The Fifth Crusade (1217–21) was a major expedition to invade and conquer Egypt which reshaped the Near East and crusading strategy for the rest of the century and beyond, yet it is little known today outside scholarly circles. Thomas Smith presents the five most fascinating facts from the forgotten campaign.
By Thomas Smith
1. Egypt: An Alien and Deadly Landscape
Egypt depicted in the Catalan Atlas by Abraham Cresques. 1375
The Fifth Crusade was the first major expedition to invade and attempt to conquer Egypt, beginning with the vital port city of Damietta. Though the kingdom of Jerusalem had launched a series of strikes at Egypt half a century before, in the 1160s, there was little knowledge of conducting military operations in the Nile Delta among the armies that landed at Damietta in summer 1218.
Participants in the Fifth Crusade had to learn to fight and survive in what was a beguilingly beautiful, but also alien and extremely deadly, landscape. Eyewitness accounts describe the Europeans’ wonder as they saw Egypt for the first time. The landscape of the Nile Delta was much greener and lusher than the crusaders had expected. Participants on the campaign wrote that gardens and orchards abounded in the area around Damietta. They wondered at the number of birds and fish and were terrified by the crocodiles which lurked in the river – they had never seen creatures like this before.
Dangers abounded at the crusader camp on the Nile. The crusaders described the behaviour of the crocodiles, noting that they devoured everything, even their own young as soon as they hatched. Some unfortunate crusaders were killed and eaten by crocodiles.
Crocodile depicted in the 16th century – British Library MS Or. 3714, f.394
There were also less obvious dangers to overcome. When the crusaders first arrived in Egypt, some of the pilgrims were unaware that they could not drink the muddy waters of the Nile. Eyewitness accounts describe the death throes of crusaders who had drunk from the Nile, writhing in agony on the banks of the river, as their comrades watched on helplessly.
Slowly, the crusaders learned to operate effectively in the region, but the initial days and weeks in summer 1218 saw a high casualty rate as the crusade host learned lessons the hard way, gaining hard-won experience that would allow them to pursue the siege of the great city of Damietta.
2. A Crucible for Military Technology
Warfare in the Nile Delta was different from anything the crusaders had encountered before. The Europeans not only encountered new technologies and weapons in Egypt, but also developed their own, with the campaign functioning as a crucible for technological development.
The Fifth Crusaders encountered a new weapon during their siege of Damietta: Greek Fire. This was a naphtha-based weapon akin to modern napalm (the medieval recipe to make Greek Fire has since been lost) used to burn through crusader ships and soldiers. It was widely used in Egypt by the defenders of Damietta, probably launched in ceramic hand grenades (which survive in large numbers from the medieval world and often crop up for sale today at auction houses) but which could also be delivered in ancient flamethrowers. A twelfth-century manuscript depicts a Greek Fire flamethrower in action, attached to the prow of a ship.
Depiction of the use of Greek fire, from the Madrid Skylitzes.
Unfortunately, the eyewitness sources for the Fifth Crusade do not specify the means of delivery, only that it struck them “like lightning”. Greek Fire was used extensively during the war, both against the crusader ships – the Christians carried stinking vats of urine on board to put out the flames – and personnel. King John of Jerusalem nearly died by immolation when he was set alight by Greek Fire during the campaign.
In response to the determined defence of the Egyptian warriors, who deployed Greek Fire as well as arrows, javelins, and stones against the crusaders, one schoolmaster from Cologne designed and built a new piece of military technology which had never been seen before: a unique floating siege engine. When the crusaders struggled to capture Damietta’s Chain Tower – a stout stone tower in the middle of the Nile which blocked access upriver via a massive harbour chain – one of the participants devised an ingenious weapons platform to overcome the deadlock.
Oliver of Cologne was a schoolmaster at the cathedral school in his home city and a very learned member of the crusader army – he also chronicled the campaign in the most detailed account of the expedition (one of the main reasons we can reconstruct the crusade in such detail). Drawing upon his knowledge of ancient military manuals, he invented and paid for the construction of a floating siege engine which could be manoeuvred into position next to the Chain Tower and then used to storm the building. The contraption consisted of two ships joined together. The masts were removed and in their place was built a large wooden fortress with a long siege ladder attached to the front. The ladder could not only be raised up and down but also rotated. This allowed the crusaders to get into position against the Chain Tower and, as Greek Fire and other projectiles rained down on them, a few brave soldiers attempted to storm the turret.
A contemporary illustration of the Fifth Crusade showing the siege of the Chain Tower from Oliver of Cologne’s floating siege engine. The crusader on the prow is the famous Hayo of Fivelgo, who was renowned for storming the turret armed with a flail, shown here in his hands. Cambridge. Corpus Christi College Parker MS 16
The crusaders also created their own home-spun weapons to meet the threat of the Egyptian defenders. One Frisian crusader, named Hayo of Fivelgo, favoured what was essentially a medieval nunchuck as his main weapon when besieging the Chain Tower. Constructed from an agricultural flail – two heavy wooden sticks, connected with an iron chain – Hayo had modified his weapon to make it even more deadly. He is recorded in an eyewitness account to have interwoven more iron chains, making this into a brutal, easy-to-handle weapon that was perfect for the close-quarter combat he engaged in as he stormed the Chain Tower. Balancing precariously on the ladder of the floating siege engine, Hayo was the second man over the turret. Oliver of Cologne watched him lashing out violently to the left and the right, felling the standard-bearer of the Egyptian sultan using his nunchuck and playing a key role in the capture of the Chain Tower.
