The Eighth Crusade and the Death of Louis IX at Tunis

I. The Situation in the East

By the late 1260s the crusader states were collapsing before the advance of the Mamluk sultan Baybars. After his victory over the Mongols at Ain Jalut in 1260 and his seizure of power, Baybars turned against the Franks. In 1263 he destroyed the cathedral of Nazareth. In 1265 he took Caesarea and Arsuf. In 1266 he took the Templar castle of Safed after a siege, and although he had promised the garrison safe conduct, he had the knights beheaded. In 1268 he took Jaffa and the castle of Beaufort.

The greatest blow came in May 1268, when Baybars took Antioch, one of the oldest Christian cities, the capital of the principality founded in the First Crusade. The city was sacked, the inhabitants killed or enslaved, and the churches burned. Baybars wrote to Bohemond VI, the prince of Antioch, who was absent at Tripoli, describing the destruction of his city in mocking detail: had you seen your knights trampled under the hooves of horses, your houses stormed by plunderers, your women sold four for a dinar. The principality of Antioch, which had lasted 170 years, came to an end.

II. Louis Takes the Cross Again

On 24 March 1267 Louis IX summoned his barons to Paris and announced that he would take the cross again. He was fifty-two, and in poor health. Joinville, who had been with him in Egypt, refused to go, telling the king that he had been ruined by the first crusade and that his people would suffer if he went again. He wrote later that those who had advised the king to go committed a mortal sin, since the king was so weak that he could not ride or wear armour, and the kingdom was at peace.

Louis's three sons, Philip, John Tristan and Peter, took the cross with him, as did his brother Alphonse of Poitiers, his nephew Robert of Artois, son of the count killed at al-Mansura, and his son-in-law Thibaut of Navarre. Pope Clement IV approved the crusade and granted a tenth of clerical revenues for three years. In England the king's son, the Lord Edward, took the cross in 1268.

The preparations took three years. Louis again sought to settle the affairs of his kingdom, issuing ordinances against blasphemy and usury and requiring Jews to wear a distinctive badge, the rouelle, a measure ordered by the Fourth Lateran Council but not previously enforced in France.

III. Why Tunis

The fleet sailed from Aigues-Mortes on 1 or 2 July 1270, and the leaders met at Cagliari in Sardinia. There, the king announced that the crusade would go first to Tunis, in North Africa, rather than to Egypt or Syria. The decision astonished many and has puzzled historians ever since.

Several explanations have been offered. One is that Louis believed the Hafsid ruler of Tunis, Muhammad al-Mustansir, was ready to convert to Christianity, and hoped that the presence of a crusading army would encourage him. Dominican missionaries had been active in Tunis and had perhaps given a misleadingly hopeful impression. A second explanation is that Tunis was thought to be a source of support for Baybars in Egypt, and that its conquest would open the route along the African coast. A third is that the decision reflected the interests of Louis's brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, whose kingdom had claims to tribute from Tunis, which al-Mustansir had stopped paying. Al-Mustansir had also sheltered supporters of the Hohenstaufen whom Charles had defeated.

Modern historians tend to doubt that Charles pressed for the diversion, since he was preoccupied with plans against Byzantium and would have preferred delay. The most likely explanation combines Louis's hope of conversion with the belief that Tunis would be an easy first conquest that would strengthen the crusade before it went east. In any case, the decision showed the limited understanding of the Islamic world at the French court.

IV. Tunis and the Hafsids

Tunis was the capital of the Hafsid dynasty, which ruled the eastern Maghreb from 1229 to 1574. The Hafsids had been governors for the Almohads, the Berber dynasty that ruled North Africa and Muslim Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and whose persecution of Jews and Christians is described on the site's page on the Almohad Persecution. When the Almohad empire collapsed after its defeat by the Christian kings of Spain at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the Hafsid governor of Ifriqiya declared independence.

