.

No, posterity will never cease to praise that passion for justice which filled the whole life of Louis IX., that ardour in search of truth, so rare even among the greatest kings; that love of peace, to which he sacrificed even the glory he had acquired in arms; that solicitude for the good of all; that tender consideration for poverty; that profound respect for the rights of misfortune and for the lives of men:—virtues which astonished the middle ages, and which our own times still perceive in the descendants of so good a prince.[38]

The ascendancy which his virtue and piety gave him he only employed in defending his people against everything that was unjust. This ascendancy, which he preserved over his age, gave to his laws an empire, which laws, whatever they may be, rarely obtain but with time. A few years after his reign, provinces demanded to be united to the crown, under the sole hope and the sole condition of enjoying the _wise ordinances of the king, who loved justice_. Such were the conquests of St. Louis. It is well known, that after his victories over the English he restored Guienne to them, in spite of the advice of his barons, who considered this act of generosity to be contrary to the interests of the kingdom. Perhaps it only belongs to elevated minds like his to know how much wisdom there is in the counsels of moderation! An illustrious writer of the last age has said, when speaking of Louis IX., _that great moderate men are rare_, and it is doubtless on that account that the world does not understand them.

In the position in which France at that time was placed, a vulgar genius would have fomented divisions; whereas Louis only sought to appease them; and it was this spirit of conciliation which rendered him the arbitrator of kings and nations, and gave him more strength and power than could have been procured by the combinations of the wisest policy. Among the contemporaries of St. Louis persons were not wanting who blamed his moderation, and many who pride themselves upon being skilful politicians blame him even now. Strange skill, which tends to create a belief that morality is foreign to the happiness of nations, and which cannot afford to the leaders of empires the same virtues that God has bestowed upon man for the preservation of society!

The more we admire the reign of Louis IX. the greater is our astonishment at his having twice interrupted the course of its blessings, and quitted a people he rendered happy by his presence. But, whilst beholding the passions which agitate the present generation, who will dare to raise his voice for the purpose of accusing past ages! If at the moment in which I write this history all Europe is moved by the rumour of a general rising against the Mussulmans, now masters of Byzantium;—if the most ardent disciples of the modern school of philosophy are putting up vows for the triumph of the Gospel over the Koran, for the deliverance of the Greeks, and the resurrection of Athens and Lacedæmon, how can we believe that in the middle ages princes and Christian nations would not be affected by the horrible state of slavery of Jerusalem, and all those holy regions from which the light first broke upon Christendom? Consistently with the character which Louis IX. displayed in all the circumstances of his life, how could he remain indifferent to the calamities of the Christian colonies, which were principally peopled by Frenchmen, and which were considered as another France,—the France of the east? We must not forget, likewise, that the great aim of his policy was to unite the nations of the east and west by the ties of Christianity; and that this aim, if he had succeeded in it, would have been greatly to the advantage of humanity. Ambition itself has been sometimes pardoned for projects much more chimerical, and wars much more unfortunate.[39]

However it may be, we can venture to say that the captivity and death of St. Louis in distant regions did not at all lessen the respect in which his name and his virtues were held in Europe. Perhaps even such extraordinary misfortunes, suffered in the name of religion and of all that was then reverenced, added something to the splendour of the monarchy; for the times we have seen were then far distant in which the misfortunes of kings have only served to despoil royalty of that which makes it respected among men. The death of Louis IX. was a great subject of grief for the French; but with the regret which his loss created, there was mingled, for the whole people, the thoughts of the happy future which Louis had prepared, and for pious minds the hope of having a guardian and a support in heaven. Very shortly the death of a king of France was celebrated as a fresh triumph for religion,—as a fresh glory for his country; and the anniversary of the day on which he expired became thereafter one of the solemn festivals of the Christian Church and of the French monarchy.

