Read Ebook: Captains of adventure by Pocock Roger

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Ebook has 1067 lines and 101792 words, and 22 pages

So the little party gained the wall of a ruined house, where they were sorely beset: Lord Hugh, of Ecot, with three lance wounds in the face, Lord Frederick, of Loupey, with a lance wound between the shoulders, so large that the blood flowed from his body as from the bung hole of a cask, and my Lord of Sivery with a sword-stroke in the face, so that his nose fell over his lips. Joinville, too badly wounded to fight, was holding horses, while Turks who had climbed to the roof were prodding from above with their lances. Then came Anjou to the rescue, and presently the king with his main army. The fight became a general engagement, while slowly the Christian force was driven backward upon the river. The day had become very hot, and the stream was covered with lances and shields, and with horses and men drowning and perishing.

Near by De Joinville's position, a streamlet entered the river, and across that ran a bridge by which the Turks attempted to cut the king's retreat. This bridge the little hero, well mounted now, held for hours, covering the flight of French detachments. At the head of one such party rode Count Peter, of Brittany, spitting the blood from his mouth and shouting "Ha! by God's head, have you ever seen such riffraff?"

"In front of us were two of the king's sergeants; ... and the Turks ... brought a large number of churls afoot, who pelted them with lumps of earth, but were never able to force them back upon us. At last they brought a churl on foot, who thrice threw Greek fire at them. Once William of Boon received the pot of Greek fire on his target, for if the fire had caught any of his garments he must have been burnt alive. We were all covered with the darts that failed to hit the sergeants. Now, it chanced that I found a Saracen's quilted tunic lined with tow; I turned the open side towards me, and made a shield ... which did me good service, for I was only wounded by their darts in five places, and my horse in fifteen.... The good Count of Soissons, in that point of danger, jested with me and said,

So came the constable of France, who relieved Joinville and sent him to guard the king.

"So as soon as I came to the king, I made him take off his helmet, and lent him my steel cap so that he might have air."

Presently a knight brought news that the Count of Artois, the king's brother, was in paradise.

"Ah, Sire," said the provost, "be of good comfort herein, for never did king of France gain so much honor as you have gained this day. For in order to fight your enemies you have passed over a river swimming, and you have discomfited them and driven them from the field, and taken their engines, and also their tents wherein you will sleep this night."

And the king replied: "Let God be worshiped for all He has given me," and then the big tears fell from his eyes.

That night the captured camp was attacked in force, much to the grief of De Joinville and his knights, who ruefully put on chain mail over their aching wounds. Before they were dressed De Joinville's chaplain engaged eight Saracens and put them all to flight.

Three days later came a general attack of the whole Saracen army upon the Christian camp, but thanks to the troops of Count William, of Flanders, De Joinville and his wounded knights were not in the thick of the fray.

"Wherein," he says, "God showed us great courtesy, for neither I nor my knights had our hawberks and shields, because we had all been wounded."

You see De Joinville had the sweet faith that his God was a gentleman.

After that the sorrowful army lay nine days in camp till the bodies of the dead floated to the surface of the canal, and eight days more while a hundred hired vagabonds cleared the stream. But the army lived on eels and water from that canal, while all of them sickened of scurvy, and hundreds died. Under the hands of the surgeons the men of that dying army cried like women. Then came an attempt to retreat in ships to the coast, but the way was blocked, the little galleys were captured one by one, the king was taken, and what then remained of the host were prisoners, the sick put to death, the rich held for ransom, the poor sold away into slavery.

Saint Louis appeared to be dying of dysentery and scurvy, he was threatened with torture, but day after day found strength and courage to bargain with the soldan of Babylon for the ransom of his people. Once the negotiations broke down because the soldan was murdered by his own emirs, but the king went on bargaining now with the murderers. For his own ransom he gave the city of Damietta, for that of his knights he paid the royal treasure that was on board a galley in the port, and for the deliverance of the common men, he had to raise money in France.

So came the release, and the emirs would have been ashamed to let their captive knights leave the prison fasting. So De Joinville's party had "fritters of cheese roasted in the sun so that worms should not come therein, and hard boiled eggs cooked four or five days before, and these, in our honor, had been painted with divers colors."

