ABSTRACT
The final offensive of the Crusades was Louis IX’s Egyptian expedition, which came back to make another attempt to take the places vainly besieged thirty years before by Pelagius and John of Brienne. The most important Arabic historians for this period are Ibn Wasil and Maqrizi: the first a contemporary and sometimes an eye-witness of the events he records, the second rather later, but here as elsewhere the compiler of earlier material. He follows Ibn Wasil’s account quite closely but enriches it with various details taken from different sources, or from a common, unknown source. We rely here on Ibn Wasil’s version for the dramatic events of the Crusade, and take from Maqrizi only certain documents and Muslim comments on the arrival of the French King, and as a final word, an outline of the Tunisian expedition of twenty years later, on which Louis lost his life.
