Mansura

Mansura is the Egyptian city at the center of a disastrous episode in the Seventh Crusade. After the French take Damietta, the army’s advance toward Mansura becomes a costly reversal: Robert d'Artois’s hunger for glory draws the Templars into an attack that ends with the Christians scattered and many knights dead.

The approach to Mansura

After Damietta falls, Louis IX must choose whether to advance on Alexandria or Cairo. Alexandria would deny Egypt an important port, but Robert d'Artois urges the king to strike at Cairo. The Templars, initially cautious, become eager for action; when the king orders the army to avoid isolated engagements, the marshal of the Temple nevertheless attacks a Mameluke squadron.

The Saracens establish their position beyond the river near Mansura. The French attempt to construct a dam and ford, shielding the work with mobile towers, but their opponents use Greek fire, learned from the Byzantines. Its light makes the burning Christian camp visible at night. In the confusion, a Bedouin guides Louis and his men to a ford for three hundred bezants, and the king orders an assault across the river.

The assault and its reversal

The crossing costs lives, as men are swept away by the current, while three hundred mounted Saracens wait on the far bank. Once the main force lands, the Templars take the vanguard, followed by Robert d'Artois. The opposing horsemen retreat, but Robert and his men pursue rather than wait for the rest of the Christian army.

Fearing dishonor, the Templars join the pursuit. They catch up with Robert after he has entered the enemy camp and begun a massacre. As the Saracens fall back toward Mansura, Robert presses on. Brother Gilles, the Temple’s supreme commander, tries to restrain him by praising his achievement, but Robert accuses the Templars and Hospitallers of withholding their strength and boasts that he has shown what a man with blood in his veins can do. Stung by the charge, the Templars enter the city and chase the enemy toward its opposite wall.

The Christians then repeat the error made at Ascalon. While they sack the sultan’s palace, the Saracens regroup and attack the disorganized force. Mansura thus becomes the setting for a reversal driven not by a single misjudgment but by a chain of them: a divided advance, a premature pursuit, and the Templars’ decision to answer an insult by pressing into the city.

Loss and significance

Robert d'Artois is killed, along with many knights, including two hundred and eighty Templars. The narrator suggests that Brother Gilles understood the danger before entering the city, though the account presents his reported warning as something some people said rather than as an uncontested record.

The outcome is described as more than a military defeat: it is a disgrace, although Joinville does not record it in those terms. Mansura’s episode links the crusading army’s appetite for glory to the collapse of its discipline, and its echo of Ascalon makes the disaster feel like a repeated failure rather than an isolated accident.