3. Arise, Female and Child Crusaders
Imagine a crusader. What first springs to mind, in terms of what they look like? Chances are you are thinking of a man with a helmet, clad in mail, wearing a white surcoat with a red cross, wielding a sword. This is the stereotypical image that pervades popular culture. But this is only part of the story (and, of course, it is primarily the Templars who fit this image – there were lots of other colour surcoats and different armour and outfits being worn by male crusaders, so it is not even representative of the male experience).
There were many women and children who took part in the crusades, but they have largely been written out of the history as a result of the primary source material, which was almost entirely written by male participants and observers, who were primarily interested in the deeds of other males. But the Fifth Crusade is one of the best for catching a glimpse of women and children on crusade and for reconstructing what their experiences were like.
A fourteenth-century manuscript illumination which depicts three female crusaders (lower register, denoted by their headdresses) and a child crusader (in red, holding hands with the female crusader in blue) participating in an expedition. The participation of women and children on crusades was routinely written out of the chronicle accounts. British Library MS Egerton 1500, fol. 45v
We have nine female crusaders attested by name on the Fifth Crusade, two of whom departed on the crusade without any male kin to accompany them (the outdated stereotype is that women only went on crusade to accompany their husbands). This may not seem like a lot, but when we adjust for the biases of the preservation of source material – and the fact that very few non-noble male crusaders are also attested by name, indeed, the overwhelming majority are nameless – this is a valuable indication of wider trends of female participation.
One of the women we know about was an Italian crusader from Bologna, called Giulietta Merxadrus, who appears in the will of her husband, who was dying in the crusader camp at Damietta in December 1219. As her husband lay dying, he took pains to provide for Giulietta in his will, laying special emphasis on her not being deprived of her part of their tent, which they shared with their companions from Bologna, or her share of the plunder from Damietta. This demonstrates not only that women were commonly present on the Fifth Crusade – Giulietta and her husband were fairly ordinary in terms of social position – but that they were rewarded with a share of the loot from the capture and sack of Damietta after the city fell to the crusaders in November 1219.
Children are glimpsed even less frequently but were also present on the Fifth Crusade. The eyewitness Oliver of Cologne recorded that after the conquest of Damietta, the plunder was “divided proportionately not only among clerics and knights, but also among attendants, women, and children [my emphasis]”. This source proves that women and children were not only present on the Fifth Crusade in numbers large enough to warrant a mention in Oliver’s source, but that they were perceived as contributors to the success of the siege and therefore were rewarded with a share of the plunder. The roles of children on the crusade are even more difficult to reconstruct than those of women, but presumably they performed auxiliary functions which were crucial to the survival of the army – they cannot have just been milling around doing nothing; everyone had to contribute to the cause.
We know that women on the Fifth Crusade carried water, stones, and other ammunition to the warriors on the frontline during combat. They are also attested acting as sentries, grinding corn, running markets selling fish and vegetables, and providing basic medical care for the sick and wounded. In emergency situations, women took up arms to fight. On one occasion when Muslim soldiers breached the camp palisades at Damietta, female crusaders killed any stragglers that the men of the army had missed. In August 1219, a group of women was recorded as having been massacred by the enemy when carrying food and water to fellow crusaders – they were active participants in the frontline action and this carried with it a high level of risk which explains why they were also rewarded with their share of the plunder.
As was common in any medieval army, some women also performed sex work. Understandably, this usually went unmentioned in the primary sources, especially since most accounts were written by clergy who disapproved of such activity. But there is an episode on the Fifth Crusade where this comes to light in the evidence. At one difficult point in the crusade, we know that female sex workers were given lashes and branded with hot irons in an attempt to cleanse the army of its sins and secure God’s favour for the expedition – it was thought that their activities were having a negative impact on the success of the campaign.
4. One of the Longest Sieges of the Crusades
One of the most famous depictions of the Fifth Crusade comes from the 17th-century painter Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen. His work ‘A Haarlem ship cuts the chain of the port of Damietta on November 15, 1219’ is on display at the Frans Hals Museum in The Netherlands
Although the Fifth Crusade is nowhere near as famous today as, say, the First or Third Crusades, in the Middle Ages, the conquest and subsequent loss of Damietta was the cause célèbre of the first half of the thirteenth century.
Damietta was one of the most important port cities in the Mediterranean. Recent network analysis shows that it was a much more significant trading hub in the region than previously recognised and was second only to Alexandria. It boasted the latest in Islamic military fortifications: a ring of triple walls, each higher than the last (imagine a modern three-tiered wedding cake). Along with the Chain Tower, mentioned above, there were 28 towers on the middle wall alone. A previous sultan had even dismantled ancient Egyptian pyramids, including one of quartz, to reuse the stones when strengthening the city’s walls.
