And the whole time, we were moving. We passed behind the mêlée, or shot-stour, or call it what you will. We left our turcopoles to hold the garrison, and we rode west.
And now we could see the battle.
In the centre, King Peter’s galia grossa had made it close in to shore. I was told later that there was a single channel, the width of a ship, that came within half a bowshot of the beach, and the king’s ship was piloted to the end of the channel, bow first, and not stern first. So the king and his knights had to go into the water over the bow, and they leaped into the waves in three feet of dirty seawater.
The army of the city loosed thousands of bolts, shafts, arrows, and stone at them. This I saw with my own eyes and the gentle surf carried shafts ashore for days, but even more wondrous was the forest of fletchings that rose out of the flat waters where arrows had buried themselves in the shallow bottom.
When the arrows had minimal effect, when, in fact, the king’s galley disgorged most of his retinue, the king and his knights began to wade ashore. Guillaume of Turenne, Sieur Percival, Simon de Thinoli, Brémond de la Voulte, Guy la Beveux and Sir John de Morphou all formed close by the king and followed him as he waded, heavily armoured, through the sea.
They began to fight their way ashore – surely, messieurs, one of the greatest feet of arms ever by Christian knights, as there were fewer than seventy of them, and they fought their way to the water’s edge against ten thousand men.
Other ships tried to emulate the king’s feat. But, as we had seen from our tower, they ran aground too far from the king’s ship to succour it, and their men-at-arms had to wade neck deep towards the shore, exhausting in armour – and a misstep could mean death. Then the king’s brother, the Prince of Antioch, hit on the notion of running the stern of his galley against the stern of the king’s galley, and making a bridge.
By this time, the king was surrounded by Bedouin and Berber auxiliaries. Jean de Rheims told me that the king killed fifty men before he fell, and I can well believe it, having seen the dead. Percival de Coulanges, who is, believe me, no friend of mine, was yet a very pillar of valour, and his sword was like that of an avenging angel. Brémonde de la Voulte had a poleaxe, and with it he cut a tunnel through the infidels.
For an hour, the sixty or seventy knights held a section of beach against ten thousand men. Finally, the Prince of Antioch’s retainers boarded the king’s galley and ran the length of it, using it as a sort of pier, and other ships began to follow suit. Ships full of crusaders laid alongside the king’s galley, or crossed her stern, or grappled themselves to the Prince of Antioch’s galley.
Imagine, then, as the whole of the crusader fleet roped itself into a great floating dock from which to land men, how it would have fared had the machines on the Pharos Castle still been able to engage them!
Truly, it was all God’s will. It certainly was not good planning or brilliant tactics.
By noon, Prince Hugh was ashore with six hundred more men. The king was still fighting, and would not retreat. Nor were six hundred knights, however brave, enough to defeat the whole number of Alexandrines.
The rest of the army, the crusaders, either hung back or could not get ashore. I mean no dishonour to those who tried – men drowned leaping over the sides of ships in frustration, into water just over their heads. But many ships hung back, the Genoese, and, I confess it, the Venetians, much as I love them. I was not aboard Contarini’s flagship when he was finally informed that the target of the fleet was Alexandria, but I have been told he swore to sink the King of Cyprus’s ship himself.
He did not. But neither did he land.
The city garrison began to close in on the knights on the beach. Now, the annals of chivalry are full of tales of one man defeating ten, or a hundred, and that with God’s help. But any man trained to arms knows that if ten untrained peasants are brave and have sharp sticks and do not fear death, they can bring down an armoured knight, aye, and kill or take him. Perhaps it would take twenty to bring down a de Charny or the Black Prince. But the odds of ten thousand against six hundred could only be held so long.