ABSTRACT
O n 25 March 1267, at the abbey of St Denis, Louis ix of France took the cross for the second time. His concern for the Latin settlements in the Holy Land had not waned since his disastrous first crusade
some twenty years earlier. That expedition had not only resulted in the capture of the king and his army in the Nile Delta, but had also, by precipitating the collapse of the Ayyubid dynasty of Cairo, the successors of Saladin, had the unintended effect of bringing to power one of the most formidable opponents the crusader states would ever face, the Mameluks. Under their sultan Baybars they set out to eliminate the crusader states and by 1265 they appeared well on the way to achieving their goal.1 It is strange, though, given the danger facing the crusader states and Louis’s concern for their welfare, that when the crusade finally departed Aigues-Mortes in Ju ly 1270, it set its course for Tunis, a north African port city just across the Straits o f Messina from Sicily. Though geography alone would suggest that Tunis posed little threat to the Latin settlements in the Holy Land, Louis and his men besieged the city through the height of an African summer. Disease eventually set in, taking the lives of many crusaders and, on 25 August, the
life of the king himself That very same day, as some chroniclers tell it, Louis’s younger brother Charles of Anjou arrived from Sicily, where he had recently come to power.2 Familiar with Tunis and its emir, al-Mustansir, he quickly negotiated a truce on terms favourable to himself.3 In this way he brought to an end the last crusade of his elder brother, a future saint and the last European monarch to lead a crusade in defence of crusader Syria.
