Читать книгу The Three Edwards: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 4

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The Crusades were running down like an unwound clock. For nearly two hundred years men had been suffering and dying under the blistering sun of the desert without gaining any lasting results. Only the hold that saintly King Louis of France had on the hearts and minds of men had made another effort possible in this year of grace 1270; and the fact that he had again unfurled the flag with the gallant cross brings to the fore a young man who was to play a very great part in history.

Prince Edward, heir to the throne of England, had taken the cross at once. He was granted a subsidy by Parliament and on August 11 had sailed from Dover with a small band of zealous Englishmen. King Louis had taken his army to Africa earlier with the intention of striking into the Holy Land through Egypt. Edward’s wife, the lovely Eleanor of Castile, had also gone ahead.

When the little English fleet arrived off Tunis, the prince learned that the great French king was dead. The blood burned fiercely in his veins when he was told that the son who had succeeded him had decided to abandon the crusade and was taking back to France the army his father had raised.

“By the blood of God!” cried Edward in a fine Plantagenet rage. “Though all my fellow soldiers and countrymen desert me, I will enter Acre with Fowin, the groom of my palfrey, and I will keep my word and my oath to the death!”

He was thirty-one years old; tall and long-legged, and with the handsome head of the Plantagenets, the golden hair, the blazing blue eyes, and the finely chiseled features. As would soon be made clear, he had all the good qualities of his family and few of their many bad ones; and he had something no Plantagenet had ever before possessed—a true sense of the responsibility of kingship, with a desire to rule justly and well when his turn came. He was going to make a great king, this Edward, perhaps England’s greatest.

He found that, after all, he could depend on the aid of more than Fowin. Every man in the company responded when he announced his intention of going on. And on they went, a sorry little force of slightly more than a thousand men, a few knights, a few stout English bowmen, a few Frisians. Could anything have been more rash and foolhardy? But on the other hand nothing would have served so well to kindle again the guttering light of crusading zeal; if the spark, alas, had not been so close to total extinction.

It was particularly daring because all of the Near East had been roused to fighting pitch by the efforts of a far more dangerous leader than the chivalrous Saladin who had opposed Richard of the Lion-Heart. A former slave in Egypt named Bibars had risen from the ranks of the Mamelukes (a body of professional fighting men) and had made himself sultan. Bibars was cruel, unscrupulous, fiercely ambitious, and incredibly able. He meant to weld the Near East into an entity under his own control and to put an end for all time to these troublesome irruptions of knights in chain mail.

Nothing daunted, Edward and his gallant one thousand (“It is magnificent but it is not war,” someone might have said on this occasion also) landed the following year, 1271, near Acre, a city still held by Christians but now under siege. So fiercely did the little force strike that the Mussulmen retreated and Edward marched triumphantly into the beleaguered city. The start of his desperate venture had been successful.

Knowing that he must strike quickly, for Bibars would soon be stretching out his steel-pointed claws to scoop him in, Edward carried the cross up the dusty road to Nazareth, which he captured. It was not a strategic victory, but there was a great moral advantage in having the home of Christ once more in Christian hands. A body of Saracens attacked them on the way back but were driven off. Edward then struck at the strong city of Haifa and won a second victory there. All this was indeed magnificent and it should have brought the laggard knights of Christendom to his aid. But the spirit had gone out of crusading, and the news that an English loon with long legs and a stout heart was striving to do with a thousand men what a hundred thousand had failed to do before him did not strike any spark.

On the evening of June 17 Edward sat alone in his tent, unarmed, wearing only a tunic, for the heat of the day had turned the desert into a furnace. He knew that a messenger was coming from the emir of Jaffa to propose terms of peace, and he knew also that he would have to accept them. Such reinforcements as had reached him had been pitifully small, and all about him the bearded sons of the Prophet were gathering, ready to strike.

He recognized the envoy who presented himself in the entrance of the royal pavilion, a plausible fellow who had already paid him four visits and was therefore above suspicion. It may have been that the offer to negotiate was no more than a ruse. At any rate, the turbaned visitor drew a knife from his belt and struck savagely at the unprepared prince. Edward took the blow on his arm and had succeeded in killing the assassin with the same knife before his attendants came to his assistance.

The knife had been poisoned and in a few days the prince’s arm had swollen to a great size and the flesh had turned dark and gangrenous. His wife sat at his couch and wept bitterly. She had loved him from the day they had taken the marriage vows; Edward, a tall youth with his blond locks clipped short below his ears, she the ten-year-old infanta with great dark eyes.

“Can I not be cured?” asked Edward when his surgeons grouped themselves about his couch and shook their heads and muttered.

Fortunately one of them thought so. When he proposed a heroic operation the prince agreed but said that Eleanor must not remain in the room. It was a measure of her devotion that she had to be removed forcibly before the surgeon took a knife and cut away all the flesh from around the wound. The story that it was Eleanor herself who saved the prince by sucking the poison from the wound is not generally accepted, but there is no reason to think that she would have hesitated had the thought occurred to her, so completely did she love him. He did survive, fortunately, and in a very few days was able to sit up again.

Bibars could have crushed the little band of Englishmen, but he had gained respect for their fighting spirit and instead he proposed a truce to last for ten years, ten months, ten days, and ten minutes. Edward, thin and weak and discouraged, could do nothing but accept. Accordingly he signed the papers and on August 15 he went sadly on board his ship and set sail for Sicily. Another of the long series of crusades had come to an end; the smallest, the least important perhaps, but certainly the most daring and courageous.