The Accursed Tower Page 3

  Among the pious, this craven realpolitik led to fierce condemnation. The historian Ibn al-Athir deplored the fact that “amongst the rulers of Islam we see not one who desires to wage jihad or aid… religion. Each one devotes himself to his pastimes and amusements and wronging his flock. This is more dreadful to me than the enemy.”6 The crusader states became just another player in the pattern of alliances and feuds. The kingdom of Jerusalem even sided with Damascus in the Ayyubid civil wars and suffered a crushing defeat for its pains at the battle of La Forbie in 1244, in which the Hospitaller and Templar detachments were almost wiped out.

  Trade also fostered détente. The crusader states were economically useful to the Islamic world; Acre and Tyre particularly profited hugely from these interchanges during the first half of the thirteenth century, for which they were as roundly criticized by the papacy as were their Islamic trading partners by pious Muslims. However, at no time did the disunity of Islam enable the Franks to regain the substantial territory lost to Saladin. Periods of truce were interspersed with small-scale crusading ventures from Europe. The Fifth Crusade had ended in failure in the Nile Delta. It was followed by a string of other piecemeal initiatives that failed to shift the balance of power. The Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, under excommunication by the pope, came to the Levant in 1228. Despite negotiating the short-term recovery of Jerusalem, he stirred up deep opposition in the kingdom. When he sailed away from Acre the following year, the townspeople pelted him with offal. Theobald, count of Champagne, led an inconsequential crusade in 1239–1240, Richard of Cornwall another shortly after.

  The functional inadequacies of both the Ayyubids and the Crusader States ensured a status quo. Without a more unified Islamic response, the Franks were impossible to dislodge; without unity among Christian factions, the goal of retaking Jerusalem remained a dream. In the West, attention to Outremer was also slowly waning. Europe was witnessing a consolidation of empires and nation-states. The papacy’s long-running feud with Frederick II and his successors over the rule of Sicily was diverting energy and funds from the Latin East. It had become possible for the faithful to fulfill their crusading vows elsewhere—in Sicily, or Moorish Spain, or the forests of Prussia, or even by purchasing remission for their sins. The Templar poet Ricaut Bonomel complained:

  For he [the pope] pardons for money people who have taken our cross

  And if anyone wishes to swap the Holy Land

  For the war in Italy

  Our legate lets them do so

  For he sells God and Indulgences for cash.7

  WITHIN THE HEART of Asia, however, the tectonic plates of power were starting to shift. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Mongols embarked on their sweep west, and before their advance, other nomadic people were being displaced. Soon the repercussions were felt in the Islamic world. The Mongols destroyed the existing Persian dynasty and pushed its Turkic tribal rulers, the Khwarazmians, into Palestine. (It was this warlike people, of similar central Asian origin, who sacked Jerusalem in 1244.)

  Among those buffeted by the Mongol advance were another tribal people from the central Asian steppes, the Turkish Kipchaks. Like the Mongols, the Kipchaks were restless nomadic tent dwellers who lived by grazing flocks and raiding their neighbors, animists who worshipped the earth and the sky through the intermediation of shamans. Similarly, they were also horse people, highly skillful fighters, expert in the use of the powerful composite bow and the mobile tactics of cavalry warfare. Pushed ever westward into an area north of the Black Sea, young Kipchaks were captured in raids by rival tribes and shipped to the slave markets of Anatolia and Syria, converted to Sunni Islam, and sold to appreciative buyers.

  The fighting qualities of the nomadic peoples had been quickly recognized. The caliph of Baghdad was recruiting tribal fighters into his army as military slaves as early as the ninth century. They were praised for their unique skills in mounted warfare: “raiding, hunting, horsemanship, skirmishing with rival chieftains, taking booty and invading other countries. Their efforts are all directed towards these activities, and they devote all their energies to these occupations.” Kipchak boys probably started to learn archery skills from the age of four. “Thus,” it was said, “they have become in warfare what the Greeks are in philosophy.”8