Damietta was a city of major strategic importance that represented, as the crusaders observed at the time, “the key to all Egypt”. Its capture was the result of one of the longest sieges in the history of the crusades: nearly eighteen months of intense amphibious and land-based siege warfare. The crusaders attempted various means to reduce the city, using trebuchets, frontal assaults using cats (a siege weapon that covered attacking infantry as they tried to break through gates), undermining, and amphibious offensives using specialised siege ships. But, in the end, none of these strategies worked. Rather, it was the less glamorous weapon of starvation that ground down the defenders.
The modern city of Damietta. The medieval city was a few miles closer to the coast, making it a vital trading hub in the Mediterranean. The silting of the Nile Delta in the intervening eight centuries – partially as a result of modern hydroelectric projects – has deprived the modern city of its coastal position. Image credit: Tarekheikal / Wikimedia Commons
After the crusaders knocked out the Chain Tower in 1218, they were able to cross the Nile and encircle the city of Damietta proper. They enforced a tight blockade and prevented resupply of the city. The citizens of Damietta, who numbered about 20,000, experienced food scarcity for the first time. A Muslim relief army under the command of Sultan al-Kamil made camp a short distance from the crusaders and attempted to dislodge the invaders. A series of brutal battles were fought before the walls of Damietta, but the crusaders clung firmly to their position. A period of turbulence in the Muslim political world meant that the invaders could better concentrate on the siege when al-Kamil departed for a time.
In the end, after nearly a year and a half of savage siege warfare, the crusaders cracked the city through starvation. One night in November 1219, the papal legate, Pelagius, despatched a crack squad of soldiers to try and breach the walls. Carrying ladders, they wove their way through the darkness, over the broken outer defences and fallen masonry, which they had battered repeatedly with their trebuchets. Setting fire to an outer gate, they burned their way through and then clambered over the inner walls using their ladders. The sight that met their eyes was almost apocalyptic. Bodies were lying everywhere in the streets, unburied. The defenders and citizens had died in droves from famine and disease, leaving the city unprotected. Summoning reinforcements, the Christians made their way into the city whose great walls they had stared at for so long, triumphant at last. As the crusaders surged into the diseased city, the sack of Damietta began.
Crusaders clamber over the walls during a siege, from a later medieval manuscript. In November 1219, the soldiers of the Fifth Crusade simply lifted ladders up to the walls of Damietta and climbed over, since the defenders were too weak to stop them. The sight inside the city, of unburied bodies lying in the streets, was almost apocalyptic. British Library MS Royal 15 E.I, fol. 32v
The conquest of Damietta represented the first capture of a major Muslim city during a “general” expedition since Jerusalem on the First Crusade in 1099. It completely changed the geopolitical situation in the Near East, opening up the map in terms of the crusader advance and the strategy of conquering the rest of Egypt. Now that the Christians had a major port city under their control, they could begin to plan their strike into the Egyptian interior, towards Cairo. For the titular king of Jerusalem, John of Brienne, this represented the first time that a new Crusader State had been established in Outremer in well over a hundred years, and he exerted all his influence to try to secure control over Damietta and to annex it to the kingdom of Jerusalem.
The news that the Fifth Crusade had conquered Damietta spread like wildfire around the crusaders’ homelands in Europe and was a cause for major celebration. When the crusade failed in 1221, the loss of the city cut deep. The Fifth Crusade had not only involved tens of thousands of warrior-pilgrims in the East, but the entire Christian population of Europe, who had donated alms, paid tax revenues, and prayed on behalf of the army. They felt betrayed that the crusaders had surrendered the great city of Damietta and subjected the main leaders, including the pope and his legate, to intense scrutiny. The Fifth Crusade was a major disruptive event in world history that is – unjustly – little known today.
5. The Main Character: The River Nile
The Fifth Crusade featured a stellar cast of characters: John of Brienne, the insecure king of Jerusalem; Andrew II of Hungary, the king who abandoned the campaign in a huff; Frederick II, the absent crusader who continually broke his promises; Pelagius, the papal legate with an undeserved reputation for fiery arrogance; and al-Kamil, the wily and chivalrous sultan of Egypt who emerged as the great hero of the war. Despite this collection of larger-than-life individuals, the main character of the Fifth Crusade was not a person, but a geographical feature: the River Nile. The Nile determined the course of the campaign of the Fifth Crusade in its entirety. From the initial beach landings, via the capture of the Chain Tower using the floating siege engine, to the crossing of the river and the siege of Damietta proper, the Nile had dictated the ebb and flow of warfare. It also defined the campaign’s ultimate outcome.
After the crusaders captured Damietta, thoughts turned to the next phase of the war: the invasion of the Egyptian interior to the south and the siege of Cairo. By the summer of 1221, this had been a plan long in the making. A prolonged period of inaction after November 1219 had led tempers to fray as the divided crusader host attempted to navigate a grand strategy in the face of a carousel of departures and the continued absence of the long-awaited emperor, Frederick II.
