POD is that Louis IX sends scouts into Mansoura who discover the ambush there and inform him of it averting the disaster of OTL. He besieges it and destroys the enemy army. He army remains intact and later conquers Cairo thereby Egypt. Levant subsequently falls. He later launches the eight crusade but unlike OTL he and his army don't have dysentery. This leads to the conquest of Tunisia
Louis IX conquers Egypt and Tunisia
- Thread starter Ohfshkssgb
- Start date
An excellent POD. I tried making a timeline like that with a Self-insert as his brother Alphonse, but I don't have the will to write multi-chapter stories.
That said, we will see the establishment of Crusader states in Egypt, likely one that rules over most of Lower Egypt with the capital being set either in Alexandria or Cairo. The king would be one of Louis' brothers. If the Christians hold Egypt, they can dominate North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.
That said, we will see the establishment of Crusader states in Egypt, likely one that rules over most of Lower Egypt with the capital being set either in Alexandria or Cairo. The king would be one of Louis' brothers. If the Christians hold Egypt, they can dominate North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.
I thought Louis would make himself king of both Egypt and Tunisia.
I think you're confusing battles, Louis lost because Robert tried to assault Mansourah with just the Vanguard when it was obviously a trap. If you want them to win the battle just say that Robert doesn't assault Mansourah, Louis arrives and lays conventional siege. After that, victory is almost assured, the Ayyubids of Egypt are both internally and externally in their worst moment. So, Egypt is conquered, I would say that Robert of Artois will be the one to be crowned king of Egypt
The Levant won't fall to the Crusaders just because Egypt fell, the Ayyubid position in Syria is pretty strong. Louis will stay after the capture of Egypt and complete his pilgrimage, but he will probably just retake the places that are most strategically valuable and most significant for Christianity; so, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Nablus, Tiberias and Ascalon return to Crusader hands. He may also try to help Antioch as its situation at this moment was dire.
In the following years Robert will need to consolidate his position, which I am pretty sure he's capable of, dealing with the remnants of thr Mamluks, capturing the Red Sea ports and fighting against An-Nasir Yusuf, Sultan of Syria, along with the other Crusader States. Given his enemies, he will most probably win.
The Mongols will invade and destroy Aleppo (I bet An-Nasir would do exact same stupid thing of trying to get the Mongols to take Egypt for him and failing completely), the Crusaders have the option of fighting the Khan alone or siding with the Ayyubids, both are possibilities; they won't accept to pay tribute because of victory desease after the fall of Egypt.
The eighth Crusade won't be sent to Tunis, the reason Tunis was chosen for the eighth Crusade was the failure of the Crusade to Egypt, so the Crusade when it happens will be directed to the Levant, to the Mongols or the Ayyubids, it depends how the Crusaders reacted previously. In case the Mongols are the ones to be dealt with, it would be very interesting to have another crusade launched from Anatolia, as Michael Palaiologos has all reasons to give full support for this Crusade. Even if it's only sent to the Levant by sea, it also serves as an opportunity for Manfred of Sicily to repair relations with the Pope. So, the Greeks will be benefited from this Crusade in every case.
Louis IX will pass as the greatest king of Catholic Christendom to that point, conqueror of Jerusalem and Egypt. So, even more places will be named Saint Louis.
Last edited:
Eh I am from an expert on this crusade in particular but isn’t it mostly agreed that Robert was more of a scapegoat for the whole affair than anything else and Louis didn’t have enough men or resources to conquer Egypt anyway or am I getting my battles/wars mixed up like OP? Would love to be corrected if thats the case.
With any previous Ayyubid sultan Louis wouldn't have had enough men to conquer Egypt, but this time it was different, because Turanshah is surrounded by people who hate him. He can't refuse to give battle due to the internal situation of Egypt, if he does that, he will be killed, and the instability will doom Egypt; and if he gives battle, he will lose, because giving the Franks pitched battle without a significant numerical superiority was always a bad idea, and he's actively trying to undermine the Mamluk elite of his army, so yeah, he's doomed and Egypt is doomed with him.
Also, losing the vanguard of your army is quite a big deal, if Mansourah fell in other time, when the sultanate was more stable, the Ayyubids would have needed to do at least some concession.
I suppose but Robert is going to have a whale of time holding Egypt and the Bedouin Tribes who weren’t all that keen on taking orders from fellow Muslims let alone some random French Prince and considering Artois’s complete dearth of accomplishments beyond getting himself killed stupidly I don’t have much faith he could pull it off.
Well, he will certainly have problems in dealing with the Bedouin tribes, but he wasn't that bad, he managed to successfully assault the Ayyubid camp and kill Fakhr al-Din with just the vanguard of Louis's army. And thinking a bit about it, I think that I pretty much exaggerated by saying that he would be able to capture the Red Sea ports that easily; in the aftermath of the Crusade, the Franks probably have their powerbase in the Nile Delta and the capital isn't even Cairo, but Alexandria or Damietta; so they will be more focused there.