A beautiful spectacle was that canonical inquiry in which the common father of the faithful interrogated the contemporaries of Louis IX. upon the virtues of his life and the benefits of his reign! Frenchmen of all classes came forward to attest, upon the Gospel, that the monarch whose death they lamented was worthy of all the rewards of heaven. Among them were many of his old companions in arms, who had shared his chains in Egypt, and beheld him dying on his bed of ashes before Tunis. The whole of Europe confirmed their religious testimony, and repeated these words of the head of the Church:—“_House of France, rejoice at having given to the world so great a prince; rejoice, people of France, at having had so good a king!_”[40]

The death of Louis IX., as we have already said, had suddenly suspended all enterprises beyond the seas. Edward only, accompanied by the count of Brittany, his brother Edmund, and three hundred knights, had gone into Syria at the head of a small army of five hundred Crusaders from Friesland. All these Crusaders together only formed a body of a thousand or twelve hundred combatants; and this was all that reached Asia of those numberless armies that had been raised in the West for the deliverance of the Holy Land. So feeble a reinforcement was not calculated to inspire confidence or restore security to the Christians of Palestine, not yet recovered from their consternation at hearing of the retreat of the Crusaders from before Tunis, and their return into Europe.

Most of the princes and Christian states of Syria, in the fear of being invaded, had concluded treaties with the sultan of Cairo; many must have hesitated at engaging in a war from which the slender succours from Europe could allow them no hopes of great advantages, and in which likewise they had to dread being abandoned by the Crusaders, ever eager to return to the West. Nevertheless, the Templars and the Hospitallers, who never missed an opportunity of fighting with the Saracens, united themselves with Prince Edward, whose fame had preceded him into the East. Bibars, who was then ravaging the territories of Ptolemaïs, drew his forces off from a city which he had filled with alarm, and appeared for a moment to have abandoned the execution of his projects.

The little army of the Christians, composed of from six to seven thousand men, advanced upon the Mussulman territories, directing its course towards Phœnicia, in order to re-establish the communication that had been interrupted between the Christian cities. In this expedition the Crusaders had much to suffer from excessive heat; many died from indulging in fruits and honey, which the country produced in abundance. They marched afterwards towards the city of Nazareth, upon the walls of which they planted the standard of Christ. The soldiers of the cross could not remember without indignation that Bibars had completely destroyed the church of this city, consecrated to the Virgin. Nazareth was given up to pillage, and all the Mussulmans found in the city expiated by being put to the sword, the burning and destruction of one of the most beautiful monuments raised by the Christians in Syria.

After this victory, for which we cannot praise the Crusaders, the Christian army had to combat the Mussulman troops, who were impatient to avenge the excesses committed at Nazareth. Whether he had learnt to respect the superiority of his enemies, or whether he had cause to complain of the warriors of Palestine, Edward returned within the walls of Ptolemaïs, and sought for no more contests. The frequent excursions of the Saracens could not provoke him to take up arms; but whilst he remained thus safe from the perils of war, he was on the point of perishing by the hand of a Mussulman whom he had taken into his service. Some of the chronicles of the time tell us that the emir of Jaffa armed the hand of the assassin; others say that the blow was directed by the sect of the Ismaëlians, who still subsisted, notwithstanding the war declared against them by both the Tartars and the Mamelukes.

After having thus run the danger of losing his life, Edward, cured of his wounds, only thought of concluding a truce with Bibars; and being recalled into England by the prayers of Henry III., whose successor he was, he quitted the East without having done anything important for the cause he had sworn to defend. Thus all the results of this crusade, which had so much alarmed the Mussulmans, were reduced, on one side, to the massacre of the unarmed population of Nazareth, and on the other, to the vain conquest of the ruins of Carthage. Another result of this war, and the only one it had for Europe, was to entirely discourage the Christian warriors, and make them forget the East. After Edward, no prince from the West ever crossed the seas to combat with the infidels in Asia, and the crusade in which he took a part so little glorious, was the last of those which had for object the deliverance or recovery of the Holy Land.

Among the circumstances that produced the failure of this crusade, history must not forget the protracted vacancy of the papal throne, during which no voice was raised to animate the Crusaders, in which there was no authority powerful enough, particularly after the death of St. Louis, to direct their enterprise. After a lapse of two years, however, the conclave chose a successor of St. Peter; and, fortunately for the eastern Christians, the suffrages fell upon Thibault, archdeacon of Liege, who had followed the Frisons into Asia, and whom the intelligence of his elevation found still in Palestine. The Christians of Syria had reason to hope that the new pontiff, for so long a time a witness of their perils and their miseries, would not fail to employ all his power to succour them. Thibault gave them an assurance of it before he quitted Ptolemaïs, and in a discourse which he addressed to the assembled people, he took for his text this verse of the hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may I myself be forgotten among men!”