Under al-Mustansir, who ruled from 1249 to 1277 and took the title of caliph, Tunis was a prosperous city, a centre of trade with Italy, Aragon and Sicily, with communities of Christian merchants living in fondachi, walled compounds, under their own consuls. After the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258, the sharif of Mecca briefly recognised al-Mustansir as caliph. Tunis was also a refuge for Muslims expelled from Spain by the Reconquista, and Andalusian scholars and craftsmen were prominent in its life.

V. The Landing at Carthage

The crusaders landed near Tunis on 18 July 1270 and occupied the ruins of ancient Carthage, where they found a fortified castle. The emir's forces did not seek a pitched battle, but harassed the camp with light cavalry and waited. Louis had decided to wait for the arrival of Charles of Anjou before attacking Tunis itself.

The camp at Carthage was an unhealthy place. It was the height of summer, the heat was extreme, the water was scarce and bad, and the African wind blew sand into the tents. The Muslims stirred up the sand with ploughs so that the wind would carry it into the crusader camp. Within days, dysentery and typhoid broke out.

VI. The Death of John Tristan

The first of the royal family to die was Louis's son John Tristan, count of Nevers, who had been born at Damietta in 1250 at the darkest moment of the first crusade. He died on 3 August 1270, aged twenty. The papal legate, Cardinal Ralph of Albano, died soon after. Louis was not told of his son's death for some days, since he too was ill.

The sickness spread through the army. Thousands died. The French chronicler William of Nangis describes the camp as filled with the dead and dying. Louis's eldest son and heir, Philip, also fell ill, but recovered.

VII. The Death of the King

Louis was struck by dysentery in early August, and he grew steadily weaker. According to his confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, and other witnesses, he spent his last days in prayer. He received the last sacraments and gave his son Philip a written set of instructions, the Enseignements, on how to rule as a Christian king, urging him to love God, to keep himself from sin, to be just to his subjects, to protect the poor and the church, and to avoid war against Christians.

Louis died at about three o'clock in the afternoon of Monday 25 August 1270, at the age of fifty-six. According to tradition, he asked to be laid on a bed of ashes in the form of a cross, and his last words were a verse of the Psalms, Lord, I will enter thy house, I will worship in thy holy temple. Some witnesses reported that he spoke the word Jerusalem before he died.

His body was boiled in wine and water to separate the flesh from the bones, a common practice for transporting the bodies of the great. His heart and entrails were given to Charles of Anjou and taken to Monreale in Sicily, and his bones were carried back to France and buried at Saint-Denis in 1271.

VIII. Charles of Anjou

Charles of Anjou arrived at Carthage on the day of his brother's death. Charles, the youngest brother of Louis, was a man of different temperament, ambitious, harsh and calculating. He had conquered the kingdom of Sicily in 1266 with papal support, defeating the Hohenstaufen Manfred, and in 1268 he had executed the last of the Hohenstaufen, the sixteen-year-old Conradin, after defeating him at Tagliacozzo. He aimed to build a Mediterranean empire, including the conquest of Constantinople, which had been recovered by the Greeks in 1261.

Charles took command of the army. There were skirmishes with the Tunisian forces, in which the crusaders had some success. But the army was weakened by disease, and Charles had no wish to undertake a long siege. He opened negotiations with al-Mustansir.

IX. The Treaty of Tunis

On 30 October 1270 a treaty was concluded. Al-Mustansir agreed to pay an indemnity of 210,000 ounces of gold to the crusade leaders, to resume the payment of tribute to the king of Sicily at double the former rate, to expel the Hohenstaufen exiles, to free Christian prisoners, and to allow Christian priests and monks to live in Tunis and to preach freely, though not to make converts by force. Christian merchants were to have freedom of trade.

The treaty was criticised by many crusaders, who had expected to take Tunis, and by later historians, who saw it as evidence that Charles had used the crusade for his own ends. Charles received a third of the indemnity, the new king Philip III a third, and the rest was divided among the other leaders. But the treaty was a realistic outcome for an army that had lost its leader and much of its strength.