I highly doubt he has a shot of conquering all of Egypt let alone the Levant considering Louis will eventually have to head back home and considering the awful retention rate of crusaders actually staying behind even after the first Crusade.....I just can’t see the Kingdom of Egypt lasting for all that long.
I think you're confusing me with the person at the top, as I literally said that they are not conquering the Levant.
Thats not the main thrust of my comment though. I am arguing that while theirs potential(unlikely but there is) for a Crusader Polity in some part of Egypt I honestly doubt it would survive for much longer than the end of the century if even that.
Might they last longer if they got the support of the Copts? I think at that time they were like half of the Egyptian population.
I also think it would be pretty hard for it to survive, but that is the interesting part of the situation, France will indefinitely support this Egypt, Cairo is retaken by the Muslims, France appears to save them, instead of having the pointless Aragonese crusade we would have constant waves of crusades from France, that directly profits from this, by consistently having the pope in their side. By the time France may be in a situation as bad as the aftermath of Philip IV's reign, Crusader Egypt would have had more than 50 years to consolidate and thanks to the previous help from France, it would have an important enough population of Latins. Also, at the end the Franks of the crusader states ended up accepting the Armenian Christians, and most of the nobles descended from Armenians, so this would probably happen again, but with Copts.
Like with the Armenians, they would probably accept them and start to marry them after a generation, so I think that yes. But, by this time the Copts are probably less than the Sunni, but still being more than after the Mamluks.
I honestly don’t think thats possible. Eventually the French are going to get distracted with troubles closer to home and I find it very easy to imagine a future King leaving his Egyptian cousins out to dry if it means getting his hands on Flanders or Gascony, and given the large distance.
Most of the Franks were Nobles and I highly doubt they’re going to start marrying Commoners. I do agree they might accept the Copts for connivence sakes but intermarriage Armenian Style when their isn’t a large Coptic Kingdom next-door to justify it.
That's why I said that this war could avoid the Sicilian Vespers, by having Manfred solve his relations with the pope. And even if that doesn't happen, knowing Philip III he would always prefer to go on actual crusading instead of attacking Aragon, so it would be up to Philip IV when Egypt is left alone, which is still pretty good for them as the Frankish manpower would still have increased by a lot.
This is actually a good point, it would probably take way more time for the to accept the copts than it did to accept the Armenians.
I’ll take your word for it in regards to Phillip III(I am more familiar with his son’s reign and mostly as it intersects with English history during this period) but still even granting all this I think the Kingdom will eventually be bogged down in all the problems of the OTL Kingdom of Jerusalem, disputes between natively born Franks and new comers, a lack of manpower compared to its Muslim neighbours and problems in securing aid from back home in Europe(The Papacy had a bad habit during the Avignon period at least of diverting funds raised for crusading to fund its own Italian wars) without the benefit of any nearby Christian Powers no matter how much blood sweat and tears the French pour into propping it up....I don’t believe it would ever be enough to make it last.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately and, while I think it's definitely possible for there to be a lasting Crusader kingdom in Egypt, the odds are against it. Like some of the other posters have said (and as I proposed in this earlier thread) the most likely POD is that Robert of Artois leads a successful surprise attack on the Mamluk army at Mansurah. Assuming the Crusaders are then able to take (or negotiate for) Cairo, the result is a rather small (but highly economically viable!) kingdom in the Nile Delta. This gives the Crusaders a notable advantage as they have captured a very fertile agricultural region which has the highest proportion of Christians in Egypt.
However from here on out the problems begin to pile up:
However from here on out the problems begin to pile up:
- Manpower: Egypt is not a country which can entice Frenchmen to sail to a foreign land and die in the desert fighting Bedouin raiders. There is little mineral wealth, silk, or spices; really all Egypt has in abundance is grains and land. They could hand out lordships over the agricultural land to Frankish knights but this is going to piss off the Coptic communities who own the majority of said land. On the other hand, the Copts are not going to be all that much help in war (peasant levies will be annihilated by the professional armies of this period) so the Franks are in something of a bind.
- Geography: Egypt is not very defensible overall, with no good natural borders. The Franks will need to maintain a constant offensive for years before they'll have a state which can be defended to any reasonable degree. Until they push into the Sinai and link up with the Crusader States in the Levant they'll be subject to endemic Bedouin raids in the east and in the west...
- The Hafsids: This period marks the apogee of Hafsid power, with Caliph Muhammad al-Mustansir being recognized as far away as Marrakesh and Mecca as the Commander of the Faithful and the leader of all Islam. They are a new and energetic kingdom which has snatched the title of Caliph from the Almohads whilst reverting to Sunni orthodoxy. An unstable and chaotic Egypt would be just east of their western border and ripe for the taking. I think it's pretty likely this scenario ends with a Hafsid Caliphate stretching from Tunis to the Hejaz.
Good points but I honestly don’t think Economic Viability is all that much of a point in Egypts favour. Jerusalem even after losing the titular city still controlled some of the richest cities in the near east that yielded considerable revenues. Certainly it wasn’t a lack of money that caused the Kingdoms collapse.
Last edited:
Because it's too far away from France. It can't be easily administered like that either. Safest option is to leave it to one of his brothers.