After that came the counting of the ransom on board the royal galley, with the dreadful conclusion that they were short of the sum by thirty thousand livres. De Joinville went off to the galley of the marshal of the Knights Templars, where he tried to borrow the money.

"Many were the hard and angry words which passed between him and me."

For one thing the borrower, newly released from prison, looked like a ragged beggar, and for the rest, the treasure of the Templars was a trust fund not to be lent to any one. They stood in the hold in front of the chest of treasure, De Joinville demanding the key, then threatening with an ax to make of it the king's key.

"We see right well," said the treasurer, "that you are using force against us." And on that excuse yielded the key to the ragged beggar, tottering with weakness, a very specter of disease and famine.

"I threw out the silver I found therein and went, and sat on the prow of our little vessel that had brought me. And I took the marshal of France and left him with the silver in the Templars' galley and on the galley I put the minister of the Trinity. On the galley the marshal handed the silver to the minister, and the minister gave it over to me on the little vessel where I sat. When we had ended and came towards the king's galley, I began to shout to the king.

"'Sire! Sire! see how well I am furnished!'

"And the saintly man received me right willingly and right joyfully."

So the ransom was completed, the king's ransom and that of the greatest nobles of France, this group of starving ragged beggars in a dingey.

Years followed of hard campaigning in Palestine. Once Saint Louis was even invited by the soldan of Damascus to visit as a pilgrim that Holy City which he could never enter as a conqueror. But Saint Louis and his knights were reminded of a story about Richard the Lion-Hearted, king of England. For Richard once marched almost within sight of the capital so that a knight cried out to him:

"Sire, come so far hither, and I will show you Jerusalem!"

But the Duke of Burgundy had just deserted with half the crusading army, lest it be said that the English had taken Jerusalem. So when Richard heard the knight calling he threw his coat armor before his eyes, all in tears, and said to our Savior,

"Fair Lord God, I pray Thee suffer me not to see Thy Holy City since I can not deliver it from the hands of thine enemies."

King Louis the Saint followed the example of King Richard the Hero, and both left Palestine broken-hearted because they had not the strength to take Jerusalem.

Very queer is the tale of the queen's arrival from France.

"When I heard tell that she was come," said De Joinville, "I rose from before the king and went to meet her, and led her to the castle, and when I came back to the king, who was in his chapel, he asked me if the queen and his children were well; and I told him yes. And he said, 'I knew when you rose from before me that you were going to meet the queen, and so I have caused the sermon to wait for you.' And these things I tell you," adds De Joinville, "because I had then been five years with the king, and never before had he spoken to me, nor so far as ever I heard, to any one else, of the queen, and of his children; and so it appears to me, it was not seemly to be thus a stranger to one's wife and children."

To do the dear knight justice, he was always brutally frank to the king's face, however much he loved him behind his back.

The return of the king and queen to France was full of adventure, and De Joinville still had an appetite for such little troubles as a wreck and a sea fight. Here is a really nice story of an accident.

"One of the queen's bedwomen, when she had put the queen to bed, was heedless, and taking the kerchief that had been wound about her head, threw it into the iron stove on which the queen's candle was burning, and when she had gone into the cabin where the women slept, below the queen's chamber, the candle burnt on, till the kerchief caught fire, and from the kerchief the fire passed to the cloths with which the queen's garments were covered. When the queen awoke she saw her cabin all in flames, and jumped up quite naked and took the kerchief and threw it all burning into the sea, and took the cloths and extinguished them. Those who were in the barge behind the ship cried, but not very loud, 'Fire! fire!' I lifted up my head and saw that the kerchief still burned with a clear flame on the sea, which was very still.

"I put on my tunic as quickly as I could, and went and sat with the mariners.

"While I sat there my squire, who slept before me, came to me and said that the king was awake, and asked where I was. 'And I told him,' said he, 'that you were in your cabin; and the king said to me, "Thou liest!"' While we were thus speaking, behold the queen's clerk appeared, Master Geoffrey, and said to me, 'Be not afraid, nothing has happened.' And I said, 'Master Geoffrey, go and tell the queen that the king is awake, and she should go to him, and set his mind at ease.'

It is pleasant to think of the queen's pluck, the knight's silence, the king's tact, and to see the inner privacies of that ancient ship. After seven hundred years the gossip is fresh and vivid as this morning's news.