X. The Return

The army embarked for Sicily in November 1270. Off Trapani a storm wrecked many ships and drowned many crusaders. The return journey through Italy was marked by further deaths. Philip III's wife, Isabella of Aragon, fell from her horse in Calabria and died after giving birth to a stillborn child. Thibaut of Navarre died at Trapani. Alphonse of Poitiers and his wife Jeanne died near Genoa in August 1271. Philip III returned to Paris in May 1271 with five coffins, his father, his brother, his wife, his child and his brother-in-law. It was a melancholy end to the crusade.

XI. The Lord Edward

The Lord Edward, eldest son of Henry III of England and the future Edward I, arrived at Carthage in November 1270, after the treaty had been signed. He refused to accept it, declaring that he would go on to the Holy Land, even if accompanied only by his groom. After wintering in Sicily, he sailed for Acre with about 1,000 men, arriving in May 1271.

Edward's force was too small to achieve much. He made raids into Mamluk territory, including an attack on Qaqun, and sought an alliance with the Mongol ilkhan Abaqa, who sent a raiding force into Syria. But the Mongols withdrew, and the barons of the kingdom and the military orders were unwilling to undertake a major campaign. In May 1272 the king of Jerusalem, Hugh III, concluded a ten-year truce with Baybars, to Edward's disgust.

On 17 June 1272 Edward was attacked in his chamber at Acre by an assassin, sent probably by Baybars or by the emir of Ramla, who stabbed him with a poisoned dagger. Edward killed the assassin, but the wound festered. The story that his wife Eleanor of Castile sucked the poison from the wound is a later legend. Edward recovered and left Acre in September 1272, learning on his journey home that his father had died and that he was king. He never returned to the east, though he took the cross again in 1287.

XII. The End of an Era

The Eighth Crusade is often regarded as the last of the major crusades to the east. After 1270 no king of France or England led a crusade to the Holy Land. Pope Gregory X, who had been in Acre with Edward when he was elected pope in 1271, tried to organise a new general crusade at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, and money was raised, but no expedition set out. Gregory died in 1276, and the project was abandoned.

The failure was due partly to the political preoccupations of the western kingdoms, partly to the diversion of crusading to papal wars in Italy, and partly to disillusion. The deaths of Louis at Tunis and the disasters in Egypt had made the cost of crusading painfully clear. The crusader states were left to their own resources and fell in 1291. The site's page on the Fall of Acre describes their end.

XIII. Louis's Enseignements

The instructions Louis wrote for his son before his death are a summary of his understanding of Christian kingship. He urged Philip to love God with all his heart and to avoid offending him; to confess often; to hear the divine service devoutly; to be compassionate to the poor and afflicted; to be just and to side with the poor against the rich until the truth was known; to keep his kingdom in peace and to avoid war with Christians; to appoint good officials and punish bad ones; and to suppress blasphemy, gambling and other sins.

The Enseignements show the sincerity of Louis's faith and his sense of responsibility for his people. They also show the limitations of his outlook. He urged his son to drive heretics from the land and to honour the church. The idea that a king should enforce religion by law, and wage war for religion, was deeply embedded in his thought.

XIV. Sainthood

Louis was canonised by Pope Boniface VIII in August 1297, after an inquiry that heard many witnesses to his virtues and to miracles at his tomb. His canonisation served the political interests of the French monarchy, which presented itself as the most Christian of kingdoms, and it was promoted by his grandson Philip IV, who was at the same time in bitter conflict with Boniface.

The cult of St Louis became central to French identity. His relics were distributed, his image appeared in churches and manuscripts, and his name was given to cities and churches throughout the Catholic world, including St. Louis in Missouri. The French kings until 1830 were his descendants, and the claim that they were heirs of a saint added to their prestige.

XV. Missionary Hopes

The hope that al-Mustansir might convert, which may have influenced the decision to go to Tunis, reflected the growing interest in the conversion of Muslims in the thirteenth century. The Dominican and Franciscan friars had established missions in North Africa, and Dominicans had founded schools of Arabic in Spain to train missionaries. Ramon Llull of Majorca, who began his career as a missionary in the 1260s, later travelled to Tunis three times to preach, and according to tradition he was stoned there in 1315 or 1316.

