Louis IX's Capture at Al Mansurah and His Ransom

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Seventh Crusade was led personally by King Louis IX of France after years of careful preparation financed substantially from the French royal treasury itself. It targeted Egypt as the perceived key to recovering Jerusalem, repeating the same strategy the Fifth Crusade had attempted a generation earlier with the identical Egyptian objective, and Louis's forces captured Damietta in June 1249, opening the campaign with the same early success the earlier expedition had achieved before it too turned fatefully toward Cairo.

The advance ended in defeat at the Battle of Al Mansurah in 1250, where Louis himself was taken prisoner by the Ayyubid army, whose defense against the crusade was completed under the new Mamluk regime that seized power from the Ayyubids during the very course of the campaign itself. Louis was released only after a large ransom, reported at the enormous sum of 400,000 livres tournois, and the surrender of Damietta back into Ayyubid and Mamluk hands, ending his own captivity after months held prisoner. The defeat at Al Mansurah reversed the momentum Damietta's capture had given the crusade only months earlier, a swing between early success and sudden disaster later crusading historians pointed to as characteristic of the whole Egyptian strategy the Fifth Crusade had first tried and this campaign then repeated.