The Saint

and

the Sulta n

The Crusades, Islam, and

Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace

Paul Moses

D O U B L E DAY R E L I G I O N
New York London Toronto Sydney Auckland

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 Copyright © 2009 by Paul Moses

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Doubleday Religion, an

imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

doubleday and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of

Random House, Inc.

Pages 289–90 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moses, Paul.
The saint and the sultan: the Crusades, Islam, and Francis of
Assisi’s mission of peace / by Paul Moses. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index (pp. 277, 291).
1. Francis, of Assisi, Saint, 1182–1226. 2. Malik al-Kamil
Muhammad, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, 1180?–1238.
3. Crusades. 4. Missions to Muslims—Egypt. I. Title.
BX4700.F6M675 2009
261.2'709022—dc22 2009005203

ISBN 978-0-385-52370-7

printed in the united states of america

Design by Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark & Media Inc.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First Edition

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 Contents

The Damietta Region of Egypt xi

Introduction 1

Pa rt O n e

T h e R oa d to D a m i e t ta

1 Outfitted to Kill 15

2 Shattered 25

3 His New Way 35

4 The Peacemaker 43

5 Journeys 50

6 A New Crusade 56

7 The Sultan 64

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 Contents

Pa rt T w o

T h e Wa r

8 The Siege 79

9 Conspiracy Against the Sultan 91

10 Francis Looks East 98

11 “Forbidding War” 105

12 The Saint and the Cardinal 120

13 The Saint and the Sultan 126

14 “Evil and Sin” 148

15 The Outsider 156

16 “Kamil” 166

17 Weeping 177

Pa rt T h r e e

Uncovering the Story

18 The Story Changes 197

19 The Seed Sprouts 218

Epilogue 229

Main Characters 243

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 Contents

Time Line 247

Abbreviations 251

Notes 253

Bibliography 277

Acknowledgments 285

Index 291

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 Introduction

F
rancis stood before the sultan of Egypt.
He had yearned for such an audience with a Muslim leader
for at least seven years, embarking on dangerous journeys three
times during that period. Now his moment had arrived, in the
midst of a Crusade that was killing thousands of people in the sweltering
heat on the banks of the Nile late in the summer of 1219. The leader of
the Christian army—Cardinal Pelagius himself—had warned the friar
from Assisi that it would be folly to traverse the battlefield between the
two armies to seek out this Sultan Malik al-Kamil. Francis, no stranger to
the cruelty of men at war, knew full well the torture and mutilation that
both armies infl icted on suspected spies. He had been told that the sultan
was a monster, a cruel tyrant likely to order his death. But Francis had
traveled a long way to see the sultan and insisted to the cardinal that he
must go.
God willed it.
The sultan looked over the odd duo in his tent, Francis and his travel-
ing companion, Friar Illuminato, barefoot monks dressed in coarse,
patched brown tunics. His soldiers had found the two wandering around
the outskirts of the Muslim camp and seized them roughly. Francis and

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 T h e S a i n t a n d t h e S u lt a n

Illuminato had cried out, “Sultan! Sultan!” That these unarmed Chris-
tians had survived their initial encounter with the sultan’s troops was
wonder enough. What could they want? The sultan thought that perhaps
the Franks, as Muslims called all Crusaders, had sent them to his tent with
a response to his latest peace proposal. The sultan, made weary by war,
desperately wanted a deal that would end the Christians’ siege of Dami-
etta, a city at the mouth of the Nile where his people were dying of dis-
ease and starvation.
“May the Lord give you peace.” Francis surprised the sultan with his
words. It was the friar’s standard greeting—most unusual for Christians in
his time, especially during war. It perplexed the sultan. Uncertain about
his visitors’ intention, the sultan asked if they had come as representatives
of the pope’s army.
“We are ambassadors of the Lord Jesus Christ,” Francis responded.
The sultan, a subtle, philosophical man who was schooled in the ways
of Christians, could not have missed the distinction Francis drew in as-
serting that he was God’s ambassador, not the pope’s. This daring little
man and his companion intrigued him—they even resembled the se-
verely dressed Sufi holy men the sultan revered for their mystical insight
into Islam.
“If you wish to believe us,” Francis continued, “we will hand over
your soul to God.”
Sultan Malik al-Kamil gave this man permission to continue. Then he
listened closely as Francis began to speak.

