12 - After Saint Louis

Summary

Two days after the death of Louis IX at Tunis on 25 August 1270, his brother Charles of Anjou arrived from Sicily. Two months later, on 30 October, as Dunbabin records, ‘he made an agreement with the emir of Tunis which clearly benefited the king of Sicily if no-one else; on the following day the crusade was abandoned. The bulk of the army, including the new king Philip III, retreated with Charles to Sicily, and from there made its way back to France. Vast amounts of money and manpower had been expended for no gain to Christendom.’ Charles was widely blamed, both for the abandonment of the crusade and for the decision to head for Tunis in the first place. His treaty with the emir brought him an annual tribute in gold, some trading privileges and the banishment from Tunis of some major figures of Ghibelline sympathies who had fled there after the battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268, and he was accused of diverting the crusade for his own purposes. Dunbabin argues that the second instance the case against him is weak; but ‘the total abandonment of any expedition to the Holy Land or to Egypt can be fairly laid at Charles's door’. This, she reports, ‘evoked sharp criticism in some quarters, most vociferously in the entourage of the English prince Edward who appeared to take his agreed part in the crusade just after the army arrived back in Sicily’. Charles continued to figure in the crusading context for nearly another twenty years in criticisms of his conduct, both by the Catalan troubadour Cerveri de Girona in the aftermath of the Council of Lyon in 1274 and by an unknown troubadour just before the outbreak of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (Easter 1282). The latter war would then spark off a political, internecine crusade against Christians in Spain, the so-called Aragonese crusade.

Charles of Anjou

Criticism of Charles of Anjou in the entourage of the English prince Edward is borne out by a particularly vitriolic sirventes composed by the troubadour Austorc de Segret and sent through a jongleur to Viscount Arnaud-Othon II of Lomagne and Auvillars in Gascony (BdT 41.1).