The combination of crusade and mission, the sword and the word, was characteristic of the thirteenth century. Many saw no contradiction between them. Yet the methods of the early Christians were very different. The disciples went from house to house and in the public places, preaching the good news (Acts 5:42), and they did so without weapons or armies. Jesus said that when people would not receive the message, his disciples should go elsewhere, not compel them (Matthew 10:14).

XVI. Death and the Crusade

The death of Louis at Tunis was seen by contemporaries as a martyrdom, the death of a crusader in the service of God. His biographers presented his death as a model of Christian dying, calm, prayerful and resigned. For the crusade movement, it was also a sign of failure. The king had died without reaching his goal, and his army had achieved nothing for the Holy Land.

The belief that dying on crusade brought immediate entry into heaven was central to the appeal of the crusade. The Greek Scriptures, however, present death not as a gateway to reward but as an enemy, to be destroyed through the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:21-26). Jesus spoke of the hour coming in which all those in the memorial tombs will hear his voice and come out (John 5:28-29). The hope of the early Christians rested on the resurrection, not on merit earned by dying in war.

XVII. Assessment

The Eighth Crusade was a tragic coda to the life of Louis IX and to the age of the great crusades. Its diversion to Tunis, whatever the reasons, wasted the resources of a large army on a target of marginal importance to the defence of the Holy Land, and disease destroyed the expedition before it could achieve anything. The treaty brought financial gains to Charles of Anjou and the French crown but nothing to the crusader states.

The crusade of the Lord Edward that followed achieved little more. Within twenty years the last crusader cities had fallen. The age of crusading kings had ended, though crusading itself continued in other forms, in Spain, the Baltic, against the Ottomans and against the papacy's enemies in Europe.

XVIII. Financing the Second Crusade of Louis

The cost of Louis's second crusade was enormous, and it fell heavily on the French church and towns. The clerical tenth granted by Clement IV for three years was resented by the clergy, some of whom appealed against it. The towns were asked for subsidies, and the royal domain was taxed. Louis also borrowed heavily from Italian bankers and contracted with Genoese shipowners for transport, paying for a fleet larger than that of 1248.

The burden contributed to the growing reluctance of the French people to support crusading. The poet Rutebeuf, who had earlier written verses urging men to take the cross, wrote a debate between a crusader and a man who refuses to go, in which the refuser argues that he can save his soul at home by living well, without going overseas to die. The poem shows that by the 1260s many questioned whether the crusade was the only or the best path to salvation. Rutebeuf himself remained loyal to the cause, but the arguments he put in the mouth of the stay-at-home reflected what many thought.

XIX. Philip III

Louis's son Philip, who succeeded him on the beach at Carthage at the age of twenty-five, was a pious and conventional prince, overshadowed by his father and known to later historians as Philip the Bold, a name given him for his courage in the fighting before Tunis. He was ill himself during the epidemic and recovered slowly. His first acts as king were to confirm the regents left in France and to agree to the treaty negotiated by his uncle Charles.

Philip's reign was dominated by the legacy of the crusade. He inherited his uncle Alphonse's lands in Poitou and Toulouse, which passed to the crown on Alphonse's death in 1271, completing the integration of southern France into the kingdom. He took the cross again in 1275, but never went east. Instead he led a disastrous crusade against Aragon in 1285, proclaimed by the pope after Peter III of Aragon had seized Sicily from Charles of Anjou in the uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers. The French army was struck by disease in Catalonia, as at Tunis, and Philip died at Perpignan on the retreat. A crusade against a Christian kingdom had again ended in sickness and death.

XX. The Christian Merchants of Tunis

The presence of Christian merchants in Tunis complicated the crusade. Genoese, Pisan, Venetian, Catalan, Provençal and Sicilian merchants traded with the Hafsids, exporting grain, wool, leather and gold that came from across the Sahara. They lived in their fondachi under their own consuls, and their trade was protected by treaties. The crusade threatened their interests, and when it began the Hafsids arrested some of them and confiscated their goods.

