In AD 1218, the armies of the Fifth Crusade invaded the Nile Delta. It was the first time that a major European expedition had targeted Egypt. The invasion was part of a series of holy wars – the Crusades – that took place between 1097 and 1291, in which Christian armies from Europe competed with Islamic powers for control of Jerusalem, the Holy Land, and the wider Near East.
After the triumphal capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099, the Europeans – or ‘Franks’ as they were called at the time – had established the ‘Crusader States’ in Palestine and Syria, which were surrounded and outnumbered by the Islamic powers of the region. Maintaining military dominance on the battlefields of the Near East proved difficult for the Franks, as the Muslims began to coalesce under a series of effective leaders and the banner of jihad – the counter-crusade. After Saladin (the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt and Syria) crushed the Frankish field army in 1187, decisively tilting the balance in the wars, his host swept across the Holy Land and recaptured Jerusalem for the Muslims.
As the European response to the loss of Jerusalem mustered from the end of the 12th century and into the 13th, the crusading strategy shifted: rather than attempting to recover Jerusalem directly, the Crusaders targeted Egypt, which was the source of Ayyubid wealth and power in the region. The theory was simple: conquer Egypt and, with the resources of the great land in their hands, the Franks would be able to reconquer Jerusalem and the rest of the Holy Land, and hold on to them in the long term.