  These first-generation Sunni Muslims still retained many of their tribal practices, but they brought to their new religion the zeal of converts. Looking back from the fourteenth century, the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun saw the appearance of the Turkic peoples as providential in reviving a decadent Islam: “Sedentary people,” he wrote, “have become used to laziness and ease. They find full assurance of safety in the walls that surround them, and the fortifications that protect them. [Nomadic people] have no gates and walls. They take hurried naps only… when they are in the saddle. They pay attention to every faint barking and noise. Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs and courage their nature.”9 Ibn Khaldun saw them as a providential blessing sent from God “to revive the dying breath of Islam and restore the unity of Muslims.”10 Saladin, a Kurd, had led armies that were Turkish in ethos. Within the insecure dynasties of the Middle East, there was a long tradition of recruiting such slaves, known in Arabic as mamluks, “the owned ones.” With no hereditary ties to competing factions, they owed all their loyalty to their master. One statesman put it thus:

  One obedient slave is better

  than three hundred sons;

  for the latter desire their father’s death,

  the former long life for his master.11

  The concept of military slavery in the Islamic world was radically different to the understanding of slavery in Europe. The Mamluks were more like elite mercenaries than bonded serfs. They could rise through the ranks to positions of power as emirs, they were paid, and their occupation could not be handed down—their children could not inherit a place in the sultan’s corps. There was always a demand for fresh conscripts from the grasslands beyond the Black Sea.

  When the Ayyubid prince al-Malik al-Salih came to power in Egypt in 1240, he began buying Kipchak military slaves and importing them into Egypt. These soldiers became his loyal imperial bodyguard and crack regiment. Al-Salih acquired a corps of about a thousand Mamluks during his reign. Many were garrisoned on an island in the Nile, from which they gained their name the Bahriyyah—“the regiment of the river.” Another smaller corps, the Jamdariyyah, served as al-Salih’s personal bodyguards. Isolated in barracks and subject to intense training in skills of horsemanship, hand-to-hand combat, and archery, the Mamluks developed a strong group spirit that served them well in battle—but potentially rendered them a threat to masters increasingly reliant on them.

  IN THE WAKE of the 1244 loss of Jerusalem, there was a fresh call in Europe for crusade. The response came from the king of France, Louis IX. Louis set about organizing the best-planned and most deeply funded military expedition ever mounted for the recapture of Jerusalem. This grand mission was destined to have unintended consequences. It would see the collapse of the Ayyubid dynasty; the Bahriyyah Mamluks would move from slaves to sultans. And it would set in motion a chain of events that would lead back to the gates of Acre in 1291.

  2

  DEATH ON THE NILE

  1249–1250

  AT DAWN ON Saturday, June 5, 1249, a crusader fleet prepared to land on the coast of Egypt, near the eastern tributary of the Nile and the town of Damietta. The army of the Fifth Crusade had alighted at the same spot thirty years earlier, and this new expedition was not unexpected. “We found there all the sultan’s forces lined up on the seashore,” wrote the French knight Jean de Joinville, surveying the scene before him. “These were very fine men to behold, for the sultan’s coat of arms were golden and they glittered where the sunlight fell on them. The noise of their kettledrums and Saracen horns was terrifying to hear.”1 With the sun rising, thousands of men waded ashore from small boats.

  A beach landing against organized opposition was dangerous in t
he extreme, but the level of discipline was exceptionally high, and the knights and foot soldiers were covered by fierce crossbow fire. Joinville landed to confront a band of Muslim horsemen. “As soon as they saw us land, they advanced towards us spurring their horses. When we saw them coming, we planted our lances in the sand with the points towards them. Once they saw the lances ready to impale their stomachs, they turned and fled.”2 To his left, the knight could see a magnificent galley rowed by three hundred men, studded with shields bearing brightly painted coats of arms and pennons fluttering in the breeze. “As it neared the shore, the rowers propelled it forward with all the force of their oars, so that it seemed as if the galley was flying. Such was the cracking of the pennons in the wind, the thunder of kettledrums and Saracen horns that were in the count’s galley that it sounded like thunderbolts crashing from the heavens. As soon as the galley grounded on the sand, riding up on the shore as high as it could, the count and his knights leaped from the galley, very well armed and wonderfully equipped, and came and formed themselves up alongside us.”3

  Up and down the beach, the standards of the great noble families of France were being planted as a rallying point for the troops in the face of mounted attacks. Prominent among these was the oriflamme, the red and orange banner of the French kings, the color of the blood of the martyr St. Denis. When the leader, organizer, and financer of this expedition, King Louis IX, watching from his magnificent ship, the Montjoie, saw his standard planted on the beach, he could restrain himself no longer. He leaped into the sea—the water up to his armpits, his shield slung over his shoulder, his helmet on his head—and stepped ashore. With his blood up, he leveled his lance, armed his shield, and was preparing to charge into the enemy ranks. He had to be held back.

