had the Fifth Crusade, and through precisely the same tactical mistakes. The king was taken prisoner and released only for a large ransom. Louis's final crusade, in 1270, against Tunis, is really a postscript to the sequence, an attempt to purge his feelings of guilt at the failure of 1248. In the event the French king died at the walls of Tunis and the expedition was aborted.
As crusading to the Holy Land ran out of steam Muslim forces were closing in on the Christian territories there. For the first half of the thirteenth century the crusaders had been fortunate in the comparative disarray of the Muslim world. The Ayyubid dynasty in Cairo, established by Saladin, was experienced in dealing with crusaders, and despite the perennial conflicts was also quite capable of reaching an understanding out of expedience, as had repeatedly been shown. Based in Egypt, it was never a strong centralized state, rather more of a federation. This made for disunity which the Christians were able to use to advantage. The Abbasid caliphate, based at Baghdad, was weaker, while the presence of the volatile extremist sect of the Assassins, bordering the crusader states, was as much a running sore to the Muslims as it was to the Christians. In addition the Muslim world felt the full impact of Mongol invasions. In the 1220s these had destroyed the state of Khwarazm, taking Bukhara and Samarkand; the Near-Eastern states began to look exposed. In 1241 the Mongols swept right into south-eastern Europe, devastating Hungary and reaching the Dalmatian coast, the legend of their ferocity preceding them; then two years later they attacked Asia Minor. In both phases they retreated as suddenly as they had come, and the Christian west, already imbued with the myth of Prester John as eastern prince willing to help the west against the Muslims, began to think hopefully in terms of conversion, or at least alliance with the Mongols to keep Muslim power in check. Good relations were cultivated, but on the matter of using them against the Muslims the idea had only brief value. In 1250, just after Louis IX's crusade had been outmanœuvred in the Nile Delta, an Egyptian army mutinied, the sultan was assassinated, and the Ayyubid dynasty was replaced by the Mamluks. Five years later the Mongols were back, taking Baghdad in 1258
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