Emperor Frederick II. His continued absence from the Fifth Crusade and many broken promises to depart on the expedition hamstrung the ability of the army’s leaders to plan a grand strategy. Wikimedia Commons
The pilgrims had encountered books of prophecy during the campaign which had foretold their success in conquering Damietta and another settlement called Tinnis. (In his chronicle, Oliver of Cologne misidentified Tinnis as Tanis, the ancient Egyptian city famous in modern popular culture as the resting place of the lost Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark). According to the prophecies, the crusaders would need to capture Cairo in 1221 to open the way for an emperor from the West (Frederick II) to meet with an emperor from the East (the legendary ruler Prester John, whom the crusaders confused with the leader of the Mongols then making advances against Islam to the East) in a newly recovered, Christian Jerusalem, in 1222. If the crusaders were to fulfil this prophecy before 1222, which would bring about the Second Coming of Christ, then they had to march out of Damietta in the summer of 1221. The only problem was the River Nile.
Nineteenth-century excavations at the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis – famous in modern popular culture from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. On the Fifth Crusade, Oliver of Cologne thought that the army had conquered this city; they had, in fact, conquered the nearby town of Tinnis. Image credit: Strassberger, B., CCA-SA 2.5 Generic.
The crusaders were well aware of the famous annual inundation of the Nile. They even wrote about it in their accounts from the beginning of the campaign. As they prepared to march south towards Cairo in the summer of 1221, they knew they would have to contend with floodwaters, but their belief in the prophecies, which had thus far all come to pass, must have convinced them that God would not allow them to be defeated. Previous scholars have blamed the outcome of the Fifth Crusade on arrogant leadership and poor strategic decision-making by the legate Pelagius, but this is to misunderstand the contemporary situation. It is only when we factor in the power of the prophecies that we can hope to understand the events of summer 1221.
A Nilometer in Cairo, used to measure the flood level in the annual inundation. The annual deluge was well known to the crusaders when they decided to march south from Damietta in their strike at Cairo. The only way to explain their decision, just as the Nile’s waters were about to rise, is to emphasise their belief in prophecy. Image credit: Berthold Werner / Wikimedia Commons
The crusaders deployed in a complex defensive formation, employing the technique of a fighting march, flanked by naval support as they wound their way south along the Nile towards Cairo. This was the same strategy that Richard the Lionheart had used to great effect on the Third Crusade, when he marched from Acre to Jaffa in Palestine, under continual pressure from enemy forces. It worked very well on the Fifth Crusade as well. On the crusaders’ right flank were a flotilla of ships on the Nile, protecting the army from the water. In the centre were the cavalry and non-combatants. And on the left flank were infantry with large shields to defend against Egyptian arrow storms. This formation trundled slowly south, hugging the banks of the river, focusing on protection rather than speed. All the while the Christians were shadowed by Sultan al-Kamil, who launched occasional attacks in an attempt to stop them.
By August 1221, the Fifth Crusaders had managed to travel about forty miles south of Damietta. There were another seventy miles still to traverse – a journey of about two weeks if they maintained their pace. When the news reached Cairo that the crusader army was on its way, panic was recorded to having broken out and some residents began to evacuate the city. To participants, then, the Fifth Crusaders appeared to be on the verge of a conquest that would eclipse even that of Damietta. But, unbeknown to the Christians, the River Nile was about to play the deciding role in their epic campaign.
The crusaders stopped at a fork in the Nile near Mansoura. They found themselves at the southern tip of an island that resembled a downward-pointing triangle, having crossed a small waterway. As the waters of the Nile rose, al-Kamil exploited his superior local hydrographical knowledge to outmanoeuvre the invaders. He was able to navigate troops behind the crusaders, using the small waterway they had crossed, which was rapidly increasing in size. Having surrounded the crusader camp and pinned them down using a withering bombardment from his trebuchets, the sultan then opened the sluice gates in the surrounding fields, used to control irrigation. The Nile deluge washed out the Christians’ camp, submerging them and making it impossible for them to operate effectively. Surrounded, outsmarted, and running low on supplies, the crusaders realised that their only hope for escape was to effect a covert nighttime withdrawal.
The Nile in flood. The situation of the Fifth Crusaders in 1221 probably did not look vastly different. Completely washed out by the river, the crusaders were left with a vanishingly small window of strategic options. Image credit: Rasha Al-faky / Wikimedia Commons
Unfortunately for the crusaders, things quickly went awry when a contingent of the army embarked on a day-drinking session hours before the operation. Reluctant to leave behind their precious stores of wine, numerous pilgrims are recorded to have drunk themselves into a stupor under the burning Egyptian sun. By the time that the order came to enact their retreat in the dead of night, numerous crusaders were so drunk that they could not be roused from their tents. Others were passed out on the roads. Some of those still capable of walking wandered off into the flooded fields that surrounded the camp and were never seen again. This wasn’t the worst of it, though. Operating under the logic of inebriation, several crusaders decided that they didn’t want to leave their tents behind to be plundered by the sultan’s forces and so set fire to them using their torches. This spelled the doom of the rest of the army.
