From the adventures of the Frankish colonists we turn with
relief to notice the last expiring flashes of enthusiasm in the armies equipped
for their relief. The Germans and Hungarians of the Fifth Crusade (1217) showed
more sincerity than worldly wisdom in delegating the chief command to a papal
legate, and in following to the bitter end his reckless plan of campaign.
Inspired with the hope of expelling Islam from the Eastern Mediterranean, they
would neither be content with Damietta, which they conquered, nor with the Holy
Land, which was offered in exchange by the Sultan of Egypt. They would have all
or nothing, and they lost even Damietta in the end. Their discomfiture by the
Nile floods, which they had forgotten to take into their reckoning, was a
tragi-comic ending to a campaign in which greed and discord had been expiated
by extraordinary daring.
St. Louis, in his Crusades of 1248 and 1270, flew in
the face of common prudence and was thought a pious fool, even by the barons
who were too loyal to disobey his call. But it is such follies that make
history something better than a Newgate Calendar of the crimes of common sense.
He was no general; his attack on Egypt was foredoomed to failure, and was made
more disastrous by neglect of ordinary precautions; that on Tunis, undertaken
in the heat of an African summer, ended, as might have been expected, in his
own death and the decimation of his followers by disease. Even as an example
these expeditions were all but fruitless. Yet, when the worst has been said of the
Crusades and those who led them, there are moments in the quixotic career of
St. Louis which haunt the fancy and compel our admiration: his bearing when, a
captive of the Egyptian Sultan, he refused, even under threats of torture, to
barter a single Christian fortress for his freedom; his lonely watch in
Palestine, when for three years he patiently awaited the reinforcements that
were never sent; his death-bed, when he prayed for strength to despise good
fortune and not to fear adversity. Ideals may fade, but the memories of those
who realise them are the world's abiding possession.
