Across the Lines at Damietta
1219 · Francis of Assisi, preaching without success in the crusader camp besieging Damietta
The siege has been going for a year and the camp is worse than the war. There is dysentery, and there are men selling positions, and a fortnight ago the army attacked against advice and lost several thousand men in an afternoon.
He came here to preach, and he has been preaching, and the crusaders are not listening. He has told the commanders that the next assault will fail and they have laughed at him.
Across the flooded ground is the Sultan's camp. There is a standing order over there that anyone bringing in a Christian head is paid for it in gold.
He can stay. There is real work here: the sick, the dying, the men who have stopped believing anything. It is his own people and they need him and nobody will call it cowardice.
Or he can walk out unarmed, in a brown habit, across the space between two armies, and ask to speak to the man they have all come here to kill.
Stay and work in the camp
Walk acrossOn your own? Play it first, then reveal.
Reveal what happened
What really happened
Francis walked across with one companion. They were seized and beaten, and then taken to the Sultan al-Kamil, who received them and talked with them for days before having them escorted safely back. Neither man converted the other. The crusade went on and failed; Damietta fell, and was lost again two years later. Francis came home ill, with an eye disease he had picked up in Egypt that eventually blinded him. He also came back and wrote into his order's rule a chapter on how friars should live among Muslims, beginning with the instruction to be subject to them and not to argue.
The philosophers weigh in
Stay"Two armies had spent a year establishing what each was willing to do. One barefoot man crossing the mud does not change that, and the mud does not care what he was carrying."
Walk across"If both sides hold something true, they cannot finally contradict. Someone has read one of them badly. He is the only man at that siege who went to find out which."