Laurence W. Marvin

The Damietta Crusade 1217-1221: A Military History

(Oxford University Press, 2024), 272 pp. $100.00

The Damietta Crusade of 1217-21, commonly called the Fifth Crusade, is one frequently overlooked and underrepresented in the historiography of the medieval crusading movement. Indeed, it seems as though not a year passes without a new volume being published by academic or popular presses in which the history of any individual crusade, its commanders, and consequences, are thoroughly dissected or explored. However, unlike the First Crusade (1095-99), whose remarkable and unlikely success began the crusading movement, or the Third Crusade (1189-92), which has retained a prominent place in popular imagination through the dynamic personalities of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin, the crusade to Damietta between 1217 and 1221 remains a topic upon which comparatively little ink has been spilt. For many the term Damietta Crusade will conjure thoughts of King Louis IX of France’s later ill-fated crusade of the 1240s, rather than the first crusading campaign to the Nile delta of the 1220s. Yet, despite the enormity of the Damietta Crusade’s preparations, that it came to within a hair’s breadth of success, and that it was the culmination of years of effort by the periods’ most powerful and energetic popes, the campaign remains largely overshadowed by those crusades that preceded it or that came later. While the campaign is included in all general histories of the crusades, it is often quickly summarised and passed over, its narrative lacking the exciting figures or dramatic events that characterise other crusades. Though the crusade has received some attention in recent years, Laurence W. Marvin’s highly detailed and insightfully analytical military history is the first dedicated monograph on the subject in over thirty years, and it demonstrates that there is still an awful lot to be said about the Damietta Crusade.

Marvin’s volume comprises eight chapters, which, following the introduction, proceed chronologically through the course of the Damietta Crusade’s campaign. Each chapter is then further broken down into sub-sections examining specific events, phases, or military challenges faced by the campaign. This not only makes navigation of the book exceedingly easy for the reader but also helps break up the pace of the text into more manageable stints where each topic is introduced and dealt with in detail, avoiding unnecessary repetition or confusion in the narrative of a campaign that lasted over four years. Additionally, several detailed maps have been included which is of great benefit to the reader in understanding the evolving layout of the siege works about Damietta between 1218 and 1221, and how the topography of the Nile delta was essential to the course of the campaign.

Notably, Marvin has chosen to title the volume ‘The Damietta Crusade’, rather than use the more common appellation of ‘The Fifth Crusade’. Indeed, this choice is reflective of the book’s approach to analysing the campaign. Unlike previous works on this topic, which contextualised the campaign to Damietta as part of a broader medieval crusading movement, with detailed examinations of Papal diplomacy and popular religious expression, this volume focuses purely and unerringly on the military history of the campaign at the strategic, operational, and tactical level. While subjects such as the Papacy’s call to crusade, recruitment and finance, and the wider geopolitics of the early-thirteenth century European and Near-Eastern worlds are briefly considered in the introduction, this is simply to set the scene for the events examined in the later sections of the book. While the reader might expect to find such topics considered at length in a military history of a crusade, Marvin has wisely chosen to divorce his account from these broader themes that often dominate discussions of the Crusades, only summarising their most relevant points, and thereby not become bogged down in superfluous detail that contributes little to the military analysis of the campaign. To include a thorough discussion of these areas could easily overwhelm the scope of the book and detract from the tightly written military narrative Marvin has expertly crafted. Indeed, other monographs have delt with these topics in greater detail, often at the expense of their own military assessments of the crusade. For example, though Pope Honorius III and the German Emperor, Frederick II Hohenstaufen, are prominent figures in the history of the Fifth Crusade generally, they are largely absent from this book because their remoteness from the campaigning in Egypt had limited direct impact on the crusade operationally, and their influence is only considered when necessary. This approach works well; the book remains focused on the military history of the Damietta Crusade throughout while firmly building upon the established historiography. Nevertheless, a little more contextual discussion at times would have been beneficial, especially for the reader who is less familiar with the specific politics, issues, and personalities of the era.

The volume’s great strength is its incredible detail on the course of the campaign. Marvin provides an almost blow by blow account of the Damietta Crusade, beginning with the crusade’s opening raids in Iberia and Syria in 1217, before moving on to the crusade’s landing in Egypt in 1218, its long, drawn-out siege of Damietta in 1218-19, its defence against Egyptian counter attacks, and finally its defeat on the flooded banks of the Nile in 1221. The retelling of the crusade can feel a little heavy in the earlier chapters where a lot of military activity is taking place in a short period of time, and relatively light in later chapters where there are frequent periods of military inactivity, but Marvin’s deft and engaging prose keeps the narrative moving along and adroitly holds the reader’s interest. Moreover, Marvin does not just limit analysis of the campaign to the crusading army that landed in Egypt but also explores the challenges their Egyptian opponents encountered in resisting the crusaders and how that impacted upon the campaign. Finally, Marvin examines the various and often conflicting sources we have for the Damietta Crusade, examining how we might better interrogate those sources to determine the sequence of events, and how those sources written both during and after the campaign attempted to shift blame or shape perceptions of specific events.

The Damietta Crusade of 1217-21 was ultimately a failure for the crusaders, but not because its goals or objectives were always unachievable. Rather, the causes of the crusade’s failure were the lack of clear leadership, the constant cycling of troops into and out of the crusade army that sapped valuable experience, the complexities of riverine warfare, the capability of the Egyptian defence, and the obfuscation of strategic objectives by operational ones. Nevertheless, Marvin gives a strong impression that for much of the crusade its defeat was not guaranteed, and that it was very much a close-run thing almost until the end. Consequently, the Damietta Crusade is a topic which deserves a lot more attention from historians of the Crusades than it has hereto received and is worthy of further investigation.

Stephen Donnachie
Independent Scholar