The field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and its Syrian Muslim allies was destroyed near Gaza on 17–18 October 1244, a defeat as complete as Hattin and far less remembered.
La Forbie, fought on 17 and 18 October 1244 on the coastal plain north-east of Gaza, destroyed the field army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The kingdom had put together its largest force since Hattin and had done something unprecedented to do it: allied openly with the Ayyubid rulers of Damascus and Homs against the Ayyubid sultan of Egypt. The combined army met the Egyptians and their Khwarazmian mercenaries south of Gaza, and by the second day it had ceased to exist.
The casualty lists are the measure of it. Around five thousand of the Christian army were killed and eight hundred taken prisoner; of the military orders, thirty-three Templars, twenty-seven Hospitallers and three Teutonic Knights survived. The Templar Grand Master was lost, the Hospitaller Grand Master spent six years in a Cairo prison, and the Count of Jaffa who had argued for the battle was captured and killed. The kingdom never again took the field offensively, and it held on for another forty-seven years on walls, treaties and other people’s crusades.
The Khwarazmians were a consequence of the Mongols. When Genghis Khan’s armies destroyed the empire of Khwarazm and its last shah, Jalal al-Din, died in 1231, some ten thousand of his horsemen were left in northern Syria with no state, no land and one marketable skill. For a decade they sold it to whoever was fighting, and in 1244 the buyer was as-Salih Ayyub, sultan of Egypt, who was losing a family war against his uncle Ismail in Damascus and his cousin in Homs — both of whom had allied with the Franks.
He turned them loose on Jerusalem. The city had been in Frankish hands since Frederick II’s treaty of 1229, undefended in any serious sense; the Khwarazmians entered on 11 July 1244, slaughtered the Christian population, desecrated the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and broke open the tombs of the kings of Jerusalem. The citadel held out until 23 August. Of the six thousand who left under a safe conduct, some three hundred reached Jaffa. Jerusalem would not be in Christian hands again for seven centuries, and the news of the sack is what put Louis IX on the road to Egypt.
The response was the strangest coalition in the kingdom’s history. The barons of Acre, with the Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights and the Lazarites, marched in company with the armies of Damascus and Homs — Muslim Ayyubid princes fighting alongside Frankish knights against another Muslim Ayyubid prince. It was not as odd as it sounds: the Latin kingdom had been treating Cairo and Damascus as rival powers to be played against each other for two generations, and the sack of Jerusalem had made the choice of partner obvious.
What the alliance lacked was a single command. Walter IV of Brienne, Count of Jaffa, carried the most weight among the Franks; al-Mansur Ibrahim of Homs was the most experienced field commander present; and the contingents kept their own formations and their own counsel. That arrangement worked while the army was marching south, and failed on the day it had to fight.
The armies met near the village of La Forbie, which Arabic sources call Harbiyah. Al-Mansur Ibrahim of Homs argued for the cautious course: fortify a camp, stay in it, and let the Khwarazmians — who had no supply system and lived off the country — exhaust themselves and disperse. It was almost certainly the right advice. The Frankish leadership, with Walter of Brienne prominent, rejected it and insisted on attacking. Whether the motive was confidence, impatience or the political impossibility of standing still while Jerusalem’s ashes were fresh, the sources do not agree.
The allied army drew up with the Franks on the right by the sea, Damascus in the centre and Homs on the left. The Khwarazmian charge fell on the Damascene contingent, which gave way; the Homs troops on the flank were driven off the field with al-Mansur Ibrahim; and the Frankish divisions, left standing alone on open ground against horse archers, were enveloped. The fighting went on into a second day, and ended with the Frankish army destroyed where it stood.
The comparison with Hattin is fair on the arithmetic and instructive on the differences. Both battles destroyed the kingdom’s entire field army in a single engagement; after both, the orders were reduced to a handful of surviving brothers. In some ways La Forbie was worse, because in 1187 the kingdom could still hope to be rescued — and was, by the Third Crusade — whereas after 1244 no recovery followed, and the loss of Jerusalem that preceded it was permanent.
It is forgotten because of what did not happen. No king was captured, since the crown was an absentee title held by the Hohenstaufen; no relic of the True Cross was lost, because that had gone at Hattin; and no great crusade arrived to reverse it, since Louis IX’s expedition went to Egypt and broke at Mansurah. Saladin was a figure the West kept writing about; as-Salih Ayyub was not. A defeat needs a story to be remembered, and this one had no protagonists the chroniclers wanted.
Egypt collected the winnings. Damascus fell to as-Salih Ayyub in 1245, ending the Syrian coalition, and Ascalon — the last Frankish fortress in the south — was taken in 1247. The Khwarazmians, having served their purpose, fell out with their employer and were broken up by the Syrian Ayyubids in 1246; as a political force they disappear from the record, having changed the history of the Latin East in three years of paid destruction.
For the kingdom, the strategic consequence was a change of category. It had begun as a state with an army that could march inland and fight for territory. After La Forbie it was a coastal strip of fortified cities defended by the orders’ castles, western subsidies and the diplomacy of playing Cairo against Damascus, which worked until a single power held both. When Baybars — who had commanded the Egyptian troops here as a young mamluk — ruled that single power, the end came quickly.