T his is a story about peace, one that is nearly eight hundred years old
but still resonates in an era when Christians and Muslims look at one
another with suspicion.
In the midst of war Francis of Assisi and Sultan Malik al-Kamil found
common ground in their encounter outside the besieged city of Dami-
etta, Egypt, in 1219. By that time the Crusades had been fought for more
than a century. Christians had seized Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099
but suffered a devastating blow when the great warrior Saladin took it

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 Intr oduction

back eighty-eight years later. In the decades that followed, the popes
launched one failed military venture after another to win back territory
in the Holy Land. The interreligious warfare would continue for centu-
ries as Christians fought Muslim armies in Europe.
This is the story of how one man tried, in his own way, to stop this
cycle of violence. I have written it because the example of Francis and
the sultan calls out from the past to be recovered as a glimmer of hope in
our own time.
Sultan al-Kamil, Saladin’s nephew, clearly was taken by this charis-
matic monk who dared to cross into his encampment. Francis, one of the
greatest Christian saints, was changed by the experience and came away
deeply impressed with Islamic spirituality. In a revolutionary departure
for his time, he urged his brothers to live peacefully among Muslims even
as the Fifth Crusade clattered on to its deadly and fruitless conclusion.
This encounter endures as a memorable forerunner of peaceful dialogue
between Christians and Muslims. I’ve written this book with the hope
that it will encourage others to build on the example of the saint and the
sultan.
Spectacular as it was, Francis’s journey to Damietta plays little role in
the timeworn portrayal of the saint as a pious, miracle-working mystic
and a quaintly impoverished friend to animals and nature. As a journalist
for some three decades, I’ll just say, in the language of the newsroom, that
the truth about Francis and his relationship to Islam and the Crusades was
covered up. The key early biographies of Francis were written under the
influence of powerful medieval popes—the same men who organized
the Crusades and used the battering ram of excommunication to force
reluctant rulers to take part. With the medieval papacy at the zenith of its
theocratic power in the thirteenth century, the early biographers could
not say what really happened in Damietta—that Francis, opposed to the
Crusade, was on a peace mission and hoped to end the warfare by con-
verting the sultan to Christianity.
Journalistic training tells me to be skeptical about the tendency in our
day to re-cast Francis as a medieval flower child, a carefree, peace-loving
hippie adopted as the patron saint of the Left. Francis was far too devoted

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 T h e S a i n t a n d t h e S u lt a n

to suffering, penance, obedience, and religious orthodoxy to be cast as an

ancestor to the hippies of the 1960s or the New Age movement. Yet a
probing look at the early documents concerning Francis reveals that the
quest for peace—a peace encompassing both the end of war and the
larger spiritual transformation of society—was at the core of Francis’s
ministry and thus at the heart of his mission to the sultan’s court.
The major problem faced in trying to recover the Francis of history is
that these medieval documents, however detailed and informative, cannot
be taken at face value. Their aim is to portray Francis’s saintliness, not to
provide a true history of his life. For me, that has meant trying to ap-
proach the material on Francis as an investigative reporter would, looking
for the agendas and “spin” in the accounts. In deciding which portions of
the medieval documents to accept as historical and which to reject, I’ve
kept in mind that the accounts of Francis’s life were written to fulfi ll var-
ious needs: to enhance his cult as a saint; to convince the church hierar-
chy of the Franciscan order’s orthodoxy; to appease competing factions
within the order. I’ve relied mainly on accounts from the first half of the
thirteenth century because the later ones tend to be much more embel-
lished. I’ve also given heavy weight to clues in Francis’s own writings,
which show that he favored a peaceful solution to the confl icts between
Christian and Muslim.
The method used in this book to seek the true story of Francis and
the sultan is a journalist’s version of the detective work Scripture scholars
have done to find the historical Jesus in the gospels. In both cases, the ac-
counts in question need to be viewed in the context of their own times:
the audiences they were written for, the political pressures at hand, the
writers’ theological goals in telling the story. By doing that, it’s possible to
decode the early documents and uncover the story of Francis, the sultan,
and what their encounter can mean today.

