The earl was stung, and declared he would be as forward among the foe as
any Frenchman. They both charged headlong, were enclosed by the enemy,
and slain; and though the king at last put the Mamelukes to flight, his
loss was dreadful. The Nile rose and cut off his return. He lost great
part of his troops from sickness, and was horribly harassed by the
Mamelukes, who threw among his host a strange burning missile, called
Greek fire; and he was finally forced to surrender himself as a prisoner
at Mansourah, with all his army. He obtained his release by giving up
Damietta, and paying a heavy ransom. After twenty years, in 1270, he
attempted another crusade, which was still more unfortunate, for he
landed at Tunis to wait for his brother to arrive from Sicily,
apparently on some delusion of favourable dispositions on the part of
the Bey. Sickness broke out in the camp, and the king, his daughter, and
his third son all died of fever; and so fatal was the expedition, that
his son Philip III. returned to France escorting five coffins, those of
his father, his brother, his sister and her husband, and his own wife
and child.


11. Philip the Fair.--The reign of _Philip III._ was very short. The
insolence and cruelty of the Provençals in Sicily had provoked the
natives to a massacre known as the Sicilian Vespers, and they then
called in the King of Aragon, who finally obtained the island, as a
separate kingdom from that on the Italian mainland where Charles of
Anjou and his descendants still reigned. While fighting his uncle's
battles on the Pyrenees, and besieging Gerona, Philip III. caught a
fever, and died on his way home in 1285. His successor, _Philip IV.,
called the Fair_, was crafty, cruel, and greedy, and made the Parliament
of Paris the instrument of his violence and exactions, which he carried
out in the name of the law. To prevent Guy de Dampierre, Count of