The patriarch of Jerusalem, and the grand masters of the Temple and the Hospital accompanied Gregory X. into the West. On his return, the pontiff applied himself at once to the re-establishment of peace in Italy and Germany. He engaged the princes, particularly the king of France, to unite their efforts in assisting the Holy Land. Philip contented himself with sending a few troops into the East, and with advancing thirty-six thousand silver marks to the Pope, for which sum he held as security all the possessions of the Templars in his kingdom. Pisa, Genoa, and Marseilles furnished several galleys, and five hundred warriors were embarked for Ptolemaïs, at the expense of the sovereign pontiff.

This assistance was far from answering the hopes or the wants of the Christian colonies. Gregory resolved to interest all Christendom in his project, and for that purpose convoked a council at Lyons, in 1274. This council was much more numerous and more solemn than that which Innocent IV. had assembled thirty years before in the same city. At this were present the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Constantinople, more than a thousand bishops and archbishops, the envoys of the emperors of the East and of the West, those of the kings of France and Cyprus, and of all the princes of Europe and beyond the seas. In this numerous assembly, no persons attracted so much attention as the Tartar princes and ambassadors, sent by the powerful head of the Moguls, to form an alliance with the Christians against the Mussulmans; several of these Tartar princes received baptism from the hands of the Pope, and Christians who were witnesses of this ceremony saw in it an assured pledge of the Divine promises.

All admired the power of God who had chosen the instruments of his designs from remote and little known regions; the crowd of the faithful looked upon the supreme head of the hordes of Tartary as another Cyrus, whom Providence had charged with the destruction of Babylon and the deliverance of Jerusalem. At the last sitting, the Council of Lyons decreed that a new crusade should be undertaken, and that during ten years a tenth should be levied upon all ecclesiastical property. Palæologus, who at length submitted to the Latin church, promised to send troops for the deliverance of the heritage of Christ; the Pope recognized Rodolph of Hapsbourg as emperor of the West, upon condition that he would go into Palestine at the head of an army.

But notwithstanding the grand spectacle of such a council, the decisions and the exhortations of the Pope and the prelates could not arouse the enthusiasm of the faithful, which was no longer anything, to borrow an expression from Scripture, “but the smoking remains of a burnt cloth.” Gregory X. had succeeded in re-establishing peace among the Italian republics, and in terminating all the discords of Germany relative to the succession to the empire: no war interfered with the crusade; but the minds of both princes and nations had taken a fresh direction. We still possess a written document of this period, which, doubtless, obtained the approbation if not the encouragement of the pope, and which appears to us well calculated to throw a light upon the spirit of the age, and show us what was then the general opinion of expeditions to the East. In this document, which will be considered whimsical, at least in its form, the author, Humbert de Romanis, endeavours to revive the zeal of Christians for the holy war, and, while deploring the indifference of his contemporaries, he points out eight obstacles to the effects of his preaching: 1st. _A sinful habit_; 2nd. _The dread of fatigue_; 3rd. _Repugnance to quit their native country_; 4th. _An excessive love of family_; 5th. _The evil discourses of men_; 6th. _A weakness of mind that creates a belief that every thing is impossible_; 7th. _Bad examples_; 8th. _A faith without warmth_. To all these motives for indifference the author might have added other reasons drawn from the policy and the new interests of Europe; but without allowing himself to be stopped by so many obstacles, the intrepid defender of the crusades, proceeding always by enumerations and categories, hastens to denote seven powerful passions, which, according to him, ought to cause the partisans of the holy to triumph; these reasons were: 1st. _Zeal for the glory of God_; 2nd. _Zeal for the Christian faith_; 3rd. _Brotherly charity_; 4th. _Devotional respect for the Holy Land_; 5th. _The war commenced by the Mussulmans_; 6th. _The example of the first Crusaders_; 7th. _The blessings of the Church_. After these enumerations, Humbert de Romanis repeats the objections that were made in his time against undertaking crusades. Some said that wars, of whatever kind they might be, only served to promote the shedding of blood, and that there were quite enough of those that could not be avoided, and of those that people were obliged to make in self-defence; others said that it was tempting God to quit a land in which his will had caused us to be born, and in which his goodness heaped blessings upon us, to go into a country which God had given to other nations, and in which we were constantly abandoned by him to all the miseries of exile. It was further said, that it was not permissible to invade the territories of the Saracens, that there was no more reason for pursuing the Mussulmans than the Jews, that the wars made against them would never effect their conversion, and in short, that this war did not appear to be agreeable to God, since he permitted so many misfortunes to overwhelm the Crusaders.

