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In the middle of the thirteenth century, two powerful rulers waged a battle for Syria. King Louis IX of France was one of the greatest kings of the medieval west. Baybars was a former slave who rose to become sultan of Egypt. Despite their different backgrounds, Louis and Baybars shared a powerful commitment to religious confrontation. For Baybars, the battle for Syria would bring religious legitimation to his fledgling regime and a bulwark against a powerful external threat, the Mongols. For Louis, it offered self‐sanctification and the potential re‐Christianization of sacred space. This chapter explores how each tried to define the looming struggle in absolute terms, as a contest pitting a unified, purified community against a religious other.

In July 1269, King Louis IX of France was planning a campaign in Egypt or the Holy Land. One year later, his fleet landed on Sardinia, and in a war council held on July 13 Louis declared Tunis the target of the crusade. What happened between July 1269 and July 1270 to send the expedition in this unexpected direction is shrouded in secrecy. By expanding the narrative to incorporate Mediterranean‐wide networks of interaction, this chapter identifies several key turning points: the visit of the Dominican linguist Ramon Martí to Tunis in 1269; the attendance of Tunisian envoys at the baptismal ceremony of a French Jew at Saint‐Denis in October; the arrival of a Mongol embassy in Paris toward the end of the year; and the dispatch of an Angevin envoy to Tunis the following April, a month after Louis had lifted the oriflamme at Saint Denis to launch the campaign.

King Louis IX of France departed on the Tunis Crusade in March 1270. The campaign was beset with challenges from the outset. Louis had contracted with the Genoese for an expeditionary fleet, but they were two months late delivering the boats. Bored and drunk crusaders rioted in the streets of Aigues‐Mortes as they waited out the long delay. When the crusade did set sail, it made for Cagliari on Sardinia rather than the Near East. Shocked by their arrival, the Pisan garrison that controlled the city at first refused the crusaders entrance inside its walls. At a council of war held on the king’s warship Montjoie, the decision to divert the crusade to Tunis was announced to a stunned rank and file. A peaceful port city was about to move from the periphery to the center of the history of the crusades.

The prologue to part one explains the rise of Capetian power and rise of Capetian claims to form a saintly bloodline by the time of Philip II’s reign around 1200, and introduces members of the French royal family in the generation of Louis IX.

Scholars have long argued that religious differences, when vigorously maintained and defended, usually led to anxiety and violence in the premodern Mediterranean. This chapter sets out an alternate history of religious difference, one that explores not only its capacity for provoking conflict but also its potential as a source of stability and cooperation in a pre‐secular age. The Tunis Crusade consolidated existing religious allegiances among Muslims and Christians, but with surprising results. Rather than causing chaos and division, the expedition’s powerful affirmations of difference animated a complex network of Mediterranean political, economic, and religious interactions that thrived into the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.