Joinville

Joinville is presented as the author of the Histoire de Saint Louis and as a companion to Louis IX in the Holy Land, serving as both scribe and soldier. In Casaubon’s reading, he is not merely a source about the Templars: his account shapes how their final crusading generation can be imagined, recording military failure through the partial, immediate perspective of someone caught within it.

Identity and Historical Setting

Casaubon places Joinville’s testimony more than 180 years after the Templar order’s foundation, when repeated crusades had already tested the ideals associated with the order. The world his account evokes has lost much of its earlier heroic cast: Jerusalem has fallen, Christian power has suffered reversals, and the crusading cause has become increasingly difficult to sustain. Against that diminished background, the Templars remain ready to follow Louis IX, not because victory is assured but because the crusade gives their military vocation its purpose.

Joinville’s importance lies partly in his dual position. As a soldier, he belongs to the events he describes; as a scribe and historian, he turns them into a narrative that survives them. Casaubon imagines himself writing as Joinville rather than making the Templars into characters in a later romance. The comparison signals an effort to recover their history through a participant’s testimony, while also acknowledging that this testimony has its own limitations and literary form.

Louis IX’s Campaign in Egypt

Joinville’s account, as recounted by Casaubon, places the Templars in Louis IX’s campaign against Egypt. The king attacks Damietta from the sea, and the landing succeeds. The Saracens abandon the city, but Louis hesitates before entering it, fearing a trap. After taking Damietta, he must choose whether to advance toward Alexandria or Cairo. Alexandria is the strategically wiser objective, but Robert d’Artois urges an advance on Cairo, where the prospect of glory is greater.

The Templars initially show caution, then become eager to fight. Louis has ordered his forces to avoid isolated engagements, but the Temple’s marshal disobeys after spotting a Mameluke squadron and leads an attack. This episode makes the order’s discipline and its appetite for battle pull in opposite directions: the knights serve the king’s campaign, yet their military identity can drive them beyond his commands.

The advance toward Cairo ends in disaster. Robert d’Artois is killed, along with many knights, including 280 Templars. Joinville’s narrative, as Casaubon presents it, does not simply label the defeat a disgrace. The failure is part of war’s course, and the account preserves both its losses and the ways participants understood them. The Templars’ readiness to follow the king into danger thus appears as fidelity to an ideal, but also as a commitment that carries them into repeated defeat.

The Witness’s View of Battle

Casaubon emphasizes the vivid, episode-by-episode character of Joinville’s writing. Its battles can resemble choreographed scenes: individual acts of combat, prayers, rescues, and deaths stand out, while the campaign’s larger shape remains difficult to see. The perspective shifts with Joinville’s immediate position—whether he has fallen from his horse or remounted. The account gives a close view of local danger without offering a commanding overview of the battlefield.

One episode follows Joinville as he rides to help the lord of Wanpn. A Turkish fighter strikes him with a lance, his horse sinks to its knees, and Joinville falls. He rises with his sword, and Chevalier Erard de Siveiey points out a ruined house where they might take shelter. They are overtaken there; other knights are wounded, and help eventually arrives. The action then moves elsewhere on the battlefield, to further deaths and last-minute rescues. The sequence conveys how survival and loss emerge from contingent, localized encounters rather than from a clear view of the campaign as a whole.

The narrative’s vividness does not mean that it is uniformly celebratory. Casaubon notes the contrast between the pageantry of battle and its material consequences: Grand Master Guillaume de Sonnac dies from Greek fire, the army suffers from disease and lack of provisions, and the Christian forces are ultimately routed. Damietta is lost, and Louis is ransomed after the queen negotiates a payment of 500,000 livres tournois. Joinville’s episodes may make war readable as a succession of memorable scenes, but their accumulation leads to defeat, retreat, and ransom.

Templars, Ideals, and Narrative Form

For Casaubon, Joinville helps explain how the Templars could remain loyal to a crusade after its promises had repeatedly failed. Louis chooses to land at Damietta despite the danger, presenting defeat as martyrdom and victory as service to God. The Templars do not share his confidence, but their training has made them knights of an ideal whose image they are expected to affirm. They follow him into what Casaubon calls a mystical commitment, even when their judgment does not guarantee success.

Joinville’s testimony also complicates the retrospective image of the order. The Templars appear as participants in a military and religious enterprise, not as the guardians of an established secret history. Casaubon’s reflections connect the order’s disillusionment and fading glory with the later legends that surround it, but the account of the campaign itself remains grounded in the losses, decisions, and limited sight of war. The gap between such concrete testimony and later myth-making is central to Joinville’s role in the novel: his narrative supplies detail, while its partial perspective leaves room for subsequent readers to impose broader meanings.