Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The Fifth Crusade, planned by Innocent and promulgated at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, was eventually overseen by his successor, Honorius III, with very limited success. Despite the deployment of large, predominantly French and German armies to assault Damietta, four years of war between 1217 and 1221 produced no lasting gains. Damietta was taken and lost, and an attempt to storm the Egyptian capital of Cairo was easily defeated by the sultan, Saladin’s nephew al-Kamil, who flooded the Nile valley and sunk the crusader army into fields of sapping mud. This, along with an almost identical crusade to Damietta led by Louis IX of France in 1248–54, was the last, faintly farcical mass assault on the east, which was thereafter left increasingly to the defense of the military orders, bolstered occasionally by independent expeditions raised privately by great lords. But this did not mean an end to crusading. For as the age of the great campaigns diminished, many smaller fields of crusader warfare emerged in their stead. In Spain, the victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 began a new phase of the Reconquista in which the Christian powers were