  KING LOUIS’S PREPARATIONS had been detailed and thorough. The crusade was French in inspiration and composition, and consisted of some 25,000 men—–mounted knights and sergeants, foot soldiers and crossbowmen. It included three of the king’s brothers and the flower of French chivalry, and had been four years in the making. This was a completely professional force: Louis had left behind the volunteers who turned up at the departure port of Aigues-Mortes on their own initiative. He was driven by a rigorous sense of duty toward his men and devout Christian ideals, inspired by a vow he had taken when he had been near death in 1244. The campaign’s initial objective, however, was not Jerusalem, but Cairo.

  SHREWD MILITARY THINKERS, such as Richard I, had understood that Saladin’s victories in Palestine and Syria depended on the wealth of Egypt. “The keys of Jerusalem,” as he put it, “are to be found in Cairo.”4 This thinking had held currency for half a century. The disastrous Fourth Crusade, which had ended in the sacking of Constantinople in 1204, had been covertly intended to make a strike on the Nile Delta. A decade later, when Jacques de Vitry arrived in Acre to prepare for a new crusade, the objective was quite explicit: “We planned to proceed to Egypt, which is a fertile land and the richest in the east, from which the Saracens draw the power and wealth to enable them to hold our land, and after we have captured that land, we can easily recover the whole kingdom of Jerusalem.”5 This Fifth Crusade had also ended in abject failure. It took eighteen months to capture the coastal city of Damietta, a hundred miles north of Cairo. The crusaders had spent another indecisive eighteen months there, had twice refused to accept a peace treaty with the Ayyubid sultan (who even offered to return Jerusalem), and had then been ambushed among the complex seasonal flows of the Nile and the labyrinth of its channels. Blockaded, trapped, and forced to wade waist deep in muddy water, the army had surrendered ignominiously.

  The crusaders advance on Damietta. The defense as shown in this medieval manuscript never happened. The town was abandoned. (Jean, Sire de Joinville, Paris, 1874)

  Louis’s crusade came with the same strategic objective, greater clarity of purpose, and whatever knowledge it had garnered from its predecessor about the unique hydrology of the Nile. It all started so promisingly. According to Joinville, the defenders of Damietta sent urgent carrier pigeons to Cairo, but they received no reply. The sultan al-Salih was dying. “They thought the sultan was dead and they abandoned Damietta,” was the confident explanation in the Christian camp.6 Where it had taken their predecessors nine months and a long and horrific siege, Louis’s troops entered the town in a single day to find its commander, the emir Fakhr al-Din, and the garrison gone. The panic-stricken population had followed. It seemed providential—a sign from God that Louis’s crusade would succeed—and it imbued the king with a disastrous sense of confidence. The planners were aware of the vulnerability of the Ayyubid regime, torn apart by factional feuding and in slow decline. This had provided some of the rationale to go for Egypt. Damietta had been provisioned and garrisoned to withstand a long siege, so its capitulation seemed to confirm that they were pushing at an open door. It was in the Islamic annals both “a terrible disaster, the like of which had never happened before” and a disgrace on the part of the emir and his regiment.7 But what the crusaders did not know was that Fakhr al-Din had only abandoned the town without a fight in order to mount his own bid for power upon the sultan’s death.

  What followed was a slow motion and much ghastlier reprise of the Fifth Crusade, whose events were recounted in vivid detail by Jean de Joinville. Louis demanded unbending discipline from the troops, but in the early skirmishes, the desire to fight led to individual knights charging at the enemy and losing their lives. He himself had set an intemperate example at the beach landing, and the chivalric code of personal valor in single combat was a recurrent problem: the nobility proved difficult to restrain from reckless acts of bravery.

  Egypt and the Nile Delta.