Humbert de Romanis, in his book, answers all these and many other objections; but these objections themselves were founded upon the spirit of the age, which could not be changed by reasoning. He in vain repeated that the Holy Land originally belonged to the Christians, and that they had the right to endeavour to reconquer it; that the vine of the Lord ought to be defended by the sword against those who wished to root it up; that if they extirpated the brambles from a barren soil, they were much more strongly bound to drive from a holy land a rude and barbarous nation. He in vain repeated what had been so often said before, that the misfortunes of the crusades did not happen because those crusades were displeasing to God, but because it was God’s will to punish the Crusaders, and try their constancy and faith. All this display of ecclesiastical erudition and argumentation persuaded nobody; not because people were more enlightened than they had been some years before, but because they entertained other thoughts: similar discourses would have succeeded admirably in the preceding century, when addressed to dominant passions; but they produced no effect when addressed to indifference.

This European indifference was fatal to the Christian colonies of the East; it gave them up without defence to the mercy of an enemy who every day became more powerful, and whose fanaticism was inflamed by victory. On the other hand, fresh symptoms of decay, and new signs of approaching ruin, were observable in the confederation of the Franks of Syria. All those petty principalities, all those cities scattered along the Syrian coasts were shared among them; and all the passions which the spirit of rivalry gives birth to became the auxiliaries of the Saracens. Every one of these petty states, in a constant state of fear, eagerly purchased a few days of peace, or a few months of existence, by treaties with Bibars, treaties in which the common honour and interests of the Christians were almost always sacrificed. The sultan of Cairo did not disdain to conclude a treaty of alliance with a single city, or even with a town; and nothing is more curious than to see figuring in these acts of policy, on the one side the sovereign of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and twenty other provinces; and on the other a little city like Sidon[41] or Tortosa, with its fields, its orchards, and its mills: a deplorable contrast, which must have made the Christians feel the extent of their humiliation, and proved to them all they had to fear. In all these treaties it was the Mussulman policy to promote division among the Franks, and to hold them in a state of dependence,[42] never considering them as allies, but as vassals, farmers or tributaries.

Such was the peace enjoyed by the Christian states in Syria; and a further matter to be deplored was, that there were then three pretenders to the kingdom of Jerusalem:—the king of Cyprus, the king of Sicily, and Mary of Antioch, who was descended from the fourth daughter of Isabella, the wife of Amaury. Parties disputed, and even fought for a kingdom half destroyed; or rather they contended for the disgrace of ruining it entirely, and giving it up, rent by discord, to the domination of the Saracens.

Bibars, in the meanwhile, steadily pursued the course of his conquests; every day fame spread abroad an account of some fresh triumph; at one time he re-entered Cairo, dragging in his train a king of Nubia, whom he had just conquered; at another, he returned from Armenia, whence he brought thirty thousand horses and ten thousand children of both sexes. These accounts spread terror among the Christian cities, a terror that was very little mitigated by their treaties with the sultan of Egypt; no one could tell what might be the next conquest Bibars contemplated, and every city was trembling lest it should be the next object of his ambition or his fury, when the death of this fierce conqueror afforded the Christians a few moments of security and joy.

The end of Bibars is related after various manners; we will follow the account of the historian Ibn-Ferat, with whose expressions even we shall sometimes make free. Bibars was about to set out for Damascus, to fight the Tartars in the neighbourhood of the Euphrates; but before his departure he demanded an extraordinary impost. The imaun Mohyeddin Almoury addressed remonstrances to him on the subject; but the sultan replied: “Oh! my master, I will abolish this tax when I shall have conquered our enemies.” When Bibars had triumphed over the Tartars, he wrote in the following terms to the chief of the divan at Damascus: “We will not dismount from our horse until thou hast levied an impost of two hundred thousand dirhems upon Damascus, one of three hundred thousand upon its territories, one of three hundred thousand upon its towns, and one of ten hundred thousand dirhems upon the southern provinces.” Thus the joy created by the victory of Bibars was changed into sadness, and the people prayed for the death of the sultan. Complaints were carried to the cheick Mohyeddin, a pious and respected man;[43] and scarcely was the levy of the tribute begun when Bibars was razed from the roll of the living—he died poisoned.