A medieval manuscript illustration of tents on fire in an army camp. When drunk crusaders set fire to their own tents at the end of the Fifth Crusade, Sultan al-Kamil could not believe his luck. Image credit: National Library of Wales / Wikimedia Commons
As flames licked up the material of the tents and embers rose into the night sky, al-Kamil’s sentries realised what was happening and the sultan launched a full-on assault on the retreating Christians, who were not able to put up much of a fight. Those crusaders who were still capable of action splashed through the water towards their ships, several of which sank in the surging floodwaters as a result of overcrowding. The covert night withdrawal was rapidly descending into disaster. Over the coming days, the crusade leadership, flooded out of their position and unable to advance or retreat, realised that no other option remained to them: they would have to surrender.
The Fifth Crusaders, in the flooded fields of the Nile Delta, surrendering the city of Damietta to Sultan al-Kamil in 1221. BnF MS Latin 4915 fol. 404
When the Fifth Crusade sealed a truce with al-Kamil, returning the hard-won city of Damietta for their lives, they had been defeated not by the military strength of their enemy, but by the power of nature, which the sultan had used to impressive effect. The River Nile had determined so much of the course of the campaign; surely the crusaders did not appreciate the irony that, in the end, it decided the outcome of the entire endeavour, too, putting an end to the most successful crusade since the First, more than a century before.
The Fifth Crusade (1217–21) was a major expedition to invade and conquer Egypt which reshaped the Near East and crusading strategy for the rest of the century and beyond, yet it is little known today outside scholarly circles. Thomas Smith presents the five most fascinating facts from the forgotten campaign.
By Thomas Smith
1. Egypt: An Alien and Deadly Landscape
The Fifth Crusade was the first major expedition to invade and attempt to conquer Egypt, beginning with the vital port city of Damietta. Though the kingdom of Jerusalem had launched a series of strikes at Egypt half a century before, in the 1160s, there was little knowledge of conducting military operations in the Nile Delta among the armies that landed at Damietta in summer 1218.
Participants in the Fifth Crusade had to learn to fight and survive in what was a beguilingly beautiful, but also alien and extremely deadly, landscape. Eyewitness accounts describe the Europeans’ wonder as they saw Egypt for the first time. The landscape of the Nile Delta was much greener and lusher than the crusaders had expected. Participants on the campaign wrote that gardens and orchards abounded in the area around Damietta. They wondered at the number of birds and fish and were terrified by the crocodiles which lurked in the river – they had never seen creatures like this before.
Dangers abounded at the crusader camp on the Nile. The crusaders described the behaviour of the crocodiles, noting that they devoured everything, even their own young as soon as they hatched. Some unfortunate crusaders were killed and eaten by crocodiles.
There were also less obvious dangers to overcome. When the crusaders first arrived in Egypt, some of the pilgrims were unaware that they could not drink the muddy waters of the Nile. Eyewitness accounts describe the death throes of crusaders who had drunk from the Nile, writhing in agony on the banks of the river, as their comrades watched on helplessly.
Slowly, the crusaders learned to operate effectively in the region, but the initial days and weeks in summer 1218 saw a high casualty rate as the crusade host learned lessons the hard way, gaining hard-won experience that would allow them to pursue the siege of the great city of Damietta.
2. A Crucible for Military Technology
Warfare in the Nile Delta was different from anything the crusaders had encountered before. The Europeans not only encountered new technologies and weapons in Egypt, but also developed their own, with the campaign functioning as a crucible for technological development.
The Fifth Crusaders encountered a new weapon during their siege of Damietta: Greek Fire. This was a naphtha-based weapon akin to modern napalm (the medieval recipe to make Greek Fire has since been lost) used to burn through crusader ships and soldiers. It was widely used in Egypt by the defenders of Damietta, probably launched in ceramic hand grenades (which survive in large numbers from the medieval world and often crop up for sale today at auction houses) but which could also be delivered in ancient flamethrowers. A twelfth-century manuscript depicts a Greek Fire flamethrower in action, attached to the prow of a ship.
Unfortunately, the eyewitness sources for the Fifth Crusade do not specify the means of delivery, only that it struck them “like lightning”. Greek Fire was used extensively during the war, both against the crusader ships – the Christians carried stinking vats of urine on board to put out the flames – and personnel. King John of Jerusalem nearly died by immolation when he was set alight by Greek Fire during the campaign.
In response to the determined defence of the Egyptian warriors, who deployed Greek Fire as well as arrows, javelins, and stones against the crusaders, one schoolmaster from Cologne designed and built a new piece of military technology which had never been seen before: a unique floating siege engine. When the crusaders struggled to capture Damietta’s Chain Tower – a stout stone tower in the middle of the Nile which blocked access upriver via a massive harbour chain – one of the participants devised an ingenious weapons platform to overcome the deadlock.