  A grimmer reality quickly set in. Despite the collapse of Damietta, the crusader camp was stalked nightly by Bedouin horse thieves and murderers. “They came and killed the sentry of the lord of Courtenay, and left his body lying on a table, having cut off his head, and they made off with it. They did this because the sultan gave a golden bezant for each Christian head.”8 For the same reason, the Bedouins were said to have also cut off the heads of hanged men and dig up buried bodies. The crusaders were quickly compelled to entrench their camp outside Damietta and guard it round the clock. They debated their next move: consolidate by taking the strategic port of Alexandria 120 miles to the west or march on Cairo. Louis’s brother, the count of Artois, was adamantly for Cairo, reasoning that “he who wishes to kill the serpent must first crush the head,” but the army was forced to wait for the Nile’s seasonal floodwaters to recede.9 It was not until November that they set out, following the path traced by the Fifth Crusade in a march south up the river, with the aim of seizing the strategic town of Mansurah, to which the sultan’s army had fallen back. Buoyed up by the disarming success at Damietta, there was a feeling that if this town could be taken, Egypt would quickly collapse.

  There was widespread alarm among the Muslims at the possibility that “if the army at Mansurah were to be driven back just one stage to the rear the whole of Egypt would be conquered in the shortest time.”10 Cairo was thrown into panic. The troops at Mansurah were dug in for a determined stand, with the dying sultan in attendance.

  The forty-mile march south was a combined operation, the army progressing along the east bank of the Nile, accompanied by galleys with food supplies. The expedition had reasonably good knowledge of the river’s hydrology but crucially failed to register the importance of a stagnant-looking waterway, the Mahallah canal, that joined the opposite side of the river halfway to their goal. It seemed too insignificant to consider blocking. This canal had played a key role in the defeat of the Nile crusade thirty years earlier, and it was about to again. As Louis’s men approached Mansurah, they found their way barred by another side river, which the Christians called the Tanis; their adversaries were encamped on the opposite bank, and the crusaders were halted in the fork between the Nile and the Tanis.

  While Louis was on the march, the sultan died, on Novem
ber 22. Al-Salih had harbored suspicions about Fakhr al-Din’s retreat from Damietta, and he had hanged the whole deserting garrison. Now these fears seemed confirmed. In conjunction with one of his widows, the sultan’s death was concealed from the people, and a power struggle for the succession was underway. Fakhr al-Din forged al-Salih’s signature on documents and called on people to come to the cause. Amid the rumors and counter-rumors, he dispatched Aqtay, the leader of the Mamluk Bahriyyah regiment, on a mission to distant Hisn Kayfa, a town on the Tigris in southeastern Turkey, to invite the late sultan’s son, al-Muazzam Turanshah, to take up the throne, perhaps with the hope that he would never arrive.

  Despite the secrecy, the news of al-Salih’s death leaked out, but people were too frightened to voice what they suspected. It was believed among the emirs that “Fakhr al-Din was aiming at sole and arbitrary rule, should al-Malik al-Muazzam [Turanshah] find it impossible to come.”11 In any case, Turanshah, the sultan’s youngest and only surviving son, did not inspire confidence. He was, by inclination, a scholar rather than a military leader, and al-Salih was reported to have harbored deep fears over his succession: “When death comes upon me, do not summon Turanshah from Hisn Kayfa and do not entrust the country to him, for I know that nothing good will come from him.”12

  MEANWHILE, THE TANIS was posing a serious obstacle for the crusade. Crossing it was critical but the river was fast flowing and apparently too deep to ford, and the Ayyubid army was determined to resist any attempts. Louis and his commanders decided to construct a causeway across it, and to protect the men tasked with building it, two “cats”—moveable wooden towers—were constructed, and catapults positioned to bombard the Egyptian camp. From the Muslim side, a similar torrent of catapult shots and Greek fire was directed at these towers. To overcome the protective screen provided by the cats, the Muslims also took to firing their arrows “straight up into the clouds so that their arrows fell right down among our men.”13 Guarding these wooden structures became fraught with danger, from both the fear of being burned alive and the shower of arrows that their enemies were launching over the water. Confronted by a “great hedge of flaming fire coming towards our cat castle,”14 Joinville and his men were forced out into the open in an attempt to extinguish it, “so the Saracens hit all of us with the arrows they were firing across the river.”15 He was openly relieved when the tower he was assigned to guard was set on fire before his next turn of duty: “God granted a great favour to me and my knights, as we would have undertaken guard duty that evening in great peril.”16