T he Life of Saint Francis by the friar Thomas of Celano was the first in
a long series of biographies, appearing two to three years after Fran-
cis’s death in 1226. It was written on commission from Pope Gregory IX,

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who wanted to memorialize the newly canonized saint’s great deeds.

Celano wrote in this work that Francis preached to the sultan, who “was
deeply moved by his words,” listening to him “very willingly.” Thomas’s
second and more complex biography of Francis, The Remembrance of the
Desire of a Soul, which appeared in 1247, was the work of a more assertive
writer. It vividly described Francis’s opposition to what turned out to be
one of the most disastrous attacks for the Crusaders during the Battle of
Damietta. Having become convinced that an attack would end badly for
the Christian forces, Francis decided to warn the Crusade’s leaders to
cancel their plans: “The saint leapt to his feet, and rushed to the Chris-
tians crying out warnings to save them, forbidding war and threatening
disaster.” Historians have long debated whether this ambiguous passage
meant that he opposed doing battle only on that particular day, or whether
he was “forbidding war” altogether. The answer can be found by piecing
together other evidence from the saint’s early life: that Francis, an aspiring
knight, turned away from the battlefield to adopt a life of peace and rec-
onciliation. It is the contention of this book that Francis, having suffered
terribly as a young man during a clash between Assisi and the city’s rival
Perugia, had come to oppose war, not just a particular battle.
Francis’s attempt to intervene during the Fifth Crusade should be
viewed in the context of his constant opposition to warfare and the pride
and avarice that often caused it. He preferred not to argue. His message
to the powers of the day was delivered largely, although not solely, by his
countercultural example of a life of poverty, compassion, and nonvio-
lence. His humility challenged the arrogance of the papal court, and his
dedication to peace confronted the violent culture of his day. At a time
when the wealthy indulged in falconry, he preached to the birds.
The truth about Francis’s devotion to peacemaking, which glimmered
through a number of the early accounts of the saint’s life, was concealed
in an influential biography that the great medieval theologian Saint Bo-
naventure wrote while minister general of the Franciscan order. Bonaven-
ture was named leader of the order’s feuding friars at a time of crisis.
The pope had forced out the previous minister general when some Fran-
ciscans fell into a heresy based on supposed biblical prophecies. These

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 T h e S a i n t a n d t h e S u lt a n

dissidents believed, among other things, that Francis was the harbinger of
a new spiritual age in which Christians would unite with nonbelievers
and the church hierarchy would no longer be needed. Bonaventure faced
a difficult task in writing about Francis, needing to unite the feuding fac-
tions within the Franciscan order in a common vision of their founder
and to purge dissent in an effort to win back the pope’s approval. In the
process, the story of Francis as peacemaker was virtually eliminated from
the pages of Bonaventure’s The Major Legend of Saint Francis and a much
more confrontational version of the saint’s encounter with the sultan was
added. Then in 1266 the General Chapter of the Franciscans voted to
make The Major Legend the authorized history of Francis and to destroy
all previous accounts. Bonaventure’s version, elevated above all others,
would set the tone for centuries to come.
For Bonaventure, and indeed for Thomas of Celano, Francis sought
the sultan out of his ardent desire to be martyred—not to seek peace.Too
many people over the years have accepted this account as historical. It is
not history, however, but hagiography—stories that idealize the lives of
the saints. Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, recognized
this side to Bonaventure’s life of Francis in a doctoral thesis in theology
he wrote in 1959 while a young priest in Germany: “It may well be that
all the various Legenda of St. Francis depict a theologically interpreted
‘Francis of faith’ instead of the simple ‘Francis of history.’” Historians who
believe Francis supported the Crusades seem to have set aside the evi-
dence showing how deeply he despised war. Nor have they adequately
considered that the early biographies were written at a time when the
popes were pushing hard for the increasingly reluctant faithful to con-
tinue the faltering drive to recapture the Holy Land. It would not have
done much good for Bonaventure, as head of a Franciscan order that had
come under close scrutiny from Rome as a source of heresy, to portray
the founder as a peacemaker who had found common ground with the
enemy. The Inquisition, already in swing during the time of these writ-
ings, treated opposition to the Crusade as evidence of heresy.