Oliver of Cologne was a schoolmaster at the cathedral school in his home city and a very learned member of the crusader army – he also chronicled the campaign in the most detailed account of the expedition (one of the main reasons we can reconstruct the crusade in such detail). Drawing upon his knowledge of ancient military manuals, he invented and paid for the construction of a floating siege engine which could be manoeuvred into position next to the Chain Tower and then used to storm the building. The contraption consisted of two ships joined together. The masts were removed and in their place was built a large wooden fortress with a long siege ladder attached to the front. The ladder could not only be raised up and down but also rotated. This allowed the crusaders to get into position against the Chain Tower and, as Greek Fire and other projectiles rained down on them, a few brave soldiers attempted to storm the turret.
The crusaders also created their own home-spun weapons to meet the threat of the Egyptian defenders. One Frisian crusader, named Hayo of Fivelgo, favoured what was essentially a medieval nunchuck as his main weapon when besieging the Chain Tower. Constructed from an agricultural flail – two heavy wooden sticks, connected with an iron chain – Hayo had modified his weapon to make it even more deadly. He is recorded in an eyewitness account to have interwoven more iron chains, making this into a brutal, easy-to-handle weapon that was perfect for the close-quarter combat he engaged in as he stormed the Chain Tower. Balancing precariously on the ladder of the floating siege engine, Hayo was the second man over the turret. Oliver of Cologne watched him lashing out violently to the left and the right, felling the standard-bearer of the Egyptian sultan using his nunchuck and playing a key role in the capture of the Chain Tower.
3. Arise, Female and Child Crusaders
Imagine a crusader. What first springs to mind, in terms of what they look like? Chances are you are thinking of a man with a helmet, clad in mail, wearing a white surcoat with a red cross, wielding a sword. This is the stereotypical image that pervades popular culture. But this is only part of the story (and, of course, it is primarily the Templars who fit this image – there were lots of other colour surcoats and different armour and outfits being worn by male crusaders, so it is not even representative of the male experience).
There were many women and children who took part in the crusades, but they have largely been written out of the history as a result of the primary source material, which was almost entirely written by male participants and observers, who were primarily interested in the deeds of other males. But the Fifth Crusade is one of the best for catching a glimpse of women and children on crusade and for reconstructing what their experiences were like.
We have nine female crusaders attested by name on the Fifth Crusade, two of whom departed on the crusade without any male kin to accompany them (the outdated stereotype is that women only went on crusade to accompany their husbands). This may not seem like a lot, but when we adjust for the biases of the preservation of source material – and the fact that very few non-noble male crusaders are also attested by name, indeed, the overwhelming majority are nameless – this is a valuable indication of wider trends of female participation.
One of the women we know about was an Italian crusader from Bologna, called Giulietta Merxadrus, who appears in the will of her husband, who was dying in the crusader camp at Damietta in December 1219. As her husband lay dying, he took pains to provide for Giulietta in his will, laying special emphasis on her not being deprived of her part of their tent, which they shared with their companions from Bologna, or her share of the plunder from Damietta. This demonstrates not only that women were commonly present on the Fifth Crusade – Giulietta and her husband were fairly ordinary in terms of social position – but that they were rewarded with a share of the loot from the capture and sack of Damietta after the city fell to the crusaders in November 1219.
Children are glimpsed even less frequently but were also present on the Fifth Crusade. The eyewitness Oliver of Cologne recorded that after the conquest of Damietta, the plunder was “divided proportionately not only among clerics and knights, but also among attendants, women, and children [my emphasis]”. This source proves that women and children were not only present on the Fifth Crusade in numbers large enough to warrant a mention in Oliver’s source, but that they were perceived as contributors to the success of the siege and therefore were rewarded with a share of the plunder. The roles of children on the crusade are even more difficult to reconstruct than those of women, but presumably they performed auxiliary functions which were crucial to the survival of the army – they cannot have just been milling around doing nothing; everyone had to contribute to the cause.
We know that women on the Fifth Crusade carried water, stones, and other ammunition to the warriors on the frontline during combat. They are also attested acting as sentries, grinding corn, running markets selling fish and vegetables, and providing basic medical care for the sick and wounded. In emergency situations, women took up arms to fight. On one occasion when Muslim soldiers breached the camp palisades at Damietta, female crusaders killed any stragglers that the men of the army had missed. In August 1219, a group of women was recorded as having been massacred by the enemy when carrying food and water to fellow crusaders – they were active participants in the frontline action and this carried with it a high level of risk which explains why they were also rewarded with their share of the plunder.
As was common in any medieval army, some women also performed sex work. Understandably, this usually went unmentioned in the primary sources, especially since most accounts were written by clergy who disapproved of such activity. But there is an episode on the Fifth Crusade where this comes to light in the evidence. At one difficult point in the crusade, we know that female sex workers were given lashes and branded with hot irons in an attempt to cleanse the army of its sins and secure God’s favour for the expedition – it was thought that their activities were having a negative impact on the success of the campaign.
4. One of the Longest Sieges of the Crusades
Although the Fifth Crusade is nowhere near as famous today as, say, the First or Third Crusades, in the Middle Ages, the conquest and subsequent loss of Damietta was the cause célèbre of the first half of the thirteenth century.
