The Crusades of Kings

CHAPTER 10 · 1218–1270 · The Crusades, 1095–1291

Everyone now accepts Richard’s logic: Jerusalem can only be held by whoever holds Egypt. So the great crusades of the thirteenth century aim at the Nile. The Fifth Crusade takes Damietta, the fortress guarding the eastern Nile, in 1219 — then refuses the sultan’s astonishing offer to trade Egypt-for-Jerusalem, marches on Cairo, and is trapped and destroyed by the annual Nile flood, forced to give back everything it had won. The Egypt strategy is sound; the Nile is its graveyard.

The turn: Jerusalem regained by treaty, 18 February 1229.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.