The Genoese, who supplied many of the ships for the crusade, were particularly concerned. Some contemporaries suspected that the merchant republics had little enthusiasm for an attack on a valuable trading partner. The treaty of 1270 restored the rights of Christian merchants, and trade resumed. The episode illustrates the tension between the crusading ideal and the commercial interests of the Christian Mediterranean, which had grown up alongside it and often worked against it.

XXI. The Muslim Side

The Arabic sources for the crusade are few. The historian Ibn Khaldun, who was born in Tunis in 1332 and served the Hafsids, describes the crusade in his history of the Berbers. He reports that al-Mustansir summoned troops from throughout his lands and that religious scholars called for jihad. He also reports a tradition that the emir had sent envoys to Louis offering money to avert the invasion, and that the envoys found the king determined to attack.

Ibn Khaldun records the death of the French king and the negotiation of the treaty with Charles, whom he calls the king of Sicily. He presents the outcome as a deliverance and attributes the epidemic to the will of God. Other Arabic writers, in Egypt, recorded with satisfaction the death of the king who had invaded Egypt twenty years before. Baybars is said to have sent a message to the Hafsid emir regretting that he had not been able to send help in time.

XXII. Geoffrey of Beaulieu

The principal account of Louis's last days is the life of the king written by Geoffrey of Beaulieu, a Dominican friar who had been his confessor for more than twenty years and who was with him at Carthage. Geoffrey wrote at the request of Pope Gregory X, who was gathering evidence for the king's canonisation, and his life is a portrait of a saint. He describes Louis's ascetic practices, his secret penances, his charity and his devotion, and he gives the most detailed account of his death.

Geoffrey's work was one of a number of lives written after Louis's death. William of Saint-Pathus, the confessor of Queen Margaret, wrote a life based on the testimony gathered for the canonisation process. Joinville's Life, written later, gives a more personal and less idealised picture. Together these sources make Louis the best-documented king of the Middle Ages, though historians must take account of the hagiographic purposes of most of them.

XXIII. Heart and Bones

The treatment of Louis's body after his death illustrates medieval attitudes to the bodies of the great and the holy. The division of the body, with the flesh and entrails buried in one place and the bones in another, was common for those who died far from home. Pope Boniface VIII condemned the practice in 1299 in the bull Detestande feritatis, calling it a cruel custom, but it continued.

Louis's bones became relics after his canonisation. Many were distributed to churches and religious houses in France and beyond, and his skull was placed in a reliquary in the Sainte-Chapelle. During the French Revolution the tombs of Saint-Denis were desecrated in 1793 and the royal remains thrown into a common pit. Some of Louis's relics had been distributed earlier and survive. The fate of these remains shows how the veneration of relics invested human remains with a significance that the Scriptures do not give them. When Moses died, God himself buried him, and no one has known his grave to this day (Deuteronomy 34:5-6).

XXIV. Tunis in the Later Crusades

Tunis remained a target of crusading after 1270. In 1390 a Franco-Genoese crusade led by Louis II, duke of Bourbon, besieged the Hafsid port of Mahdia, south of Tunis, for two months without success, ending in a treaty much like that of 1270. In 1535 the emperor Charles V captured Tunis from the Ottoman admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa in a great expedition presented as a crusade, and the city was sacked. Tunis was taken and lost again by the Spanish in the following decades and finally fell to the Ottomans in 1574.

The persistence of North African targets shows how crusading adapted to new circumstances. After the loss of the Holy Land, the war against Islam in the Mediterranean continued, but it was driven increasingly by the interests of the Mediterranean powers, Aragon, Genoa, Venice and later Spain, against the corsairs and the Ottomans.

XXV. Eleanor of Castile

The Lord Edward was accompanied on crusade by his wife Eleanor of Castile, the half-sister of Alfonso X of Castile. Her presence was not unusual, since many noblewomen accompanied their husbands on crusade, as Margaret of Provence had accompanied Louis to Egypt. Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, Joan, at Acre in 1272, who was known as Joan of Acre.

