The Crusades and Silk Road: A Captivating Guide to Religious Wars During the Middle Ages and an Ancient Network of Trade Routes by Captivating History

Author:Captivating History [History, Captivating]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Published: 2020-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10 – The Eighth Crusade (1270)

The successes of Baibars in the 1260s in the Holy Land rightly alarmed the Europeans to such an extent that the King of France, Louis IX, then in his fifties, decided to launch another Crusade. He formally took the cross on March 24, 1267. Louis and his army set sail from the Provence port of Aigues-Mortes in the summer of 1270. His departure had been preceded by a Spanish contingent that departed from Barcelona under King James I of Aragon in the fall of 1269. The Aragonese flotilla was damaged by a storm, and most of the survivors returned to Spain, but a small contingent did struggle to Acre where they engaged with Baibars’ troops. Unable to dislodge the Egyptian sultan, they returned home.

Louis IX abandoned his initial plan to sail to Cyprus and then on to the Holy Land. Instead, he chose to sail south to Tunis in North Africa, where he hoped to subdue the city by converting the caliph to Christianity and thus interrupt the forwarding of supplies to Egypt, weakening Baibars’ sultanate.

Louis’ forces were augmented by one provided by the King of Navarre, which sailed from Marseille. Both met off Sardinia and then proceeded to the coast of Tunisia. The arrival of the English fleet carrying Crusaders was delayed as Henry III of England, who had agreed to participate, backed out and sent his son Prince Edward instead.

After reaching North Africa, the Crusaders set up camp near Carthage. While awaiting reinforcements, they fell victim to a virulent epidemic of dysentery. Louis himself died of the disease on August 25, 1270. The Crusaders, after making a treaty with the caliph of Tunis, prepared to evacuate from North Africa. While most of the French troops returned home, Prince Edward of England took his army of about 1,000 men, including 225 knights, to Acre, where he disembarked on May 9, 1271.

The Ninth Crusade (1271–1272)

This Crusade is sometimes considered to be a part of the Eighth Crusade (which is why it does not have its own chapter), and it is commonly seen as the last Crusade to reach the Holy Land before the fall of Acre in 1291.

Hearing of the failure of Louis IX’s Crusade in North Africa and the death of the king himself, the Mamluk Sultan Baibars rescinded his orders to his generals in Cairo to march westward to relieve Tunis. He continued to lay siege to Crusader castles in Syria during this time. At the seemingly impregnable Krak des Chevaliers, Baibars’ army breached the outer walls in two days. They did this by using mangonels modeled after those of the Crusaders. Baibars then concocted a clever plan to force the defenders to surrender by sending them a forged letter. Purported to be from the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitallers, the letter instructed the Hospitallers stationed there to surrender. After a lull in fighting that lasted ten days, the Hospitallers, in early April 1271, negotiated their departure from Krak des Chevaliers, and their lives were spared.

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