Damietta was one of the most important port cities in the Mediterranean. Recent network analysis shows that it was a much more significant trading hub in the region than previously recognised and was second only to Alexandria. It boasted the latest in Islamic military fortifications: a ring of triple walls, each higher than the last (imagine a modern three-tiered wedding cake). Along with the Chain Tower, mentioned above, there were 28 towers on the middle wall alone. A previous sultan had even dismantled ancient Egyptian pyramids, including one of quartz, to reuse the stones when strengthening the city’s walls.
Damietta was a city of major strategic importance that represented, as the crusaders observed at the time, “the key to all Egypt”. Its capture was the result of one of the longest sieges in the history of the crusades: nearly eighteen months of intense amphibious and land-based siege warfare. The crusaders attempted various means to reduce the city, using trebuchets, frontal assaults using cats (a siege weapon that covered attacking infantry as they tried to break through gates), undermining, and amphibious offensives using specialised siege ships. But, in the end, none of these strategies worked. Rather, it was the less glamorous weapon of starvation that ground down the defenders.
After the crusaders knocked out the Chain Tower in 1218, they were able to cross the Nile and encircle the city of Damietta proper. They enforced a tight blockade and prevented resupply of the city. The citizens of Damietta, who numbered about 20,000, experienced food scarcity for the first time. A Muslim relief army under the command of Sultan al-Kamil made camp a short distance from the crusaders and attempted to dislodge the invaders. A series of brutal battles were fought before the walls of Damietta, but the crusaders clung firmly to their position. A period of turbulence in the Muslim political world meant that the invaders could better concentrate on the siege when al-Kamil departed for a time.
In the end, after nearly a year and a half of savage siege warfare, the crusaders cracked the city through starvation. One night in November 1219, the papal legate, Pelagius, despatched a crack squad of soldiers to try and breach the walls. Carrying ladders, they wove their way through the darkness, over the broken outer defences and fallen masonry, which they had battered repeatedly with their trebuchets. Setting fire to an outer gate, they burned their way through and then clambered over the inner walls using their ladders. The sight that met their eyes was almost apocalyptic. Bodies were lying everywhere in the streets, unburied. The defenders and citizens had died in droves from famine and disease, leaving the city unprotected. Summoning reinforcements, the Christians made their way into the city whose great walls they had stared at for so long, triumphant at last. As the crusaders surged into the diseased city, the sack of Damietta began.
The conquest of Damietta represented the first capture of a major Muslim city during a “general” expedition since Jerusalem on the First Crusade in 1099. It completely changed the geopolitical situation in the Near East, opening up the map in terms of the crusader advance and the strategy of conquering the rest of Egypt. Now that the Christians had a major port city under their control, they could begin to plan their strike into the Egyptian interior, towards Cairo. For the titular king of Jerusalem, John of Brienne, this represented the first time that a new Crusader State had been established in Outremer in well over a hundred years, and he exerted all his influence to try to secure control over Damietta and to annex it to the kingdom of Jerusalem.
The news that the Fifth Crusade had conquered Damietta spread like wildfire around the crusaders’ homelands in Europe and was a cause for major celebration. When the crusade failed in 1221, the loss of the city cut deep. The Fifth Crusade had not only involved tens of thousands of warrior-pilgrims in the East, but the entire Christian population of Europe, who had donated alms, paid tax revenues, and prayed on behalf of the army. They felt betrayed that the crusaders had surrendered the great city of Damietta and subjected the main leaders, including the pope and his legate, to intense scrutiny. The Fifth Crusade was a major disruptive event in world history that is – unjustly – little known today.
5. The Main Character: The River Nile
The Fifth Crusade featured a stellar cast of characters: John of Brienne, the insecure king of Jerusalem; Andrew II of Hungary, the king who abandoned the campaign in a huff; Frederick II, the absent crusader who continually broke his promises; Pelagius, the papal legate with an undeserved reputation for fiery arrogance; and al-Kamil, the wily and chivalrous sultan of Egypt who emerged as the great hero of the war. Despite this collection of larger-than-life individuals, the main character of the Fifth Crusade was not a person, but a geographical feature: the River Nile. The Nile determined the course of the campaign of the Fifth Crusade in its entirety. From the initial beach landings, via the capture of the Chain Tower using the floating siege engine, to the crossing of the river and the siege of Damietta proper, the Nile had dictated the ebb and flow of warfare. It also defined the campaign’s ultimate outcome.
After the crusaders captured Damietta, thoughts turned to the next phase of the war: the invasion of the Egyptian interior to the south and the siege of Cairo. By the summer of 1221, this had been a plan long in the making. A prolonged period of inaction after November 1219 had led tempers to fray as the divided crusader host attempted to navigate a grand strategy in the face of a carousel of departures and the continued absence of the long-awaited emperor, Frederick II.
