The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]

PRINCE EDWARD LEAVES ENGLAND

Before this calamitous event Prince Edward, Edmund Crouchback, earl of Lancaster, four earls, four barons, and the English division, had not only arrived in Africa, but had left it for Sicily, in despair that their French compeers would ever march to Palestine. The winter season was passed by Prince Edward in military exercises, and in the various occupations of chivalry, and in the following spring he turned his prow up the Mediterranean and arrived at Acre.

The whole of the forces of Edward did not exceed one thousand men. But the prowess of the Plantagenets was dreaded by the Mussulmans; and they feared that another Cœur de Lion was come to scourge them. The sultan of Egypt departed from the vicinity of Acre, which he had devastated with fire and sword. All the Latins in Palestine crowded round the banner of the English prince; and he took the field at the head of seven thousand men. The city of Nazareth was redeemed; and he surprised and defeated a large Turkish force. Edward was brave and provident, and owed his success as much to his skill as to his courage. But he was not less cruel than any preceding hero of the holy wars; and he gave a dreadful earnest of that savage implacability which Scotland afterwards so often rued. The barbarities which stained the entry of the Christians into Jerusalem, two centuries before, were repeated in a smaller theatre of cruelty in Nazareth.

[1271-1272 A.D.]

But the march of victory was closed, for the English soldiers were parched by the rays of a Syrian sun, and their leader was extended on the bed of sickness. The governor of Joppa was the apparent friend of Edward, but the sultan’s threat of degradation, if further commerce were held with an infidel, changed courtesy into malignity. He hired an assassin who, as the bearer of letters, was admitted into the chamber of his intended victim. After receiving two or three wounds, the vigorous prince threw the villain on the floor and stabbed him to the heart. The dagger had been steeped in poison, and for some hours Edward’s fate was involved in danger. The fairy hand of fiction has ascribed his convalescence to his queen.[79]

After the English prince had been fourteen months in Acre, the sultan of Egypt offered peace, for wars with the Moslem powers engrossed his military strength. Edward gladly seized this occasion of leaving the Holy Land, for his force was too small for the achievement of great actions, and his father had implored his return to England. The hostile commanders signed accordingly a treaty for a ten years’ suspension of arms; the lords of Syria disarrayed their warlike front, and the English soldiers quitted Palestine for their native country (July, 1272).