ABSTRACT
The period of the crusades of Theobald of Navarre and Richard of Cornwall is a critical one in the history of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. As a result of truces made by the crusaders with neighbouring Muslim princes the kingdom came to embrace, albeit briefly, an area more extensive than it had covered at any time since the losses inflicted by Saladin following his victory at Hattin in 1187. And yet this triumph was but the prelude to an engagement at La Forbie (al-Harbiyya) in October 1244, which was as grave a catastrophe as Hattin and from which the kingdom never recovered. Here the Frankish army was decimated by the Egyptians and their Khwarizmian allies, a new and brutal element in the politics of southern Syria; and most of the newly regained territory was lost within the next three years. In this paper I propose to examine the events of the years 1239-44, with a view to re-evaluating the military and diplomatic achievements of the crusades and to placing the disaster at La Forbie more securely in context.1
