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We were all covered with fire-darts. By good luck, I found a thick Saracen’s tunic. I made a shield of the tunic, which served me in good stead, for their fire-darts only wounded me in five places and my pony in fifteen … There was a patch of ground behind the Templars, the size of a day’s work, so covered with the darts that the Saracens had thrown, that the soil could not be seen for the density of them …
The Lord Jean de Joinville describing the firestorm of ordnance hurled at the Crusaders at al-Mansura by the Bahriyya Mamluk regiment.
Calls for a new Crusade following the despoiling of the Holy Sepulchre and the disastrous Battle of Harbiyya (of which more later) brought Louis IX of France and an army of 20,000 men to Egypt’s shores in 1249. Louis put a large force ashore near Damietta on 5 June, and the city fell the following day.
Louis waited out the flood season and marched on Cairo on 20 November. Despite being gravely ill, al-Salih prepared defences at al-Mansura with his Bahriyya Mamluks. Al-Salih died on 24 November. His heir, Turanshah, was far away in the Jazira. The sultan’s widow concealed his death and forged a decree naming the senior emir, Al-Shuyukh, commander-in-chief. Al-Shuyukh was an elderly but inspiring leader and he halted the Crusader advance at al-Mansura. He then moved his siege engines to the riverbank. The Crusaders endeavoured to bridge the river and the Mamluks stopped them dead with a barrage of grenades and short naft darts fired from tubes mounted on their bows – three darts could be loaded into the tube and fired simultaneously.
On 7 February 1249, the Crusaders discovered a ford upstream and the king’s brother charged along the river after crossing, took the Muslim encampment on the river by surprise and stormed into the city itself. The Mamluks were initially scattered, but then very rapidly barricaded the streets to prevent the Crusaders’ withdrawal and killed virtually the entire force in hand-to-hand fighting.
The Bahriyya, under the junior emir Baybars, moved out of al-Mansura to meet the rest of the king’s forces. The fighting lasted for the rest of the day. The Mamluks poured arrows and naft darts into the Crusaders’ ranks, and Louis charged again and again to relieve the pressure on his infantry. A late deployment of his crossbowmen won the day for Louis, as he managed to hold the riverbank, but the campaign was slipping away from him. Muslim reinforcements were arriving by the hour at al-Mansura. The Franks constructed a pontoon bridge to unite their now-outnumbered forces.
The Bahriyya launched an assault on 11 February and overwhelmed many of the Crusaders’ positions, but they failed to burn the pontoon bridge, despite the use of glass grenades filled with naft. Al-Shuyukh died and the new sultan, Turanshah, did not arrive at al-Mansura until 28 February, so command devolved to a clique of Mamluk emirs. A flotilla of small boats was then transported on the backs of camels downstream of the Crusaders. This little fleet very effectively cut the Crusader supply line from Damietta. Soon enough, the river and the Crusader lines were full of corpses: starvation and the filth surrounding them combined to cause contagion in the Frankish camp.
Louis offered to exchange Damietta for Jerusalem; this was rejected out of hand and he started a retreat on 5 April 1250. The Mamluks chased his army down the river and killed several thousand of his men. The rest of the Crusaders, including a gravely ill Louis, surrendered. The Mamluks massacred all the sick troops. A Mamluk Sultanate was then called into being by Baybars’s murder of the sultan Turanshah. The next half-century would be one of the bloodiest periods of Middle-Eastern history.