The Arabian historians place Bibars among the great princes of the dynasty of the Baharite Mamelukes. He was originally sold as a slave, and although he only lived among soldiers, a penetrating sagacity of mind supplied the place of education. When afterwards, he had become familiar with war, and had been cast among the factions of the army, he had acquired all the knowledge that was necessary to enable him to reign over the Mamelukes. The quality which was of most service to him in the career of his ambition was his incredible activity; during the seventeen years of his reign, he did not allow himself one day of repose; he was present, almost at the same time, in Syria, in Egypt, and upon the banks of the Euphrates: the chronicles relate that he was frequently perambulating the streets of Damascus, whilst his courtiers were awaiting the moment of his waking at the gates of the palace of Cairo. As two sultans of Egypt had perished beneath his hands, and as he had arrived at empire by means of violent revolutions, that which he most dreaded was the influence of his own example; all those whose ambition he feared, or whose fidelity he doubted, were immediately sacrificed. The most simple communications between man and man were sufficient to alarm his fierce and suspicious temper; if oriental historians may be credited, during the reign of Bibars, friends shunned each other in the streets, and no man durst enter into the house of another. When it was important to him to conceal his designs, to cast a veil over his proceedings, or himself to avoid the public eye, woe to him who should divine his thought, pronounce his name, or salute him on his way. Severe with his soldiers, a flatterer with his emirs, entertaining no repugnance for artifice, preferring violence, sporting with treaties and oaths, practising a dissimulation that nobody could penetrate, possessed by an avarice that made him pitiless in the levying of tributes; having never retreated before an enemy, before an obstacle, or before a crime, his genius and character seemed made for the government, which he had in some sort founded, a monstrous government, which sustained itself by vices and excesses, and which could not possibly have subsisted in conjunction with moderation and virtue.

His enemies and his subjects trembled equally before him; they trembled still around that litter which transported his remains from Damascus to Cairo. But so many excesses, so many violences, so many triumphs, which only ministered to his personal ambition, were not able to fix the crown in his family; his two sons only ascended the throne to descend from it again. Kelaoun, the bravest of the emirs, soon usurped the sovereign power; a uniform line of succession to the throne was not at all likely to be preserved in an army constantly exposed to sedition. Every Mameluke believed himself born for empire, and in this republic of slaves it appeared permissible for every one to dream of tyranny. A thing almost incredible,—that which appeared most calculated to ruin this band of turbulent soldiery, was precisely that which saved it; weakness or incapacity could never support itself long upon the throne, and amidst the tumult of factions, it almost always happened that the most brave and the most able was chosen to direct the government, and lead in war.

Bibars had commenced the ruin of the Christians; Kelaoun was destined to complete it. In the West, Gregory in vain prosecuted the preparations, or rather the preachings of the crusade; he several times renewed his intreaties to Rodolph of Hapsburg, but Rodolph had an empire to preserve; it was useless for the pope to threaten to deprive him of his crown; the new emperor saw much less danger for him in the anger of the sovereign pontiff than in an expedition which would lead him so far from his states. At length Gregory died, without having been able to fulfil the promises he had made to the Christians of the East. Palestine received, from time to time, some succours from Europe; but these succours, scarcely ever arriving seasonably, appeared less likely to increase than to compromise its safety. The king of Sicily, who had caused himself to be proclaimed king of Jerusalem, sent some soldiers and a governor to Ptolemaïs; he was preparing to make a formidable expedition into Syria,[44] and his ambition, perhaps, might, in this circumstance, have been serviceable to the cause of the Christians, if a revolution had not suddenly put an end to his projects.

The discontent of the people in his states, particularly in Sicily, continually increased. The people had been burdened with a heavy tax for the last crusade, and the publication of a new one was received with many murmurs; the enemies of Charles saw nothing in the assumption of the cross but a signal for violence and brigandage; it is under this sacred banner, they said, that he is accustomed to shed innocent blood: they further remembered that the conquest of Naples had been made under the standard of the cross. At length the signal of revolt being given, eight thousand Frenchmen were immolated to the manes of Conradin, and the Sicilian vespers completed the destruction of all Charles’s Eastern projects.

Kelaoun from that time had it in his power to attack the Christians; but busied in establishing his authority among the Mamelukes, and in repulsing the Tartars, who had advanced towards the Euphrates, he consented to conclude a truce with the Franks of Ptolemaïs. It may plainly be perceived by this treaty, which the Arabian authors have preserved, what were the designs of the sultans of Cairo, and the extent of the ascendancy they assumed over their feeble enemies.[45] The Christians engaged, in the event of any prince of the Franks making an expedition into Asia, to warn the infidels of the coming of Christian armies from the West. This was at the same time signing a dishonourable condition, and renouncing all hopes of a crusade.

