demonstrated by the events that followed. In late 1239, the crusaders
moved south to Walter’s own town of Jaffa, which they used as a base to
raid the surrounding countryside. A particularly daring operation was
planned by a large number of barons and knights, including a sizeable
Latin Eastern contingent headed by Walter, Odo of Montbéliard
and Balian of Sidon. Theobald’s efforts to forbid the enterprise were
ignored, as was the news that a large Egyptian army was approaching.
The raiders rode through the night to the dunes on the outskirts of Gaza.
By morning, though, Walter–who knew this part of the world better
than anyone –was beginning to have severe doubts. He suggested
turning back to Ascalon to wait for the rest of the crusaders. As it proved,
this was the last chance to retrieve the situation. Dawn revealed that the
Egyptian army was much bigger than the Christian host, and in posses-
sion of the high ground. With the support of Duke Hugh of Burgundy,
Walter promptly demanded retreat once again, stressing the difficulty of
fighting‘[when] both men and horses would be up to their knees in
sand’. As a result, the duke and the Latin Easterners conducted a
disreputable withdrawal whilst the rest of the raiding party was over-
whelmed. In short, Walter was far more heavily implicated in the process
by which the crusade had gone horribly wrong than he was in the series of
diplomatic manoeuvres that salvaged a surprising success from the
wreck. However, he did play a part, at least, in pushing for thefinal
settlement, which was made with the Egyptians in February 1242. This
ensured that the prisoners taken at Gaza, and the remains of the dead,
were returned.^88
The long stalemate in the struggle against the Hohenstaufenfinally
came to an end with a series of key events that took place in the early
1240s. For Walter, these developments were a triumph, although they
may have been offset by a shift towards an alliance with Damascus, which
seems to have been the opposite of his preferred policy.^89 In 1244,
Khwarazmian horsemen poured into the Levant, on their way to join
forces with the Egyptian sultan, as-Salīh Ayyub. In the process, they
sacked the city of Jerusalem, ending Frankish rule there for good. This
marked the death knell for Hohenstaufen influence in the Holy Land.
Rather neatly, though, it also marked the beginning of the end for Walter.
The Franks summoned their full military forces–the largest army that
they had put into thefield since 1187–and marched to join their Muslim
allies. They met the Egyptians and Khwarazmians on 17 October, at
(^88) This paragraph is largely derived from M. Lower,The Barons’Crusade: A Call to Arms
89 and its Consequences(Philadelphia, 2005), 158–77.
Seeibid., 175–6.
Cyprus and the Holy Land 93