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T his book will put the meeting of Sultan al-Kamil and Francis in the
larger context of their lives. To that end, I have included a good deal
of biographical background and an account of the Fifth Crusade, with
the aim of better illuminating what occurred between Francis and the
sultan when they met. For Francis, that means starting with the story of
how warfare traumatized him, and culminating with a look at how his
encounter with the sultan changed and shaped him in the last years of his
life.
The story begins with Francis’s participation in a vicious battle be-
tween his city, or commune, of Assisi and neighboring Perugia and his
subsequent imprisonment. Francis’s jolting experience as a soldier and
prisoner of war led to the wealthy young merchant’s famous conversion
to a life of poverty—a change that transported him away from the greed
underlying the war between Assisi and Perugia. His conversion began
when, after being released from jail and convalescing, he rode off on
horseback to join a new military campaign fought, most likely, on behalf
of the pope. His decision to reject this knightly role marked the begin-
ning of his commitment to a new life of radical poverty that made it im-
possible to go to war again. It also separated him from the values of a
voracious, honor-bound culture in which competition for wealth and
glory bred constant violence between classes, cities, and the forces of the
pope and emperor. He took the words of Jesus to “turn the other cheek”
in the face of violence quite literally. He even barred members of his
Third Order—established for lay people who want to live holy lives
without becoming friars or sisters—from possessing weapons.
Francis’s yearning for peace with Islam is especially apparent in his
suggestion that his brothers live quietly among Muslims and “be subject”
to them rather than engage in disputes, a provision that appears in an
early version of the code of conduct for his order, its Rule. He wrote it
shortly after returning in 1220 from his trip to Egypt—convincing evi-
dence that the encounter with Sultan al-Kamil affected him deeply. All
of this, and much more, needs to be considered to understand that Fran-
cis was trying to make peace in his historic encounter with Sultan
al-Kamil.

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 T h e S a i n t a n d t h e S u lt a n

T he sultan too was an intriguing personality, a statesman adept at both

making war and seeking peace. The Western portrait of him was
skewed by Crusader propaganda and the Christian writers’ basic lack of
knowledge of the Muslim world. Any humanity emerging from what
one thirteenth-century bishop called the “cruel beast” was presented as
the result of Francis’s charismatic intercession.Yet Sultan al-Kamil was far
from the Western Christian writers’ caricature of him. In Egypt he was
known for his tolerance toward the Christian minority. He was a cultured
man who loved learned conversation with scholars in his court. While
fully capable of the ruthlessness his position required, he preferred to ne-
gotiate with enemies rather than engage them in combat. His father, Sul-
tan Malik al-Adil, had similar qualities. Even his father’s brother Salah
ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, or Saladin, the conquering hero whose name
flows so easily from the lips of radical Islamists today more than eight
hundred years after his death, knew how to negotiate with Western pow-
ers for commercial and military purposes.
While Francis initiated their encounter, al-Kamil shaped its outcome.
This is very much the story of two unique men, the saint and the sultan.

I first became interested in the story of Francis and Sultan al-Kamil

shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred in
my hometown of New York City and in Washington, D.C. At the time I
was just leaving a job as the religion writer for the New York newspaper
Newsday to become a journalism professor. I had only recently written an
article on the religious beliefs of al-Qaeda terrorists convicted in New
York of killing hundreds of people by bombing two U.S. embassies in Af-
rica in 1998. One of the defense lawyers at that trial had sought to spare
his client the death penalty by arguing that the defendant’s Islamic beliefs
mitigated his responsibility for the crime. In other words, in his religious
zeal, the terrorist didn’t really understand he was doing evil. U.S. pros-

