ats, hired from the Genoese, the Venetians and
the Catalans; for France was at that time without a navy, although
washed by two seas. This king proceeded to Cyprus, and, having there
collected a still larger force, set out, according to Joinville's
statement, with more than eighteen hundred vessels, to make a descent
into Egypt. His army must have numbered about eighty thousand men; for,
although half of the fleet was scattered and cast away upon the coast of
Syria, he marched upon Cairo a few months later with sixty thousand
fighting-men, twenty thousand being mounted. It should be stated that
the Count of Poictiers had arrived also with troops from France.

The sad fortune experienced by this splendid army did not prevent the
same king from engaging in a new Crusade, twenty years later,(1270.) He
disembarked upon that occasion at the ruins of Carthage, and besieged
Tunis. The plague swept off half his army in a few months, and himself
was one of its victims. The King of Sicily, having arrived with powerful
reinforcements at the time of Louis's death, and desiring to carry back
the remains of the army to his island of Sicily, encountered a tempest
which caused a loss of four thousand men and twenty large ships. This
prince was not deterred by this misfortune from desiring the conquest of
the Greek empire and of Constantinople, which seemed a prize of greater
value and more readily obtained. Philip, the son and successor of Saint
Louis, being anxious to return to France, would have nothing to do with
that project. This was the last effort. The Christians who were
abandoned in Syria were destroyed in the noted attacks of Tripoli and
Ptolemais: some of the remnants of the religious orders took refuge at
Cyprus and established themselves at Rhodes.

The Mussulmans, in their turn, crossed the Dardanelles at Gallipolis in
1355, and took possession, one after the other, of the European
provinces of the Eastern Empire, to which the Latins had themselves
given the fatal blow.

Mohammed II., while besieging Constantinople in 1453, is said to have
had his fleet transported by land with a view to placing it in the canal
and closing the port: it is stated to have been large enough to be
manned by twenty thousand select foot-soldiers. After the capture of
this capital, Mohammed found his means increased by all those of the
Greek navy, and in a short time his empire attained the first rank of
maritime powers. He ordered an attack t