St. Louis IX Ransoms Christian Prisoners in Egypt

The oars struck the mudbank with a dull scrape and the barge tilted hard under me. I gripped the rail as the Egyptian guards shouted and prodded us forward into knee-deep water that stank of river weed and dead fish. My wrists were still raw from the ropes they had cut only that morning. Ahead, on the higher ground, a line of Frankish tents stood white against the brown fields. I counted the crosses on their standards and realized the king’s own banner flew above them.

We had been marched from the camp at Al Mansourah three days before. Most of the men around me were too weak to speak. One knight from Poitou kept whispering the names of his sons. The guards let him. They knew we were no longer worth killing.

A clerk in a stained surcoat met us at the water’s edge. He carried no weapon, only a wax tablet and a list of names. He asked each man his lord and his village. When he reached me he looked at the cut on my forearm and the fever blisters along my lip, then wrote something small beside my name without asking more.

By midday the sun had burned through the haze. We sat on the dry ground outside the largest tent while the clerk read from his tablet. He stopped at a name I knew—Robert of Artois—and crossed it out with a single line. No one spoke after that.

Toward evening a wagon arrived from the river. Barrels were unloaded and set in rows. One of the guards lifted a lid and the smell of salted meat reached us. Another barrel held wine. The clerk told us to form lines. We drank from tin cups passed hand to hand. The wine was thin and warm, yet no one left any in the cup.

Joinville came out of the tent just before dark. He walked slowly, one hand on his side where the arrow had gone in at Mansourah. He stopped in front of the nearest group and asked whether any man had seen his cousin fall. Three voices answered at once. He listened to each, then nodded and moved on. When he reached me he studied the bandage on my arm and asked how long the wound had been open. I told him. He said the king’s physicians would see to it before we sailed.

That night the guards posted fewer sentries. Fires were allowed inside the lines. Men who had not spoken for weeks began to trade small stories about the crossing from Cyprus and the first days at Damietta. The sound of their voices carried across the water to the Egyptian boats still anchored downstream.

On the third morning after our arrival the clerk returned with fresh parchment. He read aloud a list of sums. Each name was followed by a figure in bezants. When he reached the end he looked up and said the king had ordered that every man whose ransom could not be met from his own house would be paid from the royal treasury. No one moved. The clerk repeated the words once, then rolled the parchment and walked back inside the tent.

I watched the king himself that afternoon. He stood outside the same tent with his brothers Alphonse and Charles. All three wore plain linen tunics without armor. Louis held a small wooden box. He opened it, counted coins into a leather bag, and handed the bag to a Saracen officer who waited with two scribes. The officer weighed the bag on a small scale set on a camp stool, then nodded. Louis turned to the next bag without speaking.