The Dream and the Tomb (57 page)

The disaster at La Forbie signified the end of the Crusaders' offensive military power. They would continue to hold castles and fortified cities for a little while longer, but never again were they able to put a large army in the field. They had been bled white at La Forbie; the body politic had suffered so many shocks that it seemed to be dazed, exhausted, without willpower.

One more king, arrayed in the mysterious panoply of majesty, would come to the Holy Land and attempt after more terrible defeats to put its affairs in order. Meanwhile the Crusaders, crouched behind their fortress walls, murdered each other, sent occasional raiding parties into the hinterland, and sometimes they managed to believe that the kingdom was in the care of the Holy Trinity and would endure for eternity.

ONLY one of the kings of France became a saint. Although in all his acts he exhibited a peculiarly French grace and courtesy, his temperament was profoundly Spanish. His mother, Queen Blanche of Castile, instilled in him a love for devotional practices, and he was very young when he wore his first hair shirt. He had a Spaniard's abject fear of mortal sin and a Spaniard's habit of harsh meditations. He was crowned at the age of twelve at Rheims. His mother ruled France until he came of age; and even when he became the sole ruler, he sought his mother's advice so often that even the clerics who half-worshipped him wondered who was in command.

The monks called him “Friar Louis,” and there was something monkish in him; yet he was very well aware that he was king of France. Moreover, since the day of his coronation, he felt he was king not so much by divine right but by a singular blessing of God. He prayed a great deal; in his prayers he seemed to lose—and find—himself. He was devoted to the poor, the sick, and the maimed. He would go to hospitals and work there like the commonest of nurses; he would even empty out the bedpans.

One day he asked one of his companions, “What would you rather be—a leper or in mortal sin?”

“I would rather have committed thirty or forty mortal sins than be a leper,” his companion replied.

The king said nothing at the time, but on the following day the man was summoned into his presence.

“Come and sit at my feet,” the king said. “Yesterday you spoke rashly, for all the ills of the body are cured in a little while when a man dies, but if the soul is tarnished and if you are uncertain whether God has pardoned you, the evil will last forever as long as God sits in Paradise.”

The king disliked ostentation, and usually wore a brown taffeta tunic under a dark blue mantle of coarse cloth, and it may not have occurred to him that the dark tunic brought out the highlights of the bright yellow
hair that reached to his shoulders. Although usually clothed modestly, he counseled his sons to dress well. “You should clothe yourselves well and decently,” he told them, “so that your women will love you more and your household will respect you, for the wise men say we ought to dress and arm ourselves in such a manner that neither shall the good men of the world blame us for extravagance nor the young blades for meanness.” On ceremonial occasions he delighted in wearing a sumptuous vermilion surcoat edged with ermine.

He was paradoxical: a meditative man who loved action, a reasonable man who believed in the sanctity of improbable relics, a profoundly gentle man who could be mercilessly cruel on occasion. His pride and humility were in harmonious balance.

He collected relics with avidity, including the Crown of Thorns and a portion of the True Cross, both of which he purchased in Constantinople for vast sums. Eventually he built the famous Sainte-Chapelle to house them.

In time he acquired the Holy Lance and the Holy Sponge and the Holy Nails, the Purple Robe, a piece of the Holy Shroud, a portion of the Napkin used by Mary Magdelene to wash Christ's feet, a phial of the Virgin's Milk and another of the Precious Blood. Avaricious of relics, he acquired the Virgin's blue mantle and the swaddling clothes of the Christ-child. Having exhausted the available treasures of the New Testament, he went in search of the treasures of the Old Testament. He acquired the Rod with which Moses struck the Rock and all manner of strange objects from the ancient past: there was no end to the inventiveness of Venetian and Byzantine merchants.

More than any of his contemporaries, Louis IX possessed the means to buy relics and the faith necessary to worship them. He seems to have felt that relics formed a kind of celestial economy that could be brought down to earth. Heaven was in the relics, and the more relics he possessed the more of heaven lay in his possession.

There remained the ultimate relic: the empty tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Indeed, for him the Holy Land was itself a relic, a place of surpassing holiness, and he was determined to conquer it.

At last, when Sainte-Chapelle had been completed, he set out on his Crusade with every intention of recovering the Holy Sepulchre for the Christians. He left Paris on June 12, 1248, marched by slow stages to Lyons, where the baggage trains were transferred to barges and the great war-horses were walked along the river bank. Near Valence, the king paused long enough to attack the castle of La Roche-Glun, whose lord preyed on all pilgrims and merchants who passed below the castle walls. It was a very hot summer; the earth was parched and the sky cloudless. When they reached Aigues-Mortes, which means “dead waters,” the Crusaders were exhausted. At Aigues-Mortes, the sea came right up to the walls, and
one could step out of the town and board the ships at the Watergate. Thirty-eight ships from Genoa and Marseilles were waiting for the Crusader army, which numbered about twenty thousand men, of whom about four thousand were armed knights. King Louis was accompanied by his wife, Marguerite of Provence, one of the four beautiful daughters of the count of Provence. King Henry III of England married Eleanor, Richard of Cornwall married Sanchia, and Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, married the youngest, Beatrice. The four daughters were all high-spirited, intelligent, and resourceful, and they were able to influence events.

On August 25, the great fleet assembled at Aigues-Mortes was ready to sail, the horses battened down in the hatches, the knights taking their places in the forecastles and the sergeants and bowmen on the deck aft. Two days passed before the wind caught the great sails. Then, with all its banners flying, the armada made its way toward Cyprus.