The armies of the West, besides, were fighting for other interests than those of the Holy Land, and there was no reason to believe they would be seen in Asia for a length of time. Most of the princes of Europe at that time never bestowed a thought upon the Mussulmans or their victories; such princes or states as had any interests to guard in the East,[46] not only allied themselves without scruple with the sultan of Egypt, but promised by treaties, and swore upon the Gospel, to declare themselves the enemies of all the Christian powers that should attack the states of their Mussulman ally.

Thus all these treaties, dictated sometimes by ambition and avarice, and sometimes by fear, raised every day a new barrier between the Christians of the East and those of the West. Besides, these treaties were no checks upon the sultan of Cairo, who always found some pretext for breaking them, when war presented more advantages than peace. It was thus with the fortress of Margat, situated upon the river Eleuctera, in the neighbourhood of Tripoli. The Hospitallers who guarded this castle were accused of making incursions upon the lands of the Mussulmans; and this accusation, which was not perhaps without foundation, was soon followed by the siege of the place. The towers and ramparts for a long time resisted the shock of the machines of war; the garrison repulsed every attack; but whilst they were fighting upon the walls, and at the foot of the walls, miners were digging away the earth from beneath them. At length the fortress, undermined on all sides, was ready to fall to pieces at the first signal. The Hospitallers made an honourable capitulation, and Margat opened its gates to the Mussulman army.

Upon the seacoast, between Margat and Tortosa, stood another castle, to which a Frank nobleman had retired, whom some of the Arabian chroniclers call the sieur de Telima, and others, the sieur Barthélemi. This Frank lord never ceased ravaging the lands of his neighbourhood, and every day returned home to his fortress loaded with the spoils of the Saracens. Kelaoun was desirous of attacking the castle of the sieur Barthélemi, but thinking it impregnable, he wrote to the count of Tripoli,—“It is thou who hast built, or hast allowed to be built, this castle; evil be to thee, evil be to thy capital, evil be to thy people, if it be not promptly demolished.”[47] The count of Tripoli was the more alarmed at these menaces, from the Mussulman troops being, at the moment he received the letter, in his territories: he offered the seigneur Barthélemi considerable lands in exchange for his castle; he made him the most brilliant promises and offers, but all in vain. At length the son of Barthélemi interfered in the negotiation, and set out to implore the compassion of the sultan of Cairo. The enraged old man flew after his son, overtook him in the city of Ptolemaïs, and poniarded him before the assembled people. This parricide disgusted all the Christians; and Barthélemi was at last abandoned by his own soldiers, who held his crime in great horror. The castle, which was left unprotected, was shortly after demolished. From that time the sieur Barthélemi became the most inveterate enemy of the Christians; and, retired among the infidels, was constantly employed in associating them with his vengeance, and in urging the destruction of the Christian cities.

His pitiless hatred had but too many opportunities of being satisfied. The sultan of Cairo pursued the war against the Christians, and everything seemed to favour his enterprizes. He had for a long time entertained the project of gaining possession of Laodicea, whose port rivalled that of Alexandria; but the citadel of that city, surrounded by the waters of the sea, was inaccessible; an earthquake, which shook the towers of the fortress, facilitated his conquest of it. The castle of Carac and some other forts, built on the coast of Phœnicia, fell into the hands of the Mussulmans. After having thus laid open all the avenues to Tripoli, the sultan turned the whole of his attention to the siege of that city. Neither the faith of treaties, nor the recent submissions of Bohemond, were able to retard for a moment the fall of a flourishing city: no Christian city, no prince of Palestine offered the least assistance to Tripoli. Such indeed was the spirit of division that always reigned among the Franks, that the Templars, in conjunction with the seigneur de Giblet, had entertained the project of introducing some Christian soldiers into Bohemond’s city, and taking it by surprise. They were not able, it is true, to execute their design; but what evils must not these odious jealousies, these black treacheries, have brought upon the feeble remains of the Christian colonies!