The king brought peace, prosperity and content to all his kingdom, and De Joinville was very angry when in failing health Saint Louis was persuaded to attempt another crusade in Africa.

"So great was his weakness that he suffered me to carry him in my arms from the mansion of the Count of Auxerre to the abbey of the Franciscans."

So went the king to his death in Tunis, a bungling soldier, but a saint on a throne, the noblest of all adventurers, the greatest sovereign France has ever known.

Long afterward the king came in a dream to see De Joinville: "Marvelously joyous and glad of heart, and I myself was right glad to see him in my castle. And I said to him, 'Sire, when you go hence, I will lodge you in a house of mine, that is in a city of mine, called Chevillon.' And he answered me laughing, and said to me, 'Lord of Joinville, by the faith I owe you, I have no wish so soon to go hence.'"

It was at the age of eighty-five De Joinville wrote his memoirs, still blithe as a boy because he was not grown up.

A. D. 1260

THE MIDDLE AGES IN ASIA

That year the great Khan Kublai came to the throne of the Mongol Empire, a pastoral realm of the grass lands extending from the edge of Europe to the Pacific Ocean. Kublai began to build his capital, the city of Pekin, and in all directions his people extended their conquests. The looting and burning of Bagdad took them seven days and the resistless pressure of their hordes was forcing the Turks upon Europe.

Meanwhile in the dying Christian empire of the East, the Latins held Constantinople with Beldwin on the throne, but next year the Greek army led by Michael Paleologus crept through a tunnel and managed to capture the city.

Among the merchants at Constantinople in 1260 were the two Polo brothers, Nicolo and Matteo, Venetian nobles, who invested the whole of their capital in gems, and set off on a trading voyage to the Crimea. Their business finished, they went on far up the Volga River to the court of a Mongol prince, and to him they gave the whole of their gems as a gift, getting a present in return with twice the money. But now their line of retreat was blocked by a war among the Mongol princes, so they went off to trade at Bokhara in Persia where they spent a year. And so it happened that the Polo brothers met with certain Mongol envoys who were returning to the court of their Emperor Kublai. "Come with us," said the envoys. "The great khan has never seen a European and will be glad to have you as his guests." So the Polos traveled under safe conduct with the envoys, a year's journey, until they reached the court of the great khan at Pekin and were received with honor and liberality.

Now it so happened that Kublai sought for himself and his people the faith of Christ, and wanted the pope to send him a hundred priests, so he despatched these Italian gentlemen as his ambassadors to the court of Rome. He gave them a passport engraved on a slab of gold, commanding his subjects to help the envoys upon their way with food and horses, and thus, traveling in state across Asia, the Polos returned from a journey, the greatest ever made up to that time by any Christian men.

At Venice, Nicolo, the elder of the brothers, found that his wife had died leaving to him a son, then aged sixteen, young Marco Polo, a gallant, courageous, hardy lad, it seems, and very truthful, without the slightest symptoms of any sense of humor.

The schoolboy who defined the Vatican as a great empty space without air, was perfectly correct, for when the Polos arrived there was a sort of vacuum in Rome, the pope being dead and no new appointment made because the electors were squabbling. Two years the envoys waited, and when at last a new pope was elected, he proved to be a friend of theirs, the legate Theobald on whom they waited at the Christian fortress of Acre in Palestine.

But instead of sending a hundred clergymen to convert the Mongol empire, the new pope had only one priest to spare, who proved to be a coward, and deserted.

Empty handed, their mission a failure, the Polos went back, a three and one-half years' journey to Pekin, taking with them young Marco Polo, a handsome gallant, who at once found favor with old Kublai Khan. Marco "sped wondrously in learning the customs of the Tartars, as well as their language, their manner of writing, and their practise of war ... insomuch that the emperor held him in great esteem. And so when he discerned Mark to have so much sense, and to conduct himself so well and beseemingly, he sent him on an embassage of his, to a country which was a good six months' journey distant. The young gallant executed his commission well and with discretion." The fact is that Kublai's ambassadors, returning from different parts of the world, "were able to tell him nothing except the business on which they had gone, and that the prince in consequence held them for no better than dolts and fools." Mark brought back plenty of gossip, and was a great success, for seventeen years being employed by the emperor on all sorts of missions. "And thus it came about that Messer Marco Polo had knowledge of or had actually visited a greater number of the different countries of the world than any other man."

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