The story that Eleanor sucked the poison from Edward's wound after the assassination attempt first appears in the fourteenth century, in the writings of the Dominican Ptolemy of Lucca. Contemporary accounts say that Eleanor was led weeping from the room while the surgeons cut away the infected flesh. The legend reflects the later idealisation of Eleanor, whose death in 1290 was commemorated by Edward with the Eleanor crosses, erected at the places where her funeral procession rested on its way to Westminster.

XXVI. The Assassins and Baybars

The attempt on Edward's life in 1272 recalled the methods of the Nizari Ismailis, known to the crusaders as the Assassins, who had used targeted killings against their enemies since the late eleventh century and who had killed Conrad of Montferrat in 1192. By 1272, however, the Syrian Nizaris had been subdued by Baybars, who took their last castles in 1271–1273 and is said to have employed their agents for his own purposes.

The assassin who attacked Edward had gained access by pretending to be a messenger who wished to convert to Christianity, and had visited the prince several times. The episode shows the insecurity of life in the crusader states in their final decades, as the Mamluks used every method of war against them.

XXVII. Prester John and the Mongol Alliance

Throughout the period of Louis's crusades, western leaders hoped for an alliance with the Mongols against the Mamluks. The ilkhans of Persia, the Mongol rulers descended from Hulagu, were at war with the Mamluks, and several of them had Christian wives. Abaqa, the ilkhan from 1265 to 1282, sent envoys to the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and to the courts of Europe. Edward corresponded with him and coordinated the Mongol raid into Syria in 1271.

The alliance never became effective. The Mongols and the westerners were rarely able to coordinate their campaigns, and the ilkhans pursued their own interests. In 1295 the ilkhan Ghazan converted to Islam, ending hopes of a Christian Mongol ally. The persistent hope of an alliance shows the readiness of western leaders to look for help from any quarter in their war with Islam.

XXVIII. The Rouelle and the Jews of France

Louis's ordinance of 1269, issued during the preparations for the crusade, required Jews in France to wear a round badge of felt or cloth, yellow or red, on the front and back of their clothing. The measure had been prescribed by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 to prevent social contact between Christians and Jews, but in France it had been only loosely enforced. Louis's decree was urged on him by the Dominican Paul Christiani, a convert from Judaism who had disputed with Nahmanides at Barcelona in 1263 and who was licensed to preach to the Jews.

The badge marked Jews as outsiders and made them vulnerable to insult and attack. It was part of a series of measures by which the French crown, under Louis and his successors, increased its control over the Jewish community and drew revenue from it. In 1306 Louis's grandson Philip IV expelled the Jews from France and confiscated their property. The site's pages on the Rhineland Massacres and on the Almohad Persecution describe other episodes of religious persecution in this period.

XXIX. Numbering the Crusades

The numbering of the crusades is a modern convention, not a medieval one, and historians do not agree on it. Some count the Tunis expedition of 1270 as the Eighth Crusade and Edward's expedition as the Ninth, while others treat them together. Contemporaries spoke simply of the passage overseas or of the king's crusade.

XXX. Chronology

In 1260 Baybars became sultan. In 1265 he took Caesarea and Arsuf, and in 1266 Safed. On 24 March 1267 Louis took the cross again. In May 1268 Antioch fell. On 1 July 1270 the fleet sailed from Aigues-Mortes. On 18 July 1270 the army landed at Carthage. On 3 August 1270 John Tristan died. On 25 August 1270 Louis died, and Charles of Anjou arrived. On 30 October 1270 the Treaty of Tunis was concluded. In November 1270 the army left Tunis, and Edward arrived.

In May 1271 Edward reached Acre, and Philip III returned to Paris. In May 1272 Hugh III made a truce with Baybars. On 17 June 1272 Edward was attacked by an assassin, and in September 1272 he left Acre. In 1274 the Second Council of Lyons met. In 1277 Baybars died. In August 1297 Louis was canonised.

XXXI. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.