Both King Louis and his chronicler, John of Joinville, were bad sailors. The king was often seasick; he had a horror of the sea. John of Joinville describes with a cold passion what it was like to be out of sight of land:

Soon the wind filled our sails and carried us out of sight of the land, so that we saw nothing but sky and water; and every day the wind carried us further from the country where we were born. I tell you these things so that you will understand how foolhardy it is for a man to run such grave risks, especially if he is in possession of something that belongs to someone else or if he is in mortal sin. For when you go to bed at night on shipboard, you do not know whether you may find yourself in the morning at the bottom of the sea.

Three weeks after leaving Aigues-Mortes, the fleet dropped anchor in the harbor of Limassol on the southern coast of Cyprus. Immediately, there was a council of war. King Louis wanted to sail at once to Egypt, but the Cypriots and most of his knights preferred to delay the attack until the following spring. So they wintered in Cyprus, building up the fleet, amassing armaments and provisions, and quarreling with one another, while a surprisingly large number of French barons died of disease. The historian De Nangis says that two hundred and forty nobles and knights died. Charles of Anjou, the king's brother, suffered from a quartan fever. It was a bad omen. The king, however, remained in good spirits; he was so busy adjudicating the quarrels of his subjects and of the princes of the Near East that he had no time to brood.

The king of Armenia was quarreling with the prince of Antioch. The king bade them settle their quarrel with a two-year truce, and then prudently aided the princeof Antioch with a present of six hundred bowmen to fight off the marauding Turks. The Cypriots quarreled with the French;
the rival archbishops of the Latin and Greek rites stirred up dissension; and in spite of an outward show of agreement, the king of Cyprus was not always on friendly terms with the king of France. The king's financial troubles were increasing, because so many of the knights simply could not afford to spend a long winter in Cyprus. John of Joinville soon exhausted his money. He went to the king, who gave him 800 livres, “which was more than I needed.” It is fortunate that he did so, for otherwise John of Joinville would have been compelled to return to France and his
Chronicle of the Crusade of St. Louis
would never have been written.

Toward Christmas there arrived in Nicosia, where the king had his headquarters, two envoys called Mark and David, both of whom were Mongols and Nestorian Christians. They represented Aljighidai, the Mongol viceroy of Persia. Guyuk Khan, the nephew of Genghis Khan, ruled all of northern Asia from Peking to the Crimea and beyond, and Aljighidai was one of his most powerful advisers. The envoys brought news that Guyuk Khan, Aljighidai and most of the Mongol army had been converted to Christianity, and that the Mongols hoped for an alliance with the Franks against the hated Saracens. Mark and David were watched carefully, but there was not the least doubt that they were Christians; they attended mass, made the proper responses, and spoke very seriously with the Dominican friar, Andrew of Longjumeau, who was in attendance at King Louis's court, and who happened to be one of the greatest experts in the West on the Mongols. Friar Andrew spoke Persian, the court language of the Mongols in western Asia, and was able to authenticate the documents produced by the Nestorian Christians.

It was an exciting moment, this first confrontation between a European king and envoys representing the Mongol horde. The king was aware that everything about the meeting was fraught with heavy consequences. An alliance between the Mongols and the Franks promised the destruction of Saracen power in the Near East: Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo would fall; Mongols and Christians would rule over the Holy Land. Nor was this prospect merely a visionary dream. The kingdom of Armenia in Cilicia was already a vassal state of the Mongol empire; Hethum I, King of Armenia, who had married the granddaughter of a former queen of Jerusalem, had traveled across nearly the whole of Asia to present himself at the Mongol court in Karakorum at a time when the Great Khan was thinking seriously of converting to Christianity. The Mongols were closer to Jerusalem than people realized.

Mark and David, the two Mongol envoys, remained in Cyprus for over five weeks. The king sent an embassy to Aljighidai, the most important ever sent by Christendom to the Mongols. It included Andrew of Longjumeau, two more Dominican friars, two clerks, and two sergeants-at-arms. With them were sent many jewels and a tent-chapel of scarlet silk, embroidered with scenes depicting the life of Christ so that it resembled a church
with stained glass windows, mosaics, and paintings. Aljighidai died before they reached him. The embassy went on toward Mongolia only to find that Guyuk Khan had also died. The empire was being administered by his widow, Ogul Garnish, who showed no interest at all in a Franco-Mongol alliance. She received the ambassadors graciously, gave them gifts in return, and sent them back to King Louis, calling upon the king to send tribute of gold and silver “as much as may win you our friendship,” and threatening to destroy him if he did not do so.

With the coming of spring, the king's problems increased. He needed more ships for the invasion fleet; his money was running out; the quarrels of the Genoese and Pisans were getting out of hand; some of the Frankish soldiers were sailing to Cilicia to join forces with the king of Armenia, who was fighting the Turks in Asia Minor; the Templars were engaged in secret negotiations with the sultan of Egypt in spite of the king's determination that no negotiations should take place. During the previous winter the sultan had captured Hims and was thus in a position to threaten many of the coastal cities of the Crusaders. The worst of these tribulations was the quarrel between the Genoese and the Pisans, which led to a ferocious civil war lasting twenty-one days in Acre. The king wanted the ships moored in the harbor of Acre to sail to Limassol, to serve as transports for the descent on Egypt, but none came.

At last, on May 13, 1249, the fleet was assembled. There were about 120 galleons, 80 smaller ships, and a host of pinnaces, supply boats, and small craft. It took more than two weeks to provision the ships, and finally the ships were ready to sail. But just at the moment when the king was attending his last mass on the island of Cyprus, there came a tempest from the south so violent that two-thirds of the fleet, brought together at such vast expense and with so much ingenuity and care, was scattered by winds of hurricane force and dispersed throughout the eastern Mediterranean. If God were saying to King Louis, “Go back to France, your journey is doomed, save what can be saved,” he could not have said it more clearly.