La dernière croisade: Saint Louis à Tunis (1270)

Abstract

The Crusade promoted, organized and led by Louis IX of France to Tunis in the summer of 1270 was, in military and personal terms, a disaster. Louis and significant numbers of his family, leading baronage and clergy, as well as countless others, died on campaign from illness and disease. No conquests were achieved; no conversions—one stated aim of the expedition—secured. The treaty that ended hostilities, while paying the invaders to withdraw and restoring reciprocal trading rights between Tunis and Louis’ allies, Sicily and Genoa, appeared to consolidate Emir al-Mustansir’s hold on power and reinstate, even enhance, ante bellum cross-Mediterranean commercial co-operation and equilibrium. This failure to attain its declared aims, as well as its appearance as a feeble side show to the more engaging conflict in the eastern Mediterranean over the fate of the Holy Land, may explain why the 1270 enterprise, apart from the unusually extensive evidence for its preparatory organization, has attracted scant modern scholarly attention despite a continuing effluence of works on crusading in all its guises. Serendipitously, two recent books have almost simultaneously rectified this neglect, Michael Lower’s The Tunis Crusade of 1270 and Xavier Hélary’s work under consideration here. While inevitably covering much of the same ground, they are very different. Lower, integrating Arabic texts with more familiar western accounts, uses the 1270 crusade to argue a general case for seeing Mediterranean inter-faith conflict as part of, not opposed to, the process and procedures of communal, political and commercial accommodation. Hélary, while not ignoring the pre- and post-crusade ties that bound the economy of the western Mediterranean together, prefers a more traditional position, informed by close reading of Latin and French archival as well as literary sources. Where Lower sees the Tunis enterprise as serving both the pious interests of Louis IX and the commercial and geo-political ambitions of his brother Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily, Hélary maintains the more standard view of the essential irreconcilability of the two.