A formidable army appeared before the walls of Tripoli, and a great number of machines were erected against the ramparts: after a siege of thirty-five days, the Mussulmans penetrated into the city, fire and sword in hand. Seven thousand Christians fell under the arms of the conqueror; the women and children were dragged away into slavery, and the terrified crowd vainly sought an asylum from the blood-thirsty Mamelukes in the island of St. Nicholas. Aboulfeda relates, that having occasion to go to that island, a few days after the taking of Tripoli, he found it covered with dead bodies. Some of the inhabitants having succeeded in getting on board ships, fled away from their desolate country; but the sea drove them back again upon the shore, where they were massacred by the Mussulmans. Not only the population of Tripoli was almost exterminated, but the sultan gave orders that the city should be burnt and demolished. The port of Tripoli attracted a great part of the commerce of the Mediterranean; the city contained more than four thousand silk-looms; its palaces were admired, its towers and its fortifications appeared impregnable. So many sources of prosperity, all that could cause peace to nourish or serve for defence in war, all perished under the flame, the axe, and the hammer! The principal aim of the Mussulman policy in this war, was to destroy all that the Christians had done; to leave no traces of their power upon the coasts of Syria; nothing which could afterwards attract thither the princes and warriors of the West, nothing that could yield them the means of maintaining themselves there if ever they should be tempted again to unfurl their standards in the East.

Ptolemaïs, which remained neuter in this cruel war, learnt the fall and destruction of a Christian city from some fugitives, who, having escaped the sword of the Mussulmans, came to intreat an asylum within its walls. From this sad intelligence, it might easily predict the misfortunes that awaited it. Ptolemaïs was then the capital of the Christian colonies, and the most considerable city of Syria. Most of the Franks, upon being driven from the other cities of Palestine, had taken refuge there, bringing with them all their portable wealth. In its port anchored all the warlike fleets that came from the West, with the richest trading vessels from most countries of the world. The city had not less increased in extent than population; it was constructed of square-cut stones; all the walls of the houses rose to an equal height, and a platform or terrace surmounted most of the buildings.[48] The interior of the principal houses was ornamented with paintings, and they received light by the means of glass windows, which was at that time an extraordinary luxury. In the public places, coverings of silk or transparent stuffs screened the inhabitants from the ardours of the sun. Between the two ramparts which bounded the city on the east, were built castles and palaces, the residences of the great; the artizans and traders occupied the interior of the city. Among the princes and nobles who had mansions in Ptolemaïs, were the king of Jerusalem, his brothers and his family, the princes of Galilee and Antioch, the lieutenants of France and Sicily, the duke of Cæsarea, the counts of Tripoli and Jaffa, the lords of Barouth, Tyre, Tiberias, Ibelin, Arsaph, &c. We read in an old chronicle that all these magnates were accustomed to walk in the public places, wearing crowns of gold like kings, whilst the vestments of their numerous trains glittered with gold and precious stones. Every day was passed in festivity, spectacles or tournaments; whilst the port was a mart of exchange for the treasures of the East and the West, exhibiting at all times an animated picture of commerce and industry.

Contemporary history deplores with severity the corruption of morals that prevailed in Ptolemaïs, the crowds of strangers bringing with them the vices of all countries. Effeminacy and luxury pervaded every class, the clergy themselves being unable to escape the general contagion: the inhabitants of Ptolemaïs were esteemed the most voluptuous and dissolute of all the nations of Syria. Ptolemaïs was not only the richest city of Syria, it was further supposed to be the best fortified. St. Louis, during his abode in Palestine, had neglected nothing to repair and increase its fortifications. On the land side, a double wall surrounded the city, commanded at distances by lofty battlemented towers; and a wide and deep ditch prevented access to the ramparts. Towards the sea, the city was defended by a fortress built at the entrance of the port, by the castle of the temple on the south, and by the tower called the King’s Tower, on the east.

Ptolemaïs appears then to have possessed much better means of defence than at the period at which it stood out for three years against all the forces of Europe. No power could have subdued it if it had been inhabited by true citizens, and not by foreigners, pilgrims, and traders, at all times ready to transport themselves and their wealth from one place to another. The persons who represented the king of Naples, the lieutenants of the king of Cyprus, the French, the English, the pope’s legate, the patriarch of Jerusalem, the prince of Antioch, the three military orders, the Venetians, the Genoese, the Pisans, the Armenians, the Tartars, had all and each their separate quarter, their jurisdiction, their tribunals, their magistrates—all independent of each other, and all enjoying the right of sovereignty. All these quarters were as so many different cities, opposed to each other by customs, by language, by manners, and above all, by rivalries and jealousies. It was impossible to preserve order in a city in which so many sovereigns made laws, which had no uniform government, and in which the crime pursued in one part, was protected in another. Thus all the passions were without a check, and often gave birth to sanguinary and disgraceful scenes: in addition to the quarrels that took their rise in the country, there was not a feud in Europe, particularly in Italy, that was not felt in Ptolemaïs. The discords of the Guelphs and the Ghibelines were here carried on with warmth, and the rivalries of Venice and Genoa had caused torrents of blood to flow. Each nation had fortifications in the quarter it inhabited, against the others; and the churches even were fortified. At the entrance to each division was a fortress, with gates and iron chains; it was plainly to be perceived that all these means of defence had been employed less for the purpose of stopping the progress of an enemy, than as a barrier against neighbours and rivals.

