In 1219, Francis made the fateful decision to join the Fifth Crusade, as a peacemaker rather than a soldier. The Second Life (30) records that he went with “the desire for martyrdom”; he would be a knight for Christ in the best chivalric tradition. He left for Acre in the summer, accompanied by Peter of Catanio (this was not the same Peter of Catanio who was one of the early members of the order, who had died before this date) and a handful of others. Brother Elias was in charge of the mission in Acre, and after a brief sojourn in his company, Francis continued on with one companion (or several, according to Sabatier), Brother Illuminato, to the crusaders’ camps outside the Muslim city of Damietta, at the mouth of the Nile in Egypt. These camps were the bustling headquarters of perhaps 40,000 Christian soldiers under the secular leadership of John de Brienne, king of Jerusalem in exile. Unfortunately for the mission, Pope Honorius had also put Cardinal Pelagius of Saint Lucia as legate in charge of his own expedition to Damietta, and Pelagius began to dispute the strategy and command with John of Brienne. Their mission was to recover Jerusalem from the Muslim forces and the Ayyubid dynasty, but in the course of this undertaking, they made a base outside Damietta and laid siege to the city, which they wished to turn into a center for trade. This siege began in May 1218 and lasted until after Francis’s arrival in Egypt; when it began, the city had some 80,000 inhabitants and was an important and prosperous trading port in the Mediterranean. A surprise attack won the defensive watchtower of the city, situated on a small island in the Nile, for the crusaders in August 1218.
The news of the fall of the tower of Damietta, its first and perhaps most important line of defense, caused the death of the elderly sultan al-Adil. His son al-Malik al-Kamil became sultan of Egypt; he had already been the leader of the forces trying to battle the crusaders. Now the crusaders were able to besiege the city in earnest, and the situation became more critical for al-Kamil and the Muslim forces. The siege went on through the blistering heat of two Egyptian summers, during which the crusaders and the occupants of Damietta alike were wracked by plagues of disease-bearing flies and epidemics of dysentery and scurvy.11 By the time Francis and Illuminato arrived, gangrene and disease were rampant not only in the camps, but also in the city.
Tensions rose inevitably as conditions worsened. It became clear that battle could not be postponed much longer. The Second Life (30) describes a vision that Saint Francis had, in which the Lord showed him that if the battle were to take place, it would not go well for the Christians. After some hesitation, he went before the Christian forces “with salutary warnings, forbidding the war, denouncing the reason for it.” And indeed, the Christian forces were turned back on August 29, when some 5,000 crusaders may have died. It was then that Francis resolved to approach the sultan toward an attempt at peacemaking.
When Francis and Illuminato approached Sultan al-Kamil, they may first have been seized and maltreated: “for before he gained access to the sultan. . . he was captured by the sultan’s soldiers, was insulted and beaten” (First Life 57). They were then received “very honorably” by the Sultan himself, given gifts, and listened to courteously, but sent away empty-handed (although with a protective escort), succeeding neither in converting the sultan nor in achieving peace. Steven Runciman describes his visit in terms that are not complimentary to Francis but evocative of the circumstances:
The battle had been watched with sad dismay by a distinguished visitor to the camp, Brother Francis of Assisi. He had come to the East believing, as many good and unwise persons before and after him have believed, that a peace-mission can bring about peace. He now asked Pelagius to go to see the sultan. After some hesitation, Pelagius agreed, and sent him under a flag of truce to Fariskur. The Moslem guards were suspicious at first but soon decided that anyone so simple, so gentle, and so dirty must be mad, and treated him with the respect due to a man who had been touched by God. He was taken to the Sultan al-Kamil who was charmed by him and listened patiently to his appeal. . . . Francis was offered many gifts, which he refused, and was sent back with an honourable escort to the Christians.12
Not long after his visit, however, the sultan, determined to save Dami-etta, offered a trade to the crusaders: he would cede them Palestine, if they would leave Egypt. Although John of Brienne and his troops were eager to accept the offer, Cardinal Pelagius would not agree. And thus the stage was set for the final disgraceful episode of the siege of Damietta. The crusaders stormed the city walls on November 4 and found a mere 3,000 emaciated inhabitants alive, the other 70,000-odd souls having died of disease or starvation. The Christians promptly looted the city, raping and beating the last sickly inhabitants, or taking them to sell into slavery. To all of this were Francis and Illuminato witnesses, no doubt appalled by the savagery surrounding them.
Brother Elias and the other missionaries came from Syria to join them. The brothers spent their time in prayer and caring for the sick and the wounded. Francis wore himself out in caring for others; his health, never vigorous, was permanently broken, and he would return to Europe in 1220 with a chronic inflammation of the eyes that would eventually leave him blind. No doubt he also experienced traumas of the spirit after witnessing the ugliness of war and the behavior of the crusaders.
In 1935, medical historian Edward Frederick Hartung collated all of the symptoms Francis suffered after his time in Egypt and concluded that the affliction of the eyes from which Francis would suffer for the rest of his life was trachoma, which even today is the world’s most common infectious cause of blindness and endemic in Egypt since ancient times. Today, the disease can be treated (if caught early enough) with antibiotics; untreated, it causes constant discharge, with other symptoms similar to pinkeye. Blisters on the eyelids and their eventual inversion follow; the inversion causes constant abrasion by the eyelashes, which in turn causes ulceration of the corneas and ultimately blindness. Hartung’s diagnosis fits the symptoms described by Francis’s biographers well, but of course it is impossible to know for sure. In Francis’s day, trachoma was a chronic, painful, and debilitating disease for which there was no effective treatment: “for it St. Francis’ physicians applied eye bindings, salves, plasters and urina virginis pueri, the sovereign eye wash [of the time]. In final resort the doctors applied hot irons to the Saint’s face.”13 Hartung also speculated on the cause of Francis’s stigmata and death (see further below).
While the crusaders won the day at Damietta, they would not win the war. The Fifth Crusade ultimately saw the crusaders return home in shame, with nothing to show for their efforts and Damietta again in the hands of the infidel. Runciman, in his three-volume history of the Crusades, categorizes the Fifth among “Misguided Crusades.”
Following Francis’s time in Damietta and before he returned to Acre, there is a gap in the records. No one knows where he was or how he spent his time; perhaps lying sick somewhere in the Middle East between the two cities, perhaps journeying to sites in the Holy Land. Even today, following the Franciscan mission to Acre led by Elias and Francis’s time in Egypt and Syria, the Franciscans retain a special right of access to and care of Christian sites in the Holy Land.
World History