The pilgrims had encountered books of prophecy during the campaign which had foretold their success in conquering Damietta and another settlement called Tinnis. (In his chronicle, Oliver of Cologne misidentified Tinnis as Tanis, the ancient Egyptian city famous in modern popular culture as the resting place of the lost Ark of the Covenant in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark). According to the prophecies, the crusaders would need to capture Cairo in 1221 to open the way for an emperor from the West (Frederick II) to meet with an emperor from the East (the legendary ruler Prester John, whom the crusaders confused with the leader of the Mongols then making advances against Islam to the East) in a newly recovered, Christian Jerusalem, in 1222. If the crusaders were to fulfil this prophecy before 1222, which would bring about the Second Coming of Christ, then they had to march out of Damietta in the summer of 1221. The only problem was the River Nile.
The crusaders were well aware of the famous annual inundation of the Nile. They even wrote about it in their accounts from the beginning of the campaign. As they prepared to march south towards Cairo in the summer of 1221, they knew they would have to contend with floodwaters, but their belief in the prophecies, which had thus far all come to pass, must have convinced them that God would not allow them to be defeated. Previous scholars have blamed the outcome of the Fifth Crusade on arrogant leadership and poor strategic decision-making by the legate Pelagius, but this is to misunderstand the contemporary situation. It is only when we factor in the power of the prophecies that we can hope to understand the events of summer 1221.
The crusaders deployed in a complex defensive formation, employing the technique of a fighting march, flanked by naval support as they wound their way south along the Nile towards Cairo. This was the same strategy that Richard the Lionheart had used to great effect on the Third Crusade, when he marched from Acre to Jaffa in Palestine, under continual pressure from enemy forces. It worked very well on the Fifth Crusade as well. On the crusaders’ right flank were a flotilla of ships on the Nile, protecting the army from the water. In the centre were the cavalry and non-combatants. And on the left flank were infantry with large shields to defend against Egyptian arrow storms. This formation trundled slowly south, hugging the banks of the river, focusing on protection rather than speed. All the while the Christians were shadowed by Sultan al-Kamil, who launched occasional attacks in an attempt to stop them.
By August 1221, the Fifth Crusaders had managed to travel about forty miles south of Damietta. There were another seventy miles still to traverse – a journey of about two weeks if they maintained their pace. When the news reached Cairo that the crusader army was on its way, panic was recorded to having broken out and some residents began to evacuate the city. To participants, then, the Fifth Crusaders appeared to be on the verge of a conquest that would eclipse even that of Damietta. But, unbeknown to the Christians, the River Nile was about to play the deciding role in their epic campaign.
The crusaders stopped at a fork in the Nile near Mansoura. They found themselves at the southern tip of an island that resembled a downward-pointing triangle, having crossed a small waterway. As the waters of the Nile rose, al-Kamil exploited his superior local hydrographical knowledge to outmanoeuvre the invaders. He was able to navigate troops behind the crusaders, using the small waterway they had crossed, which was rapidly increasing in size. Having surrounded the crusader camp and pinned them down using a withering bombardment from his trebuchets, the sultan then opened the sluice gates in the surrounding fields, used to control irrigation. The Nile deluge washed out the Christians’ camp, submerging them and making it impossible for them to operate effectively. Surrounded, outsmarted, and running low on supplies, the crusaders realised that their only hope for escape was to effect a covert nighttime withdrawal.
Unfortunately for the crusaders, things quickly went awry when a contingent of the army embarked on a day-drinking session hours before the operation. Reluctant to leave behind their precious stores of wine, numerous pilgrims are recorded to have drunk themselves into a stupor under the burning Egyptian sun. By the time that the order came to enact their retreat in the dead of night, numerous crusaders were so drunk that they could not be roused from their tents. Others were passed out on the roads. Some of those still capable of walking wandered off into the flooded fields that surrounded the camp and were never seen again. This wasn’t the worst of it, though. Operating under the logic of inebriation, several crusaders decided that they didn’t want to leave their tents behind to be plundered by the sultan’s forces and so set fire to them using their torches. This spelled the doom of the rest of the army.
As flames licked up the material of the tents and embers rose into the night sky, al-Kamil’s sentries realised what was happening and the sultan launched a full-on assault on the retreating Christians, who were not able to put up much of a fight. Those crusaders who were still capable of action splashed through the water towards their ships, several of which sank in the surging floodwaters as a result of overcrowding. The covert night withdrawal was rapidly descending into disaster. Over the coming days, the crusade leadership, flooded out of their position and unable to advance or retreat, realised that no other option remained to them: they would have to surrender.
When the Fifth Crusade sealed a truce with al-Kamil, returning the hard-won city of Damietta for their lives, they had been defeated not by the military strength of their enemy, but by the power of nature, which the sultan had used to impressive effect. The River Nile had determined so much of the course of the campaign; surely the crusaders did not appreciate the irony that, in the end, it decided the outcome of the entire endeavour, too, putting an end to the most successful crusade since the First, more than a century before.
Dr Thomas Smith is a prize-winning author and historian of the crusades and the medieval world. His new book is The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt (Yale, 2026). Follow him on Instagram @medieval_tom and Facebook.
You can order The Fifth Crusade from Yale University Press, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones and Hunt’s Bookshop.
Top Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Français 22495 fol. 268
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