The leaders of all the quarters and the principal inhabitants of the city sometimes assembled; but they seldom, agreed, and were at all times mistrustful of each other: these assemblies never laid down any settled plan of conduct, never established any wholesome fixed rule, and, above all, never showed the least foresight.

The city at the same time demanded succours from the West, and solicited a truce with the Saracens. When a treaty was concluded, no one had sufficient power to secure its observance; on the contrary, every one had it in his power to violate it, and thus bring upon the city all the ills that this violation would produce.

After the taking of Tripoli, the sultan of Cairo menaced the city of Ptolemaïs; nevertheless, whether he dreaded the despair of the inhabitants, or thought that the favourable moment was not yet arrived, he yielded to their solicitations, and renewed a truce with them for two years, two months, two weeks, two days, and two hours. According to a chronicle, the pope’s legate disapproved of the treaty, and caused some Mussulman traders, who came to Ptolemaïs, to be insulted: the Templars and the other military orders were desirous of making reparation to the sultan of Egypt; but the legate opposed them, and threatened to excommunicate all who should have the least intercourse with the infidels.[49]

An Arabian author assigns another motive for the violences committed against the Mussulmans. He relates that the wife of a rich inhabitant of Ptolemaïs, being deeply enamoured of a young Mussulman, had appointed a meeting with him in one of the gardens that surround the city; the husband, warned of this outrage against conjugal fidelity, gathers together some friends, goes out from Ptolemaïs with them,[50] surprises his wife and her seducer, and immolates them both to his injured honour. Some Mussulmans are drawn to the spot; the Christians come up in still greater numbers; the quarrel becomes angry and general; and every Mussulman is massacred.

These violences, which fame did not fail to exaggerate whilst narrating them, might give the sultan of Egypt a pretext for renewing the war; and the Christians, who plainly perceived their new perils, implored the assistance of the sovereign pontiff. The pope engaged Venice to furnish twenty-five galleys, and this fleet transported to Ptolemaïs a troop of sixteen hundred men, levied in haste in Italy. This reinforcement, which was sent to the inhabitants of Palestine for their defence, provoked their ruin; the soldiers of the Holy See, levied among adventurers and vagabonds, gave themselves up to all sorts of excesses. Having no regular pay, they plundered Christians and Mussulmans indiscriminately; at last, this undisciplined troop marched out of the city in arms, and made an incursion upon the lands of the Saracens. Everything was laid waste on their passage; towns and villages were pillaged, the inhabitants insulted, and many of them massacred. The sultan of Cairo sent ambassadors to the Christians to complain of these outrages, committed in a time of peace. On the arrival of the Mussulman envoys several councils were held in Ptolemaïs. Opinions were at first divided; some were willing to take the part of those who had broken the truce; others thought it more just and prudent to give satisfaction to the sultan, and solicit the continuation of the treaty. In the end, it was determined to send a deputation to Cairo, commissioned to make excuses and offer presents. Upon being admitted to an audience of Kelaoun, the deputation alleged that the offences had been committed by some soldiers who had come from the West, and in no case by the inhabitants of Ptolemaïs. The deputies, in the name of their city, offered to punish the authors of the disorders; but their submission and prayers produced no effect upon the sultan, who reproached them severely with making a jest of the faith of treaties, and with giving an asylum to disturbers of peace and foes to the laws of nations. He was the more inflexible, from thinking the opportunity a favourable one for carrying out his projects; he was aware that no crusade was in preparation in Europe, and he knew that all the succour from the West was reduced to this band of adventurers who had just broken the truce. Kelaoun sent back the ambassadors, threatening the city of Ptolemaïs with the whole weight of his anger: his orders were already given for preparations for war throughout all his provinces.