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ecutors countered by producing an imam to dispute that interpretation

of Islam. The government lawyers praised the faith for its devotion to
peace.
I spent September 11 writing the main story of the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Late in the afternoon a reporter
in the paper’s Washington bureau called with a few paragraphs quoting a
source as saying that al-Qaeda was the prime suspect in the attack. Given
the magnitude of what happened that day, it was noted only briefly in a
long story. I wasn’t sure at first whether to believe it. Early reports after
the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
on April 19, 1995, had errantly identified an Arab taxi driver from my na-
tive Brooklyn as the suspect.Yet as I made my way home that night across
the vacant streets of a spooked city, recalling the courtroom debate over
the nature of Islam, the thought that religious belief was in some way re-
sponsible for the World Trade Center horror stayed with me. Sometime
afterward, in search of some spiritual reading, I picked up The Little Flow-
ers of Saint Francis, a still-popular account of Francis’s life dating to the
century after the saint’s death. There I read a version of the story of Fran-
cis and the sultan and was struck at the added layer of meaning it took on
in the wake of the so-called “clash of civilizations” between the West and
radical Islam. My encounter with that book ultimately led to this book,
which is both a journalist’s investigation into Francis, Malik al-Kamil, and
the Crusades and a reflection on what the meeting of saint and sultan can
mean today.
Of course, ever since the September 11 attacks, references to the Cru-
sades have emerged time and again in the public square. Al-Qaeda leaders
referred to their enemies as “Crusaders and Jews,” an odd pairing if ever
there was one, since the Crusaders were a plague to the Jews. Osama bin
Laden has called his jihadists “descendants of Saladin.” Lt. Gen. William
Boykin, deputy U.S. undersecretary of defense, sounded as if he were
preaching the Crusade when he gave speeches that cast the war on ter-
rorists as a spiritual fight against Satan. “I knew that my God was bigger
than his,” he said of a Muslim fighter in a widely quoted remark. “I knew

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that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” His comment (which
he later said was misunderstood) paralleled the Crusader practice of de-
picting the monotheistic Muslims as pagans.

P ope John Paul II felt the burden of the history of Christian-Muslim

relations in the moments after learning that his emissary had been
unable to persuade President George W. Bush against attacking Iraq in
March 2003. His former personal secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz,
later recalled that the pope feared the world was moving toward a “holy
war.” In covering John Paul’s journey to Jerusalem in 2000, I wrote about
another incident in which memories of the Crusades shadowed the pope.
Standing before the thirteen-hundred-year-old Dome of the Rock with
a group of Muslim clerics, John Paul was confronted by protesters, one of
whom shouted to the pope’s Palestinian hosts: “Shame on you! Saladin
took the keys; now you have handed them over to the pope.”
John Paul’s many efforts to build a bridge between Christians and
Muslims offered no protection to his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, who
immersed himself in hot water by quoting the views of the fourteenth-
century Byzantine emperor Manuel II on Islam: “Show me just what
Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only
evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith
he preached.” Benedict had always advocated a tougher approach to
Catholic-Muslim relations than did John Paul, and although he prefaced
his remark in a speech at Regensburg University in his native Bavaria by
saying Manuel had spoken “with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness
that we find unacceptable,” it did nothing to quell Muslim outrage or
avert outbreaks of protest and even violence in many places.
That furor spurred my plans to write this book because I am con-
vinced that Francis and the sultan have something important to say to us
today: we can find common ground despite our differences. Of course,
there are efforts today to bridge the divide between Christians and Mus-
lims that did not exist in medieval times. In November 2008 the Vatican
hosted a meeting with leading Muslims that Benedict said opened the

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way to improved relations. Such high-minded, high-level encounters are

crucial, but they don’t in and of themselves change the hearts and minds
of the many Christians and Muslims who view one another with distrust.
This is where the dramatic example of Francis and the sultan can help us.
If the greatest Christian saint since the time of the apostles had opposed
the Crusade and peacefully approached Muslims at a time when they
were supposed to be mortal enemies, that action can inspire and instruct
us today. So should the fact that al-Kamil, a great sultan of Egypt and a
nephew of Saladin, was so tolerant of Christians that he allowed one of
them to preach to him in the midst of a Crusade. The story of Francis of
Assisi and Sultan Malik al-Kamil says there is a better way than resent-
ment, suspicion, and warfare. It opens the door to respect, trust, and
peace.
It needs to be told anew.

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 To purchase a copy of 

The Saint and the Sultan 
 
visit one of these online retailers: 
 
Amazon 
 
Barnes & Noble 
 
Borders 
 
IndieBound 
 
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